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This week on my podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing @myrrhanda from the recently launched WOMENdontDOthat podcast. (I was also interviewed for her podcast which will be out soon!) In honesty, I hesitated a little when Myrrhanda reached out because I had read in her story that she lost her 16-month son a couple of years ago. My fear in this area is so, so strong. A part of me just didn’t want to examine the reality of losing a child. The idea of something happening to Jonah just feels like it would end me and render all my self-care useless. And yet, people go through it all the time and survive and make new meaning from their lives. I was curious about what this looked like and so I wrote Myrrhanda back. I’m so glad I did! She’s an amazing women who has so much strength and hope to share. After our conversation, I still have my fear (I’m starting to believe this is just a built-in part of parenting), but I also have a vision of how to use self-care to work through the pain and grief. We also speak about how feminism and Christianity work together and for the first time ever, I talk about my views of God on the podcast. Big stuff! Have a listen (link in my bio), share with those who might need it, and keep taking excellent care of yourselves. ♥️♥️♥️ I was so privileged to record a podcast with the amazing Buddhist teacher @annielakemahon In our conversation, we share our own messy, real-life stories of spiritual development, and together, debunk the myth that spirituality should look any certain way. We also discuss Annie's concept of "raw mindfulness", our experiences of authentic leadership, and the self-care practices that keep us truly grounded in ourselves. Please have a listen! (Link in my bio.) You'll learn so much from Annie's wisdom! Right now, everything is breaking my heart. Yesterday, I went to the park with Jonah and saw a group of differently-abled adults working, skillfully and joyfully, with challenging life conditions. I saw the police car stationed up on the hill, now there all the time, because young men in my neighborhood have been at war lately, due to challenging life conditions. This morning, Micah told me, while feeding the cat, that 50 people had been shot in Christchurch, another terrible incident in the challenging life condition that is extremist hate-based violence. It’s hard to put all these heartbreaking pieces together in one coherent narrative. The best I can do is think of how vulnerability, the human reality of it and our cultural abhorrence of it, is underlying everything. So many of us aren’t internally prepared to handle losing that which we care about, be it our social status, our wealth, our health, our loved ones. When we feel this fear, we defend ourselves by attacking others. So much of this happens unconsciously, which is most dangerous. This is why, if we truly want to counter the insidiousness of white supremacy and create a world that supports all people, we must develop our own capacity to be with difficult emotions and transmute them into compassionate action in our world. I’m so grateful to have a spiritual path that helps me work skillfully with the challenging condition that is life. Of course, I still create drama and unnecessary suffering, but I trust in my Self, that which goes deeper than my ego, to sustain me through whatever happens. As this kind of Self-care spreads so beautifully to others, I believe a supremely resistant act to hate is to develop a practice that helps you transmute suffering into compassion. Yoga and Buddhism are both solid paths for this, but I also trust in the power of simple self-care. Wake up gently with yourself, go to bed with love, make kind decisions about your life, and watch how this transforms everything around you. *** I also have just three spaces left in A Radiant Beginning, my new motherhood self-care pilot program starting 4/1 - more info in my bio. ♥️ I'm so excited to share information about the next virtual Women of Color Self-Care Roundtable on Sunday, March 17th from 10 to 11:30am. The theme will be on creating a nourishing evening routine.
A while back, when Jonah was a few months old, I received the feedback from a few people in my life that I shouldn’t post so much about motherhood. These people had different reasons - that talking about motherhood made me seem like I was struggling or that the content might not be relevant to people who don’t have children. A part of me didn’t agree with this feedback and another part of me internalized it. Thus, I would dole out my Jonah and me pictures for every few posts (even though they are the majority of my camera roll). The problem is, that when I’m tamped down that part of myself down, it felt harder to show up as myself in this space. Grappling with motherhood is my story right now, the same way grappling with being single was my story when I was 34. To connect as human beings, I think we can drop whatever comes after “grappling” and relate over the soul-searching, emotional journey that is trying to live our lives with integrity. You may be grappling with how to find meaning in your work or whether you’ll be able to conceive a baby or how to care for your aging parents or just how to stay emotionally buoyant enough to get through this week. For me, knowing I am not alone in the struggle keeps me resilient. Also, recognizing that a willingness to be in the struggle (and talk about it and lift the shame off of it and see the vulnerability as a blessing and practice self-care anyway) is a sign of strength and always will be to me. So here we are, Jonah and I, two posts in a row, doing the best we can to just be ourselves today. PS - I posted on my blog this week about the divide between mothers and non-mothers as we get older in life. Link in my bio, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how that divide affects you and your self-care. 