How to ask for what you want...from an aligned, energetic place

Your needs matter. You don't have to cower nor do you have to be demanding.

a calm griffin “As a Spirit Animal, Griffins arrive when you need protection, guidance, and courage. They symbolize the power to overcome obstacles, break down barriers, and achieve emotional balance and spiritual progression. Griffins are associated with the qualities of strength, courage, and vigilance, making them a powerful symbol of protection and defense.”—Leo, Brave Browser AI response to: What is the difference between a griffin and a sphinx spiritually?

I tell myself this is silly.

I tell myself that you know how to do this.

What am I thinking?

But those thoughts don’t stop me.

That’s because I know most of you might relate to a lot of these things.

It is not always easy to ask for what you need. It is not always easy to know what it is.

There is a reason for that. It is simple. There have been many times when you tried to get your needs met, with a variety of strategies, and it didn’t go smoothly.

I am sure you can remember one of them.

I have a memory regarding which I can still find resentment in me. My sister came into my room and helped herself to my clothing. When I told her I wanted her to ask me first and not borrow my things…she ignored me. Back then, there was nothing I could think of to do. I probably told my mother. But maybe not.

By my teenage years, I had learned to mostly ignore my needs.

Now, I am not blaming my family. Or my sister. She hadn’t learned to respect boundaries. I hadn’t learned an effective way to set them.

There are many moments in the past for all of us, where we wanted or needed something and didn’t get it. The most profound of such moments involve care, or safety. Empathy is a big one as well.

When shit happens, and you are a kid and there is no one who can really resonate with you and hold your challenges with care and capacity, you develop strategies.

My friend Sandra recently had a humorous way of describing such strategies. She and I often have similar issues with opposing coping mechanisms.

Sandra called these techniques for addressing unmet needs as tail up, or tail tucked.

I am including this as I find it funny that this is the best image I got when I asked the AI image generator on Substack for this: “angry dog with its tail erect and a cowering dog with its tail tucked under”. I assume you can imagine what I wanted and I hope this makes you laugh. I guess Sandra is the poodle dog and I am the more powerful looking brown dog (that I intended to look weak and whimpering).

The “tail up” strategy: You get angry at people. You stand toe to toe and are ready to fight, if necessary. If someone hurts you, you point at your bleeding gash and say, “Look. Look AT THIS. You did this to me.”

The “tucked tail” strategy: You tuck your tail between your legs to protect your vulnerable parts and tiptoe into a corner to whimper quietly. You try not to bother anyone while you lick your wounds.

Now, let’s digress for a moment and talk about how important all of this is on so many levels.

For instance, Dr. Luis recently recommended I embark on weight lifting to increase my bone strength.

Manuel, my physiotherapist, is working on helping me improve my root chakra energy and find a muscle I have not used in my abdomen to engage my lower belly.

I have been dedicating a lot of attention to figuring out why my lower back becomes sore when I practice my yoga moves. I finally realized I was tucking my sacrum under my pelvis.

What does all that mean?

Well, it means that for me, and my approach to life in general, my habit has been to tuck my tail and go hide in a corner rather than confront somebody. The way I align my body reflects my strategy. It is not just sessions with Manuel and weight lifting that is going to fix me.

Sandra, on the other hand, has a powerful, in-your-face, tail-erect strategy. I am not sure of what body issues she may have. She mentioned feeling drawn to take Milk Thistle for liver cleansing. I think for me; it is likely something for the kidneys would resonate. And just so you know, energetically, the liver is associated with Anger and the kidneys, with Grief. Please keep in mind that many of these things are intricately related, like two sides of a coin, or the tail up or tail down strategies.

In the end, our strategies accomplish the same thing.

They are there because at one point in time, we both found these the best ways to deal with people in our vicinity.

Sandra and I know well that it is time to outgrow these strategies. They are two sides of the same coin. Mine is more apologetic. Hers is outspoken and might come in kind words, but there would be something angry under it…something that would feel like the kind words had more hidden meaning.

Either way.

They are both simply two different game plans.

Perhaps you can see yourself in one of them?

The main thing to notice first is what your strategy is? Are you a tail-tucker like me, or a dog ready for a fight? Maybe you have something more unique? We are creative beings.

The next thing is to take a Dr. Phil moment and say: “And how’s that workin’ for you?”

I know, for Sandra and me, we want to embody a different frequency.

Let’s call this Confidence, with a relaxed tail.

Power.

Authenticity.

Griffomancy.

So, “How do you do that?” you may ask.

Well, thank you for asking.

That is a very important question, for it isn’t as easy peasy as simply noticing and deciding you will do something different.

The first thing that needs to happen is to meet the energy in you that needed that strategy and offer it what it didn’t get: care, understanding, empathy, and capacity to hold the pain of the part of you with those unmeant needs.

This is not…

(Drum roll, please…)

This is absolutely not, Pity.

That is victimhood and is just another strategy to gain energy by feeling sorry for yourself.

