on being happy.

 I haven’t written in awhile, and sometimes I wonder about this. Have I lost my creativity? Am I no longer the pensive, longing human being that I used to be? Do I just simply lack anything interesting or useful to say? I cycle through these questions every month, pensively asking myself if I lost something that made me who I was for so long.

But really the answer is much simpler—I am happy.

So much of my life was marked with suffering, with pain that seemed interwoven with who I was as a person. I wrote so much not because I was learning so much, but because I needed somewhere to process the immense amount of feelings I was experiencing.

Now this is not to say that I haven’t been learning anything new, because I’m not sure any of us ever stop doing that. The thing is, I think when I wrote before it was because I felt alone. I didn’t know how to share or talk about my feelings while also feeling them. Sure, as a therapist I could wax on theories and analysis and description of my emotions all day long. I had no shame in telling people my traumas, the little intricacies that made my inner world tick. But there is a huge difference in telling and showing.

When we tell someone what we are feeling, we get to control the narrative. We can perform or withhold in any way that assures us we are safe. As a therapist, we see this all the time. We call it “intellectualizing.” It’s when a client is so smart and insightful and aware but then lack any ability to feel these emotions in their body. They approach therapy as a way to figure out or solve their problems, without really going into them. It’s a very clean way to move through life, but it’s an exhausting life to keep living.

Intellectualization is also very similar to spiritual bypassing. We want the reward of the work without dealing with the work. For myself (and many of us!!) who have relational trauma, this feels like a safer way to ensure our own goodness. We want to know how to perform in such a way as to cleanse us from any possible finger pointing. We want to be able to connect on a very narrow, very controlled path.

And it’s not to say this isn’t possible. I think there are always ways to grow in relationship, no matter where we are on our own healing journey. I like to think of it as levels—we learn what we need to learn, when we need to learn it, and no more. I’ve heard therapists describe this as “leveling up.” We don’t get to know what we don’t know until we are ready to know it. Fun!!!

But there’s a reason for this. Sometimes, if we get more than what we need before we need it, it overwhelms us. We are not ready to receive, because we haven’t quite made it to that space in our heart yet to prepare for the reception. I read an article once that called this experience “backdraft.” It’s when old wounds are broken open by the compassion of another, and our bodies are just not ready for it. It scares us, because so often what rushes in is the stuff we’ve hidden away from.

When I first started dating my partner Kyle (of four years!) I was a backdraft professional. While I do think the reason Kyle came into my life was because I was finally ready for it, there was still a lot (no really, a LOT) of relational practicing to be done. I had just barely cracked the door of my heart open, and was curious (in the most naive way possible) about what it might be like to invite someone in. To my distress, Kyle was the most genuinely loving, patient, enduring and gentle soul and this really freaked me the fuck out at first.

I remember in the early days when I would cry, I would turn away from him and bury my face in the couch. I wasn’t doing this intentionally or even consciously, and to be honest, I didn’t even realize I was doing it until Kyle pointed it out one day. He said it made him sad to see me hide away when I was upset, that he wanted to be present with me and for me to feel I could literally lean on him. This felt so strange to me. I was so used to self-soothing, to leaning on myself that it didn’t even occur to me to lean on him.

As our relationship developed and deepened further, I came to understand what another’s physical and emotional presence could do for me. I felt drunk on skin to skin contact. I would bury my face in his neck and breathe in so deeply that for the first time I knew what it meant to fully release into another person. It felt like coming home—to him, but also to myself. In this way I learned to endure the backdraft and emerge from the ashes a little bit more myself each time. It was like being born again.

Why do I say all this? Because I think an important thing for you and me and all of us to remember is that healing doesn’t always and only come from pain and loneliness. Healing can come from joy, from love. From a hug and the touch of a friend. It can come in waves and it can come as a surprise, and it can come even when it feels it may never come again. Most of all, it almost always comes from unexpected places.