💜 Here is what no one told me about being a mother: the only way this journey will feel empowering is if I choose to see it as a spiritual process. First, I want to speak about the disempowering parts. Caretaking is extraordinarily hard work. It’s highly physically and highly emotionally challenging. What makes this work harder is how little it’s valued in our society. As mothers (and probably all parents to some degree, but I’m going to speak about motherhood here), we give up so much. We give up our own bodily care and so much of our energy that could go into things society does value (excelling at our career for example), because we know how important caretaking is. But, because our culture makes it so hard to have a family, we swim upstream all day and often think it’s because we are personal failures. Please know this is NOT true! Mama, you’re amazing and I see you balancing so much with your beautiful mind and heart. Now, the empowering part. I freaking love being a mother and find the journey is helping me grow on such an important level - my spirit. So many of us have a spiritual sickness in our culture. Having been taught to worship material goods and that we should be able to go it on our own has disconnected us from our own sense of love and belonging. Within all the self-sacrifice of motherhood, I’m waking up from this delusion. I see how valuable each of us are (me too, I’m valuable!), and laugh at the idea that I could do anything alone, especially mothering. Of course, I think the way to this empowerment is extreme self-care and I’m finally ready to talk about the specific self-care that’s kept me grounded and inspired during my first year of having Jonah. Please join me for a FREE call on the Self-care of Early Motherhood on March 8 from 3-4pm ET and learn how to care for yourself while you’re sacrificing so much for your kiddos. Sign up in bio. Can’t wait to share more! How do self-care and social media fit together? I ask myself question that question a lot, especially when I click out of my IG/FB feeds feeling like I’m falling behind in life. I do think it’s human nature to notice what others are doing. Our current ultra-competitive culture teaches us to heighten any difference as a threat. The inverse is true. Posting awesome moments and getting lots of “♥️’s” for them produces it’s own high. I know I was taught that if I looked like I had it all together and people approved of me, that was enough. It took me over 30 years of trying like hell to shine to the world before I realized that how I felt was more important that how I appeared (maybe this is basic for some people, but it’s been truly revolutionary for me). Today, I’m really happy to say that how my life looks outside and how I feel inside is pretty congruent most of the time. Finding an inner/outer balance has taken a lot of very specific self-care and a new sense of patience to allow myself to change at a sustainable pace. In short, I’m learning to give myself the space and grace to be a work in progress and I do my best to share it all with the world, IRL and through social media. On good days, I get inspired by everyone’s beautiful lives. But on a bad day, when everything feels messy, scrolling through my social media feeds can get to me. I see someone’s peak moment and compare it to my lowest low. (Or I get little sad when I don’t get as many “♥️’s.”)This comparison feels particularly dangerous when it comes to motherhood, because it’s so vulnerable and confusing to parent. I don’t think there’s an easy answer for how to not let social media inflate our egos or knock us too low. For me, being intentional in how often I share and the content of my posts is helpful. Sharing from where I’m struggling and hearing your all’s experience creates so much connection (thank you!). But some days my self-care dictates that I don’t post or scroll. I miss out on things, but I can stay connected in other ways. Alas, this is our increasingly complex world! How do you practice self-care through social media? I’d love to know. The thing I feel most sure of in this life is the power of my own presence. Think about all the people who have inspired your socks off and made you want to grow. It was something about the way they carried themselves, right? We each have that power—the power to leverage the love inside of us to uplift others and change destructive systems—but like anything, we must cultivate this power. I think this is absolutely the secret to creating such a beautiful life for myself. I’ve invested time, money and energy to honing my perspective toward joy and alchemizing the painful places inside of me. The amazing news is that this kind of self-care is win-win. You will both enjoy your life more and be able to serve others from a very full place in yourself. I think the best way to cultivate your presence is to do it within an inspiring and supportive community. For this, I created the Beautiful Life Collective, a community if women who are taking care of themselves in order to create a better world for all. Our work is deep and our work is beautiful. It’s fun and it’s real. We do most of it virtually and go on amazing retreats together. Wanna join? I’m opening the Collective for new members until January 31st at midnight. Click the link in my profile to learn more! I feel like I haven’t written directly about motherhood for a while now. That’s probably because I’m in this phase that’s intense in a way that’s hard to even talk about. Jonah’s almost 17 months old and is most definitely not a baby anymore. He walks on his own, quite well, and has slept through the night for almost seven months (praise be!). He know animals sounds and can point to his nose and his ears. He gives hugs and has a really well developed sense of humor (with a preference for physical comedy). He also needs a lot from me! He wants to be lifted up high to see what I’m cooking and helped down from every last piece of furniture he climbs up. He falls, and then cries, so many times a day. He eats two bites of the food I make and then throws the rest on floor and then will only eat cheddar bunnies (please tell me this is just a phase?). He’s adorable and he’s consuming. I’m hanging in there, but I also feel like I’m stretched to maximum capacity most of the time. Especially in the cold weather, there are days I don’t leave the house because I’m taking care of Jonah or, while he’s in daycare, catching up on work. I have a strong urge to hunker down and hibernate and instead I spend most of my days doing the opposite. Mothering is intensely intimate and also really isolating. Its the biggest teacher I’ve had yet. I hope this doesn’t come off as complaining, because I feel so much appreciation for what I have. I guess I just wish our culture were more family-friendly. I wish we worked less and played more. I wish we could be more connected to nature, especially us city folks. And I have a much greater appreciation for what every mother has had to do to bring a child up in the world. You all have my intense admiration. I wish you all were leading our world.