February 26, 2025 • 37 mins
Trigger warning! Today, I am talking about… triggers. Not necessarily those traumatic examples that tend to come with a trigger warning. I’m talking about triggers in general – those moments when something happens and we experience fear, shame, anger, or other reactive emotions.
Years ago, I decided that I was going to take responsibility for my emotions. Instead of blaming someone else for how I felt, I was going to investigate why I was feeling that way. After years of doing this, I can tell you that no trigger happens without purpose. There is a wealth of information and healing that comes when you allow yourself to go into the thought and emotion behind the trigger.
That’s what I want to share today – my experience with investigating my triggers, to possibly empower you to stop giving your power away to others and start to learn your own Soul lessons.
In this episode, I share:
- Why it’s disempowering to you to blame others for making you mad
- The biological and Soul reasons we get triggered
- My process for investigating and releasing the emotional charge of the trigger
- Examples of what myself and my clients have learned from triggers
- Why our intuition sometimes leads us into painful situations on purpose
Links mentioned:
- Join me for Unshakeable starting March 3: https://andreaandree.com/unshakeable
- Mindvalley’s Conscious Parenting course: https://www.mindvalley.com/conscious-parenting
- Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-andree-5338248/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Trigger warning, today I am going to talk about triggers.
(00:05):
Now, I'm not going to get into the big major triggers
that a lot of people mean and intend
when they say trigger warning,
those bigger, more abusive, traumatic type triggers,
but I am going to talk about triggers
because as crazy as it sounds in the past five plus years
since I've started doing this for myself,
(00:26):
I'd say 80 to 90% of my personal growth
has come from learning how to investigate my triggers.
Now, I've worked with coaches and teachers
in the past as well, and I've learned a lot from them as well,
but what I have realized is you only get an hour every week,
every other week with those teachers,
but there's a lot of life that has lived
(00:47):
in between that time period and there's a lot going on.
And so I knew if I waited just to talk to my coaches,
I was missing out on a lot of growth.
And so what I learned to do is investigate my triggers
because in my world, a trigger is coming up
as a means to get your attention,
(01:08):
as a means to say, hey, there's some pain here
that I want you to look at and then I want you to release.
Hey, there's a disempowering thought here
that is not supporting you in where you're trying to go.
You need to look at this so that way you can grow beyond it
and grow without it.
And so that's why I want to talk about triggers today
because in my world, someone who is standing in their power
is not going around reacting to everything everyone says
(01:32):
around them.
They're not going around saying, oh, you hurt me,
so you need to change because the truth is everything
that happens, everything that comes our way
is simply a reflection of the energy within us.
And when we go around and we blame other people
for making us feel a certain way,
that's giving them our power,
(01:53):
power that they don't deserve to have.
And so I want to talk about triggers in a way
that my intention is to empower you
to start to take back control of your inner world,
your emotional reactions, so that way you don't go around.
It's like you're giving the world a remote control
to your feelings and whatever they say,
(02:13):
whatever they do, if you're reacting negatively to them,
then you're losing your most powerful capability,
which is your feeling state.
Your feeling state is powerful for a couple of reasons.
One, because that's the only thing you ever experience
in life is are you feeling high vibrational?
Are you feeling excited?
Are you feeling scared?
(02:33):
Are you feeling fearful?
Like we're looking at everything around us,
but we're not experiencing those things around us.
I'm looking at a tree out my front window,
but I'm not experiencing the tree.
What I'm actually feeling is the emotions,
the thoughts and emotions that are going through my body
in response to looking at that tree.
And so when you learn to manage your inner world
(02:55):
and stop being triggered by everything outside of you,
one, your experience of life feels a lot more stable
because you're in control,
you're not riding the wave of whatever anyone might say
in front of you or whatever might be on the news.
You're in control, you're able to recent or reground,
say peaceful, despite all of that.
That's pretty powerful, right?
(03:16):
And the second reason this is so important
is your inner state, your thoughts,
but more importantly, your emotions
are what are contributing to the law of attraction,
and that is what is drawing back to you similar situations.
So maybe you've heard like attracts like,
the law of vibration or the law of attraction,
that same thing, everything emits a vibration.
(03:37):
And then what we attract to us is in a similar vibration
to what we're giving off.
And so if we're more often than not,
giving off a higher vibration,
happiness, joy, kindness, compassion,
then the things and the people that are coming back to us
in our world are going to reflect that back to us.
If more often than not,
(03:58):
we're giving fear and anger and guilt and shame,
then the things coming back to us
are going to reinforce those feelings.
And so it puts us on more of a feedback loop
that doesn't feel good.
And so when you let yourself get triggered
over and over and over,
when you're constantly reacting to the outside world,
(04:20):
you're missing out, you're letting,
again, other people have control over
your most powerful feeling state,
your most powerful technology, which is your feeling state.
And then you're attracting poorly based on that,
and you're just experiencing the world poorly.
And so I wanna help you take back control
and learn to see your triggers as a good thing,
(04:41):
as painful as they are.
Because I can tell you as much as I have felt
sadness, guilt, shame, fear, anger,
since I've started doing this roughly five years ago,
I also have more moments of freedom and joy
(05:04):
and compassion and peace
because I've allowed myself to go through that.
So first let me start with what I consider a trigger,
and this is nothing that I've looked up.
This is all what I've experienced within myself
and really digging in and investigating this
the past few years.
So for me, a trigger is when there's something outside of you
(05:24):
that happens that then you react,
think fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
So fight, you just wanna yell, you wanna punch,
you wanna kick something.
Flight, maybe you wanna run away from it, freeze,
you're overwhelmed, you're paralyzed,
maybe you're in fear and you don't know what to do,
fawn, you people please, you start heavily apologizing,
(05:46):
you're like, oh no, no, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.
So it's when you're reacting in a way that,
and you know, you feel embarrassed, you feel shame,
it's like that punch to the gut, like that, right?
For me, I do a lot of crying, makes me wanna cry,
and that's just how I release emotion.
But what exactly is getting triggered?
(06:08):
So this is gonna take a little bit of explaining
for me to get to the point that I wanna make
with all of this.
So we're familiar maybe, if you've been listening to me,
of our unconscious, and our unconscious
is like a computer program.
It has stored thoughts and emotions around
what we think the world is, what's scary,
any pain we might have experienced in the past.
(06:29):
And the point of our unconscious is to have this directory
of things where quote unquote, supposed to be afraid of,
or we're supposed to stay away from,
and then when something in our current reality happens
that is on a similar-ish wavelength or frequency
to something that's been stored
in our unconscious computer program,
(06:49):
our unconscious goes, ooh, ooh, red flag, red flag,
better look at this, better stay away from this.
And so it gets our attention through an emotion.
So through fear, through guilt, through shame,
through embarrassment, through anger.
So it's getting our attention through this painful,
like punch to the gut, or when our face gets flushed,
(07:10):
that's really what we're responding to,
we're not responding necessarily to outside of us,
but what we're feeling is this painful emotion
that's coming up within us.
And so the way I like to think of that painful emotion,
more often than not, it's not a new emotion.
It's an old emotion that at one point was felt,
(07:31):
but it wasn't fully allowed to be felt.
And so maybe you've heard me say this before, emotions,
emotion, energy and motion, energy wants to flow.
And if it's not allowed to flow,
energy cannot be created or destroyed,
it just changes forms.
So at one point, let's say you were a kid
and you started to feel embarrassment,
but because as kids, we didn't really,
(07:53):
most of us didn't grow up in a society
that supported feeling our emotions.