And for those of us that were raised with the mantra “you have to learn to love yourself before someone else can love you” here’s what I have to say about that:

There are places inside of us that only we can heal but there are also places inside of us that only someone else can. We were not meant to love on our own—ourselves or otherwise. We were meant to heal in community, alongside one another, in imperfection and mess and before we have our shit together. This is what it means to be loved after all—to be seen, to be gently turned away from hiding, and to allow the compassion of another to break our hearts wide open again and again and again.

on holding it lightly.

As someone who grew up in a religious community, it is a habitual pattern of mine to label things as good or bad. We are told, from a Christian perspective, that we are born into sin—and then spend the better portion of our lives worrying about this.

And this is not unique to Christianity (or many other religions) in the slightest. Regardless of how you grew up, at some point or another it is likely that you believed yourself to be bad in some way. It is our human nature to divide our decisions, behaviors, and even emotions into two very distinct categories:

Good

Or bad.

Sometimes, this habit even flows into our assessments of seasons of life. I don’t think that anyone would look back on the last two years and think to themselves, “Wow, that was so GOOD right?!” We have lived through a collective trauma on multiple levels, one that has left many of us in a state of bewildered despondency to say the least.

At times, the most that we can do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

We want the answers, we want to know how things are going to turn out. Even more than this, we want to be able to make the right decisions, the good decisions that ensure a good ending.

When I am working with clients as a therapist, one of the most common themes that comes up is this dichotomy between good and bad. People want to know if they are normal, if their thoughts and feelings and choices are okay, if they are okay.

And this is perfectly understandable—we all want to be accepted. The problem is that our acceptance of ourselves, each other, and the world around us is based on the wrong thing. It is not as simple as good or bad, wrong or right. We are not as simple as that. We are all mixed up, full of conflicting feelings and our very, very sticky humanity. At any given moment we may experience the world through a complicated lens of our own making, one that leaves very little room for the grace and love and hope we all most desperately need.

Our anxiety around what is happening in our lives and how we can get back to a good place (or personhood) can often rob us of the many joys (and lessons) to be found in the here and now. We cannot make an intuitive decision from a fearful place.

Sit with that for a moment.

We cannot make an intuitive decision from a fearful place.

This means that one of the preconditions for a full life is acceptance—of all of it.

When things are hard, it does not mean that we Pollyanna our way through it. But it does mean that we soften into it, with open hands and curiosity, with understanding and compassion and gentleness. The more we push up against what we wish not to be, the more we beat ourselves up about which way to go, the more chaotic we become.

In the Yoga Sutras, it says, “Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.” Many yoga teachings speak about still waters. If you are in a river, it may be hard to see your feet and where you are going with the water rushing all around. In fact, it actually may be impossible. But if you are in a place where the water is calm, you will be able to see everything around you including your feet.

You see, good or bad does not allow for still waters. They are expectations that require much, much movement.

We miss out on so much of the sweet stuff by focusing on trying to change the past or control the future, which we believe we can do if we just try hard enough. We hold ourselves prisoners to a system that is doing us no favors. What would it be like to instead compassionately hold ourselves exactly where we are with gentle, loving-kindness?

In this moment, do you notice if you are holding your breath? Are your shoulders tense and raised up towards your ears? Does it seem like you are bracing yourself for an inevitable fall? Do you feel like your mind is straight jacket of your own making?

Are you TIRED? 

Inhale, exhale.

Good, bad.

As Susan P. David says, sometimes “let it go” can be “hold it lightly.”

And as Ram Dass says, don’t take yourself so personally.

We are all learning the road back to ourselves one day at a time.

Let yourself be present and curious for the journey.

Let yourself be bigger than "good" or "bad."

You are so much more than your limitations.

Stay open to this moment, with its many inconsistencies, in all its beautiful glory.

Because really, everything worth having is found in the in-between, anyway. 

sunshine and sadness.

Sometimes, after a long period of suffering and wandering around in the dark, we finally come up for air. It seemingly happens out of nowhere, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, and we are able to take a deep breath. We recognize ourselves for the first time—in a long time—and are surprised by what we find:

That we are alright.

And I mean alright in the deepest sense of the word. What we feel is all is right—within—despite what is happening on the perimeters of our life. We can see clearly, all the ways we have been fighting and pushing up against our selves—all our difficulties and contradictions and wounded places. As Mary Oliver says, we can “let the soft animal of (our) body love what it loves.”

