30 days of self-love: awe
What is awe?
Sharon Salzberg says it’s “the absence of self-preoccupation.”
Psychologist Dachner Keltner says, “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”
Keltner has recently written a book called “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” which is the focal point of this recent NYTimes article on how awe can improve your life. Turns out, there is a great science of awe to accompany the sense of it. Keltner recommends a few different practices to cultivate daily awe, which I recommend reading into deeper: pay attention, focus on the moral beauty of others, practice mindfulness, choose the unfamiliar path.
To me, awe is me getting out of the way. When that happens, I get to see that it is everywhere around me. I get to open my eyes and my heart with my full attention to the beautiful people I am among. It’s difficult for me to write about, to truly capture, the feeling in me when I think about the people in this world that I don’t even know that have moved me to awe with the miraculousness of their existence. From Thich Nhat Hahn to the couple I pass often when I walk who are always laughing together. It is a great wonder, to be here. Oh, maybe it’s trite, but I can’t help let tears come for what we still have.
The earth. The sky.
Each other.
I walked my dog this afternoon and was knocked out by the water, the sky, the sky in the water. How did we even get here?
I haven’t always had access to that sight though. I’ve spent a lot of my life preoccupied with myself. Stuck in circuitous narratives that never really got me anywhere, even when I moved to the other side of the world from where I started. Made a habit of running with a home in my head. Always standing in front of myself, in between me and other people, blocking my view of the sky. I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t know how to be any different.
I’ve described my ever-evolving healing journey in lots of ways. Through dance, movement, vision boards, hugs, unfurling, writing, singing, more dance. Actions too, like opening into relationship with people as my authentic self and accepting I am accepted as me. LOVED, even.
And when I read this by Kirk J. Schneider, a psychologist and psychotherapist, I thought YES. This, this right here, captures the awe in the recognition of growth, of what opens up when you can start to see the sky again.
“As clients overcome the blocks to that which deeply matters in their lives, they begin to develop new, more aligned paths. These paths may take the form of a new job, a project, or a relationship. But they may also grow beyond specific goals to encompass the freedom to embrace life itself – in all its stark possibility. This new relationship to life is often characterized by awe – the humility and wonder or sense of adventure toward all that exists. This adventure is the same that clients experience – albeit in embryonic form – from the beginning of therapy. From the start, in other words, clients learn to shift from abject terror to blossoming wonder – from humiliation to audacity – and this template, as it were, forms the basis for clients to experience awe: the maximal capacity to live.”
My wish, for Awe, for You – the maximal capacity to live.
30 days of self-love: imagination
I love Christmas. I always have. Even as a child, it was never just about Santa and presents to me. Somehow it seemed like the happy ending every year had been waiting for, a magical time when it wasn’t silly to believe.
This holiday season, I found myself thinking of my favorite Christmas gift. I received it on the first Christmas after my parents had separated, when I was 7 or 8 years old. It was a Pollyville Superset. The excitement of being able to create a whole world, the joy of this little world in a box just waiting to be opened up, this is what I remember.
Synchronicity struck, and the same day I had been talking about that gift, I received an envelope in the mail from my mother with a few photos from past Christmases. One of them happened to be that specific Christmas, with the Pollyville Superset next to me on Christmas morning as I waved at the camera.
I googled the toy to compare the colors and the box to make sure it was the same. It was! A link to one of the houses from the set came up on Etsy, and the first link I clicked on happened to be the one I had loved most. Scrolling through the photos, I could suddenly remember each of the little characters, which one I liked best, where I liked to have them sleep, how magical the little lives I created in that house were. It was a visceral excitement and a specificity of childhood memory that I rarely experience.
I ordered it, and got it two days before Christmas. I wrapped it, put it under my tree, and opened it on Christmas Day. The anticipation of opening it was almost as fun as actually opening it. This is something I recommend to every adult. The recommendation isn’t just to buy the toy and look at it, but to go a step further and actually play with it.