We thought that it was wrong to feel our emotions,
so we shoved it down.
And so it's like this emotion started being felt,
but it didn't finish being felt,
and it doesn't go anywhere, it stays in our system.
So our unconscious is actually full of so many unfelt,
like unexpressed emotions.
(08:15):
And in my world, those are what are getting triggered.
And so I like to think of it as,
we've got all these little like pockets of emotions,
and then there's some sort of resonance
in the outside world with one of those.
And it's like our body unconsciously shakes a pop can,
but doesn't pop the top.
And so then we get all this pressure in our body,
(08:37):
and that's when we want to cry,
that's when we want to yell, that's when we want to hit.
That might be when we choose to get a drink
or do something, scroll our phones,
so that way we can ignore the pressure.
But what that does is that's like,
it's keeping all of that pressure in the pop can.
We're just shoving it back down,
where what I've learned to do
(08:58):
through paying attention to the trigger,
and using breath work with the trigger,
is it's like you pop the top of the pop can,
you feel the emotion completely,
and then it's not there to continue reliving itself
over and over and over in your world.
And so when I get triggered as embarrassing
and as painful as it can be,
(09:20):
I let myself feel the feeling,
because I know that the only reason I'm getting triggered
is there's some old remnant of an emotion
that wasn't allowed to be felt at some point.
It could have been in my childhood.
It could have been, we know we carry trauma
from our generational line.
And so I've actually cleared a lot of things
(09:41):
from that have no resonance at all in my own childhood.
So an example like this is,
it used to be when my kids would get sick,
I'd have so much fear of them dying.
My son had seizures when he turned one,
and the memory of those seizures
would bring up so much stuff.
Like, oh my gosh, my kids are gonna die someday.
My daughter once had a fever and she was so tired,
(10:06):
and I just thought she was gonna die from that.
But there is no reason in my current reality
we didn't have sibling style,
like no child that I knew died.
And so I knew that was either past life or generational.
And I would go into the feeling
and I would actually get images, different images.
So one image was like,
(10:27):
I went back to things like Oregon Trail Times
and some kid died and I felt really bad about it.
And apparently I had never fully completed.
And again, I don't know if this is me
or generational or whatever,
but I just trust if the energy is within me,
then it needs to clear.
So it was like, whoever that mom was in that time,
(10:48):
in that lifetime, never fully felt the grief of that.
And so I was carrying the grief of that.
And that was the grief that was getting triggered
when my kids got sick.
And so once I allowed myself to go in, I cried it out.
I cried as if it was me back in the day
and it was my own kid who died on the Oregon Trail.
(11:10):
But then I was free from feeling that feeling
with my current kids.
And so that's why I heard someone say once,
they went to therapy and their therapist was like,
you have no reason to feel that way or to think that way.
And I call bullshit on that
because we know that we can carry trauma
from our generational line.
And I've experienced, again, generational,
(11:32):
probably past life trauma come up in my current life.
And so there's so many ways that we just carry this energy
that impacts our day-to-day life.
And if you're going around getting triggered,
getting sad, getting embarrassed,
(11:52):
and you're blaming the other person for making you feel
that way and you're trying to get them to change
so that way you don't feel that again,
you're actually doing yourself a disservice
because the triggering is meant to be a healing opportunity.
I had a client, this is what I taught her,
and one of her quotes was,
I now understand that triggers are my body's way
(12:14):
of alerting me that I'm ready to release pain.
And I was like, yes, that is exactly what they are.
It's your body's way of letting you know
that you're ready to release pain.
And it's your higher self's way of telling you
that, hey, guess what?
You can't carry this with you where I want to take you
because all of us want better in our life.
(12:36):
We might want more money,
we might want a better relationship,
we might want to make a bigger impact with our job,
we might want a better relationship with our kids
to be more compassionate with them
instead of reactive and controlling to them.
And it's really hard to do that when we carry so much pain.
And so I like to think of it as every time you allow yourself
to feel the emotion behind the trigger,
(12:57):
it's like you're dropping a tiny sandbag from your body.
And when you do that over and over and over,
your vibration raises naturally,
you create more space for joy, more space for freedom,
more space for happiness,
because you've allowed yourself
to actually go into that trigger.
So walk on me into doing this work.
Somewhere around 2019, 2020,
(13:19):
when I started noticing my behavior with my kids
and wanting to shift it,
at that point I started taking a conscious parenting course
on Mindvalley with Dr. Shafali.
I love her, she's a total badass
in talking about how most parenting is really us
just projecting our trauma onto our kids,
which has totally been accurate based on what I've experienced.
(13:42):
But one of the things she talked about was the pregnant pause.
And this is where I had a little bit of an issue
because she'd say, before you react, just pause.
And so I would, instead of reacting,
instead of yelling at my kids, I would pause.
And then in my head, I would think,
I probably shouldn't yell right now,
and then I would just yell.
(14:02):
So somehow I just had this idea that there was another way.
And around that same time, I was reading Power Versus Force.
And this is the book, if anyone is watching this on YouTube,
Power Versus Force by Dr. David Hawkins.
He's an MD, PhD, so he is pretty well studied.
He's the one who came up with the Scale of Consciousness,
(14:23):
if you've heard of the Scale of Consciousness,
which actually this is how it looks in the book,
which is not very exciting,
it's just a bunch of tables with words.
A lot of people, if you Google it online,
they've made it into pretty pictures.
But basically the Scale of Consciousness,
he came up with levels.
And he thinks of them, he talks about them
as like the perspective you take on the world
(14:45):
based on your level.
And so the very lowest levels,
shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride,
those are what he calls the victim mentality,
the victim states.
And then once you go above pride,
then courage is sort of the fulcrum.
And above courage, you got neutrality,
(15:06):
willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace,
and enlightenment.
And so at that level of courage, at that level of 200,
he calls out the initial level of empowerment.
And it says, here arises the willingness
to stop blaming and accept responsibility
for one's own actions, feelings, and beliefs.
So long as cause and responsibility
(15:27):
are projected outside of oneself,
one must remain in the powerless state of victimhood.
And so I took that in as a mom,
and I said, I'm going to stop using the language,
my kids made me mad,
and I am instead going to take responsibility
for that anger and say,
what is this anger trying to teach me?
I let them make me mad, but why?
(15:49):
And I've got journals upon journals of doing this
and releasing the emotion behind it.
And then I can get to a more centered place
and learn the lesson and come across
either as a more powerful me or a better parent
or a better business owner, whatever it is.
So a really simple example, this was from years ago.
(16:11):
I was picking up toys after my kids,
and I was furious, furiously picking them up.
I was so angry.
So at one point I stopped and I said, why am I mad?
What am I thinking about right now?
So that's the clue.
What am I thinking about right now in this moment?
What am I thinking about?
And what I was thinking in that moment was,
I'll be picking up toys for the rest of my life.
(16:33):
And was that true?
No, not necessarily, but that was the thought
that was going through my head
that was making me so angry.
And so I sat down and I let myself feel the anger
behind that emotion.
And then I got myself to a grounded space.
And from a grounded centered space,
I could look at this more objectively.
(16:53):
And I realized, you know what?
I've never actually taught my kids how to pick up.
I've never actually said, hey, this is when you're done,
this is where it goes.
Like none of that, I had just expected
these magically unicorn babies would just come out
of the womb and know how to keep the house clean.
And I was angry because they didn't do that.
And when you look at it that way, you're like,
(17:14):
yeah, that makes sense.
Like, of course they don't know how to pick up.
And instead the old me would have just yelled at them,
like, why aren't you picking up your toys?
