Creating Conscious Love with Sheleana Aiyana
We recently caught up with Sheleana Aiyana - Rising Woman founder and author of Being the One - to talk about attachment, the power of Conscious Love and creating more intimacy and connection. Here’s what she had to say…
One of the ways that I really like to invite people to explore their own histories and their own sensations is to just normalize, you know, because as a person who has experienced so many different layers of developmental and childhood trauma and all sorts of attachment trauma and abandonment for me really has never been easy. It's always been something that I deeply desired and really wanted. And yet something that I also wanted to run away from - especially in romantic contexts.
So in my partnership with Ben, my husband, Ben, there was a lot of attachment work for us, both to do, even though he has a degree in counseling and he's been doing his work for 15 years and I had been deep into the, you know, the healing work myself. We thought, “Oh, here we are. We’re ready for a conscious relationship. We’re gonna be so good at this!”. And then as soon as the honeymoon phase wore off, it was “Uh-oh! Here are our patterns. Great!”.
So he's acting in this avoidant manner and I'm being very anxious and pursuing. For those of you who might have seen one of my workshops with him on this and essentially, you know, what I had to learn in my was that in order to remedy this pattern and to really find a way to harmony, I had to stop pursuing him and seeing him as the problem.
“We thought, “Oh, here we are. We’re ready for a conscious relationship. We’re gonna be so good at this!”. And then as soon as the honeymoon phase wore off, it was “Uh-oh! Here are our patterns. Great!”.”
Watch our conversation with Sheleana Aiyana
If we identify more as anxious, then we're really focused on, you know, getting our needs met and, and the overwhelm that we're experiencing. But what we failed to question is, okay, well, what is this person who we're labeling as the problem experiencing, right? Because it's really just the same experience just expressing differently. And so when I was able to recognize that and learn how to self sooth, instead of trying to offload my big emotion and my intense feelings onto him in those moments and really say, Hey, actually I realize that I'm pursuing you quite intensely here and I'm not honoring that you're overwhelmed and that, you know, you don't feel like you can do this right now.
“When I was able to do that, when I started practicing, okay, I’m gonna go self-sooth, he would start moving toward me because he felt like he had space to breathe. And so oftentimes I worked with couples and I work with people who are in these dynamics and it’s the same every time. We have to bring it back home to ourselves first. ”
If I'm able to just step back and go into my own and process and be in my body and remind myself, okay, I'm okay here, I'm in my body, I'm alive, I'm breathing. I can talk to my inner child. I can talk to those wounded parts that are being triggered that three year old me that was dropped off at a foster home in the middle of the night and left. I can be with the 12 year old me that was in foster homes.
When I was able to do that, when I started practicing, okay, I'm gonna go self-sooth, he would start moving toward me because he felt like he had space to breathe. And so oftentimes I worked with couples and I work with people who are in these dynamics and it's the same every time. We have to bring it back home to ourselves first.
Do you want to learn more about Creating Conscious Love? Join our Introduction to Conscious Love workshop with Sheleana Aiyana on April 23rd. You can join live or catch up with the On-Demand Recordings.
