In an act of self love, I give myself permission to:
- Rest as needed - Fail often - Feel lost - Have faith - Forgive myself - Forgive others - Be weird - Acknowledge weakness - Try new things - Be afraid - Face my fears - Be honest - Cry - Laugh at myself - Love - Dream - Celebrate successes - Be grateful to my body - Feel beautiful - Be vulnerable
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Habits to Help You Get Out of Bed Easier in The Morning:
1. Open your eyes - One by one or both together, it’s up to you. Open them wide and exercise movement. Don’t forget to check in with your peripherals; this is often where the little, important things are hiding, affecting you from the sidelines, their very existence clandestine. Acknowledge everything. 2. Put on the kettle - Remind yourself you are getting ready to drink, from the overflowing cup of your life. Let this pull your blanket down from your chin, and then swing your legs to dangle off the edge of your bed. It’s ok if you need a little time to wake up. Think about the liquid you are about to ingest. The first swallow of the day. Whether you choose to drink water, coffee, tea or whiskey, remember that the choice is yours. 3. Wash your face - Cold water awakens your sensory preceptors. Let go of your compulsion that life should hold you like a warm bath, like your mother’s womb. Let the tap flow freely. Splash the water on your wide eyes; remove yesterday’s garbage. Relax your furrowed brow, leave your muscles free to smile. Embrace the change. 4. Oral Hygiene - What we don’t clear away will rot our mouths from the inside out. Get it out. Swirl the water around, through your teeth and across your sharp tongue and spit it out. Spit it out gently, don’t aim at somebody’s heart. But do not hold it in for fear of making a mess. You will choke on your own decay. 5. Gentle stretching - Easy as it is to lie still, to live we must move. There’s no need to push yourself into heavy exercise, this will lead to fatigue and injury, keeping you longer in bed. Feel your need for movement, and embrace it - slowly, at first, until you are limber and ready for bigger steps. Breathe in as you lengthen your limbs in any direction or manner that feels natural and good. Exhale your fatigue, your stagnancy, your memory. Bask in gratitude as you feel your body loosen and thirst for more movement. This is growth. 6. Get to work - Your work should lure you out of bed, call to you even before you have opened your eyes. If you see this step as a deterrent to rising from your slumber, you are in the wrong line of work. Write a task list that leaves you lusting for its content. Fill your days with challenges that energize your chakras. Do not read want ads on the internet. Sit in silence and flip through the pages of your gut. Shake loose the back issues of your soul, and collect the fragments of anything that falls from their pages. Cut and paste these treasures together into a collage of what your life will be. Get to it. You don’t have to hold me with kid gloves. Let me bleed into the palm of your hand. Crush my bones down into powder, if only so I can rebuild myself again. Tell me what you’re thinking, throw your words like daggers. I can’t promise that I’ll answer you; I don’t care too much for swords. But don’t be invisible, even when you’re angry. It’s poisonous to go to sleep that way. So love me anyway, and when the morning comes, we can forget about the last day and start a new one. King and queen of whatever we dream our reality to be. Whatever we feel, whatever we need, is ok. It’s a thing called honesty. As scary as it can be, it’s a vessel for the truth. The most important thing, it’s what I seek in you.
Dear Anna,
I’ve never met you, but I figure you must be wise if everyone is writing to you. I find myself in a situation that I can’t seem to wrap my head around, and I’d like your counsel. You see, my suitcase is packed, yet again, and I’ve told myself I’m leaving, yet again. But I don’t know where it is I’m going. And this time especially, I’m not sure why it is I’m walking away. So far, it’s just been something I do, every now and then, when the place I’m in starts to feel familiar and my every move predictable. I’ve thrown myself into new situations, struggled to find my footing, until I have, and proceeded to build a life around it - friends that feel like family, like lovers, like life. Why do the fish fly? Is it their instinctive reaction to an overwhelming sense of freedom and joy? Like the one I felt when I saw them rocketing in my direction out of the flat-as-glass surface of this clear blue sea? I squealed like a child, and I jumped too - right into the water. I swam and twirled, splashed my feet in mermaid unison. For a brief instance, those fish and I traded places. I drowned my to-do list in the ocean, with total disregard for the weather above. Rain or sunshine, pay no mind when you are fishing. And that I was. All the while, the fish were flying. I wonder what the birds were up to? Maybe swapping places with the dogs, digging holes in the sand to keep themselves cool. While Muffin and Bo were building castles in the sky. And the cows...well I haven't seen them down here at the beach in weeks. I wonder which animal they've been living as? It's difficult picturing cows doing anything but cow things. But then again, before coming here, I had never pictured a cow swimming in the ocean. Oh, the lives of animals!