But that would have done absolutely nothing
because I had never taught them.
I had totally missed the step where I needed to teach them
how to pick up their toys.
But the only reason I was able to get there
(17:36):
was because I let myself feel the emotion
and get curious about the emotion and then come at it
and look at it from a higher, more centered perspective.
So one small example, another example with a client
investigate everything, right?
So she was telling me how her son spilled milk.
She, with her son, she told him, don't do that,
(17:58):
you'll probably spill.
And then of course he spills and she got really upset.
So we dug into it and I said, let's investigate this.
And so I said, going back to the moment
where you spilled the milk and you can use this,
this is my process.
So take notes, use this the next time you get triggered,
let me know what you come up with.
(18:18):
I always do it with the journal
because for me journaling is a good way to get into your
unconscious a lot easier.
So, but I did it through coaching through verbally too,
but when I'm doing it by myself by journal.
So I asked her, what were you thinking about in the moment
that the milk was spilled?
And she actually wasn't even thinking about,
oh, my son didn't listen to me.
(18:39):
What she was reacting to unconsciously when we picked it
apart was the fact that the milk was creeping towards
this puzzle on the table that hadn't been finished.
And then underneath that, she's like,
but I'm the one who finishes things.
And so in a really strange way,
because our unconscious is totally nonsensical, the fact
that the milk was moving towards the puzzle was directly
(19:01):
a threat to her identity of being the type of person
that finishes things.
So that's what she was reacting to.
And then we went even further back from that.
And so we were talking about, has this ever come up before?
And she came up with a moment where she was somewhere
and she slipped on ice and got a concussion.
And instead of taking care of herself,
(19:23):
she opened her laptop to try to finish whatever it was she
was trying to finish.
So she was putting other people and other people's projects
ahead of her own well-being in that moment,
because she's the person that finishes things.
And so in that moment, I gave her space
to just look at that objectively.
And she released some emotional pain.
(19:44):
So clients, there's often some tears
when they're in session with me, which is good,
because tears are released.
We're getting rid of that sandbag,
removing that suppressed energy that's been in there.
But then that allowed her to see that behavior
and be like, this isn't healthy behavior, right?
This isn't when I think about where I want to go
(20:04):
and this higher version of me, I'm not the type of person
that puts my health in jeopardy to finish someone else's
project.
I'm the type of person that puts myself first when things
happen.
And all of that came from investigating
when she got mad over spilled milk.
I know they say never cry over spilled milk,
but we learned a lot when she cried over spilled milk.
(20:27):
And that is the beauty of investigating
why you're getting triggered.
So I'll give another caveat to this, too.
It's also in the realm of failures-ish.
And it's that sometimes our intuition
will call us to do things that don't actually end up well
(20:50):
with the intention of triggering us.
So that way we move something out of us.
And so I had this conversation with a client a few weeks ago.
She's like, intuition told me this,
and then that's not what happened.
And I told her this, and she was kind of pissed about it.
And it is really annoying, right?
But it is all with higher intention.
(21:11):
And so this takes a level of trust
to know that if something quote unquote bad happens,
it's for a reason.
And it's because our higher self sees something for us
that we can't get to if we keep this energy
and this behavior in our body.
(21:31):
And so sometimes it walks us to a path
that intentionally triggers pain out of us.
So that way we can release it from our body,
from our energy body.
So a couple examples here, one for me back
when I was still working, I don't even remember
what the world event was, but we had this online portal
(21:53):
where you could go on and you could share your thoughts
and people could comment.
And so I felt really called to post something to that
with a different perspective
because I look at the world differently.
And so I posted it thinking, yes, it's gonna be amazing.
People are gonna love it.
They're gonna be like, oh my gosh, Andrea,
I never thought of it that way.
But then within an hour, I got a message from someone.
(22:16):
She wasn't in HR, but she was working in HR
saying the post was offensive and she had to take it down.
And I was so embarrassed, so embarrassed by that.
Like I'd done something wrong.
This triggered the part of me
that doesn't wanna do anything wrong
because I feel like I'll disappoint somebody.
And the perfectionist and then not making anybody upset
(22:38):
and the people please, they're like,
it triggered that part of me.
And thankfully we were work from home at this point.
So I just sat in my office and I cried and I felt
all the burn of embarrassment and emotion.
I just let myself feel it all.
And then I investigated and then from there
from a clear headspace, I was able to say, you know what?
(23:01):
I put myself out there,
probably wasn't the right audience.
Just thinking through the things that I posted
or the thing that I posted probably required a little bit
more understanding background than what I gave.
And so I could understand how it kinda came at a left field
and it could have been perceived as offensive
even though that was not what I intended at all.
(23:24):
And so I was able to learn from that as well
and also learn that, you know what?
I can put stuff out there and people cannot like it
and I can still survive that situation.
Like our ego is so afraid of doing things
because it feels like death would happen.
If something like this were to happen,
if someone were to come back at us.
But I proved to my ego that I'm not going to die
(23:47):
if I put something out in the world.
It's gonna feel a little uncomfortable for a while
but guess what?
There's this magical thing called time
that makes most everybody forget what we even do
because most people are more paying attention
to their lives versus ours.
And so that was a really powerful lesson for me.
You know, something that I felt guided to do
and it ended up painful.
(24:07):
But yet it also had a higher intention
and a lesson for me.
A client, I think I've given this example at some point
but we had one session and she was talking about
how she was treating herself and she went in for chocolate
and she met someone who has this Tai Chi studio
and everything was feeling really good
about her going to try Tai Chi.
(24:28):
So we made a plan.
I'm like, all right, before our next session,
you go, you take a class.
And so she did.
And I was like, how was it?
She goes, it was terrible.
She went in there and she felt what it triggered for her
was there were all these people who already knew each other
and then there was her.
And so she perceived it as they were clicky
but for her, it brought up feelings of I'm in the way,
(24:51):
I'm not to be seen.
And this is also as a side note,
a really good example of how who knows
what those other people were thinking.
They could have been thinking absolutely nothing of her
and just been so self-absorbed in their own world.
But in her head, she was projecting onto them
what they were thinking based on the pain
(25:13):
that she had in her body.
And so on that call, we sat in silence for a long time.
Well, she just felt it was just burn of this pain.
And we went back, she's like, yeah, with my mom,
I needed to be perfect.
Yeah, I was not to be seen, but I needed to be perfect
and how she behaved.
(25:33):
And so it brought up all this old pain
from experience with her mom.
And so she sat in silence
and I just held space for her to sit in silence.
And even at one point, I said, ask your intuition,
does it need anything right now?
And the word that came up for her was purge.
And so she just allowed herself to purge that experience.
(25:54):
And what happens when we purge those things,
things like I'm in the way, I'm not allowed to be seen,
then we naturally feel better about taking up space
about putting ourselves out there
because that fear is not as heavily in our body anymore.
And so this is why a lot of people say,
(26:16):
feel the fear and do it anyway or do it scared in my world.
There are some fears you need to do that.
And those fears come from the Spleen Center
and our human design.
Those are fears that are always with us
that we just have to do it scared.
But if it's a trauma like this,
I feel the trauma ahead of time.
And then when I do the thing, I don't do it scared.
I do it clear and grounded.
(26:38):
And for me, that's just a much nicer way
of moving through the world
because I don't do things afraid.
I feel the fear beforehand.
And then I can move and I can do the thing
without feeling the fear.
And I'll do this sometimes too,
I'll pre-imagine triggers to get the pain out of my body.
