I recently got back from a trip to Tenerife and during that time I was exposed to a beautiful community of people and to the intimacy and connection that was created within that. It made me reflect on the importance of intimacy and connection in our lives. Listen to the full podcast to hear my thoughts and on how we got it wrong.
I recently got back from a trip to Tenerife and during that time I was exposed to a beautiful community of people and to the intimacy and connection that was created within that. It made me reflect on the importance of intimacy and connection in our lives. Listen to the full podcast to hear my thoughts and on how we got it wrong.
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Hi, I'm Donna Joy Usher, and welcome to Living through Heart.
So it's been a little while since I shot a video.
I shot a whole heap and then I went away to Europe and I went away for pretty much was away for six or seven weeks.
And it was massive for me.
I went to a retreat just before I left.
And then I went over to Brisbane and I stayed with my family for a weekend, you know how that always triggers up lots of lovely juicy stuff to work on.
And then I went over to Tenerife, in Spain and Portugal and I facilitated a retreat over there that has been held by Breathe to the Roots.
So my beautiful friends, Keith Hodge, and David and Chantal Genecand who run that.
And it was amazing, the whole thing was amazing.
And I got so much out of it.
And I had so much growth and development out of the whole thing.
There's so many things I want to share with you, so many things that I've decided within my own life and shifts and changes that are really happening for me.
But what I'm going to want to talk about is one of the main things that I found when I was in Tenerife.
So I went to Tenerife.
So for those of you know, Tenerife is actually part of Spain, it's in the Canary Islands, which is kind of more of Africa.
And my one of my good friends, Charlotte, who I've worked with and her business, and she trained me as a hypnotherapist, and she was a sales coach.
And basically I am where I am today doing what I am doing, because I met Charlotte.
So I went and stayed with Charlotte we had actually never met before.
So we've been working together for five years.
And we finally met and it was beautiful.
It was so nice to actually be with her and hold her and hug her and to stay with her and to meet all her friends.
And a lot of my clients are actually over there as well, because one of the businesses that I help her with now is the Ultimate Hypno coach, which is where we train and lead hynoptherapists and psychotherapists and we put them through an actual certified diploma in that.
And one of my roles is to always actually do therapy on a lot of the trainees coming through.
So I do the hypnotherapy on them so that they can learn,
well, one clear their own channel
so that they can have hypnotherapy because you mean you can't really
you shouldn't really be doing therapy or coaching unless you are in coaching or in therapy yourself.
Or doing your own work in some way, having come through therapy and continuing your own work and continuing to, to basically clear yourself and clear your channel.
So a lot of those people there are clients of mine friends of hers,
and what I
what I really got, and what I really realized from staying with her was the importance of intimacy and connection.
And she lives in, she has a house and she has, she's kind of a little bit of a community there.
So she's got a few flatmates that live with home people that she's actually basically supporting and helping and now we're giving them opportunities.
And so that, you know, some of them have trained
and are training as hypnotherapists and basically giving them a safe space to be in while they kind of work their self out and get themselves back on their feet financially.
And it's a really beautiful energy.
I mean, the house is beautiful.
It's up on the hill in Tenerife, overlooking the water, and it's got these beautiful, big balconies, and it's like, ah, and it's near the National Park and we were walking her dog in the mornings and then going and catching up with other friends and other people.
And this is really beautiful spiritual community there.
But within the house itself too, and within the community, you know, when you would when I would wake up in the morning, I would come into the kitchen and whoever was there, you would go and hug and not just a hug, like the way we get taught to her what I don't know, in your family, maybe it was different.
But most of it's kind of like this, you hug because you taught you have to.
And maybe we have some people that we hug and we really were really hug and we mean it.
But I've had some more beautiful hugs with people that I've never actually, I don't even know when I've gone to certain events and things and people who are just opening their heart to you as a person and seeing who you are and holding you in that and not projecting or transferring anything on to what they need or want to be.