Being a nanny, teacher, baby-sitter and auntie, I have spent a lot of time playing with toys with children. I was surprised though that when I sat down by myself to play with my new old toy, after the initial excitement, I felt frustrated. “What am I supposed to do?” I sat there, feeling deflated. Then I thought, what did I used to do with this toy? I was in awe of my imagination as a child, of all children’s imagination. They don’t sit down and think how can I create a world with this toy? They just play.
I’m happy to say that I have continued to sit down with that toy, and I can play with it. And it’s FUN! The experience has sparked a commitment this year to my imagination. This past year, I have worked so hard on recognizing my worth, loving what I see in the mirror, loving myself when I’m not how I think I should be. Self-love is a lifelong journey, and also, part of that is loving our whole selves fully. Such an important part of this is loving and playing and engaging our inner child. Of course, we must be imaginative to do this.
So this year I want to PLAY more! How can I bring imagination into my work, my relationships, my community? What could we build together from a more imaginative and playful place? As Rilke wrote, asking the questions and then, with intention and fun, living those questions into answers.
Happy New Year, y’all.
30 days of self-love: movement is the medicine
Why do I love movement? I’ve asked myself this many times over the past few years. I’ve always loved to dance, but in hindsight, I had always moved performatively, for attention. Movement always had an agenda for me tied up with my ego. Even by myself, I’d constantly catch myself imagining some sort of audience.
No, the movement I’ve fallen in love with is organic movement, the movement with no rules, acceptance, following impulses, letting go of narratives, shame, fear, changing my relationship with pain, tumbling into myself in a way I have only found through those times lost in writing a personal story or psychedelics.
I’ve experienced the gift of doing this in community a few times in the past couple of weeks. Dancing alone is its own incredible journey and also, there is something so magical about accessing this kind of freedom with a group of people. So far, I haven’t experienced anything else like it.
There are different types of ecstatic dance. It is an ancient freeform of dance without any rules, except generally no talking, no alcohol or drugs, no phones or cameras and no judgement – of yourself or others.
I have found many moments of complete self-acceptance during the times I dance and move. It is the only consistent direct line to my river, “the felt sense,” (a term coined by Eugene Gendlin and used by Peter Levine), where I am sensations, my essence flows wild, where the truth of my experience lives, where my bodily knowing, my intelligence is. It’s where I can touch, be, the spectrum of emotions I have held onto, what is unnamable inside, pure joy, love and what has been nearly unbearable to witness. This is where my play bursts from, awe, creativity, where I can whirl in embrace with my shadows and not be taken out by fear or shame. I feel in this space I am divinity and energy. It is my favorite place to explore.
Gabrielle Roth, who created the ecstatic dance of 5Rhythms, wrote so beautifully of the dance in this Huffington Post article.
“Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness. I yearned to know what was going on in that wilderness, not only in me, but in everyone else as well.
And so, movement became both my medicine and my meditation. Having found and healed myself in its wild embrace, I became a mapmaker for others to follow, but not in my footsteps, in their own. Many of us are looking for a beat, something solid and rooted where we can take refuge and begin to explore the fluidity of being alive, to investigate why we often feel stuck, numb, spaced-out, tense, inert, and unable to stand up or sit down or unscramble the screens that reflect our collective insanity.”
And when we find this in ourselves, we can find that in others too. It’s not even a conscious thought but a discovery that we are all divine fluidity. Moving, like Joseph Pintauro wrote in The Magic Box, “into the open kingdoms of each other.” Moving into the healing. (All book photos are from “The Magic Box)
I got the opportunity to participate in an experiential class focused on trauma and embodied movement with Manuela Mischke-Reeds and Dr. Scott Lyons through The Embody Lab, and they helped me to understand what I already felt in my body – that movement is our first language, our primary language, our primordial language. We come from the water. It is who we are. Lyons explained that our motor neurons myelinated (meaning a protective sheath has been formed around neuron’s axons, which are crucial for transmitting information/electrical impulses effectively and quickly) before our sensory neurons, “meaning we were meant to move before we could sense. That is a such a significant evolutionary development that we are made to move and express. That is part of how we come and interact in the world, is not just what we take in, but how we move in relation to it.”
