Natalia Rachel

We don’t just wake up one day with mental health symptoms.

They are part of a greater story. There’s multi-dimensional context.

Rather than offer labels and solutions to quiet or fix our symptoms, we need to learn to explore the story and unearth the roots of our distress and dysfunction.

➡️The remedy is always in the root.

There are three areas we can explore to begin to look at mental health from a more complex and systemic perspective:

1️⃣Capacity

When we are living beyond our capacity or limits, our nervous system will enter survival mode. Not only do we deplete our internal resources, but we start experiencing through the lens of threat. This can show up as anxiety, depression, emotional volatility, hyper-sensitivty, apathy and a growing resentment for the people and the world around us.

👉Healing asks us to learn to live within our capacity. Say no to the vocies and forces that ask us to live beyond it. And set boundaries with the parts of us that feel more worthy with the identity of burnt out superheroes.

2️⃣ Belonging

If we are surround by people or living in communities where we don’t feel we are truly seen, heard, valued and welcomed, it will take a toll on our mental health. As humans we are primed for connection. We need care, intimacy, support and validation in order to thrive. Without it, we can’t truly thrive. This is a neurophysiological truth.

👉Healing asks us to find people who see, hear, welcome and value us. This is often easier said than done when we are living within relationships, communities and cultures that are dismissive, neglectful, shaming, disrespectful or harmful.

Note: before we give out mental health labels, it’s important to look around at the relationships in our lives. They are the biggest influence on our mental emotional well-being.

3️⃣Authenticity

When we are twisting ourselves in knots to belong, quieting our voice to keep the peace or curating a version of ourselves for success, we will often feel like something is wrong. This can show up as voices in our heads, the feeling of imposter syndrome, deep lonliness accompanied with shame, waves of anxiety, followed by deep depressive lows. (And we tend to hide those too). Underneath it all, our spirit is calling for emancipation and expression.

👉Healing ask us to set our voices free, find our true nature and liberate it. This is a complex journey of unlearning all the ways we have been taught to show up and claim our authenticty.


➡️As leaders and humans that want to co-create a kinder more equitable world, we can ensure that the dynamics, cultures and systems we build recognise the fundamental pillars of wellbeing.

👉Let’s stop trying to cope within dysfunctional dynamics and systems.

👉It’s time to change the template we are working with. It’s time to heal.

❓What do you think?

#healing #mentalhealth #culturetransformation #socialimpact

Watch my keynote time to heal. Link in comments.

We don’t just wake up one day in burnout.

Burnout is a chapter in a greater story.

It often begins with living beyond our capacity.

📌There’s often a chapter where we ignore our early warning signs, even though we can feel them.

📌Then there’s the part where we convince. ourselves to knuckle down, buck up and work even harder, telling ourselves that things would fall apart if we take our foot off the pedal. We make output more important than our own health… usually in this chapter, our relationships begin to suffer… and we may not be behaving in ways that reflect who we truly are.

📌Next there’s the coping, surviving and numbing phase where we use all kinds of ways to equalise or dissociate (the could look like anything from over exercing, to drinking or substance abuse, to usuing people as human soothers).

📌The phase that comes after is often where there is the onset of physical and mental health symptoms that demand we slow down and begin to start setting some boundaries around our wellbeing. This phase often feels very distressing, scary and may cause some huge kind of reality check.

➡️Most of us wait til this stage before we start taking burnout seriously. We do this, because our cultural value system rewards us for stretching ourselves beyond our limits. Some of us also do it, purely from a place of survival… to put food on the table or send our kids to school.

👉Healing happens when we start taking burnout seriously, individually and systemically.

👉From a personal perspective, we can learn to tune in and respond to our early warning signs. This is about energy mastery.

👉From a systemic perspective, we can look at the ways we build systems that demand overdrive and will ultimately cause burnout epidemic.

When it comes to burnout recovery and prevention, we have so much work to do.

❓What do you think?

#burnoutprevention #burnout #recoveryispossible #addiction #epidemic #culturetransformation #healing #socialchange #systemschange

Learn to tune into your signals.
Learn to create dynamics that promote wellbeing.
Links in comments

Empathy is not about absorbing or soothing others’ pain.

➡️Healthy empathy is about understanding another’s plight or pain, and engaging in ways that are considerate, kind and with clear boundaries in tact.

Once we breech the boundary between what is theirs and what is ours to hold, two issues arise:

1️⃣ Overload, burnout, vicarious trauma

When we go around all day as a human sponge we will end up feeling depleted, taken from or begin to see our worth in terms of how much of a servant or saviour we are. Over time this can cause mental and physical health symptoms and also really skew relationship dynamics so that we are always giving and never receiving, seen as a helper not an equal.

2️⃣ Disempowement & enablement

When we mop up other peoples mess, mayhem or tears over and over again, we don’t really allow space for them to learn how to metabolise their pain and find the internal resources they need to step into their power and create change.
While our intentions may be good, we actually become a block to the healing that needs to happen.

❓Why do we tend to overstep the boundary of care?

➡️ So many of us are terrified of pain. Our own and each others. So we will do anything to make it go away. Often when we are over-empathising and over-serving it’s not really about the other person’s experience. It’s a way we are self-soothing or diverting from our own need for healing.