And I've had some more beautiful hugs from people whose names I have only just found out,
than I have from friends and family that I've known for years
and it's because of the way we are
and I think we get it wrong,
in the majority will and I'm talking about the culture that I was brought up in and a lot of countries obviously this isn't the same where they do kind of almost still live in almost like a tribe with a family units are still together but in Australia, and Australians, we tend to isolate ourselves.
It's like we grow up, we get a boyfriend, girlfriend, we get married, we create our own little unit, we get a box that we live in, we go into the box, and we breed, we have children, sorry, sounds bad, we have children, we create a family.
And we're isolated within that.
That's not really a real sense of community.
And quite often, once people have children, they kind of drop off the radar, because they're so busy with the children and getting out of the struggle, or the child's routine, or things like that.
And they don't, they don't tend to get out into public as much.
But even without children, we tend to go into this nest in this box, and then we expect to get all of our intimacy and connection needs from our partner.
And that's really just not fair.
And we need to be able to get intimacy and connection.
And I'm not talking
when I'm talking about intimacy and connection,
I'm not talking about having sex with somebody,
because you can have sex with somebody and have zero intimacy or connection there.
I'm talking about heartfelt relationships with people, or relating with people or being open for people and having people be open for you, and actually holding space for you to turn up and be who you are, instead of trying to get you to conform to what they need you to be for them to feel safe.
And when you come into an environment like that, where people are just open to who you are, and they've learned how to not make everything mean something about themselves and,
and they're able to listen to what you say,
and not get too terribly true.
Like I'm not saying people don't get triggered at all, but it's more like they're more open to listening and hearing your side of the story.
And then reflecting on that, and then coming back with what their story then is on that.
When you are in that, and you feel the difference in that,
It shows a real problem with a lot of how we live in society today, where we're just trying to get what we need to be safe.
And we need to feel loved.
And we need to feel worthy.
And we're not trying to get from our partner.
And the problem is that a lot of the time, we
if we can't,
if we can't get to intimacy and connection, needs
from other people,
friends, family, and we can only get it from a partner, then we have to be in relationship with somebody,
or we have this like this clawing need and this desire.
And it took me a long time to work this out.
Because after I left my husband, I was because I was single, I'm still single
I was
I kept myself apart and alone for a very long time.
And even the kind of like isolating myself from friends and family in a way that I was like a dog licking its wounds and trying to work out and trying to work out who I was and, and I also had this belief that I had to be strong enough and be able to be okay by myself all of the time.
And there was something wrong with me that needed healing if I wasn't.
And maybe on the alignment level, that's true, but not in the level of the human experience that we are here to have, right?
And the truth is that we're actually a communal people, and we need people.
And we need connection.
And we need intimacy.
And when I'm talking about intimacy, once again, I'm not talking about sexual intimacy, I'm talking about being able to just go over to someone and put your head on their shoulder and have them put their arm around you.
And for you to be able to go to someone and say, hey, I need a hug.
Or for you to be able to sit and just hold hands with somebody and not have it mean something.
And this is the problem when you're continuously trying to get intimacy and connection to fill a wound or to like make a pain go away or to feel okay about yourself and to feel safe in the world, then it's all for the wrong reason.
And it's more like a grasping neediness.
And you're just taking energy, and maybe also pushing your energy onto the other person.
But it's not done from a place of just being able to enjoy that connection.
And then it becomes something that we can't be without, but for the wrong reasons.
So rather than being able to give ourselves that intimacy and connection and then be able to get it from friends and family in a non needy grasping way, we ended up going to try and get it from our partner and then they're trying to get it from us as well.
And then it all falls apart and it ends up becoming this struggle between two people to have life the way they perceive it to be,
to have their partner see the life the way they see it and to make them safe and to give them what they need.
But meanwhile the other partner is trying to do the same.
And it's almost like our partners role just becomes to be to make us feel okay,
to make us feel happy to make us feel like,
You know that distraction,
when we can't actually be within ourselves, we can't be with ourselves.
Because we don't even know why.
I mean, unless you've actually started going into this stuff, you don't even know what it is.
All you know is that you can't be by yourself.
Or if you are by yourself, you end up watching telly, or you end up going to the fridge, which is my whole thing was to go the fridge and I would end up eating.
