When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
~Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
I have a confession.
I actually love the winter holiday season.
I love all the lights and glitter. I love the promise of snow. I love the food we eat this time of year. I love the hustle and bustle and the quiet snuggling in. I do. I love it.
And.
This time of year is also challenging for me. My mother’s birthday is in mid-December and so there is a triple reminder of how she is not here to celebrate this time of year with us. I notice how certain family members don’t call. I think of friends who have moved away. I consider the things and opportunities in life that I have lost. I think about the life I wanted compared to the life I have.
In short, while I love this time of year, it is also a time of grieving.
And while I do love the bright energy of the hustle and bustle of this time of year, I also am acutely aware of how that bright energy can become heavy and oppressive. How what is supposed to be fun can become overwhelmingly stressful. How one moment I may look at my full calendar with excitement and anticipation and the next I may look at it with dread.
Basically, I am human. Which means I am complex. Which means I can have a mix of seemingly opposing emotions and feelings all at once.
Just like you.
To me, it’s never a question of my complexity. Rather, it’s a question of how I hold all of me at once.
In other words, how to do I allow all my complexity to flow and be? How do I sit with the bittersweetness of this time of year? How do I not only allow myself, but also encourage myself, to feel all the various and opposing emotions, thoughts, and well, feelings?
For me, that answer is being in my body. Not leaving it, not sitting or hovering outside of it. Rather, being in it, in the now, and finding ways to tolerate all the complex sensations and emotions that I may be having.
Embodiment is both simple and not easy. Coming home into our bodies, and deeply feeling and sensing our lived experience can feel overwhelming at times. It can feel too much. And also, with practice, we learn to tolerate those challenging emotions and sensations more and more.
We stop stuffing them down, only to wait for them to explode.
We stop ignoring them, only to have them crop up as various illnesses.
We start connecting to them, dipping out toes into them at first, and in time and with practice, going further and further in, finding new ways to embrace our own complexities, our own disparities, our own both ands.
I talk more about this in the 14 minute video below ::
This essay is the third and final essay in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for Challenging Times :: Holiday Edition. If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.
Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and where someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom.
~Henry Cloud
Boundaries.
We talk about them a lot. On my most recent Open Office Hours call we talked about them, in fact.
We talked about what a boundary is. What they mean to us. What some of our “obstacles” may be in honoring or defending our own boundaries. What some of our stories are when others honor their own boundaries. How boundaries run both ways. How they are fluid. How they are complex.
There are many things I believe about our boundaries. One is that they are fluid and living and breathing; they change from day to day and person to person. In a phrase, what our boundaries actually are depends on All The Things.
In my experience there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to boundaries. What may be a firm boundary with person A today may not be a boundary at all tomorrow with person B. Many of our personal boundaries change with time, and some never change at all. This is part of life – we all change and grow and it makes sense that our boundaries would do so too.
I also deeply believe our boundaries, physical, psychological, and emotional, are directly tied to our bodies. What I mean by this is that I believe we can sense when a boundary is being violated long before we are fully consciously aware of what it happening. Our body reacts, in one way or another, to this intrusion. It could show up as a knot in our stomach or literal pain in our neck. It could show up as suddenly feeling agitated or anxious, without any “real” or “logical” explanation. It could show up in any number of ways. The point being, our body is giving us information, long before our brain can comprehend what is going on.
Our boundaries are also tied to our histories. If we have trauma in our past, how our caretakers modeled boundaries when we were children, both inform what our boundaries are as well as how we react when our boundaries have been violated.
Our culture also informs our boundaries, and more importantly, how or if we defend them. We all have messages about “being nice” and “not hurting people’s feelings” in our psyches and bodies to unravel.
We have all been told in one way or another that our Noes don’t matter, aren’t valid, and should never be voiced.
Most of us learned at a young age that when we say no to someone or something we are giving them a message that we don’t love them. And of course, while we internalized this direct message, we also internalized the reverse :: that if someone says no to us it means they don’t love us.
Again, boundaries go both ways. There are our own boundaries for us to connect to and consciously and intentionally decide to defend (or not!) and there are the boundaries of others that may stir up some of our own stories of worth and value and instigate an unconscious response from us.
