As the years passed, I got more efficient with my techniques. I started teaching them to others who wanted to know how to heal themselves. Working with others and continuing to keep myself healthy led to something interesting; I found that I had boiled down my own mind-body practice to a core practice. I relied on this core practice every day to maintain my health, feel good emotionally, and decrease my stress.

After years of chronic physical pain and stress followed by years of using mind-body healing, I know that it is vital to my health and well-being to maintain a light but effective mind-body routine. Without that, I tend to fall back into old patterns, old ways of dealing with stress, my body, my emotions, and daily life. When I fall back into old patterns, I get sick, something starts hurting, or my body finds some way to remind me to get out my mind-body skills.

Yet, I’m also a person who likes to do a lot of different things. I’m usually fairly busy, excited about lots of different projects, and living a full life. I don’t want to devote hours and hours a day to my mind-body practice. That’s why I ended up distilling all those hours of research and all those mind-body healing tools down into my short daily practice.

About a year ago, I started using this distilled core mind-body practice of mine with my clients. I wasn’t sure if it would work for others – I just knew it worked for me. Yet, my clients found it extremely helpful. It seemed I’d found a concise way to help people with the “how-to” of mind-body healing.

Now, I’ve written the core mind-body practice down and created a package for anyone who wants to learn and use it in their own lives – no coaching needed. It’s all there, in a short ebook, a sample recorded coaching session, and a guided audio of the practice. It’s my go-to tool for myself, what I use with my clients, and the basis for everything I do in my personal and professional practice.

Since I’m about to take a short coaching hiatus while I give birth and transition into motherhood, I thought this would be the ideal time to share this Core Anamsong Mind-Body Practice with you. You can learn everything you need to know in the ebook, start implementing it into your own life, and essentially coach yourself! The guided audio will allow you to sit back and be taken through the practice any time you want. I always love being guided, myself, so that I can close my eyes, sink deeply into the practice, and really get great results. And, hearing me coach a client through the practice will help you see it in action and apply it to your own life.

Whether you’re struggling with pain issues, stress, confidence, or even career and business building, the Core Anamsong Mind-Body Practice will serve as a central tool for you to use to create change in your life. I’m so excited for you to try it out, start to see the power of the combined mind-body skills working in your life, and get results.

By now, if you follow my blog, you’ve probably downloaded the Hear Your Soul, Heal Yourself complimentary ebook. (If not, grab your copy in the right sidebar sign-up box!) I’ve written that ebook to give you a good, solid, introduction to the mind-body healing basics. Now, you’re ready to take it further, to a deeper level, to the next step. You’re ready to use the Core Anamsong Mind-Body Practice, which is slightly more advanced, but can serve as a basis for your daily practice for years to come. It’s the practice that will allow you to connect deeply with yourself, heal, and let your soul sing.

Click here if you’re ready to learn more about the Let Your Soul Sing: The Core Anamsong Mind-Body Practice Package!

I got out my trusty mind-body journal (which is just a spiral bound notebook where I use all my own tools on myself). I went outside to sit quietly and be with myself. In Wyoming, that means sitting in a clump of sagebrush. I picked a spot with a great view of a beautiful valley, breathed in the scent of sage, and got quiet. I asked my soul to help me understand what is going on in my life right now.

Soon after I asked, I heard my soul’s answer. It said, “You’re in the In-Between.”

The In-Between is a place the mind doesn’t fully grasp. The In-Between requires the wisdom of the body and emotions and soul. Otherwise, the mind just gets confused.

My soul helped me to understand the In-Between. As I sat, I saw images of my life this year like pictures on a movie screen.

Getting pregnant for the first time in my life

Celebrating the pregnancy with my husband

Working on my coaching business

Having a miscarriage

Grieving with my husband

Grieving, in general

Discovering new things about myself

Finding out I wasn’t saying everything I wanted to say – to readers, to clients

Getting new ideas for my business

Being in the process of starting new projects

Considering getting pregnant again

Waiting for my body to feel like getting pregnant again

Waiting for my soul to feel like getting pregnant again

Being in the process of renovating and redecorating my house

Being in the process of creating a new website and new material

Doing new work, with new people

Not having the end vision yet, for anything

Right now, everything is started. Nothing is done. I don’t have a full vision of what everything will look like. I’m not totally sure what I want, yet. I’m exploring. I’m not deciding. I’m looking at all the different flavors. I’m tasting them. I’m not sure yet which ones I’ll choose.

