This is where I want to share tools and practices that have helped me navigate the rocky terrain of depression, anxiety, chronic illness, and the general awkwardness, pain and confusion inherent in being human.
Before I start, I want to say that just because I’m here writing this stuff doesn’t mean I practice what I preach all the time. In fact, recently I’ve remembered that it’s only in teaching these tools that I’m truly motivated to delve in and use them. It feels so very empty preaching without doing the work. So I’m here just as much for me as for you.
Please be patient and loving toward yourself. In times of crisis, just showing up is enough. I find that the work often presents itself on its own; I just have to make myself available to it. The biggest part of this is practicing presence (another good word here is mindfulness). My goal here is to help you build a repertoire of practices that you can actually use when life gets messy (it’s bound to happen). When we learn to tolerate being uncomfortable, we create space around the sensation, the feeling/whatever it is. And it’s in this space where it has room to pass. When we stay with it, we see it passing, we watch whatever takes its place taking shape and form, and we remember that all things are impermanent.
Right now we have an opportunity to get strong. To build resilience in our whole beings, create more clarity and intention in our way we choose, make decisions, and relate to both ourselves and others. When we let things be as they are, we learn how to respond to situations that usually trigger us, rather than sink back into our old comfortable and familiar patterns of reactivity. This is hard. Not only the practice of it, but also because the more we do it, the more we realize how responsible we are for our lives. Once we know something, we can’t “unknow” it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Hopefully at some point I will figure out how to make this blog simple and not more complicated. Somewhere in that thicket is learning how to incorporate drop-down menus, I just know it.
For tonight I’ll just let this page sit as it is, new and imperfect, waiting to be shaped and changed and transformed along with everything else.
my body speaks 