Like if I'm afraid of posting something or doing something
(27:00):
because of what someone might say,
I actually imagine that they say it ahead of time.
Like what is the worst thing someone could possibly say to me?
And I imagine that they say it
and that gets the fear out of my body.
So that way I can, maybe I don't even have to post it again
at that point because again,
sometimes we're driven to do things with the intention
(27:22):
of moving that fear out of our body.
So maybe at that point, I don't even have to post it.
Or maybe I just post it with a more clear space
and I'm not afraid to post it anymore.
Because the other thing that always goes through my head
is you attract what you fear.
And so I know like if I post things
and I'm afraid of people commenting,
then I'm probably going to receive negative comments
(27:44):
because the universe wants to shake fear out of us.
It will intentionally put things in our way
to trigger us to bring up fear
so that way we can move beyond it
and realize we are not fear.
Fear, some people say fear stands for false evidence
appearing real and the most true version of us,
(28:05):
who we are, our soul.
So we're again, we're spiritual beings
having a human experience.
That spiritual being part of us does not know fear.
So when I think about how can I move through the world
as the highest version of me,
it is without as much fear as possible.
Now, fear comes from the human experience.
(28:25):
We hold fear in our bodies.
We're always feeling the fear of the environment
or from our community or from our family.
And so do I believe that I can get to a point in my life
where I never feel any fear?
No, because we're human and fear is just part
of the experience, but directionally,
I do believe that I can get to a point
where I feel less and less fear
(28:47):
and I feel more and more empowered in my life.
And that is my goal.
And that is why I allow myself to embrace those triggers.
And I know that the triggers happen for me, not to me.
And I can tell you there is not a single damn one
in the five years I've been doing this
that has no reason for showing up.
(29:07):
Everything has had a reason.
Everything has had a lesson.
Everything has had a healing,
which healing in my world means a releasing
of old emotions that don't serve me.
And the more you allow yourself to feel those emotions,
to heal those emotions, healing is feeling,
the more free you become.
(29:27):
And I will tell you, even taking my own advice,
it can be really hard because a week ago,
I was on vacation with family
and someone in my family said something that hurt me
and hurt me real bad.
And for the whole three days I was there, it kept,
it was very active in my energy body.
(29:48):
I cried at least three times when I was there that weekend.
And in the emotion, while the emotion was still raw,
while the trigger was still raw,
I couldn't imagine how this was happening for me
and not to me.
Even though I held that perspective,
(30:08):
it was a hard one.
In this particular case,
I don't know that anyone has ever said anything
this hurtful to me and it was a hard one to get over
or to move through.
I don't wanna say get over as if that's the goal.
We move through in whatever the divine timing is
to move through these and it took me a few days.
(30:30):
Often I'm able to sit and journal it out
and be done with it and move on,
but that wasn't the case with this one.
And so when I was finally able to get some space
from the family and from the situation,
one of the things I realized was if this person
is willing to say that about this thing in my life,
then there must be nothing I can ever do
(30:52):
to make that person happy or proud of me.
And so I should just quit trying.
And this is something I've been peeling back layer by layer
of for myself over the years of,
I don't need that person to be proud of me.
I just need to be proud of myself.
But this was like that final kick in the seeds
that I needed to be like, screw it.
(31:14):
I'm just gonna be myself.
I don't need this person to be proud.
I'm done trying to make them happy, right?
They're gonna be mad whether I'm happy or not.
So I should just do me.
And so in a crazy way,
this really painful experience gave me so much freedom
on the other side of it.
(31:36):
And that is what the beauty of these triggers are
if we allow ourselves to go into them.
But I could only get to that perspective
by feeling the emotion that was behind the trigger.
Cause when you're in the trigger,
it's like that son of a bitch,
I'm never gonna see them again.
I'm never gonna put myself in this situation,
(31:57):
which maybe that is also part of the learning
and part of the lesson and part of the action.
But my methodology is don't make that decision
when you're in the emotion,
make that decision from a more clear grounded place
because that's where you're looking at this more objectively.
So that's why I don't wanna say I love triggers
(32:21):
because damn, it feels painful
when you're going through the pain.
It really does.
Going through the guilt, the shame, the anger,
the embarrassment, but I do believe
that that is actually one of the purposes
of this lifetime on earth is to heal.
And when we heal it for ourselves,
we don't pass it on to our kids.
(32:41):
And so my fems, my mother is out there, especially,
or even non-mothers, we're all connected.
So when one of you allows yourself
to feel something incredibly painful,
when you're doing it on behalf of your family line,
you're clearing generations ahead of you,
you're clearing generations behind you,
you're clearing it on behalf of all of those people,
(33:03):
whose energy does not know time,
and you're helping to start to clear it
for the collective of women that is alive today as well.
So this is incredibly brave work.
It is hard work, but is also the most freeing
(33:23):
and growth-oriented work I have ever done.
Because again, once you get out of the trigger,
then you can go, okay, how can I see this
from a higher perspective?
Or, okay, spiritual guides, hire self,
what is my next step here?
What are you calling me into?
Where are you calling me to go?
And you can do that without the pain and without the fear.
(33:46):
So this is one of the bigger lessons
that I teach my clients when we're working together
is how to go into the fear and get the lesson from it.
And beyond this, I have become what I like to say,
a mindset savage.
So learning how to manage my triggers is one piece of that,
(34:07):
where I can actually go through the world now
and just let people be and not get so reactive to it.
And you can probably feel why that would be powerful, right?
People can just say shit all they want,
and I'm just like, no, you know what?
I'm here being me.
Or my kids can have their emotions,
(34:27):
and instead of me yelling at them
for having their emotions, that's what I used to do,
I can be the antidote, be the peace,
be the calm that allows them to access that peace and calm.
And so learning how to manage my triggers
has been a powerful piece of my overall
learning how to manage my mindset,
my mindset, my thoughts, my emotions.
(34:49):
And so through investigating these triggers,
I now get triggered less and less
because there's no energy in my body that gets triggered.
But also I know that when the trigger comes up,
I just need to breathe through it.
Instead of the pregnant pause, it's okay, I go in,
where do I feel this in my body?
And then I breathe into it and allow it to be there.
(35:12):
So my process, if you wanna use it,
I should have said it earlier.
But when you get triggered,
and you're sitting with your journal,
I also say, where do I feel this in my body?
And I close my eyes and I do a body scan.
Typically it's somewhere in my guts,
all of my clients will say, heart space, shoulders,
neck, head, wherever they feel it in their body.
(35:33):
I have them on the in-breath, they send breath to that place.
And on the out-breath, imagine that
getting bigger and bigger
and coming to the surface of their skin.
That's allowing the emotion.
Right, what most of us do is we shove it down.
Again, we get a drink, we scroll our phone, we eat something.
But when we allow it, when we feel it,
that's when we get rid of it.
(35:55):
And then you're not triggered so much
because the trigger isn't even there to begin with.
So moving back to the mindset savage thing,
I am going to be sharing some of my best mindset tips
in a week-long free event called Unshakable.
So it starts next week, March 3rd,
if you're listening to this live on the drop date
or at least the drop week.
(36:16):
And it's all free.
Monday through Thursday, there's going to be email tips.
And then Friday, there's going to be a live session
where we're just going to bring a lot of these together
because my goal in particular with this is to,
one, give you some tips to help you start to just re-center
because there's so much chaos in the world.
People are getting triggered left and right
(36:38):
by our government, by what's on the news,
by how people are acting.
And in my world, those triggers
are really great information for you.
If you're not investigating your triggers,
you're missing out on an opportunity
to learn a lot about yourself.