And I would hate myself for it.
So then I'd be exercising,
or I'd be reading, just reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, learning, like losing myself in other people's stories and writing,
writing, you know,
wrote all those books to lose myself in that,
or scrolling social media,
we end up doing these things because we can't just sit and be with ourselves.
And one of the things that that need brings in as a craving is that intimacy and connection, which we need, because we are herd animals, and then we need to get it from our partner.
And that's just not fair.
So when I was in Tenerife, sorry,
I'm going around in circles.
when I was in Tenerife,
you know, we're coming to the kitchen and whoever was there,
they would give you their presence,
they would give you their attention,
and you would go up to them, and you would have the most beautiful, heartfelt hug every day.
And you would give and get, and you would hold them, and they would hold you, and you would make space for them, and they would make space for you.
And whatever energy was there in that moment, was allowed.
And it was a really beautiful thing,
And to be able to just be with people where you're like, Hey, would you like a massage? And they go, Yeah, thanks, I'd love to massage.
And then this this, like, giving and receiving going on, just, you know, we'd go to the beach, and that was what will happen, people will get massages, or we were, you know, we were going down and swimming or coming back or sitting and talking.
And it was just really beautiful, you know, not once and I mean, I don't have a television, so I don't watch television.
But not once while I was there in this community, did we ever have the need to just put on a television, or scroll social media,
there was always just being together, and being okay with whatever was there with each other.
And it wasn't always pretty.
It wasn't always happy, happy joy.
There was moments of intense sadness,
when someone was moving through something,
and we were just being there for them and allowing that.
And there was moments, you know, when people you know, we're, we're going through anger, and but not directing it at you just being in it.
So it's not always about having to be happy, happy, perfect. And having to then, to be like that, having to get what we need to stay in that state from people.
It's about being real with who we are, and what's there.
And one of those things that's being real with is our need for intimacy and connection.
So what I want to invite you to do is to have a look at your life.
And where do you get intimacy and connection.
Is it just from your partner?
Is it just from your partner and your children?
And do you have a need?
Because often what happens, and this is what if you've, you've listened to my attachment style series, which was back in the 20s, the episodes of the 20s on my podcast and in the videos.
Often, what happens is that wives who aren't getting their intimacy and connection needs met by their husband, try to get it from their children, and then their energy can be overly grasping and needing and really overwhelming for these children.
And when I'm working with especially men, I've got a lot of male clients at the moment. And when I'm working with them, often what we end up going into is the fact that their mother just smothered them, trying to get the love and the attention from the masculine that she wasn't getting from her partner.
So where are you getting your intimacy and needs from?
And are you meeting them yourself?
Are you able to be with yourself and breathe into yourself and sit with what's present and allow it to shift and move through you?
And are you allowed to hold yourself within that?
And just to say, hey, it's okay, you're safe and hey, you are lovable and you are worthy.
And if there is something there, you're able to go and get help shifting it and not just try to make it go away by being active, or by being you know, drowning yourself with you know, making it go away with alcohol or with food and I'm not judging any of this stuff, right?
Because everyone's an addict.
You know, and in society, we all judge the people who chose the bad addictions like alcohol and drugs, and pornography and things like that, right?
I was you know, you look at our society.
How many people have obviously got a food addiction, or and you can saying it's like my hormones or you can say it's this we can say it's that.
I mean, there's obviously we eat, we eat for the wrong reasons, right?
We eat because of social situations or we eat because it makes us feel better or we eat because it makes it happy that there's like, that's an addiction, right?
We have this addiction to the food because when we eat when we eating it, for whatever reason, it's releasing oxytocin in our brain, it's making us feel good, whether it's because we're with the family or maybe it's not oxytocin, maybe it's.
Maybe it's not oxytocin, maybe it's dopamine.
Okay.
So oxytocin is normally released, when you're in that some sort of family situation, or some communities thing and you're getting your, like your hit of connectivity, right. eye gazing, you know, produces a huge amount of oxytocin.
Maybe it's dopamine.
So dopamine is the reward brain hormone.