My soul explained that the In-Between is necessary. It is, in fact, more important than the Not In-Between. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can happen without the In-Between. Nothing can be born without the space from which to be born. Healing happens in the In-Between. The In-Between is about discovery. It’s the thing that happens before gestation. Even before a seed is planted.

In music, there’s a thing called a rest. It’s a notation on the music score that tells you to not make any sound for a certain number of beats. Most beginning musicians ignore the rests. Their eyes skip over them and see the next music note on the page. As a teacher, I used to have to explain, over and over again, that the rest was just as important as the note. That it was more important, because if you played in the rest, the music no longer worked. Playing in one rest could mess up an entire symphony. It could cause cacophony and dissonance. It could bring the entire orchestra to a grinding halt. Now I’m explaining to myself that the rest is just as important as the note.

The In-Between is a rest between two notes. It’s the murky, not-clearly-defined place between imagining and creating. I am imagining a lot right now. I imagine different colors of home décor in different rooms in my house. I imagine giving birth in different months of the year. I imagine different images on my website.

I don’t decide. Yet.  I don’t start.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll know more. In fact, this week I did choose some colors for the living room. They feel right. But the living room is still in process.

I pick one little thing at a time. I imagine some more. I listen to my body.

And, I grieve. Still.

In my opinion, we think the grieving process is a lot shorter than it really is. At first, grief is like a flood. It consumes everything we do. Later in the process, it becomes like summer thunderstorms. It arrives suddenly and passes quickly, several times a week.

I’m learning to let grief be a part of my life. I’m learning that it’s okay to be in the middle, half this and half that, undecided, in and out – In-Between.  The In-Between allows me time to process and assimilate the changes necessary right now to make my life an authentic representation of me.

My living room wasn’t quite me

My business wasn’t quite me

My website wasn’t quite me

I wasn’t quite me in my relationships

I wasn’t quite me in many ways.

I need a solid foundation of authenticity in my life before I race forward into What’s Next. I’m building it. I’m course-correcting where I need to – where I got off track due to not listening to my soul. Where I forgot to check in to see who I am, right NOW.

Course-correcting is just part of living. Sometimes I make little course corrections in a day, an hour, a minute. Other times I make a giant course correction that includes every aspect of my life.

The last time I made a giant course correction was when I stepped onto the mind-body path and decided to learn how to heal my body by bringing my mind, body, emotions, and soul into harmony. It was a major life change. It led to me being more authentic, to following my true dreams, to becoming a coach, and to giving myself permission to be me.

Then, I grew. I changed. I learned. It is time to catch up with myself again, and to really look closely at everything in my life.  Last summer, I had a garage sale. I spent two weeks picking up objects and saying – does this fit into my life? Is this really me?

That process is still going on, in every aspect of my life. I’m in the In-Between.

It’s a place of discomfort, for me, and at the same time, I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. I love where everything is going. I love how much more me I’m being. I love all the new in my life. And at the same time, I grieve what I’m releasing. I let myself feel sad when the living room couch leaves. I let it go. I let myself love the new chairs that took its place.

Now I see that thanks to the In-Between, I’ll know the right moment to start anew with the motherhood project. I’ll know what feels right to put on my website. I’ll know what feels right to create for my clients. I’ll know what feels right to add to my home.

I asked my soul how long the In-Between would last. It just smiled.

I get emails from clients like the sample below pretty much every week:

Agh! I think something is terribly wrong with me! Oh no! I am crying a lot! I feel terrible! What should I do? I can’t live like this! What if I’m never happy again!

To which I usually reply something like this:

Yay! Soooo glad you are crying and feeling your emotions! Don’t worry – this won’t last forever. It’s what we’ve been hoping to accomplish. Remember when you said you wanted to stop stuffing your emotions and actually feel them? Well, this is the beginning!

I have gained a reputation for being the coach who makes you cry. In a good way. In an “I can finally let down and let this emotion flow” kind of way. I joke about this crying coach thing with my clients, who thus far have not thrown tomatoes or eggs at me, or toilet papered my house. This may be because most of them live far, far away from Wyoming. Thankfully.

