It’s been almost three months since I last wrote here. A lot has been happening in my personal and business life and writing has had to take a back seat. This is the ebb and flow of creative life, of life in general: our focus shifts as our needs and the needs of those we love most shift too. There is never any true “balance,” or rather, if there is it is very fleeting. We move our attentions where they need to be each day, and hopefully we find moments here and there to remember to connect to ourselves and our passions.
Or maybe we don’t find those moments. Maybe our grounding and centering and self-car practices all ebb and flow along with the rest of life. Maybe we find ourselves after a stretch of hectic and very stressful months completely ungrounded and disconnected from our body.
Or maybe we don’t. Maybe some of our practices carry us through, we remember to take five minutes here and ten there and then when the chaos quiets and our life shifts and flows again, we dive deeper into the practices.
I’ve slowly started coming back to my daily writing and body-focused practices over the last two weeks. My initial motivation was the start of the second module of the Unbecoming Quest Circle. Reconnecting with the women who allowed me to guide them through the spring has been so inspiring. Seeing how each of them have shifted and grown and shed and blossomed since we began our work together six months ago leaves me in a place of awe. Watching them dive back into this work, after our summer break, seeing the vulnerability and the truth coming out from each of them… well, it has reminded me to get back to my work.
The more I work with women, the more I see how many barriers we all have around taking care of ourselves. The stories run deep: we are being selfish, others need us more, we don’t deserve it. These stores run hand in hand with the stories we all have about our bodies, both in general and specifically sexually. The story of being a “good girl” can run so deep and not wanting to be a “bad girl” or be accused of being “selfish” we disconnect from our bodies and our Self and continue to nourish and honor every other person on the planet.
How do we make the shift from total self-disconnection to honoring and nourishing our body, our Self? How do we change the story about being selfish or unimportant or undeserving? How do we move from living in our disembodied heads to becoming deeply tuned into our own innate, embodied wisdom?
One way to start is by taking care of ourselves. To get quiet for a moment, each day, and to listen. What does your heart have to say? Your belly? Your neck? Your thighs?
We could get curious about ourselves and simply ask the questions of “what if”: what if I took five minutes (or ten or fifteen) to simply sit and daydream? What if I took these moments to breathe deeply into my pelvis? What if I made going for a walk each day a priority? What if I closed the door to go to the bathroom (every women who has or had a young child knows exactly what I am talking about!).
We could start by taking ten minutes, just ten minutes each day to focus on us. Those ten minutes could be ten one minute breaks, two five minutes or a the whole ten at once. Just ten minutes to breath, to ground, to connect to us.
What would happen if you took ten minutes out of your day just for you? What if for ten minutes a day, you honored and nourished yourself as the beautiful, deserving and sacred person that you are?
What if?
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