We can come home to ourselves.

We can look around with love and gratitude for all we have been through, marveling at the wonder that we have made it out and that we are okay.

And okay doesn’t mean without scars or an undercurrent of grief. I think it is normal to soften around the seasons that brought so much pain, to look back with a heartbreaking sadness for the person that had to travel in loneliness on that particular path, in that particular time.

Even Jesus wept.

And yet, we are given the gift of distance at some point—the ability to become separate from our experience, to look back and see what we learned. To realize that what was returned to us in the process could not have come through any other means, to understand that sometimes healing requires the breaking and resetting of bones.

We are not so fragile as we may seem.

But these moments—these truly precious, sweet moments with our truest self—they show us the way. One of the best things I ever heard was to lean into the glimpses of joy and love and peace because we will need them when the hard times come again. They are memories of sustenance that we can return to when we have forgotten who we are and what is most important.

It is never a waste of time to love oneself wholly in any given instant.

We are so unfamiliar with treating the parts of ourselves that are most uncomfortable with compassion. Our instinct is to run and hide, or bully and condemn. Neither gets us to where we are trying to go.

Can you be with yourself in your most difficult places? Can you look with a curiosity and an openness, a kindness even?

Because this is how we move forward just a little bit more whole. We cannot avoid our hurting places, no matter how hard we try. Eventually, they will catch up. But if we stay with them, gently accepting and welcoming and making friends with them—we will no longer fear the things that make us human.

This is no easy task, and sometimes the urge to go to sleep will win out.

Do not worry—the hibernation is sometimes a necessary part of the work.

But know this—there is always light available to you.

Even if it’s cloudy.

Even if there is a storm.

Even if you can’t see it right now.

It’s there.

And you will eventually find your way back once again.

My therapist used to say to me—you can borrow my hope.

So I’ll say the same to you.

You can borrow mine.

All is not lost.

And the sun will come out again.

 

on going to sleep.

I have been feeling so far away from myself lately. I think part of it is living alone in a pandemic—if I talk out loud and there is no one to hear me, do I even really exist? This past year has really brought into focus with excruciating detail how much other people remind me of who I am. All my good parts, the lively pieces of who I am exist in relationship to others.

This is very different from not being able to be alone—I haven’t ever been one to have my identity defined by those around me (though I am a well-practiced chameleon). I have found that for most of my time here on earth, I have avoided relational commitment while simultaneously dancing with relational longing (don’t leave me but don’t come to close). Now, don’t get me wrong, I am very good at procured intimacy. I can share with you vulnerable things, secret things about myself that I give away quite easily. But sharing and showing are two different things…

Just like being alone and loneliness.

It’s so, so easy to go to sleep in your soul when you are lonely and far away from yourself. And this is how the great mystics often define loneliness—being so distant from your true being, so disconnected from your grounded self that your heart physically hurts. I often describe loneliness as a longing—a reaching for something that is just out of reach. It can feel like a wide open ache, or an emotional straightjacket while you watch the world continue on without you.

The business of being lonely is very busy indeed.

I say busy because I have found that in the vast emptiness of loneliness I reach for what is outside of me, over and over again. It’s interesting because loneliness is a feeling we all want to avoid, but instead of addressing it directly we almost always build carefully around it. The thing is we usually know the thing that will make us feel better, but we are too depleted (we feel) to get there.

So we numb out, turn away. We let ourselves fade slowly because the thought of trying to do anything else feels like the absolute hardest thing. We allow stagnation because at least it isn’t scary. 

Predictability has its perks after all.

Staying awake is an intentional task, and quite frankly I myself am tired as hell.

And yet—

I am also sad, self-loathing, and all around dead inside.

I don’t want to feel this way, but I am so worn down from all this living.

And so the cycle continues—self-directed misery, avoidance, lethargy, apathy, loneliness…

Repeat.

To want more than this seems like not only an incredible amount of effort, but risk as well.

For starters, I would have to learn to like myself.

I would have to put myself out there.

I would need to learn to draw outside the lines, just a little.

