Melissa Lamoureux

whether it’s someone just “grinding your gears” for some inexplicable reason, being outright judgemental, feeling comparison, jealousy, or resentment, it’s a you problem not a them problem.

what do i mean by that?

it means everything in life is neutral. and if a person is igniting certain feelings within YOU, it means YOU have something that needs to be explored and healed. otherwise you would have no reaction to that person.

we often think that it’s the other person because we’re the ones who feel bad. and we may even wish they would change so we would feel better.

but that approach is neither realistic (because it’s based in controlling uncontrollable external circumstances), and it also lacks personal responsibility.

recognizing that we are the ones having a reaction from an unhealed place gives us our power back and also our self-governance. it gives us information, and a place to get curious about who we are, and what this person is reflecting back to us that needs some attention. it also gives us the opportunity to make new choices and/or set boundaries if needed.

next time you feel triggered or irritated by a person’s presence or behaviour, practice some self-inquiry by sitting with the feelings: what shows up for you? where do you feel it in your body? what is the emotion behind the feeling? what does this feeling or experience remind you of? what version of yourself is this person reminding you of?

see if you can just allow what is true for you to be experienced and felt. can you love yourself for feeling this discomfort? can you accept yourself for feeling judgement or hate towards another person (or maybe to the part of you that person is reflecting back to you)?

when we go deeper to do the healing work that is needed, we give ourselves and the people around us the gift of our presence, and of allowing them to show up exactly as they are. we illicit different experiences from people when we no longer carry inner wounds and conflicts.

it all starts and ends with us. ♥️

Hey friends!

I know this is last minute(ish) as I've been doing majority of my promo via Instagram, but I have launched a new program called Emotions Rx: A Roadmap to Self Mastery and there are still 2 spots available.

This is an 8 week immersive program that includes weekly teaching calls and weekly q+a's after you've had time to try out the practices. There are also 4 Bonus Modules. Cost is $297 and payment options are available.

I'm giving everything I've learned - all the best practical tools and info - over the last 12 years and would be absolutely honoured if you felt called to join us. I'm a huge believer that practical is powerful, so this will be all of the HOW of 'doing the work' we hear so much about.

It will be a small group and as this is the first round, it's essentially a beta program (meaning, it's a test program). Participants will have the opportunity to help shape this program as it moves forward in the world and so I'm looking for participants who want to contribute in that way.

Here is the link for more info if you feel called to join us in understanding your inner world better, and reclaiming the parts and energy of you that have gotten lost along the way: https://melissalamoureux.com/emotional-rx-roadmap-to-selfmastery/

Emotional Rx: A Roadmap to Self-Mastery | Melissa Lamoureux A 6-week course to understand your emotional system, empower yourself with the tools to move through the hard stuff, and live a more whole, integrated life.

one of my favourite quotes from my incredibly wise and loving mentor , executive director of the national eft institute .

one of the biggest lessons i have learned on my journey of healing has been understanding that having the courage (and a safe container ie. helping relationship/someone you trust) to lean into hard emotions like shame, guilt, desperation, rage, and fear is one of the biggest gateways to healing.

when we are able to stop running and face the big scary monsters in our closet with love and acceptance, it supports us in reclaiming the parts of us that got frozen in the past via traumatic experiences. in turn we are able to show up with more presence and wholeness in our current experience of life.

when we carry these emotions with us because we don’t know how to allow them to fully move through us effectively, it’s like we have one part of us subconsciously trying to manage keeping these parts at bay, while we simultaneously try and “live our best life”.

many years ago when i first started on my journey, i went deep into the land of law of attraction and “raising your vibration”. but something always felt kind of off. it felt out of integrity to be reaching for all these feel good affirmations, when in reality i literally felt like s**t about myself and my life.

i was carrying so much emotional baggage from my past because i just didn’t have the tools to process the experiences that had left me fragmented, and feeling isolated, lonely, and filled with shame.