And so I want to start to teach you how to do that.
So that way, again, you can stop riding the waves
(36:58):
of the world and giving the world a remote control
to your inner world and start to teach you
how to stand strong and re-center within yourself
and to remain peace in the chaos of the world.
So if you're interested, andreaandrea.com slash Unshakable,
I will leave a link in the description.
You can sign up there.
(37:19):
Again, it kicks off soon.
I would love to have you there.
And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend.
Feel free to review on Spotify or Apple.
That really helps the show get out
to a wider audience as well.
And find me on LinkedIn, andreaandrea,
if you are interested in connecting.
Until next time, see you later.
Trigger warning, today I am going to talk about triggers.
(00:05):
Now, I'm not going to get into the big major triggers
that a lot of people mean and intend
when they say trigger warning,
those bigger, more abusive, traumatic type triggers,
but I am going to talk about triggers
because as crazy as it sounds in the past five plus years
since I've started doing this for myself,
(00:26):
I'd say 80 to 90% of my personal growth
has come from learning how to investigate my triggers.
Now, I've worked with coaches and teachers
in the past as well, and I've learned a lot from them as well,
but what I have realized is you only get an hour every week,
every other week with those teachers,
but there's a lot of life that has lived
(00:47):
in between that time period and there's a lot going on.
And so I knew if I waited just to talk to my coaches,
I was missing out on a lot of growth.
And so what I learned to do is investigate my triggers
because in my world, a trigger is coming up
as a means to get your attention,
(01:08):
as a means to say, hey, there's some pain here
that I want you to look at and then I want you to release.
Hey, there's a disempowering thought here
that is not supporting you in where you're trying to go.
You need to look at this so that way you can grow beyond it
and grow without it.
And so that's why I want to talk about triggers today
because in my world, someone who is standing in their power
is not going around reacting to everything everyone says
(01:32):
around them.
They're not going around saying, oh, you hurt me,
so you need to change because the truth is everything
that happens, everything that comes our way
is simply a reflection of the energy within us.
And when we go around and we blame other people
for making us feel a certain way,
that's giving them our power,
(01:53):
power that they don't deserve to have.
And so I want to talk about triggers in a way
that my intention is to empower you
to start to take back control of your inner world,
your emotional reactions, so that way you don't go around.
It's like you're giving the world a remote control
to your feelings and whatever they say,
(02:13):
whatever they do, if you're reacting negatively to them,
then you're losing your most powerful capability,
which is your feeling state.
Your feeling state is powerful for a couple of reasons.
One, because that's the only thing you ever experience
in life is are you feeling high vibrational?
Are you feeling excited?
Are you feeling scared?
(02:33):
Are you feeling fearful?
Like we're looking at everything around us,
but we're not experiencing those things around us.
I'm looking at a tree out my front window,
but I'm not experiencing the tree.
What I'm actually feeling is the emotions,
the thoughts and emotions that are going through my body
in response to looking at that tree.
And so when you learn to manage your inner world
(02:55):
and stop being triggered by everything outside of you,
one, your experience of life feels a lot more stable
because you're in control,
you're not riding the wave of whatever anyone might say
in front of you or whatever might be on the news.
You're in control, you're able to recent or reground,
say peaceful, despite all of that.
That's pretty powerful, right?
(03:16):
And the second reason this is so important
is your inner state, your thoughts,
but more importantly, your emotions
are what are contributing to the law of attraction,
and that is what is drawing back to you similar situations.
So maybe you've heard like attracts like,
the law of vibration or the law of attraction,
that same thing, everything emits a vibration.
(03:37):
And then what we attract to us is in a similar vibration
to what we're giving off.
And so if we're more often than not,
giving off a higher vibration,
happiness, joy, kindness, compassion,
then the things and the people that are coming back to us
in our world are going to reflect that back to us.
If more often than not,
(03:58):
we're giving fear and anger and guilt and shame,
then the things coming back to us
are going to reinforce those feelings.
And so it puts us on more of a feedback loop
that doesn't feel good.
And so when you let yourself get triggered
over and over and over,
when you're constantly reacting to the outside world,
(04:20):
you're missing out, you're letting,
again, other people have control over
your most powerful feeling state,
your most powerful technology, which is your feeling state.
And then you're attracting poorly based on that,
and you're just experiencing the world poorly.
And so I wanna help you take back control
and learn to see your triggers as a good thing,
(04:41):
as painful as they are.
Because I can tell you as much as I have felt
sadness, guilt, shame, fear, anger,
since I've started doing this roughly five years ago,
I also have more moments of freedom and joy
(05:04):
and compassion and peace
because I've allowed myself to go through that.
So first let me start with what I consider a trigger,
and this is nothing that I've looked up.
This is all what I've experienced within myself
and really digging in and investigating this
the past few years.
So for me, a trigger is when there's something outside of you
(05:24):
that happens that then you react,
think fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
So fight, you just wanna yell, you wanna punch,
you wanna kick something.
Flight, maybe you wanna run away from it, freeze,
you're overwhelmed, you're paralyzed,
maybe you're in fear and you don't know what to do,
fawn, you people please, you start heavily apologizing,
(05:46):
you're like, oh no, no, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.
So it's when you're reacting in a way that,
and you know, you feel embarrassed, you feel shame,
it's like that punch to the gut, like that, right?
For me, I do a lot of crying, makes me wanna cry,
and that's just how I release emotion.
But what exactly is getting triggered?
(06:08):
So this is gonna take a little bit of explaining
for me to get to the point that I wanna make
with all of this.
So we're familiar maybe, if you've been listening to me,
of our unconscious, and our unconscious
is like a computer program.
It has stored thoughts and emotions around
what we think the world is, what's scary,
any pain we might have experienced in the past.
(06:29):
And the point of our unconscious is to have this directory
of things where quote unquote, supposed to be afraid of,
or we're supposed to stay away from,
and then when something in our current reality happens
that is on a similar-ish wavelength or frequency
to something that's been stored
in our unconscious computer program,
(06:49):
our unconscious goes, ooh, ooh, red flag, red flag,
better look at this, better stay away from this.
And so it gets our attention through an emotion.
So through fear, through guilt, through shame,
through embarrassment, through anger.
So it's getting our attention through this painful,
like punch to the gut, or when our face gets flushed,
(07:10):
that's really what we're responding to,
we're not responding necessarily to outside of us,
but what we're feeling is this painful emotion
that's coming up within us.
And so the way I like to think of that painful emotion,
more often than not, it's not a new emotion.
It's an old emotion that at one point was felt,
(07:31):
but it wasn't fully allowed to be felt.
And so maybe you've heard me say this before, emotions,
emotion, energy and motion, energy wants to flow.
And if it's not allowed to flow,
energy cannot be created or destroyed,
it just changes forms.
So at one point, let's say you were a kid
and you started to feel embarrassment,
but because as kids, we didn't really,
(07:53):
most of us didn't grow up in a society
that supported feeling our emotions.
We thought that it was wrong to feel our emotions,
so we shoved it down.
And so it's like this emotion started being felt,
but it didn't finish being felt,
and it doesn't go anywhere, it stays in our system.
So our unconscious is actually full of so many unfelt,
like unexpressed emotions.
(08:15):
And in my world, those are what are getting triggered.
And so I like to think of it as,
we've got all these little like pockets of emotions,
and then there's some sort of resonance
in the outside world with one of those.
And it's like our body unconsciously shakes a pop can,
but doesn't pop the top.
And so then we get all this pressure in our body,
(08:37):
and that's when we want to cry,
that's when we want to yell, that's when we want to hit.
