Getting the help we need…
Tuning into our internal landscape is fraught with complexities, both positive and negative on a daily basis. Being individuals with our own unique journey to navigate, our family of origin is sometimes equipped in helping us overcome the challenges we face. Many of us seem to have to learn things the hard way. This does have its merits, as science shows that behavior change needs time, consistency and often friction (Or for us to hit that particular rock bottom) for our habits to evolve.
We believe that mentors, guides and wise friends are needed these days to help adolescents navigate their internal and external world. With the amount of social media information coming in, both positive and negative, combined with the instant feedback that they are getting from their peers often on a superficial level, it is easy for internal landscapes to get off target or on the wrong track.
We know that some welcome this journey, find refuge inside and get a myriad of bubbly feelings when exploring their inner workings. Some encounter a web of confusion, where past events get mixed into the present, and where the weather of this landscape hints of dark skies, rather than uplifting blue ones. Some of us want to avoid it altogether.
We have all had these two dimensions of emotionality, these two perspectives. With time, when exploring our inner workings, hopefully we can find peace inside of the confusion, and have strategies to overcome it. Journeying inward rather than evading it, not pulling the covers up and waiting decades to face our feelings.
Dr Edith Egar in her book, The Choice, chronicles her 35 year journey to deal with her childhood trauma inflicted at Auschwitz internment camp. She speaks of crippling flashbacks and the shell of herself that she lived in before she was finally willing to talk about what happened to her and get the support to make ‘a choice’ in the moments of her life. She helps others of all walks find these choices on a daily basis and knows that we each can too.
Our main goal is to bring understanding of the control that we do have over our mental state, from both a nutritional perspective, to embodied internal and external strategies for when we are triggered. We support ongoing practices of speaking up for ourselves when we each tend to focus inward - or outward - and when the opposite will help us in that moment on a more powerful level.
At Evolve Thrive Joy Youth we believe that knowing and touching bases with our true selves, while connecting with others in meaningful and healthy ways helps us become mature selves in our youth, in our mid-life and at any time that we need it.
Being spiritual beings in human skin-suits is wonderful and complex. May we all get the support we need when we learn how to ask for it.
“The meaning of life is that it is to be lived.”
Bruce Lee
Sheila Griffith