i didn’t realize that in an effort to “raise my vibe”, not only was i battling a tsunami of trauma and pain, i was also inadvertently keeping myself stuck because i was pushing against what was true for me rather than inviting it in to be explored, surrendered, and healed.

this is the work my friends, and i’m so excited to be sharing my emotions rx: a roadmap to self mastery program with all of you (and the world!) for the first time starting this september 28, 2020.

this program is a culmination of everything i have learned, tested, and integrated over the last 12 years of being on this journey and i would be honoured to have you join us. link in bio ♥️

true story.

our brains and bodies are always looking for opportunities to heal.

what we often don’t realize is that the struggles that keep showing up for us again and again in our current life are actually pointing us to something we’ve carried forward with us from our past; past emotional experiences we didn’t know how to process, past decisions we made about who we need to be to be safe and how the world works.

the things you struggle with today - that annoying experience of constantly feeling unheard by the people around you, of feeling like you don’t matter, of your addiction to food, exercise, s*x, of feeling the need to be right or being overly controlling - all of these things are rooted in the past.

and when we know how to heal and reclaim those parts of us that got lost, that were scared, that learned the world wasn’t safe, we can unlock the doorway to true healing and living in wholeness and integrity in the now.

a key foundation of this work is being able to recognize, name, and navigate our emotional experience as humans. in my personal and professional work over the last six years, this has been such a core piece of shifting major patterns i had struggled with for years.

if you want to start building your own emotional literacy, stay tuned for the emotional rx: a roadmap to self mastery course i’m launching in september.

i’ll be running a discounted beta for the first launch to work out the kinks and a waitlist for those interested next week!!

will you consider joining me? ♥️

how are you doing? 2020 has been a turbulent year, and with each new collective trauma i could feel myself becoming more and more dysregulated (read anxious, scared, and feeling out of control) the more i engaged with and consumed content on social media. can you relate?

it can be a challenge to remove ourselves from the frenzy of content when it feels so urgent, and relevant, and there is momentum around our emotions. after being in a frenzy myself this last month, taking time away was just what i needed to reset and re-evaluate.

what the clarity of space provided for me was a remembrance that those feelings we feel after consuming content are pointing us to what is serving us - and also what isn’t. a good rule of thumb for me? if i feel uplifted, supported, and/or nourished, it’s good to go. if it makes me feel depressed, angry, or anxious, i evaluate to see if there’s something i’m seeing that is showing me where i have my own work to do, or if it’s just not in my highest interest.

it can be tricky to discern between the two, but as we increase our self-awareness around our yes’ and no’s, we can gain clarity much quicker to keep our energy and emotions clear as we move forward.

so my sweet ones, take care and pay attention to how you’re feeling before, during, and after consuming and engaging with the plethora of content flying around the interweb. what we expose ourselves to has the ability to either lift us up or spiral us down, and in the current times, it’s so important to monitor our emotional and mental health. if we’re not okay, we can’t support our families, friends, communities or work places and we still have 6 months to go in this incredibly transformative year. take care of you and we’ll all get through this universal dark night of the soul together. ♥️

food for thought 🧀

gentle reminder for the current times. two (seemingly) opposite ideas/things can both be true at the same time - life is not always a this or that or this equals that. for example, i can believe and support the idea and truth that black lives matter and also at the same time not support the as an organization. the statement “black lives matter” is inherently true, while it’s also true that the organization is a marxist group that has goals that are not aligned with actually supporting black lives (ie. destroying the nuclear family - check out their mission statement on their website for more info - which works AGAINST supporting the flourishing of black communities {and that’s only one example - check out or for more stats/info}). there is deep truth in simplicity. we need to expand our minds to have capacity to hold the tension between two truths at the same time. this is how we grow, evolve, and allow ourselves and others to “live in the grey” - a much more honouring space for ourselves and others. “living in the grey” gives space for individual lived experiences, rather than lumping individuals into groups/categories - effectively taking away voice and agency in the process. ♥️

with the multitude of voices, resources, videos, articles, should’s and shouldn’ts we’ve been seeing these last weeks and months in response to the current state of the world, one of the things i keep asking myself (when i’m not in an intensely dysregulated state) is “what’s the AND here?”

it can be easy in a state of reactivity and stress to jump on the latest bandwagon of feel good and/or self-righteous thought and to fall into a trap of binary thinking and conflated assumptions:

“if this is true, it means that isn’t true.”