That might be when we choose to get a drink
or do something, scroll our phones,
so that way we can ignore the pressure.
But what that does is that's like,
it's keeping all of that pressure in the pop can.
We're just shoving it back down,
where what I've learned to do
(08:58):
through paying attention to the trigger,
and using breath work with the trigger,
is it's like you pop the top of the pop can,
you feel the emotion completely,
and then it's not there to continue reliving itself
over and over and over in your world.
And so when I get triggered as embarrassing
and as painful as it can be,
(09:20):
I let myself feel the feeling,
because I know that the only reason I'm getting triggered
is there's some old remnant of an emotion
that wasn't allowed to be felt at some point.
It could have been in my childhood.
It could have been, we know we carry trauma
from our generational line.
And so I've actually cleared a lot of things
(09:41):
from that have no resonance at all in my own childhood.
So an example like this is,
it used to be when my kids would get sick,
I'd have so much fear of them dying.
My son had seizures when he turned one,
and the memory of those seizures
would bring up so much stuff.
Like, oh my gosh, my kids are gonna die someday.
My daughter once had a fever and she was so tired,
(10:06):
and I just thought she was gonna die from that.
But there is no reason in my current reality
we didn't have sibling style,
like no child that I knew died.
And so I knew that was either past life or generational.
And I would go into the feeling
and I would actually get images, different images.
So one image was like,
(10:27):
I went back to things like Oregon Trail Times
and some kid died and I felt really bad about it.
And apparently I had never fully completed.
And again, I don't know if this is me
or generational or whatever,
but I just trust if the energy is within me,
then it needs to clear.
So it was like, whoever that mom was in that time,
(10:48):
in that lifetime, never fully felt the grief of that.
And so I was carrying the grief of that.
And that was the grief that was getting triggered
when my kids got sick.
And so once I allowed myself to go in, I cried it out.
I cried as if it was me back in the day
and it was my own kid who died on the Oregon Trail.
(11:10):
But then I was free from feeling that feeling
with my current kids.
And so that's why I heard someone say once,
they went to therapy and their therapist was like,
you have no reason to feel that way or to think that way.
And I call bullshit on that
because we know that we can carry trauma
from our generational line.
And I've experienced, again, generational,
(11:32):
probably past life trauma come up in my current life.
And so there's so many ways that we just carry this energy
that impacts our day-to-day life.
And if you're going around getting triggered,
getting sad, getting embarrassed,
(11:52):
and you're blaming the other person for making you feel
that way and you're trying to get them to change
so that way you don't feel that again,
you're actually doing yourself a disservice
because the triggering is meant to be a healing opportunity.
I had a client, this is what I taught her,
and one of her quotes was,
I now understand that triggers are my body's way
(12:14):
of alerting me that I'm ready to release pain.
And I was like, yes, that is exactly what they are.
It's your body's way of letting you know
that you're ready to release pain.
And it's your higher self's way of telling you
that, hey, guess what?
You can't carry this with you where I want to take you
because all of us want better in our life.
(12:36):
We might want more money,
we might want a better relationship,
we might want to make a bigger impact with our job,
we might want a better relationship with our kids
to be more compassionate with them
instead of reactive and controlling to them.
And it's really hard to do that when we carry so much pain.
And so I like to think of it as every time you allow yourself
to feel the emotion behind the trigger,
(12:57):
it's like you're dropping a tiny sandbag from your body.
And when you do that over and over and over,
your vibration raises naturally,
you create more space for joy, more space for freedom,
more space for happiness,
because you've allowed yourself
to actually go into that trigger.
So walk on me into doing this work.
Somewhere around 2019, 2020,
(13:19):
when I started noticing my behavior with my kids
and wanting to shift it,
at that point I started taking a conscious parenting course
on Mindvalley with Dr. Shafali.
I love her, she's a total badass
in talking about how most parenting is really us
just projecting our trauma onto our kids,
which has totally been accurate based on what I've experienced.
(13:42):
But one of the things she talked about was the pregnant pause.
And this is where I had a little bit of an issue
because she'd say, before you react, just pause.
And so I would, instead of reacting,
instead of yelling at my kids, I would pause.
And then in my head, I would think,
I probably shouldn't yell right now,
and then I would just yell.
(14:02):
So somehow I just had this idea that there was another way.
And around that same time, I was reading Power Versus Force.
And this is the book, if anyone is watching this on YouTube,
Power Versus Force by Dr. David Hawkins.
He's an MD, PhD, so he is pretty well studied.
He's the one who came up with the Scale of Consciousness,
(14:23):
if you've heard of the Scale of Consciousness,
which actually this is how it looks in the book,
which is not very exciting,
it's just a bunch of tables with words.
A lot of people, if you Google it online,
they've made it into pretty pictures.
But basically the Scale of Consciousness,
he came up with levels.
And he thinks of them, he talks about them
as like the perspective you take on the world
(14:45):
based on your level.
And so the very lowest levels,
shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride,
those are what he calls the victim mentality,
the victim states.
And then once you go above pride,
then courage is sort of the fulcrum.
And above courage, you got neutrality,
(15:06):
willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace,
and enlightenment.
And so at that level of courage, at that level of 200,
he calls out the initial level of empowerment.
And it says, here arises the willingness
to stop blaming and accept responsibility
for one's own actions, feelings, and beliefs.
So long as cause and responsibility
(15:27):
are projected outside of oneself,
one must remain in the powerless state of victimhood.
And so I took that in as a mom,
and I said, I'm going to stop using the language,
my kids made me mad,
and I am instead going to take responsibility
for that anger and say,
what is this anger trying to teach me?
I let them make me mad, but why?
(15:49):
And I've got journals upon journals of doing this
and releasing the emotion behind it.
And then I can get to a more centered place
and learn the lesson and come across
either as a more powerful me or a better parent
or a better business owner, whatever it is.
So a really simple example, this was from years ago.
(16:11):
I was picking up toys after my kids,
and I was furious, furiously picking them up.
I was so angry.
So at one point I stopped and I said, why am I mad?
What am I thinking about right now?
So that's the clue.
What am I thinking about right now in this moment?
What am I thinking about?
And what I was thinking in that moment was,
I'll be picking up toys for the rest of my life.
(16:33):
And was that true?
No, not necessarily, but that was the thought
that was going through my head
that was making me so angry.
And so I sat down and I let myself feel the anger
behind that emotion.
And then I got myself to a grounded space.
And from a grounded centered space,
I could look at this more objectively.
(16:53):
And I realized, you know what?
I've never actually taught my kids how to pick up.
I've never actually said, hey, this is when you're done,
this is where it goes.
Like none of that, I had just expected
these magically unicorn babies would just come out
of the womb and know how to keep the house clean.
And I was angry because they didn't do that.
And when you look at it that way, you're like,
(17:14):
yeah, that makes sense.
Like, of course they don't know how to pick up.
And instead the old me would have just yelled at them,
like, why aren't you picking up your toys?
But that would have done absolutely nothing
because I had never taught them.
I had totally missed the step where I needed to teach them
how to pick up their toys.
But the only reason I was able to get there
(17:36):
was because I let myself feel the emotion
and get curious about the emotion and then come at it
and look at it from a higher, more centered perspective.
So one small example, another example with a client
investigate everything, right?
So she was telling me how her son spilled milk.
She, with her son, she told him, don't do that,
(17:58):
you'll probably spill.
And then of course he spills and she got really upset.
So we dug into it and I said, let's investigate this.
And so I said, going back to the moment
where you spilled the milk and you can use this,
this is my process.