There is so much for each of us to unravel around our boundaries, including becoming consciously aware of where they come from and when and if we want to honor and defend them (and I’ll tell you now, the answer isn’t always yes, there can be many different reasons why we don’t defend our boundaries and none of them have to do with us being “weak” or having “poor judgement.”)
I talk more about this in the 13 minute video below ::
This essay is the second in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for Challenging Times :: Holiday Edition. If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
~Audre Lorde
We are entering into that time of year again. That time here in the northern hemisphere where the light recedes and we enter into more and more darkness as each day passes. It is also the time of year of the winter holiday celebrations, which can for some of us, bring their own darkness with them.
I have always declared that the winter holiday season begins with my birthday in mid-October. Then quickly is Halloween and the All Souls and All Saints Days. Next is Thanksgiving. And then we move into December when most religions have a festival of lights celebration of one kind or another. With all these holidays often comes gatherings with family – ones that we either attend or avoid. With these gatherings come all the stresses of connecting with our families, be that in person or in spirit.
There is also the truth that for many of us this time of year is a painful reminder of the people we have lost in our lives, either through death or severing of ties. It can be a reminder of those we loved who aren’t here to celebrate with us, and the grief that comes forward has its own way of showing up at a time of year we are told over and over we need to be joyous.
There are a million plus different reasons why the this time of year can be challenging in many ways and why we all need to remember self-care, real self-care, during this coming seaon.
One of my frustrations with our current culture is how the term self care is defined. For many this term has a very white, privileged look to it. It looks like spa days or mani-pedis, or days at the salon, or weeks at some tropical local. It’s looks like, according to many, something only the wealthy can afford.
I have a very different definition of self care.
For me, self care is first and foremost about calming and soothing our nervous systems. It is self-regulation and being able to bring ourselves back from a “triggered” or highly emotional state. This can look like many different things, including drinking water, getting sleep, any of the numerous Nervous System Soothing tips I share with you in the weekly love letter and on Facebook, drinking tea, locking ourselves in the bathroom for five minutes of solitude… all of those things are self care. These are the small, non-glamorous things that keep us going and keep us feeling calm and sane.
And, self-care isn’t 100% regulating our nervous systems. The other big piece of self care, for me, is boundaries.
You know, that whole being able to say No thing. (I’ll talk more about boundaries as self-care in the next essay in this series.)
However, I do believe that before we can really connect to, and then honor and enforce, our boundaries, we need to be able to connect to our bodies and calm our nervous systems.
What do I mean by “calm our nervous system,” “triggered state,” or “activated nervous system”?
I deeply believe that all of us have trauma living within our bodies. It could be a trauma (or multiple traumas) of our personal lived experience. This could look like abuse, neglect, rape, or car accidents, surgeries, living through natural disasters. Any and all of those events that we may personally experience our bodies experience as traumatic events.
In addition, we have intergenerational, or ancestral, trauma living in our DNA. Epigenetics has shown us how these “trauma markers” are passed down through the generations and how they are “mutable” or “reversable”. This means that the unresolved, unprocessed traumas of our parents, grandparents, and back to the beginnings of time, live in our bodies today.
Finally, there is what I call Cultural Relational Trauma. This is the trauma we experience living in a white supremacist, capitalistic, misogynist, patriarchal culture. This is the trauma of isolation, of being told we are less than, not enough, too much, that we should feel shame for who we are and for existing at all. This is the trauma that tears us from our communities and teaches us that one “group”is somehow superior to another. It is the trauma we hold in our bodies that is put in us every day.
Because we all carry trauma in us, our nervous systems are generally all out of sorts. What this looks like day to day is that we are easily irritated, or anxious, or depressed, or have rapid and far ranging mood swings, or feel like we want to crawl out of our skin on a regular basis – but with all of these things happening we can’t always pinpoint the why or what actually caused the dysregulation or what is also called an “activated” nervous system or a triggered state.
Calming or soothing our nervous system brings us out of this activated state. It allows us to feel good in our bodies, to be in our frontal lobes (where empathy and logic live), and eventually to respond to stimulus (or triggers) in a way that isn’t harmful to ourselves or others (and by harmful I mean not only physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically).
I talk more about this in the 11-minute video below ::
This essay is the first in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for Challenging Times :: Holiday Edition. If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.