“if they believe this, they must also believe that.”

but the world - and our experiences as individuals - are not always either/or, and we can miss the richness of context and variation when we fall prey to - i’ll admit - the comfort of knowing, of certainty, of a feeling of completeness or being “right”.

part of growing into wisdom is the recognition that multiple, and seemingly contradictory ideas and realities can co-exist at the same time.

“this can be true, AND so is this other thing that seems contradictory and maybe i don’t like it.”

i don’t want to pretend that i have all the answers - i definitely don’t. and i also don’t want to pretend that i’ve been able to stay perfectly emotionally regulated and aware through so much global chaos - i most certainly have not - and have fallen into reactivity (more on that tomorrow), deflection, assuming, projecting, and outright denying in various ways throughout these past weeks and months.

but part of looking for the AND in every situation is recognizing that we can hold space for what we feel and know to be true (for us) while also allowing room for ideas, people, and things that may not fit into our nicely defined boxes of how we understand the world.

we won’t always get it right, but looking for the AND means we’re willing to challenge our own perceptions, and to give ourselves and others grace as we navigate our collective experiences as first time humans. ♥️

how will you start looking for the AND in your own life and thought process?

it’s been a big week. how are you doing? how are you feeling? my hope for you is you’ve had safe spaces to connect and share whatever has been on your heart. now is the time to lean in.

now is the time to look at if/how we have disempowered ourselves or others through our belief systems and assumptions.

it’s a call to radical self-responsibility for all of us. it’s a call to start with ourselves, to do the inner work, to reflect on who we are, what we believe about ourselves and others, and what kind of empowering future we want to move towards.

it’s a call to hold space for each other as we walk through the cleansing fires as a collective.

it’s a call to hold each and every one of us to a higher standard of accountability and to reflect on which narratives we want to amplify as a community.

do we want to encourage each other in acknowledging how far we’ve come? or do we want to fixate on what we deem as broken?

ask yourself:

how does it serve me to believe i am oppressed?

how does it serve me to believe others are oppressed?

who would i be without that thought?

what would it look like if i saw myself and each individual as empowered and free?

this is not to diminish real, lived experiences of discrimination and the pain it has caused both in the past and present - far from it. nor does it aim to erase the past. we can both hold space for the pain and be willing to free ourselves from the past by looking to an empowered future. and this empowered future for all begins with us.

it begins with challenging the ideas we cling to and being open to a new possibility. as within, so without, and until we are able to free our minds, we will continue to perpetuate the same lived experience. ♥️

because even in the realm of “productivity” it’s still about safety.

at the beginning of 2020 i decided to experiment with issue-specific workshops, and after listening and learning from all of you, what i heard a lot of is people being annoyed with themselves for procrastinating.

“i know i’m smart, i know i’m capable, and i know exactly what i need to do, but i’m just not doing it?!?”

can you relate?

so, as a bit of an experiment, i created a workshop focused specifically on using eft/mind-body and a trauma-informed lens and applying it to this pesky problem that is so often filled with confusion and self-judgement.

and while this may seem off base from my usual messaging, the thing is that procrastination - like most other things i talk about here - is about our internal experience of the world (ie. our emotions) and safety (either not feeling safe and/or avoiding painful emotions).

this friday, may 22, i’m offering what *may* potentially be the last run of this workshop, so if any of this speaks to you and you’d like to learn more about how procrastination shows up in your life and how you can move through it with mind-body tools, consider joining me and 4-5 others on the journey.

i’ll be covering things like the cycle of procrastination from a nervous system/physiological perspective, your unique procrastination strategy, understanding the three levels of procrastination and how they impact your life, and also the basics of eft to help regulate the nervous system and break the cycle.