So take notes, use this the next time you get triggered,
let me know what you come up with.
(18:18):
I always do it with the journal
because for me journaling is a good way to get into your
unconscious a lot easier.
So, but I did it through coaching through verbally too,
but when I'm doing it by myself by journal.
So I asked her, what were you thinking about in the moment
that the milk was spilled?
And she actually wasn't even thinking about,
oh, my son didn't listen to me.
(18:39):
What she was reacting to unconsciously when we picked it
apart was the fact that the milk was creeping towards
this puzzle on the table that hadn't been finished.
And then underneath that, she's like,
but I'm the one who finishes things.
And so in a really strange way,
because our unconscious is totally nonsensical, the fact
that the milk was moving towards the puzzle was directly
(19:01):
a threat to her identity of being the type of person
that finishes things.
So that's what she was reacting to.
And then we went even further back from that.
And so we were talking about, has this ever come up before?
And she came up with a moment where she was somewhere
and she slipped on ice and got a concussion.
And instead of taking care of herself,
(19:23):
she opened her laptop to try to finish whatever it was she
was trying to finish.
So she was putting other people and other people's projects
ahead of her own well-being in that moment,
because she's the person that finishes things.
And so in that moment, I gave her space
to just look at that objectively.
And she released some emotional pain.
(19:44):
So clients, there's often some tears
when they're in session with me, which is good,
because tears are released.
We're getting rid of that sandbag,
removing that suppressed energy that's been in there.
But then that allowed her to see that behavior
and be like, this isn't healthy behavior, right?
This isn't when I think about where I want to go
(20:04):
and this higher version of me, I'm not the type of person
that puts my health in jeopardy to finish someone else's
project.
I'm the type of person that puts myself first when things
happen.
And all of that came from investigating
when she got mad over spilled milk.
I know they say never cry over spilled milk,
but we learned a lot when she cried over spilled milk.
(20:27):
And that is the beauty of investigating
why you're getting triggered.
So I'll give another caveat to this, too.
It's also in the realm of failures-ish.
And it's that sometimes our intuition
will call us to do things that don't actually end up well
(20:50):
with the intention of triggering us.
So that way we move something out of us.
And so I had this conversation with a client a few weeks ago.
She's like, intuition told me this,
and then that's not what happened.
And I told her this, and she was kind of pissed about it.
And it is really annoying, right?
But it is all with higher intention.
(21:11):
And so this takes a level of trust
to know that if something quote unquote bad happens,
it's for a reason.
And it's because our higher self sees something for us
that we can't get to if we keep this energy
and this behavior in our body.
(21:31):
And so sometimes it walks us to a path
that intentionally triggers pain out of us.
So that way we can release it from our body,
from our energy body.
So a couple examples here, one for me back
when I was still working, I don't even remember
what the world event was, but we had this online portal
(21:53):
where you could go on and you could share your thoughts
and people could comment.
And so I felt really called to post something to that
with a different perspective
because I look at the world differently.
And so I posted it thinking, yes, it's gonna be amazing.
People are gonna love it.
They're gonna be like, oh my gosh, Andrea,
I never thought of it that way.
But then within an hour, I got a message from someone.
(22:16):
She wasn't in HR, but she was working in HR
saying the post was offensive and she had to take it down.
And I was so embarrassed, so embarrassed by that.
Like I'd done something wrong.
This triggered the part of me
that doesn't wanna do anything wrong
because I feel like I'll disappoint somebody.
And the perfectionist and then not making anybody upset
(22:38):
and the people please, they're like,
it triggered that part of me.
And thankfully we were work from home at this point.
So I just sat in my office and I cried and I felt
all the burn of embarrassment and emotion.
I just let myself feel it all.
And then I investigated and then from there
from a clear headspace, I was able to say, you know what?
(23:01):
I put myself out there,
probably wasn't the right audience.
Just thinking through the things that I posted
or the thing that I posted probably required a little bit
more understanding background than what I gave.
And so I could understand how it kinda came at a left field
and it could have been perceived as offensive
even though that was not what I intended at all.
(23:24):
And so I was able to learn from that as well
and also learn that, you know what?
I can put stuff out there and people cannot like it
and I can still survive that situation.
Like our ego is so afraid of doing things
because it feels like death would happen.
If something like this were to happen,
if someone were to come back at us.
But I proved to my ego that I'm not going to die
(23:47):
if I put something out in the world.
It's gonna feel a little uncomfortable for a while
but guess what?
There's this magical thing called time
that makes most everybody forget what we even do
because most people are more paying attention
to their lives versus ours.
And so that was a really powerful lesson for me.
You know, something that I felt guided to do
and it ended up painful.
(24:07):
But yet it also had a higher intention
and a lesson for me.
A client, I think I've given this example at some point
but we had one session and she was talking about
how she was treating herself and she went in for chocolate
and she met someone who has this Tai Chi studio
and everything was feeling really good
about her going to try Tai Chi.
(24:28):
So we made a plan.
I'm like, all right, before our next session,
you go, you take a class.
And so she did.
And I was like, how was it?
She goes, it was terrible.
She went in there and she felt what it triggered for her
was there were all these people who already knew each other
and then there was her.
And so she perceived it as they were clicky
but for her, it brought up feelings of I'm in the way,
(24:51):
I'm not to be seen.
And this is also as a side note,
a really good example of how who knows
what those other people were thinking.
They could have been thinking absolutely nothing of her
and just been so self-absorbed in their own world.
But in her head, she was projecting onto them
what they were thinking based on the pain
(25:13):
that she had in her body.
And so on that call, we sat in silence for a long time.
Well, she just felt it was just burn of this pain.
And we went back, she's like, yeah, with my mom,
I needed to be perfect.
Yeah, I was not to be seen, but I needed to be perfect
and how she behaved.
(25:33):
And so it brought up all this old pain
from experience with her mom.
And so she sat in silence
and I just held space for her to sit in silence.
And even at one point, I said, ask your intuition,
does it need anything right now?
And the word that came up for her was purge.
And so she just allowed herself to purge that experience.
(25:54):
And what happens when we purge those things,
things like I'm in the way, I'm not allowed to be seen,
then we naturally feel better about taking up space
about putting ourselves out there
because that fear is not as heavily in our body anymore.
And so this is why a lot of people say,
(26:16):
feel the fear and do it anyway or do it scared in my world.
There are some fears you need to do that.
And those fears come from the Spleen Center
and our human design.
Those are fears that are always with us
that we just have to do it scared.
But if it's a trauma like this,
I feel the trauma ahead of time.
And then when I do the thing, I don't do it scared.
I do it clear and grounded.
(26:38):
And for me, that's just a much nicer way
of moving through the world
because I don't do things afraid.
I feel the fear beforehand.
And then I can move and I can do the thing
without feeling the fear.
And I'll do this sometimes too,
I'll pre-imagine triggers to get the pain out of my body.
Like if I'm afraid of posting something or doing something
(27:00):
because of what someone might say,
I actually imagine that they say it ahead of time.
Like what is the worst thing someone could possibly say to me?
And I imagine that they say it
and that gets the fear out of my body.
So that way I can, maybe I don't even have to post it again
at that point because again,
sometimes we're driven to do things with the intention
(27:22):
of moving that fear out of our body.
So maybe at that point, I don't even have to post it.
Or maybe I just post it with a more clear space
and I'm not afraid to post it anymore.
Because the other thing that always goes through my head
is you attract what you fear.
And so I know like if I post things
and I'm afraid of people commenting,
then I'm probably going to receive negative comments
(27:44):
because the universe wants to shake fear out of us.
