How To Expand Your Capacity

Let's talk about capacity. 

When referring to a vessel like a cup or concert venue, the capacity is: the amount of something it can hold.

But what does it really mean when we use it to refer to ourselves / other people?

"I don't have the capacity for that conversation."

"My capacity for new projects is limited right now."

"I didn't know I had the capacity for that much joy/pain/grief."

These common phrases speak to the variety of things we might be holding or unable to hold at any given time. 

For those of us who have spent a lifetime overriding our body's signals, our growth lies in recognizing when we are nearing our limits and making choices to honor ourselves.

This is sacred work--tuning in to yourself and trusting what you hear enough to risk disappointing others so that you stop abandoning yourself. 

"There is a voice that speaks without words. Listen." --Rumi

In addition to tuning in to ourselves and knowing when we're at capacity, sometimes we want to build additional capacity, to hold more. 

So how do we do this? How do we expand our capacity? 

In my experience, this comes down to 3 things:

1. We increase our self-awareness (awareness of our emotions, body sensations, intuition, what energizes us and what depletes us, our default modes of thinking that may or may not be serving us, our habits).

2. We meet this awareness with radical acceptance. Non-judgment is critical. Many of us have been living with our inner judge for decades--believing what it tells us without question. We allow it to speak to us in ways that we would NEVER speak to someone we love.

3. We build our self-trust so that our actions align with our feelings. We stop abandoning ourselves, minimizing our needs, and overriding what we know to be true in favor of pleasing others. We start to believe the truth that our needs matter, our emotions matter, our bodies matter. 

When we focus on these three areas, the result is that we develop a deep felt sense of inner safety. In other words, our nervous systems snap out of the hyper-vigilance we've been in due to the constant perceived threats generated by our own treatment of ourselves. 

We expand our window of tolerance and begin to be able to hold more uncertainty, more risk, more vulnerability, more connection, more stress, more pleasure. 

The beautiful result, my friends, is that our lives become so much richer. 

If your inner judge is beating you up as you read this for not having more capacity, being farther along, or having figured this out yet, I invite you to pause. Take a breath. Look up from your device and slowly scan the room from side to side, noticing what you see in your environment. Noticing that you are safe. 

This is not your fault. There are so many ways we are conditioned to turn away from ourselves from a young age. So it's not your fault, and it is your responsibility.