So when you find something, when you achieve something, you do something, if you're really good about it, that's dopamine being released, right?
So when we were eating, like, for me, I would eat and then I would, I would have this sigh.
It was like, It's okay.
And quite often, when I've traced back memories in therapy, and gone back to times, it was like, because when I hurt myself, or fell over, I was crying, I was offered food.
And that was my like, hey, food makes the pain go away. It's actually a belief that came up for when I was a really, really young age.
So food was my addiction.
Working too much was my addiction.
I was a workaholic.
So I was either work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, to get that sense of achievement, to feel worthy to get that dopamine hit from look how good I was.
And then when I wasn't doing that, I would find myself gravitating towards the fridge, because hey, now I'm having a break, I can eat something.
And then I would be getting my dopamine hit from the food and getting the reward from giving my body food.
Their addictions, right?
So let's not judge people who have addictions, like alcohol, it's not to say why they just stopped drinking, or where they just stopped taking drugs, because they can't, because there's a reason that they're doing it and they don't want to be doing it.
Alright, deep down inside.
And they're, they're either going to find their way out of it or not, that it's really about going into the pain and the discomfort that's inside and what's there and that discord and disharmony inside that's making them so uncomfortable, that they can't be with that.
And ironically, the long term pain of the addiction, and actually the program running in the background, they're always in it.
And some people won't go into it, because I think it's going to be too painful.
But it's actually a moment of pain, or a few moments of pain, or a few months of pain as opposed to a lifetime of pain. And that's what we do with the therapy, we go into the pain and we unravel the energy in the body.
It's trapped there from these moments in time where these beliefs were formed.
And we basically allow the brain to rewire and these belief systems that are there in the background, creating the programming to be rewritten, and then the need starts to go, the need for the food, the need for the cigarette, the need for the alcohol starts to quieten off, because we're not in so much internal pain that we're trying to distract from it all the time.
I knew that I was gonna go around and around today.
So sorry.
I was just going to talk about intimacy and connection.
But anyway, so for a lot of people, to be able to be with themselves and to give themselves intimacy and connection, it's just not possible because they're in too much internal pain, and they need to be getting somebody else to give it to them.
So I invite you to have a look at your life, where you're getting your intimacy and connection and needs and what does it look like?
Is it from sex with people?
You know, are you continuously on dating apps, and the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one another? Whatever, right?
Nothing will be able to give you what you need, because in reality, we need to be giving ourselves what we need.
And when we come in, we have the energy and then what we will attract is something totally different.
Are you getting it just from your your, your partner?
Are you getting it from your partner and children just from your family?
Do you have friends that give it to you?
And what does it look like?
Is it actually being with each other, and sharing deep thoughts and having deep conversations and actually allowing that person to be truly who they are without judging them,
without telling them what they should be doing or shouldn't be doing or should be thinking or shouldn't be thinking?
And that was another big one for me.
You know, one of the reasons I'm single is because I didn't want to...
there's a lot of reasons.
But one of the reasons is that there was no space for me and what I wanted and what I needed and whenever I would state I don't want to be a dentist anymore, which is why I was doing all this stuff, the online stuff and the writing books and you know learning marketing and network marketing and then the sales coaching everything I was doing and training is NLP Hypno coach was trying to get away from dentistry.
And whenever I actually stated it out loud, what I got met with was, oh, I don't know why you don't just be a dentist.
You make better money that way or make good money.
And then you can just like, it's like, well, I don't want to do that.
It's kind of like this.
Wow, really missing the picture of what life is about who when we're doing things that we don't want to do,
for what reason?
Same mistake in relationships, we don't actually want to be in why what's the reason?
And you know, it wasn't just my husband was, it's my father as well.
And he's still saying it.
I don't know why you don't just be a dentist.
I don't want to be a dentist anymore.
And is that not enough?
And when I say that, why don't ask me, why not?
And get curious about me and who I am and what I'm thinking.
So where are we getting our intimacy, needs and connections from?
And who are you getting them from?
And are being real with people, and are they able to be real with you, without you telling them what they should think or forcing your opinion on them.
And when you hug someone, do you actually hug them and hold them?