It has been a rough patch of living as of late, Mercury is about to complete her (damned) retrograde, which has left in its path tiny piles of destruction. I awoke this morning feeling that - while everything on the surface was fine - the world was somehow askew. I fumbled with my notebook, unable to find words. My cup of morning tea remained untouched, and my body refused to contort itself to any shape vaguely resembling a downward-facing dog. A bust, it was heading to be a bust of a morning - which, of course, runs the risk of evolving into a bust of a day. And that is not what I am after. I decided, hesitantly, that what I needed was a change in perspective. To shift not what I was looking at but rather the direction from which I was seeing it.
This is an older piece of writing that I rediscovered on my old (currently unused) blog, When the Bird Flies. It's just very fitting in my life right now, so I want to share it here. Peace and love <3
What I felt in that moment was stronger than anything I had felt before and everything that I have felt since. It began, packed densely as a star about to burst, in a tiny spot behind my navel. But it carried like wildfire through my body and into my hair, which stood on end. How alive it made me feel to feel anything so deeply. In that moment, there was nothing else, no questions lingered. I was you, and we were truth, and we were truly living life in the way the powers at be intended us to. And it felt like magic, for everything to be so right. It was intoxicating. Divinity was wrapping its comforting arms around us. I could finally breathe with ease. But moments are just that, and of course they pass. Time has its way, and as it carries on, so do we. With only a memory, one that seems to fade with increasing speed. Until that feeling, that in the moment was so strong, becomes nothing more than a whisper. Like a word on the tips of our tongues, we can’t quite place it. But it was there, we know that it was, that it existed. Didn’t it? I could have sworn the gods reached down and touched us, that the earth shook. But now I’m not even sure that you were real. Or that I was, for that matter. In this time, in this place, it’s hard for me to picture your face. Let alone remember what it felt like to be loved by you. Maybe it’s a case of my brain protecting me, selective memory. So that I’m not left here longing for something I can never have again. Or maybe it was nothing, and I was a fool to think otherwise. Something short I came across in my old files. Written last June here in Suratthani. One of those pieces that I'm sure at the time I thought was nothing, but finding it again now, I want to know where it was going, where it came from. It's nice to see one's own writing in this light.
when the pin drops He said to me, it has always been you. Different chapters, different books, call it what you will. You did not materialize at age twenty-whatever, you do not get to shed that skin, you are a human. You have always been. And I said to him, you are right. Like you have always been, or usually are at least. How is that you see me? So truly, and so deeply? Like everything else that has ever existed, we started as a mere possibility. One that I may have glossed over in my peripheral, unknowingly, and let go of immediately. But a seed is a seed, and this one was buried deep. So deep that I didn't feel it growing in me, not until the days turned into years and our circumstances, winding around the world like vines, once again brought him into my life. Sometimes you don't realize you have been sitting in silence until the pin drops. Suddenly I heard music. I don't remember the first time we kissed, or who initiated it. But what ensued. What ensued shook me like an earthquake, it shifted my plates. My foundation would never be the same. From the inside, I watched the egg break. For an unprecedented series of moments, standing in the warm shower stream, I felt a sensation that is fairly foreign to me: I felt in control. This did not equate to knowing, to being right, to doing all of the things I deem in my head as being good to do. But it meant that, regardless of what was happening around me, everything that exists does so as a result of a choice I have made, a decision I have come to. Whether I wake up and drink water before an intense workout, or linger in bed reading a book that even upon reaching the last page I am unsure if I like or not - I am in control. Of my actions, most obviously, but also of my emotional reaction to the results of these actions, to the changes in my context that ripple outward, indefinitely. With such power, comes fearlessness. What reason is there to be afraid, when I am the one directing the traffic of my life? I am building, destroying, rebuilding. I alone am doing this. It is glorious and intoxicating, especially in these early hours of the morning, when like my body, my potential is shaking off the darkness of night, is coming alive again. Simply because I have allowed it to.
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AuthorChicago-born citizen of the globe, rich in the things that really matter. Let's get weird. Categories
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