What I intend to show you (and me as I learn to embody this) is a way to be free of any strategy and simply own what you want and need.

Then express it like a powerful Griffin with a relaxed tail. Or a Sphinx.

Calm, collected, powerful, wise, compassionate, sphinx. According to Leo AI on Brave: Sphinxes embody the mysteries of the universe, wisdom, and knowledge. They are often associated with the Divine and are said to possess ancient secrets and mysteries. As a symbol, Sphinxes represent the power of intuition, wisdom, and insight, guiding individuals towards self-discovery and spiritual growth.

So, the next thing you do, after you realize you want something, is to have some compassion for the part of you that wants to pull out the old strategy.

Then you do things differently.

Let me give you a recent example from this morning.

Raul, the gardner’s wife, Cruz, cleans my casita every two weeks and washes my bedding and sheets as per my agreement with Reynaldo, the owner. I actually think the agreement includes all my laundry and I still prefer to care for my clothes myself. People love clothes differently here. They get loved by handwashing them in a sink to get them REALLY clean.

I have chosen less clean and less loving and haul them to my friend Suez’s washing machine.

But regardless of all that, this is the agreement I have and pay Reynaldo for.

Last week, Cruz came and did a lovely job cleaning my casita and the main windows in the living room. She waited like a hawk for the right timing to grab my sheets and get them clean before any rain came. My sheets are sun dried. Which is lovely. And tricky in monsoon season. But Cruz is adept at timing such things.

The only thing is, she neglected to take my bath and kitchen towel.

It is a small thing, I told myself.

But it was niggling at me.

I have an extra, I told myself.

It still niggled at me.

My tail strategy kicked in and I also told myself Cruz doesn’t get paid enough for what she does…I could take my towels to Suez next time I washed my clothing etc… etc…

What really mortified me was to figure out how to ask her to wash a couple of towels.

I figured I could go around that issue and ask Selvin, the supervisor here, when he returned in a few days from Guatemala.

Now, you may be cringing.

I know.

The tucking one’s tail strategy isn’t pretty.

But if you are on the other side of things, I want to point out that the jumping-down-someone’s-throat is equally not-pretty.

And bless my heart. There are good reasons I have learned to walk on eggshells around people. But that doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I must create the eggshells myself and toss them in the path in front of me.

So, this leads me to what I did.

#1: I took Sandra’s image and ran with it.

She called me out on tail tucking things I said.

I remembered Selvin had already told me he was at my service. He had specifically asked and tried to clarify for me that he wants me to let him know about ANYTHING I might need.

So, I decided I didn’t have to talk to Selvin about the towels to avoid talking to Cruz (who I didn’t want to offend).

If I had spoken to him out of that energy, it would have come from fear and tail-tucking (you can feel that, can’t you?).

But Selvin was the one to talk to because I had been told he wanted to help me meet my needs.

So, step one was complete.

I would talk to Selvin.

Not out of fear.

I would talk to him and he would have the chance to stand in his male energy, in a KINGLY way, and help me.

And I, for my part, could enjoy the energy of being received and receiving.

I noticed my compulsion to compliment him. Or to make an excuse for my asking.

Sandra pointed that out to me.

So, I kept things to the point: short and sweet.

“Hello Selvin! Welcome back. I hope you had a good weekend. Cruz has done a lovely job cleaning and washing my sheets. I think she forgot the towels. Could you have them washed when it is convenient, please? Also, the toilet paper holder is broken. I will send a photo. I think it is missing a small metal pin.”

He responded right away positively. I left my dirty towels on the porch and he said he would fix my toilet paper holder in the afternoon.

Nice.

Easy.

For me, that was not tail-tucking. It felt clean.

If I had felt guilty that they don’t pay Cruz enough…(as I started to until Sandra called me out on it), or afraid Selvin might find me annoying or needy (I didn’t get that far and I could have easily gone there with my old strategy), my request would have come from a tail-tucking energy.

It wouldn’t have felt good to say and I imagine it would have felt equally uncomfortable to receive.

Now, I will not be hard on myself about this strategy I have used.

I will not blame myself for my back issues.

This life is about growth. It is about learning.

I can’t grow unless I do one thing, and then learn to do it differently. I can feel how much better it is for me.

And, I can have more compassion for the strategies of people I meet.

I can take things less personally.

“Oh Terra, that person talking to you has their tail up….or down…”

We can fill our lives with more humor and compassion and I, I Terra, as an adult, can really own and love myself and my unmet needs.

Then you and I can go back in time and spiffy things up from the past that were messy.

We can have love and compassion for the parts of us that developed those strategies and do things differently for them and for ourselves now.

We can love one another. With compassion. With empathy.

Like a Griffin.

Or a Sphinx.

No pity.

Just compassion that can cut through anything.

As a little aside, here are two photos of my recent experiment freezing water using Veda Austin’s techniques. I asked the water to give me a message I would recognize and this is the result. Sandra and I think the first one looks like a Griffin. And there is a butterfly in it!

See you next week!