It’s important to name that pain is complex, emotional and physical, and Mischke-Reeds spoke about movement existing in all of us. Beyond the thinking of the traditional way of movement, there is access for all. There are micro movements that can be accessed. Breathing is movement. No matter the physical or emotional injury or the compromise in a body, we all hold this innate wisdom inside of us.
This is the hopefulness of movement to me. This is the alchemy of movement. Trauma transmuted, our soma (our body) is the alchemist and the storyteller with no ego. Only endless possibilities. Where we are the wizards of everything.
It feels important to add one last piece, which is something I struggled with when I first started to move in this way, and that still comes up.
How do we focus on movement and really be able to put the narrative of the story that comes along with it to the side, on a shelf?
I’ll share Lyons’ answer to this in full, because I think it’s really beautiful, and something I’ve experienced to be true.
“I think it’s a process, it’s a process of trust that I can exist without the story, that I can be seen and heard and understood without the narrative, that externally and internally that sometimes we have to ask, ‘What is my experience without the story? Am I still valid? Am I still worthy of the bigness of my experience, if I’m not holding onto the details of the narrative? And it’s a practice of going, we’re just putting it on the shelf. We’ll come back to it…We’re not ignoring it. We’re not dis-evaluating it. It’s simply so that we can be a compassionate witness to ourselves first. And we might notice after that, as we attend to ourselves, how the narrative might actually change. Because narratives are flexible stories, narratives of experience can actually change. And they do. But we can’t change the story from trying to change the story. But we can process our experience and the narrative can reform.”
So maybe, try it out. Observe the movement of your breath. Pay attention as you sit down, and stand up. Find a playlist (from a recent ecstatic dance here in New Orleans) that resonates with you, even a song. Here is an article of how to try it out on your own.
Can you move like no one is watching you? Can you feel that truth? That we are the magical swing?
As Gabrielle Roth said above, “This is our dance.” Self-love is following the yellow brick road.
30 days of self-love: a bedtime story
I was planning to write a post inspired by a great session with Lisa Dion from the somatic course I’m taking with The Embody Lab. I don’t have capacity to write it tonight. I have been struggling with capacity this week, and part of that is that I haven’t been sleeping through the night, and have been having nightmares when I do sleep.
Tonight after I brushed my teeth and take out my contacts, I looked at myself in the mirror, and said,
“I am doing my best.
I am lovable exactly as I am. Heavy is not my whole story. I am worth loving.
I am difficult to be around sometimes and I am still worthy of love.
I am joyful too. I am courageous too. I am grateful too. I am fun too.
I love my shadows. I love my dragons.
I’m doing my best and that is enough.
I’m doing my best and that is enough.
I’m doing my best and that is enough.
I am going to sleep through the night.”
I am going to smudge myself before bed, rub sage balm on my temples, spray my pillow with lavender essential oil, put on a story (Peter Pan from the Dreamful podcast) and trust those words in the mirror. That self-love is a bedtime story too.
30 days of self-love: self-worship
I have been working my way through adrienne maree brown’s and Sonya Renee Taylor’s “Journal of Radical Permission: A Daily Guide For Following Your Soul’s Calling,” and I wanted to share the beginning of the below practice section on self-worship.
I’ve already finished this section, and I wanted to come back to this section, reread, and revisit the questions and my answers.
They start off each section with an assessment question. I’d invite you to try this question out for yourself. For me, it felt and still feels really unfamiliar to use the term, “self-worship,” and I’m trying it on here anyway.
Where in my own nature do I see similarities to what I see as divine in the world?
