The theme for the past couple of weeks has been to speak up even when you don’t want to. Clients have been allowing boundaries to be crossed again and again and it’s taking a toll on their nervous system. Over the past few months I’ve been having recurring dreams where a woman is on stage and can’t say what she wants to say. So I did what I do best and paid attention to these dreams and looked closely at my own life asking this question, “Where am I not able to speak up?” Let me preface what I learned about communicating our truth. It’s hardest to speak up when we have something at stake with the person. Speaking up about needing something in a hotel with people you’ll probably never see again is much different than speaking up with a loved one.
In meditation I saw a couple of scenes of a situation where I needed to speak up with my sweetheart about what I need around the holidays, but hadn’t due to not wanting to appear high maintenance. Maintaining balance in relationships require that needs be discussed. Another situation came to mind with a group of friends I love dearly, but there I had been silent due not wanting to cause waves. A teacher I had once said that all leaders are disruptive. The thought of being disruptive sounded horrifying to me and still does. Another thing that same teacher said was that most women who haven’t hit menopause worry about what others think of them and that after menopause this eases for most women. It makes so much sense as I’m starting to go through “the change” and speak up more with loved ones than ever before.

People don’t necessarily like when I go against the grain, but to be who I am and be well, it’s necessary. Even as a little girl I wouldn’t speak at school. I remember being afraid of people. I just wanted to be in my bedroom with my bird. The problem with not speaking up, is that the act of holding in what we need to express takes a toll on our throat chakra, the area of self expression and communication where the thyroid gland resides. While the healing I’ve done has brought me to feeling good, the thyroid tests still show a problem and my throat will let me know on certain days that there is more to address here. I truly believe not speaking up has been contributing to this.

I looked up throat in on one of my favorite go-to books by Louise Hay called, Heal Your Body. Louise lists the throat as an avenue of expression and a channel of creativity and problems around the throat as a root cause is the inability to speak up for one’s self. Swallowed anger and stifled creativity. Refusal to change. The affirmation she recommends for the throat is, “It’s ok to make noise. I express myself freely and joyously. I speak up for myself with ease. I express my creativity. I am willing to change.” On another list of ailments for the organs, called ZYTO Balance Scan that my friend gave me, it lists imbalances with the throat as representing powerlessness. If you think about it, not speaking up is like taking our own power away, keeping us stuck in life. We block our creativity. I stand for peace and it starts inside of me, so I knew what I had to do: speak up once again even though I was risking upsetting my sweetheart. It’s never been easy or comfortable to do this, but I find myself speaking up sooner rather than later nowadays, which has brought such relief to my body after it’s all over.
I asked him if we could have a quiet night on Easter Eve as we were going to be with family on Easter. The kiddos were also with us that weekend. While it wasn’t easy, we worked it out. Along the way I had to speak up two more times about the volume of music, television and video games in our home and music volume in the car and it worked out each time. I’m slowly proving to myself that speaking up won’t kill me. It also opened up the need to speak up about what was on my mind with those friends and it seemed to open up for some of the others to do the same. We were able to create a solution that is even better than what we were doing before. If I hadn’t spoken up, we’d all still be stuck and frustrated. I’ve decided to pay close attention and catch myself stifling my words moving forward.