And not just like, not just like a collarbone?
Oh there you go,
but actually hold them body wise and allow your heart and their heart to share energy.
Because that is if you've never had a hug like that, or what I call a heart chakra hug, you've never been hugged before.
Because that is such a different, beautiful experience, to have someone open their heart energy to you and to you open their heart to them, and to feel the energy moving between you and to sharing and just being open to them.
So how do you hug?
And when you're hugging,
What are you getting out of it?
Are you just receiving and taking and feeling like, Ah, it's okay.
Or are you are you giving and allowing?
Or are you just giving?
Are you the sort of person who,
who just needs to give
the people who end up pleasing people all the time,
because they need to feel safe through that.
And that's a wounding as well in itself, right?
When we go around, and we, we want to just like make everybody else happy, and we sacrifice ourself within that.
That's not healthy either.
Because we're not being there for ourselves, we're not being true for ourselves.
We're sacrificing ourselves,
We're martyring ourselves.
And this is, you know, part of what I used to do all the time too.
Energetically timewise you know, I would sacrifice myself for everybody else.
And it's why I stayed for so long when I you know, when I wasn't happy,
because I was sacrificing myself,
because I didn't want other people to be unhappy by me leaving.
So I invite you, once again, to have a look at everything and everything about intimacy and connection and how can you be more,
have better intimacy and connection within your life, with your partner,
to actually be connected and not just sitting and watching telly together, not just be scrolling social media together,
I mean, you're together,
there was something in the beginning that brought you together.
And it's still there.
We're so funny as humans, we like we get bored with stuff or we get used to stuff and something that was magical and mystical and amazing initially becomes not.
But it still is if if we are able to open ourselves up to that and see what it was that was there.
Now sometimes what was there is actually just that our pain was getting taken away and and now it's not maybe the person that we're with, it's not the person that we should be with.
So that's an interesting reflection as well.
But how can you increase internet connection your life?
Can you start hugging people more and holding them more and letting them like relax and you relaxing as well into it?
When you when you hold something like that...
And then there's a point where you feel them and you feel yourself and maybe not together at the same time I'm saying but you're kind of like ah relax into it release into it.
And this tension gets released because of this energy and this connectivity.
So can you start hugging people more?
Can you have hugs in your family?
Maybe have a think about how often do you hug your spouse, your partner, your family, your siblings and really, really let them know that you're there for them and that you love them?
And then look at your friends and the same way.
You know,
Are you friends with people who bring you joy?
Or are you friends with people who allow you to feel okay with being where you are, because they're in the same situation?
Are you friends with people who are expanding themselves in life and are encouraging you to go with them on that journey?
Are you friends with people who are constricted fear and you will talk about the same stuff?
And do you watch television and if you do why?
I mean I'm not saying it's bad to watch telly but is it to distract yourself from what's there, continuously?
Do you get hooked into watching the news and the negativity and then you find yourself getting lower that and then it becomes like this like dislike you against the rest of the world or when you watch you when you watch the news it's like oh now I'm safe because I know what's going on in the world and then have a think about that, what's going on there?
What's going on inside that's creating that?
Can you just sit and be with yourself, by yourself?
And actually love yourself?
And can you do this through meditation?
Or can you just do it and just sit.
You know when you have a coffee in the morning?
Can you not distract yourself with other things?
How many times have you had a coffee or eaten something and then realize that you didn't even realize you get eaten or drank it?
It happens to me still. I get halfway through my meal and oh my god, I'm not enjoying it.
As part of me is the part of me that's like, getting it's like oxytocin and dopamine hit for like the yeah, we're eating right, that part of me that program.
But the part of me that's enjoying this beautiful meal that I've just made for myself was really healthy food and enjoying the taste and the flavor and the texture.
There's a meditation just within eating and being fully present and enjoying.
And I guess that's really what I'm inviting you to do with life, to be fully present and to enjoy it.
And if you can't, then have a look at why.
I'm looking at why, okay.
I hope I didn't lose you.
I hope I didn't bore you.
And I hope that you got something from this.
I will see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai