By being here, reading this, you’ve already demonstrated you have the capacity to be a cycle breaker. Break your cycles of bad habits, break your hedonic treadmills, break your chronic stresses, break your avoidance of facing past demons, break from the things that have held you in pain.
If you pause and reflect, you likely have a pattern of showing up to life with the baggage and elements of that wounded self. Many of those wounds were passed along to you by parents or people close to you. Some may have been self inflicted. These traumas (“big T” and “little t” traumas - for another post) lead to cycles of behaviors that often increase stress and prevent you from showing up as your best self.
Another way to look at this is when you self reflect and you think about your core values, your goodness, the positivity you have in your soul, your aspirations - these all make up your best self. Yet most of us have some type of conditioning from our pasts that trigger us into patterns of self-criticism - which contribute to patterns of how we show up as our wounded self.
Dr Mariel Buque earlier this year published good supporting text on this subject - Break the Cycle, A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma (I gave it 4 stars on goodreads, if I could have given it 4.5, I would have). She presented a helpful exercise that has a place in beginning to address those cycles… and I was reminded of this when a coworker yesterday brought up a similar activity.
Exercise:
For background, there is research on “multigenerational trauma” (your parents getting trauma from their parents, passing it onto you, intergenerationally)…as a definition for the following…
Start first by drafting a self contract that you’ve lived under.
Format: “Since [date], I’ve been operating as a wounded self. I have unconsciously fed into an intergenerational trauma cycle that has kept me in decades of hurt. Sometimes without my own conscious knowing that it was doing this, it has stunted my life and that of my lineage. I no longer wish to be bound to this contract, I release it and let it go.
Now take that written contract and rip it up.
This is a cathartic activity, symbolic, cleansing, and the physical act itself opens up neural pathways to change your thinking. Immediately after ripping it up, take out a new blank paper (* cycle breaking journal) and perform the following task:
Now, in your cycle breaking journal, draft a new contract.
Starting [today’s date], I will be wholeheartedly stepping into the identity of a cycle breaker. I will consciously feed my life and those around me from an elevated multigenerational and ancestral consciousness. I will do this for myself, my lineage and my collective.
Sign and Date your journal entry.
Reflect on this exercise. How did you feel it in your mind? How did if feel in your body? In your spirit (did you feel it in your soul?)
How this relates to Toward Wellth? The design of programming in the space, particularly those with a multi-week component, will lend itself toward many moments of journaling and reflection. Journals (or cycle breaking journals) will be provided to patrons of classes and the first activity page in the journal will be space to draft this contract as a reminder of the commitment to wellth.