What came to mind immediately was mushrooms – specifically, mycelium. Mycelium is a root-like structure (a mushroom is the fruiting body – like the flower of a plant), through which the fungus absorbs nutrients. Mycelium is a crucial part of any ecosystem. It decomposes plant material (helping with overgrowth in forests) and by wrapping around or actually going into plant roots, acts as what’s called a “mycorrhizal network” that connects separate plants together to transfer nutrients like carbon, nitrogen, water and other minerals. A nutrient telephone!
To me, self-love isn’t just about myself. It’s wrapped up in community and our interdependence, and how I show up within that space. My love for myself is love for other people. My love for myself is love for the environment. My nature is the natural world. That’s why I love this question, what do I find to be divine in the natural world, and where do I see those similarities in me? I strive to be like mycelium, and I see mycelium in me. Mycelium heals the earth, eradicates pollutants, and creates better soil for all of the ecosystem to thrive. Mycelium is symbiotic. When we heal ourselves, we are creating better conditions and a better environment for everyone to thrive. When we love ourselves, we make ourselves and the environment around us more fertile for love. When we take in the ways we’ve been harmed and have harmed, and we transform that into love with accountability, we thrive. We heal. Biological degradation is bioremediation.
I heal myself, I heal the world. I love myself, I love the world. I love nature, I love myself. I am love for my community, my community is love for me. I am mycelium, mycelium is me.
30 days of self-love: community
I haven’t posted in a handful of days. Part of it was that I was living the self-care, the self-love – I prioritized sleep, spending time with my partner, grounding back in community here in New Orleans. Part of it was my ever-present struggle with balance and time management. Part of it was that I have been experiencing high highs and low lows and my capacity has been all over the place, just like me. I’m an imperfect person still worthy of love, even if I miss 4 days of posting on my blog. Even if I know I have a lot of work to still do around consistency and commitment. Mmm…it feels good to say that out loud, sort of roll my shoulders to settle into that truth. Yes I am.
So, community. I spent a lot of the summer based in Austin, literally and figuratively. I was in a community there, and it was really healing for a while. Then it started to not feel so good anymore. There were so many rules and expectations that I had embodied, and when I didn’t resonate with many of them anymore, I felt trapped, unsuccessful, unclear, disconnected. What had started as a way to go deep into a journey of myself in community had become something else I’m still exploring. An incredible learning experience, of that I’m certain. I’m not ready to write about it, and I will.
(Image credit: exploringyourmind.com)
I bring it up as a contrast to the community I’m finding again in New Orleans. I believe there’s something for everyone here in this city. It’s such a special, rooted place, if you’ll let it take you in. I’ve felt really disconnected from here many times in the years I’ve lived here, and I understand now that was in large part because I was still living the way I had been since I was an adult: one foot out the door, waiting for the shoe to drop off it so I had an excuse to leave. Again. Again. Again.
I’ve spent the past couple weeks in different communities here, where I’ve been able to see so many different ways that I belong with people. With writers, in communal circles, in ecstatic dances, in the park with my neighbors and their dogs, holding hands, howling at the new moon with the spirit of Samhain in my heart. Even in the virtual somatic program I’m taking, we learn practices that bring us together. I understand how strong the human ability is to connect, driven by our need for it. And how much we become who we’re meant to be, embodied, entangled, one, when we’re ourselves in community, when we can access and be accepted for who we are without conditions.
Can I love myself enough to recognize the truth that I belong where I go, that I’m as valuable and worthy as the person standing next to me? Can I love myself to acknowledge I am a needed part of the collective?
I know it. And I keep practicing knowing it. I say it out loud.
I belong where I go, I am as valuable and worthy as the person standing next to me.
I acknowledge I am a needed part of the collective.
And since research says it takes 300 repetitions for a practice to become muscle memory and 3,000 to be embodied…now only 2,999 more times to go.