I would have to draw my attention away from what is not there, to what is.

And all of this will require effort.

Yikes!

We have a saying in therapy:

When the pain of not doing something becomes greater than the pain of doing it, you will move forward.

My friend Erin and I have another saying—sometimes you just have to sit in your dirty diaper for a bit before you are ready for a change.

You may not be ready to do anything about the way you are feeling. I am not even sure I am.

But I do know this.

There is more.

This is not the end.

In the choice between going to sleep or coming to life, I have faith that I will eventually turn the corner.

That the dark will shift ever so slightly, and I will find myself again.

That the spark is still there, even if it is the faintest it’s ever been.

That even if it is only my one, solitary voice being echoed back to me that it is still my voice nonetheless—

And the only one like it.

I hope that wherever you are today you will know that you are not alone.

That things will get better.

And that soon we will begin to wake up, just a bit more.

Until the feeling of living brings our dry bones to life once again.

on belonging.

I am currently sitting outside, in New York City, in 28 degree weather. I am feeling particularly desperate to belong today. I know for a lot of people, the pandemic brought up feelings of isolation and loneliness—a great, sweeping stagnation of connection that even the gift of technology could not permeate. It is one thing to hear someone’s voice, another to hold their hand or look directly into their eyes face to face.

The space has brought up a lot of different things for people. Old wounds resurfacing, experiences with mental illness, dreams deferred, grief, loss…the list goes on. We are vulnerable and scared, mostly.

And with that insecurity comes a wild abandonment of the present. I do not want to be here anymore. And here could be anywhere. It could be a state of mind, a feeling, a situation…we are craving movement in its purest form.

For me, there is something about the stillness that has enveloped me that is maddening. Part of this is because I am child of crisis, and there has been few moments in my life that have not been marked by the steady stream of chaos. My habitual body wants to press up against something, anything—and in its absence I have come undone. I feel like I am in an emotional straightjacket, trapped by nothing but yearning for everything, unable to break free of the monotony that is current living.

I think what troubles me most is that I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I think at my core, I am yearning for relationship, for belonging. I want so badly to belong, and NYC offers this readily, when its heart is beating to the normal rhythm of the streets past. You find it on the train in a smile, or in a secret joke shared in glances at something only two of you have noticed in this preposterous city. But in the pandemic, all is still. All is quiet. And the beloved community that once was a standard becomes a drag, because somehow with all the stillness we are still too tired to fight to connect.

And even if you are are fighting to connect, it can feel like a chore. We don’t want to do one more zoom meeting, one more facetime, one more phone call on what seems like the longest long distance call in history. We feel helpless, or at least I do.

I want so badly to belong.

I keep asking myself what I’m missing, and frankly, I’m not sure. I feel like a puzzle piece is hiding, like I’m trying to solve a problem without all the necessary parts. It all feels foggy and out of focus, and all I am left with in this space is…myself.

And it’s not like I haven’t been here before. I know what it feels like to sit alone in the chambers of my lonely soul, I know what I means to fight through loneliness in order to bring myself home.

This aloneness almost feels more like a slow suffocation, like I’m going to sleep but don’t want to. And over and over I am reminded that the only way out is through, the only way forward is to relax into the process. But what do you do when relaxing feelings like giving up, when helplessness feels like hopelessness and when you fear that if you stop moving, you might never get back up again?

And yet, this is where we are. There is no way out but in, no way forward but through. We go back to the basics. We value the moments. We remember what it’s like to breathe in and out, to feel our own hearts beating, to recognize the miracle that is simplicity, that is our very cells being born.

We learn to be here now. We learn to hold hands with the present while always longing for a different future, we trust that the process within is not over yet. We hope for better days while also acknowledging the preciousness of this very moment.

And we learn to wait well. We embrace the frustration, keep leaning into the seat of the soul, keep pressing our ears against the earth to remember the ways in which we are all connected. We remember that our suffering is not ours alone to carry nor is it unique to our own broken bodies. And in the same breath we remember that neither is our healing—there is light, and love, and connection in the air that surrounds us, if only we close our eyes to feel it.