There are also influences from various cultures and religions that teach us that to serve is the foundation of being a good human. What they haven’t taught us, where to find the line between service and self-abandonment.

👉Healing asks us to learn to meet others in their pain, without becoming part of it, or taking on the responsibility to fix or solve. When we find this sacred line, we say: ‘let me sit with you as you move through your experience. While I offer myself as a resource, this is your story to write.’

This is how we use our presence to restore the balance of power.

❓what do you think?

#empathy #culturalintelligence #servantleadership #burnout #vicarioustrauma #healing #socialchange

Learn how to find the sacred line between service and self-abandonment.

Join me in 🇸🇬🇺🇸🇳🇱 September/October
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Feeling like we are not where we are meant to be in life, that we are behind the ‘pack’ or on a different time line, may be linked to past trauma.

➡️Trauma causes a disruption in our development.

➡️When we are living in survival, or navigating chaos or oppression, there’s no space for our own psychological and neurophysiological development. In fact, we tend towards adaptation, in order to navigate threat or exclusion.

➡️Because so much of our energy is going to survival, coping and adapting, we may not develop aspects of ourselves, or reach common life milestones in the same way our peers do.

➡️Our tendency to compare and shame ourselves, blocks our healing and in some cases we can retraumatize ourselves with our own negative self talk.

Some of the ways we may feel less developed than our peers include:

📌career

While others we climbing ladders, there were years where we were just trying to stay safe and sane.

📌romance and love

While others were our learning how to date and explore partnership, we were either totally shut down, or going wild, wreckless with our hearts and bodies… or with others.

📌 Finances

While others made future-focussed choices and bought homes or built wealth, we were just trying to pay the rent and get fed, or maybe we were too scared to look at the numbers, or self-soothing with shiny objects.

📌 Self-development / self-actualization

While others read books, did courses and found their true voice and path, we were just getting by and trying to process the past (often without the resources and support we really needed to make sustained progress)

👉Healing asks us to stop comparing ourselves to where others are in life. And to hold ourselves with compassion, self-forgiveness and tenderness.

This is a paradigm-shifting moment.

When we meet ourselves where we are with nothing other than understanding and love, a future filled with all that we desire becomes possible.

👉Less shame, more love.

❓What do you think?

#healing #shame #compassion #selfdevelopment #traumainformed #healing

Shift your paradigm.
Links in comments.

As we heal, we tend to develop a strong sense of justice.

We learn to walk in through world with a ‘do no harm’ approach.

➡️One of the places or pitfalls, where we can loop back into our trauma, is when we decide to take on the role of advocating for justice at all costs…. And feeling unheard, unseen or disrespected in the process.

We may find ourselves in some of the following situations:

📌 pointing out other people’s harmful or misaligned behaviours, and trying to make them see themselves more clearly - we become the ‘wise’ person, who at one moment will also become the ‘villain’ or be rejected in some way.

📌 coaching people how to relate to, connect to or love us well, even when they continue to disrespect or hurt us. (It can feel like banging our heads against a brick wall)

📌 Feeling an overwhelming sense of burden and duty when faced with the enormity of injustice in our world. And trying so hard to give as much as we can to remedy it, even at our own expense.

➡️When we become hell bent on healing the world and everyone around us, it can take an enormous toll on the spirit, and mess with the natural order of relationships and power distribution.

➡️Over time it can bring on feelings of anger, hopelessnes, betrayal and grief. Despite our best intentions, it can make us feel lonelier than ever.

👉Healing asks us to learn when it’s time to step into service or facilitation, and when it’s time to surrender, let others live their story, and refocus on our own.

👉The moment we stop trying to fix, coach, facilitate or improve others lives, we will meet the parts of us who were not well supported or cared for, weather in early years or present times. This can be a very painful place to visit.

👉As more and more of us turn to service, it’s important we continue to tend to our own wounds, and find the boundary between helping others, and helping ourselves.

👉This is how we break cycles of self-abandonment and find a healthy way to live, love and serve.

👉Healing asks us to keep coming home to ourselves and heal.

❓What do you think?

#healing #coaching #facilitation #leadershipdevelopment #boundaries #compassion

Serve with sensibility.
Break the cycle.
Links in comments.

Many of us are exhausted.

📌From pushing ourselves beyond our capacity for decades.

📌From building lives that may not be truly in line with our true nature or primal desires.

📌From pretending we are well and good, when really we are not.

📌From efforting to maintain relationships that are not respectful, reciprocal or life giving.

📌From doing so much alone, without the kind of support we really need to thrive.

📌From packing ourselves into products, trying to build presence online, in the hope it’s going to dramatically change things… one day.

📌From suppressing and masking unhealed trauma that’s been bubbling away inside us for years, or even a life time.

📌from living with our nervous systems in overdrive, flooded with information and input all day every day.

➡️The feelings of being stuck, tired, apathetic or down right depressed are not a mark of dysfunction.

➡️They are the direct result of a the build up of self-abandonment and/or over-stimulation in a world that demands too much of us every single day.

👉Instead of shaming ourselves for being less productive or not happy, shiny and bright, we can begin to put our experiences into context.

Of course we are tired. Of course we are.

👉Healing happens the moment we validate our experiences.

Let’s begin here.

❓What do you think?

#burnout #healing #traumainformed #neurodivergant #trauma #mentalhealth #compassion #fatigue

Heal.
Link in comments.