30 days of self-love: vision
I love this vision board. I’ve made them many times throughout my life, and here in this moment at 37 years old, I feel that I’m as clear as I have ever been. Which is funny, because I have been much more “sure” at other times in my life of what I’m meant to be doing. I know now that sureness was actually hiding. I know now that back then, I was actually doing what I was meant to be doing, but not in the way that I that I understood it back then. I was meant to do everything exactly the way I did it, because that was the only way I could be exactly where I am tonight.
Making this vision board was an act of self-love. And hanging it up after is a reminder that it’s the choices I make every day where I am reminded if I am moving in the world with the spark of my soul’s calling alive in me. I used to live my life like a vision board – I think, I analyze, I figure out my dream job, my dream place to live, my dream partner, make a plan and put it all down on a piece of paper, and I hold so tightly onto it that there isn’t space for anything else to happen. That’s how I kept control.
I look at my vision board and I see space now. I see my gifts, what lights me up, where I find flow, my healing, sharing, community, family. I see room for evolution. I see possibility. A world of trauma transmuted, where we all have capacity to be alchemists of our experience.
I will lovingly give myself the gift of space, and keep the reminder. Self-love is also in the follow-through.
30 days of self-love: new things
Trying new things is a beautiful way to love yourself. These days when I get that feeling in my stomach that tells me “Ah! I don’t feel comfortable doing that!” I make sure that I reflect, and if it’s because I’m nervous to be out of my comfort zone, because it taps into an insecurity I have in myself, I make sure that I do it. (IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN INTUITION. I honor my intuition. There is a difference between, “I don’t want to go to a writing meet-up where I don’t know anyone because what if they think my writing sucks,” and “I don’t want to continue doing this because what we’re doing in this moment feels wrong in every fiber of my body.”)
Today I went to a writer meet-up in New Orleans called Third Lantern Lit that I found on Instagram last week. And, of course, I was so glad that I went. At our core, at our most wanting, humans want to belong. We want community, we want connection. So finding something I’m passionate about and helps me better understand myself and the world (that’s writing for me) and combine it with community? Yes!
These things may seem like an “of course, why wouldn’t you?” It’s not always easy for me to push past that initial, “but what if…(insert potential disaster)?” though. So I say, how about, what if it all works out? That’s self-love for me tonight, trusting that no matter what, it will work out. I am a lovely person who can and does belong in many places.
I’ll leave you with a very short story I wrote, inspired by a post-it prompt I grabbed out of glass jar when I got to the meet-up. Meet Spider.
Sigh. October. I am a spider in the thick of the haunting season. You’ll be seeing me everywhere these days, on doors, windows, gates, tossed into stretchy white cotton. I am a creep, if you’ll believe what you see. So scary, scary, scary.
I’m here to tell you the truth. I hate Halloween. I don’t know how I got here, but me and the black cat who lives next door lament how it gets worse and worse for us every year. I know, what a cliché. Imagine how we feel. The dread in my stomach grows as the days grow shorter and cooler. That’s how I know another season of misery is upon me.
Imagine if every time someone saw you, they screamed? Swatted at you? Said, “Ew, gross, smash it, quick!” Yet you are posted up on every other house as a symbol of the season. It’s a strange paradox I live, this infamous existence.
Look, I know that spiders can do some gross things, through a human’s eyes. Just this evening as I sat listening for the vibrations on my web of an impending meal, I heard someone talking about a movie they had seen at The Courtyard Brewery called The Beyond. “The spiders, they ate a man’s face. So disgusting!” She shuddered.
No one recognizes the good we do in this world. We help balance the ecosystem. We eat your household pests, including the real menaces: mosquitoes. I mean, not even the Dalai Lama likes them.
I just wish people would take the time to get to know me. Don’t you see the magnificence I spin out of my butt? I can create a web that is STRONGER THAN STEEL. Come outside on a humid morning and tell me you haven’t seen something as miraculous as a spiderweb where the dew catches the light and glitters as if were a jewel made just for you in this moment. I am divinity.