You see, the thing about wanting to belong is a paradox, because truly, we already belong. Belonging, it turns out, is a state of mind rather than a state of being—it is a path that moves backwards and down instead of forwards and up.

It is a journey of remembering.

So today, as I sit at this café in the coldness of January, I will pause to feel the sun on my face and hear the beauty of connection. I will remember that right here, right now, all is available to me. I will find peace in the present, and in this way, I will find my way back to the belonging that has always been there, the belonging that whispers—

All is well. Come home.  

 

lost and found.

"When you won’t accept forgiveness, you’re left to your own schemes.”

In recent years, I came to the startling conclusion that I am attachment avoidant. I think I mostly never realized this because I would date classically unavailable men. In my mind, I wanted an intimate partner, but my intimate partner didn’t want me. I gilded this thought process and pattern in light that made me look like the all patient, all loving individual who just kept picking men who were bad for her. I would complain and push and spiral out and be crushed when my relationships would inevitably fall apart. I would wonder what was wrong with me that I couldn’t make anyone stay. It took me a long time and lots of inner work to understand that I willingly chose men who would not choose me because I myself did not choose me.

As a person who feels things very deeply, being in an intimate space with someone can feel very messy. Strangely, this doesn’t register for me as much in friendship as it does in romantic relationships, or relationships in which some sort of commitment is involved (read—organizations, bosses, communities in general). Somewhere between my perceived freedom and possible attachment I go a little wonky. I start to feel anxious, afraid even. Now, I have done enough personal and therapeutic work to recognize that what is happening within my nervous system is a result of a history of relational trauma and not necessarily an actual indicator of something dangerous. And yet, I am nearing 32 years old and have deeply struggled to allow myself to connect in a lasting and loving way with someone else—someone I could belong to. I am much more comfortable singing my life song alone. 

And thus comes my word for 2021—belonging. It’s interesting because my word for 2020 was home. I was trying to figure out how to come back home to myself, how to belong to myself, and yes—how to choose myself. I was trying to stop running, to settle into the spaces within that I had avoided for a long time. I was trying to learn how to accept and even love myself. I was trying to find me. The me I had buried or pushed away because of shame, the me I had yet to forgive because I found her unforgiveable. But the thing about belonging to others is that we first have to belong to ourselves.

And the thing about belonging to ourselves is that we then discover there’s a part of us that can only be found in others.

Lost and found.

We are all just lost and found.

Over and over again.

In moments where I lose myself, I feel off kilter. I can feel myself saying and doing things that don't align with my heart—with my core. I can recognize that there’s a part of me that is afraid, or angry, or anxious, a part of me that is trying to protect me from getting hurt but is really mucking things up in the process. And now when this happens, I try to close my eyes and breathe. I find this small, frightened part of myself and I speak to her gently. I let her know that I am here, that I will not betray her and that it’s alright if she take a break from being so worried all the time. I give her a hug. Then, I take a deep breath and look for the underlying string that will lead me back to my center.

I imagine that this string is gold and softly glowing, and while I can’t really see anything else around for miles and miles and know not the path it will take me, I can trust that it will lead me back home to myself.

But the other thing I am learning is that sometimes, the road back home is also a road back to our connected self. There are parts of me that only exist in relationship to others. I can be myself by myself, yes, but we are not meant to be alone. Poet Kahlil Gibran puts it eloquently when he says, “and let your best be for your friend…for it is his to fill your need but not your emptiness.”

At the start of last year, I wrote this part of the poem in the first page of my journal, as sort of a guidepost for my healing process. For so long I sought others to fill my emptiness, and ironically this kept me from my needs actually being met. I first had to fill my own emptiness and heal my hurting places so that I could even begin to enter authentic relationship. I had to recognize my own responsibility in self destruction, my own avoidance and choice in rejecting myself over and over and over again in order to really have the relationships I was looking for.

I do believe that others help us on our healing journey, but I also believe that until we internalize this healing we are just wells that dry up too soon. We must constantly tend to our emptiness and find the places where we feel full—which is usually where spirituality is forged.