Other essays in this series :: (active links coming soon)
My own relationship with my Self has been a rocky one most of my life. From a very young age I received and internalized the messages of how my body was not mine, how I was to be seen and not heard, how I took up too much space, how I was too smart, how I wasn’t good enough at this or that or anything. I had feelings of shame for even existing as far back as I can remember. These messages came from many places, family of course, but as I grew older and started reading teen magazines and Cosmopolitan, watching movies, really listening to music, the message became very clear that my sole purpose on this earth was to look pretty and to get a boy or man and that in order to do that I had to look and be a certain way.
And of course I didn’t measure up to the standard idea of beauty – my thighs were too big, my hair too mousy; I was too short; I wore glasses. My clothes were hand-me-downs or homemade and never in style. I would never fit that Ideal and so I would likely never catch a boy or man. In addition, I was smart, and, well, we all know that smart girls can never ever be pretty.
Since my worth, according to media, according to popular (i.e. patriarchal) culture, was measured by whether I could get a boy/man, I was clearly worthless.
This didn’t get much better as I grew older. In college I spent the first three years or so proving how very stupid (and therefore how very pretty) I was. There were periods of self harm that included drugs and drinking and hitting myself, usually my legs, so hard that I would bruise.
All of this I hid from others for the most part. All of this I had to hide because it was only more proof of how flawed I was because I couldn’t “handle” life and very clearly didn’t have my shit together.
Eventually I did meet my now husband and our love story is one for another day. But my not measuring up didn’t stop with falling in love with, and more importantly being loved by, this man. I had my career, then an electrical engineer, where I was constantly pushing myself beyond my limits by working 50, 60, and even 70 hour weeks to prove I was as good as The Boys and trying to find the balance of my femininity and my power. And then when I had my first child things became even worse.
Now I had to juggle career and motherhood and I could not fail at either. And failure, by the way, basically looked a lot like being human. I kept up a persona and mask that everything was Fine when the truth was I was suicidal and on the brink of a complete mental collapse. I hated myself, and blamed myself as obviously lacking, because I couldn’t do it all and my career, marriage and motherhood were all flailing.
I was never ever enough on the one hand and I was way too much on the other and no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I could never “win”. I could not feel, now matter how much I did, that I deserved any of the success that came my way. If someone tried to compliment me on some thing or another I would come back with a list of all the things that were wrong or imperfect or all the ways I fucked this or that thing up.
And boundaries… what were those? I wouldn’t dare set a boundary for fear of being considered rude or a bitch or selfish or not committed to my work.
And at my core, I didn’t like myself. In fact, I really hated myself. I truly did not believe I was worthy of being loved. I did not believe that I was lovable. I didn’t respect myself. I was ashamed of who I was, how I looked, and almost everything I did.
There are many things that contributed to the shifting of my relationship with myself. There was therapy, and then my pregnancy with my daughter and then her birth and life. There was leaving engineering and going to graduate school to study psychology. There was mindfulness and yoga and writing the words breathe or love or gentle on my arm. There were a million books. There were friendships that saved me. There was my husband. And there was more than all of this.
One of the things that finally helped make it click for me though, was the realization that it – all that self hatred and loathing, all those feelings of not measuring up or taking up too much space or needing to prove I deserved to even exist – wasn’t my fault.
None of it was my fault.
It was the realization that our culture purposefully trains and conditions us to think we are undeserving and unworthy of love as we are and so we must keep striving and proving and fixing ourselves. That if we have boundaries we are cold and uncaring and will alone. That we must bend and mold ourselves ways of being to always please others and make sure they are comfortable.
When I started to dig into the ways the system was truly and actually stacked against me – against all women, and definitely some more than others – light bulbs started to go off in my head.
Our culture doesn’t want us to have healthy or loving or connected relationships with other women – because when we do come together and rise up the status quo is going to be destroyed.
And more than that, our culture doesn’t want us to have any type of healthy relationship with our Self – with our body, our mind, our spirit or our soul.
It wants us living outside our body while also being focused on changing it, on starving it, on torturing it, on hating it.