Once they get through the initial panic over actually feeling these darn emotions, however, they report feeling much, much better. Emotionally, physically, and mentally. Storing all that emotional stuff in one’s body really doesn’t feel great, takes a lot of energy, and leads to physical pain. You’ve gotta remember the reason you embarked on this mind-body healing journey, whether it was to relieve pain around issues like vulvodynia or interstitial cystitis or gain confidence and quiet the self-doubts and inner critic. You wanted to feel better. You wanted to actually let yourself have emotions. You wanted to connect to your soul wisdom, even if you didn’t know it in so many words.

Well, the first step is to actually feel those emotions you’ve unwittingly stored away. Conceptually, this sounds great. In reality, it’s very unnerving, at first. This is because you’ve spent years NOT feeling them. Trust me – as a champion emotion avoider, I have so been there. The reason we don’t want to feel these things is they are sooooooooo uncomfortable. (Along with other reasons, such as feeling vulnerable and “weak” if we let them flow.)

Like many, many things in life, when you start this process, you have to make it through the rough patch where things seem worse before they get better. In physical healing, this is often called the “healing crisis.” In the mind-body process, I just call it The Mess. It generally involves a lot of Kleenex tissue, reassuring one’s spouse that this is not an emergency, and a cave-like place to which you can retreat and blubber. A lot.  (My spouse has mentioned that spouses need a blog post on what to do with mates who are going through the mess. He too, speaks from personal experience. Possibly I’ll write that one next…)

The only reason this seems so awful, for most of us, is the panic and fear that arises from the inner part of us that thinks these emotions are not to be felt. They are to be avoided! Stuffed away! “Run now!” shouts this inner suppressor inside us. “The tears are coming! Noooooooo!”

This is what we call resistance. Resistance to feeling these emotions is normal. It’s just part of the process. You might feel it in spades or feel it just a little, but it is likely to show up nearly every time you start to really feel an emotion, especially at first. Just acknowledge this resistance, reassure it (you can talk to it like it’s your friend) that you are okay and that you will go gently into the emotion swamp.

If you can stay slightly in the role of observing yourself feel (this feels like you’re watching yourself in a movie), even as you are crying (or throwing things at your poor, unsuspecting spouse), you’ll find that the swamp is just that. It’s only knee-high. You won’t drown, you won’t feel overwhelmed, and you will make it to the other side.

Once you’ve started letting yourself feel emotions and have integrated that into your daily life, they’ll be like just a blip on the screen. Just a normal, simple, passing part of your daily existence. You’ll become a pro. You might still feel some resistance every now and then, and you won’t do everything perfectly, but you’ll feel much more at peace with emotions, and you’ll feel much more relaxed and energetic in your body. If you were in pain, it will fade away. You’ll start to feel like you know yourself. You’ll start to feel like you like yourself. And dare I say, even love yourself! You’ll find yourself having fewer bouts of self-doubt, and when those do arise, you’ll see them from a slightly detached place instead of getting totally knocked flat and immobilized.

I write all of this simply to say this: stick with it. You can do it. It doesn’t feel this hard forever. If you can get over the hump and through the muddiest part of the swamp, you’ll get back onto dry ground. It’s much easier to just keep going forward, through the discomfort, through the resistance (not forcefully – just with a steadfast willingness to go forward) than to start and then stop, over and over again. That tends to feel horrific, like you are never going to make it out of the swamp.  Martha Beck, my mentor and the original reason I became a coach, calls this process going through the ring of fire. This is an apt analogy, because it does burn hot. If you move forward, however, you don’t catch fire. You end up in what she calls the Core of Peace. Ahhhh. If you start and stop repeatedly, you end up just standing in the fire, burning. Gack. I’ve done it, and I don’t recommend it.

Keep feeling. Be willing to be a mess. Be willing to have a melt-down, even if it’s not in your schedule. (Because really, have you scheduled your melt-down time? Is it listed in your calendar between the haircut and picking the kids up from school? Didn’t think so!) Emotions are not logical, not linear, not organized. They affront our intellect with their very kindergarten-style way of doing things – so haphazard, so random, so…undisciplined. Yet, they return us to our own bodies, our own soul wisdom, and, ultimately, peace.

Embrace the mess. This too shall pass. You can do it. Stock up on Kleenex. Celebrate this sign that the mind-body process is working. Know that most people have no idea how to navigate emotions, so they may not understand what you’re doing. Reassure them that it’s okay, and don’t bother worrying about what they think. You are on the path to healing, and you will most definitely arrive. Just keep going forward, through the swamp, through the fire, and remember to breathe. You will not only survive – you will thrive.