Yet to you, I am something to be squashed, a dollar store gel-hanging to be slapped up on a window in October, as a spooky creeeeeeepy-crawly.
You humans like to say about yourselves, we’re more than our stories, we’re so many stories. We contain multitudes. Well, I am your mirror. I am of nature, and so are you. Get to know my story, get to know my magic. I am more than the cardboard cutout your child brings home from school.
I Am Spider.
30 days of self-love: attention! this is water
As happens often, I sit down to write one thing, and I’m taken to another. I started off with hydration on my mind and ended up at David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, This is Water. I’ve listened to this speech so many times, and I never tire of it. All these years later, often when I’m in the grocery store on my own, I’ll still hear, “This is water, this is water,” and bring myself present again, out of my head and into the world around me.
Not dissimilar to Aldous Huxley’s mynah birds from his novel, Island. “Attention! Attention! Here and now, boys! Here and now!” Constant reminders to pay attention, life is here, life is now.
Wallace said, “Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
I have been thinking about attention a lot lately in my learning, as so much of somatic work is about bringing attention not just to the moment of now, but deeper into sensations, an awareness of our body in the moment and how we show up in it. And how that connects to the stories we are telling ourselves, the meaning we are making from our experience.
Tonight I don’t have any answers. I am noticing, I am paying attention. I am overwhelmed sometimes by how much I feel in my body, the amount of stories I have running in my head at once. I am growing. I am learning myself. I am sometimes at peace, and sometimes I feel like there is a hurricane inside me and I can’t get still, no matter how hard I try. I am loving myself, amidst all of this, within all of this.
Attention, attention.
I am here, I am here.
This is water, this is water.
30 days of self-love: when I’m harmful
This weekend, I experienced one of the hardest times for me to love myself: when my behavior has harmed another person, created dis-ease in another person, caused another person pain. In the past, I haven’t had relationships where there was even the capacity and space to have communication where someone else could share with me when my behavior was negatively impacting them. I’m grateful to have that in my relationships now. And also, despite all my recent intense experiences with feedback, it was still really hard for me to hear that communication. Not just because I had hurt someone I love, but because I already was aware of this particular behavior pattern and how it shows up across my life. It’s something I am actively trying to change and that change is happening more slowly than I’d like.
To be more specific, I’ll share one of the behavior patterns that arose: helplessness. Trying half-heartedly to figure something out, and when any challenge presents itself, giving up and asking my partner to take care of it. “I can’t do this! It’s too hard!” It’s a codependent, self-defeating behavior, and in some way, I feel that it’s a way to get attention. And honestly, it’s a way to not have to do the hard work to figure something out. Sometimes I simply don’t feel like doing it, and I’m being selfish.
Having that brought to my attention brought me to up in my head and to two places at once – back to my childhood to understand where these behaviors may originate, and to self-defeating narratives (“You’re lazy, you’re not a good partner, you’re not resilient, you don’t have patience to figure things out, you don’t have a curious enough mindset, you don’t have a growth mindset, this is why you shouldn’t be in a relationship). While it is important to be curious and does help me understand myself to ask questions like, where would it have benefitted me to be helpless, to rely on someone else to do things, it is certainly not truthful or helpful to engage in the above narratives.
I let the feelings come. The narratives. I let myself feel shut down. I let my mind wander back to my childhood and connect with the times I got attention from being helpless. I remembered other ways I would get attention, like antagonizing my brother until he lashed out at me and I got to be a victim. I let myself feel those moments and let myself cry. I am lucky to have a partner who doesn’t hold onto my feelings but holds space for me to move through that.
My self-love has senses in these situations. It sounds like Melissa, you are still lovable, you are resilient, you are loving, you are kind. It looks like literally shaking my body, shaking stuck energy off like a dog, moving through my response like an animal does naturally. It feels like big breaths in and out.
Self-love is an interruption. It is a choice. It is an action, deciding to close the distance between me and my partner when my reaction is to isolate and run away, and hug him instead.
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