the workshop is 3hrs and also includes 3X 30min group follow up Q + A calls, printable pdf worksheets, and complimentary access to my pre-recorded Intro to EFT Workshop.

it’s kind of a steal actually 🙃

my goal is ALWAYS about giving you practical tools and context for how to use them.

if you’d like to join us for this experience, send me a DM for more details or for any questions you may have.

happy long weekend friend! 😘

what’s on my mind today.

i used to think that if i could just “figure it out”, it would unlock the doorway to a new lived experience.

but what i didn’t realize at the time was that my current lived experience was built on experiences (which are emotional in nature), belief systems and safety strategies that were literally baked into my nervous system and brain.

sustainable change is the long game. there is no quick fix. it takes courage and grit and a willingness to continue moving forward even when things are hard or scary or uncertain.

it takes guidance, the the right-for-you tools. it takes patience, persistence, and the ability to hold space for both the work, and just living life.

it takes acceptance of who you are now, the journey, and who you are becoming.

what has your journey of change been like? what tools have helped you create a change in your lived experience? 🙏🏻♥️

something i’ve been reflecting on a lot lately. we are all in process, and the really good stuff - the deep embodiment of who we know we came here to be - can take time. so for me, i keep thinking about “is how i am showing up in this situation in line with a leader? a person of integrity? a person who can be an example of vulnerability and hold space for others with compassion?” and “what decision can i make today, how can i show up in this moment, that will support the person i am growing into and want to embody?”

what kind of person are you wanting to embody? who is that person and how do they show up in life, for others in relationship, as a parent, in your career?

share your insights in the comments 😘👇🏻

it’s a process, and it’s a wild ride out there. lots of things are coming up in different ways for so many of us at this time. we will get through it, but while we’re in it, have patience and give yourself grace. contraction is always followed by expansion. ♥️

♥️

A part of me hasn’t wanted to post since last week because I don’t want to be adding to the noise you may be experiencing.
•
Because this is a lot, I know.
•
And honestly, I just feel like retreating.
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Because what we are experiencing is collective trauma.
•
And while I definitely don’t have all the answers right now (or ever), what I do know - and what I hope helps you - is that this too shall pass.
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Maybe not tomorrow, or next week, or next month - and I know it’s hard in all kinds of ways unique to your own experience - but it will.
•
You may be facing job loss and have no idea how you’re going to pay your bills;
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Maybe you’re missing your partner, or kids, mom or dad or grand-babies, or maybe you’re going through this alone;
•
Maybe you’re juggling home schooling and attempting to work full time, or you’re a medic on the front lines who has been working around the clock and you don’t know when this is going to end;
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Maybe you still have to work even though you don’t feel safe, a dream wedding or trip that had to be cancelled, or a business you’ve poured your heart and soul into and have had to close your doors;
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Maybe you are worried about your health or the health of a loved one, and aren’t sure how you’ll make it through, or you may have already lost a loved one or a friend to this virus;
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Whatever the case is for you, I see you, my heart is with you, and I’m rooting for you.
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And I know it probably doesn’t seem like much, but just know that through it all there’s someone out there cheering you on, believing in you, and knowing you will move through this.
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So my hope is that in reading this amidst all the noise, you’ll be reminded that this too shall pass.
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That one day, you will get to the other side of whatever you are going through and recognize that you made it. You got through it.
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That this time we are all going through is now in the past. That the days of worry and stress, of uncertainty and fear have actually paved the way for you to experience life in a whole new way.
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That all of this was happening for us, not to us, and you’re actually a lot more resilient and resourceful than maybe you ever thought you were. ♥️