And then, we have to trust ourselves enough to let our inner child go. It’s sort of like a parent who is worried that her child won’t be able to protect herself, won’t be able to make her way out in the world—except we are the parent and the child is our softest most tender and beautiful place within.

We have to let her go.

There is so much hope and love and joy and peace and connection to be found out there but we must be brave enough to go and get it. We must belong to ourselves so that we can belong to others, and we must give ourselves away in order to find ourselves again. It’s such a complicated, messy, undefined process that will absolutely involve being hurt.

But being hurt is a shared part of our humanity.

We were never meant to not feel.

As psychologist Susan David says, to feel nothing is to have “dead people’s goals.”

And as C.S. Lewis says, “to love at all is to be vulnerable.”

So, here we are friends.

Open hands.

Giving and taking.

Losing and keeping.

Hurting and healing.

Over and over and over again.

But this is the music of our life.

Some notes are lost, some are found.

In the end, it's all part of the grand symphony--

our soul's song.

Let us be brave enough to create it.

on knowing.

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

There are many ways of knowing, of learning to trust ourselves and the process that is living. When I look back at my younger years, I can see the undercurrent of my true self weaving in and out of my choices. There were the decisions I made from who I thought I was supposed to be, who I wanted to be, and sometimes—who I really was. I have found that our souls have a profound way of re-directing us to who we are underneath the more performative acts of our nature. And while we worry that the wandering is a waste of time, really it is just another way of reflecting our light within, gently guiding us home little by little.

As someone who struggles with mental illness, faking it isn't really part of my repertoire. However, I have tried to outrun myself on several occasions. As a young adult, I wanted to be happier, nicer, more patient. I wanted to be normal. So I squeezed myself into places I didn’t quite fit, and the result was always incredibly painful. And while I believe that many of my mental health issues were biological in nature, I also know that sometimes they were indicators of inauthentic ways of being. As Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak put it, sometimes depression is really just a friend trying to get your attention, pressing you down to the self that is longing to be heard.

Whenever I meet with clients and they thank me for my help, I always remind them that really, they already know the answers to what they are looking for. Therapists are just facilitators for the inner self trying to make its way to the surface. Our divine nature is very powerful, pulling us back to our center even when we don’t realize it. I think this is a comforting thing to remember, to recognize and trust that we know the way even when it feels like we are lost. I have entertained my own fair share of chaotic experiencing, a practice deeply familiar to me from childhood. Externalizing our feelings and behaviors is a quick attempt to escape suffering, but generally just exacerbates it. All of us can fall into the habit of reactionary living—because it is familiar, because it is easier, and because it protects us from the vulnerability we desperately seek to avoid.  

Many spiritual paths speak about the journey within—what I believe to be our most holy offering to humanity itself. We each are a key that has the potential to unlock goodness and hope and freedom and love in this world. We do ourselves and those around us a disservice if we are not living from our grounded self. Another way I have heard this concept explained is to live from the back, not the front. The front is where we go to present our ego in all its fragility and confusion. The back is a place of stillness, of space. It is from here we are able to access our ability to transform, which in turn allows others to do the same.

I have spent so many moments not trusting myself, not listening to my inner voice. I have spun out, shut down, and begged others for advice and guidance. None of these things were necessarily bad—they all were a part of me growing forward in the only way I knew how. But I can see now how I participated in my own suffering at points, complicating situations in an effort to control them. I think all this time I have just been trying to figure out how to live graciously with myself, to listen to the light inside and believe in its inherent goodness.

In Sanskrit, the word namaste translates to “the divine in me bows to the divine in you.” I think now, more than ever, finding divinity within ourselves and each other is not only necessary, but a matter of life and death. The path to knowing becomes that much more vital because our actions (and inactions) profoundly impact those around us. The place of stillness, where we can sit back into our soul, is also a place from which we can effect rooted change because it is where the strands of all our humanity join together—and true stillness always leads to right action.

So learn to listen. There are many ways of knowing. Follow the strand that leads to where your soul finds freedom to just be. Then be with yourself. Especially in the tough moments, the ones where you wish that you were someone else all together. And be with each other. We are all in need of a little space, a little tenderness in the hurting places, someone to see the divine within...

and someone to walk with us home.