It will intentionally put things in our way
to trigger us to bring up fear
so that way we can move beyond it
and realize we are not fear.
Fear, some people say fear stands for false evidence
appearing real and the most true version of us,
(28:05):
who we are, our soul.
So we're again, we're spiritual beings
having a human experience.
That spiritual being part of us does not know fear.
So when I think about how can I move through the world
as the highest version of me,
it is without as much fear as possible.
Now, fear comes from the human experience.
(28:25):
We hold fear in our bodies.
We're always feeling the fear of the environment
or from our community or from our family.
And so do I believe that I can get to a point in my life
where I never feel any fear?
No, because we're human and fear is just part
of the experience, but directionally,
I do believe that I can get to a point
where I feel less and less fear
(28:47):
and I feel more and more empowered in my life.
And that is my goal.
And that is why I allow myself to embrace those triggers.
And I know that the triggers happen for me, not to me.
And I can tell you there is not a single damn one
in the five years I've been doing this
that has no reason for showing up.
(29:07):
Everything has had a reason.
Everything has had a lesson.
Everything has had a healing,
which healing in my world means a releasing
of old emotions that don't serve me.
And the more you allow yourself to feel those emotions,
to heal those emotions, healing is feeling,
the more free you become.
(29:27):
And I will tell you, even taking my own advice,
it can be really hard because a week ago,
I was on vacation with family
and someone in my family said something that hurt me
and hurt me real bad.
And for the whole three days I was there, it kept,
it was very active in my energy body.
(29:48):
I cried at least three times when I was there that weekend.
And in the emotion, while the emotion was still raw,
while the trigger was still raw,
I couldn't imagine how this was happening for me
and not to me.
Even though I held that perspective,
(30:08):
it was a hard one.
In this particular case,
I don't know that anyone has ever said anything
this hurtful to me and it was a hard one to get over
or to move through.
I don't wanna say get over as if that's the goal.
We move through in whatever the divine timing is
to move through these and it took me a few days.
(30:30):
Often I'm able to sit and journal it out
and be done with it and move on,
but that wasn't the case with this one.
And so when I was finally able to get some space
from the family and from the situation,
one of the things I realized was if this person
is willing to say that about this thing in my life,
then there must be nothing I can ever do
(30:52):
to make that person happy or proud of me.
And so I should just quit trying.
And this is something I've been peeling back layer by layer
of for myself over the years of,
I don't need that person to be proud of me.
I just need to be proud of myself.
But this was like that final kick in the seeds
that I needed to be like, screw it.
(31:14):
I'm just gonna be myself.
I don't need this person to be proud.
I'm done trying to make them happy, right?
They're gonna be mad whether I'm happy or not.
So I should just do me.
And so in a crazy way,
this really painful experience gave me so much freedom
on the other side of it.
(31:36):
And that is what the beauty of these triggers are
if we allow ourselves to go into them.
But I could only get to that perspective
by feeling the emotion that was behind the trigger.
Cause when you're in the trigger,
it's like that son of a bitch,
I'm never gonna see them again.
I'm never gonna put myself in this situation,
(31:57):
which maybe that is also part of the learning
and part of the lesson and part of the action.
But my methodology is don't make that decision
when you're in the emotion,
make that decision from a more clear grounded place
because that's where you're looking at this more objectively.
So that's why I don't wanna say I love triggers
(32:21):
because damn, it feels painful
when you're going through the pain.
It really does.
Going through the guilt, the shame, the anger,
the embarrassment, but I do believe
that that is actually one of the purposes
of this lifetime on earth is to heal.
And when we heal it for ourselves,
we don't pass it on to our kids.
(32:41):
And so my fems, my mother is out there, especially,
or even non-mothers, we're all connected.
So when one of you allows yourself
to feel something incredibly painful,
when you're doing it on behalf of your family line,
you're clearing generations ahead of you,
you're clearing generations behind you,
you're clearing it on behalf of all of those people,
(33:03):
whose energy does not know time,
and you're helping to start to clear it
for the collective of women that is alive today as well.
So this is incredibly brave work.
It is hard work, but is also the most freeing
(33:23):
and growth-oriented work I have ever done.
Because again, once you get out of the trigger,
then you can go, okay, how can I see this
from a higher perspective?
Or, okay, spiritual guides, hire self,
what is my next step here?
What are you calling me into?
Where are you calling me to go?
And you can do that without the pain and without the fear.
(33:46):
So this is one of the bigger lessons
that I teach my clients when we're working together
is how to go into the fear and get the lesson from it.
And beyond this, I have become what I like to say,
a mindset savage.
So learning how to manage my triggers is one piece of that,
(34:07):
where I can actually go through the world now
and just let people be and not get so reactive to it.
And you can probably feel why that would be powerful, right?
People can just say shit all they want,
and I'm just like, no, you know what?
I'm here being me.
Or my kids can have their emotions,
(34:27):
and instead of me yelling at them
for having their emotions, that's what I used to do,
I can be the antidote, be the peace,
be the calm that allows them to access that peace and calm.
And so learning how to manage my triggers
has been a powerful piece of my overall
learning how to manage my mindset,
my mindset, my thoughts, my emotions.
(34:49):
And so through investigating these triggers,
I now get triggered less and less
because there's no energy in my body that gets triggered.
But also I know that when the trigger comes up,
I just need to breathe through it.
Instead of the pregnant pause, it's okay, I go in,
where do I feel this in my body?
And then I breathe into it and allow it to be there.
(35:12):
So my process, if you wanna use it,
I should have said it earlier.
But when you get triggered,
and you're sitting with your journal,
I also say, where do I feel this in my body?
And I close my eyes and I do a body scan.
Typically it's somewhere in my guts,
all of my clients will say, heart space, shoulders,
neck, head, wherever they feel it in their body.
(35:33):
I have them on the in-breath, they send breath to that place.
And on the out-breath, imagine that
getting bigger and bigger
and coming to the surface of their skin.
That's allowing the emotion.
Right, what most of us do is we shove it down.
Again, we get a drink, we scroll our phone, we eat something.
But when we allow it, when we feel it,
that's when we get rid of it.
(35:55):
And then you're not triggered so much
because the trigger isn't even there to begin with.
So moving back to the mindset savage thing,
I am going to be sharing some of my best mindset tips
in a week-long free event called Unshakable.
So it starts next week, March 3rd,
if you're listening to this live on the drop date
or at least the drop week.
(36:16):
And it's all free.
Monday through Thursday, there's going to be email tips.
And then Friday, there's going to be a live session
where we're just going to bring a lot of these together
because my goal in particular with this is to,
one, give you some tips to help you start to just re-center
because there's so much chaos in the world.
People are getting triggered left and right
(36:38):
by our government, by what's on the news,
by how people are acting.
And in my world, those triggers
are really great information for you.
If you're not investigating your triggers,
you're missing out on an opportunity
to learn a lot about yourself.
And so I want to start to teach you how to do that.
So that way, again, you can stop riding the waves
(36:58):
of the world and giving the world a remote control
to your inner world and start to teach you
how to stand strong and re-center within yourself
and to remain peace in the chaos of the world.
So if you're interested, andreaandrea.com slash Unshakable,
I will leave a link in the description.
You can sign up there.
(37:19):
Again, it kicks off soon.
I would love to have you there.
And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend.
Feel free to review on Spotify or Apple.
That really helps the show get out
to a wider audience as well.
And find me on LinkedIn, andreaandrea,
if you are interested in connecting.
Until next time, see you later.
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