A part of me hasn’t wanted to post since last week because I don’t want to be adding to the noise you may be experiencing.
•
Because this is a lot, I know.
•
And honestly, I just feel like retreating.
•
Because what we are experiencing is collective trauma.
•
And while I definitely don’t have all the answers right now (or ever), what I do know - and what I hope helps you - is that this too shall pass.
•
Maybe not tomorrow, or next week, or next month - and I know it’s hard in all kinds of ways unique to your own experience - but it will.
•
You may be facing job loss and have no idea how you’re going to pay your bills;
•
Maybe you’re missing your partner, or kids, mom or dad or grand-babies, or maybe you’re going through this alone;
•
Maybe you’re juggling home schooling and attempting to work full time, or you’re a medic on the front lines who has been working around the clock and you don’t know when this is going to end;
•
Maybe you still have to work even though you don’t feel safe, a dream wedding or trip that had to be cancelled, or a business you’ve poured your heart and soul into and have had to close your doors;
•
Maybe you are worried about your health or the health of a loved one, and aren’t sure how you’ll make it through, or you may have already lost a loved one or a friend to this virus;
•
Whatever the case is for you, I see you, my heart is with you, and I’m rooting for you.
•
And I know it probably doesn’t seem like much, but just know that through it all there’s someone out there cheering you on, believing in you, and knowing you will move through this.
•
So my hope is that in reading this amidst all the noise, you’ll be reminded that this too shall pass.
•
That one day, you will get to the other side of whatever you are going through and recognize that you made it. You got through it.
•
That this time we are all going through is now in the past. That the days of worry and stress, of uncertainty and fear have actually paved the way for you to experience life in a whole new way.
•
That all of this was happening for us, not to us, and you’re actually a lot more resilient and resourceful than maybe you ever thought you were. ♥️

I've been using the BB FIR Weight Blanket for the last couple of months and it has been so helpful in supporting me in healthy sleep habits (plus the weight of it feels so good).

They're running a contest to give away 1 BB Blanket (valued at almost $300) and a weighted Pad - check out their website to enter and share with anyone who's been wanting a weighted blanket!!

SleepGift 🌿SleepGift offers products for those who suffer from insomnia, anxiety, depression

There are so many ways that we can prepare ourselves by supporting our mind and body during this unique time in our collective history.

These are just a few suggestions from things I personally do to support myself on a regular basis. Of course we won’t always do these perfectly and some of these may not resonate, but now more than ever it’s important to lean into our hearts, bodies and minds to ask “What do you need?”

Also, just a fun fact about EFT/Tapping: research published in the Journal of Evidence Based Integrative Medicine showed EFT/Tapping to reduce by 37%, decrease by 40% and increase markers by 113%!

Check out the post in my story for all the stats. ♥️

Let’s take care of ourselves and each other as best we can.

Hey everyone! My two beta groups for the Overcoming Procrastination Workshop went so well I decided to continue offering this 3-hr experiential workshop virtually, to accommodate locations/schedules, etc.!

This workshop is for you if:
* You'd like to understand the scientific, root cause of your procrastination behaviours
* You want to understand your own unique style of procrastination better (and learn what you can do about it!)
* You want to move forward in your life and business with more ease and less internal struggle
* You want to learn how to create goals that feel good to you - and that are also achievable!

What's included:
* 3hr Live Workshop via Zoom - Friday, March 20 9AM - 12PM
* 3 X 30 Minute Follow-Up Q + A Group Calls (Dates shared at end of Live Workshop)
* Weekly Goal Alignment Printable Worksheets
* Complimentary Access to my Intro to EFT Recorded Workshop (Regular price $35 - sent upon registration to watch prior to Live Workshop)

To Register:
Send me a PM or contact me via email at [email protected]

because it can be easy to think we’re supposed to be further along in the journey, in a different body, making more money, or in the relationship of our dreams.

we compare ourselves with others, and against our own expectations we have of ourselves.

but here’s the thing - when we’re hating where we are, it makes it impossible to be fully present to the joy, connection, peace, belonging, and successes that are right in front of us.

befriending the part of us that feels agitated, that feels that we’re supposed to be “somewhere else”, feeling her panic, agitation, frustration, and anger of what is creates a doorway to acceptance.

and in accepting what is, we realize there’s nowhere else to “get to”.

♥️