Category: self-love

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On Self Care :: Holidays, trauma & our nervous systems

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)

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries!

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

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Unleashing Our Self :: Disconnection, Shame, and thinking it is us

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.

This essay and video are the third in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

You can find first essay & video in this series right over here and the second one right over here.

 

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Change our stories – a quick love note

When we change our stories we change our lives. When we delve into the raw material of who we were and are, the events and people who made us, and start to see things from the perspective of others involved, we gain empathy. As we gain empathy for those who have hurt us in the past–not excusing their behaviors, rather understanding some of the whys behind them–we can learn to have empathy for our Self. As we gain empathy for our Self we can start to change our patterns and internalized stories and move into a different way of being.
Empathy is one of our weapons against the Shame Beast. Developing empathy and compassion, for our Self and others, loosens the grip of shame and the stories of too much and not enough. Loosening the grip of these stories lets us write the stories – live the stories – we want instead of being driven by fear and shame.
Want to read more? Sign up for my weekly love letter, right here. xoox
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Nourishing from the outside in

I write a lot about the (Un)Becoming circle. In part because that is where most of my working focus is right now, in part because I am amazed daily by the beauty of the women in the circle and in part because of my own transformation in guiding and doing this work. It is intense, yes. Each of us has resistance along the way. Each of us come in and out of the work, at our own natural ebb and flow. And there is an energy connecting the women that is indescribable.

What has struck me the most is how each of us have transformed in our self-love and self-care practices. I believe this transformation is in part because of the focus I put on self-care as a guide and  in the circle, and also it’s something more. Each of the women are finding their worth, their value in this world. Each are starting to respect themselves in deeper ways. Each are learning the art and science of allowing themselves to be.

This is where the nourishment is: in the being; in the allowing. Yes, it’s in the cup of tea or glass of wine or long hot bath or even in the taking a moment to breath. And yet true nourishment isn’t in the doing of these practices at all. It is in the honoring that you are worth the time of these practices. It is in the giving yourself the respect that you deserve. It is in embodying the truth of your own worth and value. It is in the knowing when it is time to be quiet and allow things to settle within and then in the allowing and being.

Nourishment lives not in the doing. It lives in the being.

So how do we make the shift from the doing to the being? The irony is that we need to start doing the practices to encourage the ideas and feelings and knowing of our own worth to come back out into being. We start to shift when we mindfully and intentionally take the time to love ourselves up, whether that be in a 60-second breath exercise or in a 60-minute massage. As we intentionally do and explore these self-love practices, a shift starts to happen within: we start to allow for the being in these moments; and as our practices expand, the being expands beyond those moments of intentional and scheduled self-love and starts to grow into our daily life, our normal way of living in the world. With time the doing exercises can drop off from being done daily and can instead live within us, to be drawn upon when needed.

This shifting is what my work is about. This learning of moving from the mindlessly doing to the mindfully doing; and then from the mindfully and intentionally doing to the simply being. This shifting doesn’t happen overnight, it isn’t instantaneous, and yet with time and practice and beginning again and again, it does happen. I have watched the women in my circles make amazing shifts in a matter of weeks, even greater shifts in a few months. It always leaves me awestruck when they start to make connections and shifts and then when the being starts, holy wow!

I have witnessed these shifts within myself also. I started my body-centered mindfulness practice with the sole intention of not yelling at my daughter so much and trying and connect with her more. That was it: I wanted a better relationship with my kid. With time I did yell less and then I noticed other shifts in me, in my attitude about our home, my connection to my husband and then the biggest surprise was the deeper connection to my body and feeling more comfortable in my skin and in the world. The shifting has continued on to connecting more deeply to my own embodied knowing and and finding re-connection to my feminine self and to the sacred and Divine. I know these shifts and transformations will continue, and each time I am left in awe and gratitude for this work, both in solitude and in community.

Want to learn more? You can subscribe to my weekly love letter right here. 

 

 

 

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Dancing with the old stories

There is an ebb and flow to this work of undoing all the myths and stories that were overtly pounded or slyly snuck into our heads as we grew up in the world. It is a dance of coming together and holding the stories close while learning not to let them have a hold on you. It is whispering to the old stories that we, us and the story, have transformed while they scream at us.

Sometimes we feel the shift happening. We notice our dissonance and discomfort as a story is about to transform, be re-written, reborn. We are ill at ease and sometimes this comes through as anxiety and sometimes it comes through as physical illness and sometimes is comes through as just not feeling right in our skin, sensing that it is about to shed.

Stories of our worthiness are common. Or rather, our unworthiness. Stories of how we have nothing to offer this world. Stories of how we are terrible mothers or wives or friends. Stories of how we are ungrateful daughters or students. Stories of how we have no real value in this world.

I believe we dance with these stories. I know I do.

These stories stop us from caring for ourselves. From loving ourselves. From honoring ourselves.

These stories allow us to give and give and give to others, trying so desperately to prove our own worth and value, to the outside world, but mostly to our Self. We discount our work as unimportant. We undervalue our gifts. We make self denigrate ourselves when another person recognizes our gifts or thanks us for being in the world.

These stories can be re-written. We do not need to live in a world where we are not valued, not honored, not respected.

We start re-writing by learning to honor, value and respect our Self. We start taking the lead in the dance by making the space to love ourselves even during our busiest times.

These are things I have learned and relearned. My own dance with many of my old stories has become more refined, smoother. I am in the lead and can hold some of my old stories as they cry and scream, like I would hold my own toddler as he is sharing his big emotions with me. I can thank many of my old stories for what they did or tried to do to protect me and then lovingly tell them it is time for them to change, that they can’t bite or kick or hit me anymore.

I can tell them that they have changed, that I have changed. And then I move out of that dance and  into another, another layer ready to be revealed and shed. As I love myself up a little bit more, as I recognize my own value and gifts for this world, for my Self.

I hear the music of my worth. And I change the steps to the dance.