Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,159

a mental breakdown or worse.”

Taylor thought about Dr. Saithe. She had said, if a person was going on the Law of Externals, and what they were doing was pleasurable but not right, they experienced guilt and shame and thus, they would end up in fight-flight-or-freeze mode. That fit really well with this because if what you were doing didn’t line up with who you were, then that would lead to fear, guilt, grief, shame, and a host of other equally damaging emotions.

“Remember,” Dr. Brasher said, “emotion is simply energy in motion, and as Einstein proved in E=mc2, everything is energy. So our emotions, our feelings, are energy that creates our motion. We call this motivation. That means, if your being is not in line with your doing, your e-motions signal that you’re stretching in ways you were not meant to. This is supposed to create the motivation to do something to change the direction you’re going in, but for too many of us, we have been trained that when anxiety shows up to give us this message, we tell it to sit down and shut up. And we keep doing that and doing that until we begin to have actual physical issues and illnesses.

“We need to learn to listen to our thoughts and emotions—not be ruled by them. It’s so important to listen to them, to what they are trying to tell us. If our emotions are telling us that doing this is creating dissonance, frustration, pain, and anger, then we should look at why we are so stretched away from our authentic self—not figure out a way to keep doing it anyway. We talk ourselves into doing so many things for everyone else. How many times do we not listen to what our truest self is telling us?”

Taylor scribbled, CHEMISTRY in her notes in big letters.

This confirmed it. She was on the wrong road. Her heart had been trying to tell her that almost since she had gotten to Tech. Why had she been so loathe to listen?

“If you feel you are on the wrong road, if you feel you are being stretched between your be and your do,” Dr. Brasher said, “take some time to make a list of the things you are currently doing and track your thoughts and your feelings about each of those things for one week. Where are you out of balance with yourself? Then consider making the changes necessary to come more into alignment with your most authentic self.”

“But you did apply? They have your paperwork,” Izzy, one of the radiology doctors who ran the lab, asked Greg at just after six when he was still there waiting for his patient to be released from the lab so he could take her back to the ER.

“Yes,” he said, crossing his arms. With a shrug, he shook his head. “But every time I go down there, they act like I’m wasting their time.”

“Well, they’re wasting my time,” Izzy said. “This is no way to run things. I’m not a fan of shoe-stringing it all the time.”

Greg had no idea how to reply to that, and before he did, the door came open. He’d been in the hospital for more than 12 hours and his aches were starting to have aches of their own.

“Don’t up and quit on us for no reason,” Izzy said, pointing at him. “You’re one of the good ones.”

He wasn’t so sure about that, but it was nice to have the compliment. “I’m going to clock out after this one if that’s okay.”

“Yeah, go home and get some rest. You might need it come Monday.”

“And then they talked about ways to realign yourself with who you are,” Taylor said to Wes and Lauren who were unlucky enough to have been the only ones home when she got there.

Wes had asked how it was, and since then, Taylor hadn’t stopped talking.

“What it amounts to is what they talked about in all the flow videos,” Taylor said, never really taking so much as a breath. She was sitting in the chair while the two of them sat on the couch, Wes’s arm around Lauren. Although they had been looking at her skeptically, which would once have turned off the spigot of words, it was doing nothing to stop them today.

“Did you know that when Csikszentmihalyi was doing his research that they took this group and didn’t let them do their flow state thing for a month? Except it only lasted ten days because