It wants us disconnected from our mind and so keeps us distracted with all the menial ways we “fail” and don’t measure up, be it the clothes we wear, the home we live in, the way our children act. It wants us constantly striving and striving and striving, never being satisfied with anything we have, because if we feel satisfied with ourselves, with our life, we might actually take the time to stop, and breathe, and look around and see how fucked the entire system actually is – and then, and then, we might actually also have the time and energy to do something about it.
It wants us believing in a spirituality that doesn’t feed us, that oppresses us, that doesn’t allow space for women.
It wants us cut off from our soul, from our core, from our very being.
By keeping us disconnected, disembodied, and cut off from our Self, our culture, and those in power in our culture, is able to keep us distracted, compliant and complicit. By keeping us severed from our Self, it is able to continue oppressing us and in turn have us passing this oppression down through the generations.
To all of this I say:
No More.
Not on my watch.
You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.
And
I am connected to my Self.
I have compassion for my Self.
I honor and love and cherish my Self.
I invite you to join me in the resistance to our culture. To the gas lighting. To the shaming. To the stories and lies of how we aren’t enough and are too much and aren’t lovable and need to be “fixed.”
I invite you to sing and shout and whisper and scream and roar with me:
No More.
Not on my watch.
You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.
And to
Connect with your Whole Self – body, mind, spirit and soul.
To have compassion for your Self, your stumbles along the way.
To honor and love and cherish your Self, as the beautifully profound and amazing being you are.
I invite you to join me in this rebellion of connection, of wholeness, of love and in so doing burning down a culture that dare to hold us down.
I talk even more about how our culture encourages us to disconnect from our Self in this 20-minute video below. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve spent most the last few days offline. And while there is a part of me that has the pull to check in and see if we have launched nukes yet, I also know that there is a long game here and I need to be able to play it.
Which means, I need to take time to do the work to take care of myself. To calm my nervous system the fuck down. To see my therapist. To spend time cuddling with my little guy while watching Peppa Pig. To spend time with my becoming-a-young-woman learning about the women of American history and reading fairy tales from different cultures and talking about the archetypes and running themes within the stories. To do the laundry and pick up the toys. To read. And to write. To connect with friends, new and not new, for conversation.
Because the horrible shit will still be happening tomorrow. And today (and yesterday and Saturday) I needed time to breathe.
And we need to remember that while the short game is vital, and truly lives are depending on us being in the arena for the short game, the long game is also vital. And sometimes we can only be in one arena at a time and sometimes we can be in both and sometimes we truly have to tap out and sit on the sidelines for a moment.
And THAT there is the beauty of the collective and of community. It means that not a one of us has to Do It All. It means that we each have a role, a place and sometimes that looks like being a supporting character and sometimes that looks like being in the lead and sometimes it looks like being the understudy sitting off stage. And sometimes maybe, it looks like being the director or producer or the one who’s bankrolling the show. And maybe sometimes it means we are in the audience, giving witness to all that is happening. And maybe sometimes we are the ones sewing the costumes or building the sets or even writing the play itself.
My point is it takes a whole community of people for change to happen, for there to be true revolution. And because it take so many people, it also means that each of us can take the time to care for ourselves. Because if we are the lead, the understudy can step in for a night, to continue that analogy.
We can’t burn ourselves out one week in.
Pace yourself.
When and if you can be in the arena for the short game, do it. Call your congress people. Go to the marches and rallies. Go to the town hall meetings. Go to the community organized events that teach you how to be a revolutionary, how to be an ally, how to be an asset in this fight. Volunteer. Donate. Offer support in whatever ways, to those who are in the trenches, and have been – offer child care or take them a meal or pay for them to get a massage. Do what you can.
And we all need to be in the arena for the long game. Doing the things we each do to bring our consciousness shifts as well as working towards that 2018 election.
We will win. We have to.
And the only way we are going to is if we get in community, take our role, and remember to pace ourselves, set boundaries, and give ourselves breaks as needed.
We’ve got this. We do.
In rebellious solidarity, always.
xoox
I’m offering two workshops where we will learn and practice how to soothe our nervous systems, come into our bodies, and process and sit in uncomfortable emotions & sensations. One is in-person here in the Seattle area, is six weeks long, and begins this Friday, March 3. To learn more about it and register click here. The other is an online six month circle that begins March 15. To learn more about it and register click here.
