30 days of self-love: say yes
This post is a short one, people, because it’s post-incredible show and your girl needs to go to bed. I almost passed on The Midnight’s show at the Civic tonight here in New Orleans. Now, if I had decided to stay home, that also would’ve been lovely for me. I did decide to say yes tonight though (thank you, Megan), and without even planning it, I answered a question I had asked myself this morning while journaling.
The question was , “I wonder what ventral vagal with sympathetic energy feels like in my body?” Basically, what does it feel like to be anchored in safety and flow, and have that delicious activation energy? (Quick little screenshot of the polyvagal theory I’m referencing below)
And this is why I love Rainer Maria Rilke’s quote so much, and even though I know I recently used it in a blog post, I’m going to use it again, because it bears repeating, and it brings me full circle tonight. “Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Dancing freely tonight in that crowd, being truly embodied, fully IN MY BODY, answered that question I asked myself this morning. So self-love tonight is say yes, because we never know where living everything, living the questions now, will bring us.
30 days of self-love: my dog
In a loving-kindness meditation I was doing this morning, I was guided to look upon my life as if I would a best friend, as a way to evoke a real love and acknowledgement of myself and the love I deserve. It has been a great tool for me to practice talking to myself the same way I do to the people I hold most precious to me. To hold my journey in the same reverence I do of the amazing people I am surrounded by.
So, I thought about best friends. And I thought who would say the kindest, most unconditionally loving things about me? The answer is this sweet girl, Lorei.
Tonight’s self-love practice is a love letter from Lorei to me. She has seen me at my most impatient, my most out of control, and in my most despairing moments, and she loves me wholly and unconditionally, as I am, however I am.
Dear Melissa,
You are the best person I know. When you come home after you have been gone for so long, the feeling I get inside is bursting happy. I have to wiggle and jump and spin in circles and lick and sometimes bark because I can’t hold the happy in my body. If you wonder why I usually follow you when you leave a room, it’s because I like to keep in my sights because you make me feel safe, and you are my home. Also, because sometimes when you leave, you’re going to the backyard and I always like to go outside, especially if I am with you.
I have to tell you a secret. Sometimes when you are feeling really lonely and sad, it makes feel a little happy too because that’s when I’m allowed to sleep on the bed, and when you let me lick your face, and then I even get to sleep close to you. I hope that doesn’t make you think I am a bad dog.
I am so happy to be with you. You are the best human I ever met. You always take care of me, and you treat me so kind. You make me feel loved. Thanks for taking me for so many walks, and on so many trips, to see my dog friends far away and at the parks. Even when I know it’s time for you to brush my teeth or give me a bath, I still always come to you because I trust you and I know you will never hurt me. I love you.
Love, Lorei.
P.S. Fitz loves you too, he just can’t help it that he gets mad sometimes and bites and scratches us and ruins your clothes and plants. He’s actually pretty nice.
30 days of self-love: when I don’t want to
Look, I know exercise is helpful for me when I have my period. I know that movement heals so many things in me. I feel better when I dance. Always! I love to ride my bike. And also, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still hard for me to motivate myself to move when I feel like this. There is a whole self in me saying, “I. DON’T. WANT. TO.”
Maybe it’s my inner child. Maybe it’s one of my dragons. Maybe it’s my autonomic nervous system. Maybe it’s a story I’m telling myself that I can’t. Maybe it’s all of those things. Maybe it’s just damn, I’m losing a bunch of blood and it makes me feel super fatigued.
I think it often comes back to being choiceful, doesn’t it? I feel my no, and this time, I know that it’s a resistance that can be worked with. It’s not a no because I’m upholding a boundary, it’s not a no to keep me safe, it’s not a no to keep me in integrity with myself, it’s not a no to protect my peace. I can work to a yes not because I feel obligated or like I should, rather because I do know what’s on the other side of motivated, committed self-love in this moment. Release. Nature. Connection with my partner. Joy watching my dog sprint next to our bikes. No screens. Outside of my house where I work all day. The beautiful unknown of whatever discoveries wait for the curious.
And now on the other side, my soul is sated. I’m glad I worked to a full-body yes this time. It doesn’t always work out this way. That’s the learning. I do know it gets easier for me when I’m in my body and out of people-pleasing.
The last thing I’ll share is something I wrote in an earlier post that I was reminded of as we biked, the most dynamic and incredible sky I’ve witnessed in quite a while. A prayer for myself, and a reminder:
look up. The sky is always there for you.
look down. What a miraculous body you have, that is always there for you to notice, appreciate, and thank it for what it allows you to do.
feel in. Your breath is always there, a safety, a comfort to rely it. Notice it, follow it, allow it to guide you back to your body, to this moment.
30 days of self-love: new home
I recently moved to a new home. I believe home is in ourselves, and also, I love the literal process of making a home. The shedding of the old, the creating of the new. I’ve done this in so many places, and every time I understand myself in a different way. I can see how I’ve shifted, how my priorities have shifted, what I value.
Here’s how my love for myself comes to life in my home – it’s a home made for me, and my pets. I’m in the process of making every spot in the house where people sit or lay a different kind of comfortable with different tactile materials to touch where they sit or lay. Essential oils and lotions in all of the rooms for using. Sage and palo santo in all of the rooms for smudging.
I’m not quite there yet – I’m working toward every single thing in my house being something that I love and value and use in some way (Marie Kondo has helped me through my moves with this concept immensely).
So tonight before I go to sleep, I’m sitting in my home and being grateful for myself, enjoying my own company, resting in a cozy space I’ve created with so much love.
30 days of self-love: resilience
My plan was to write about something totally different today. My evening presented me an opportunity to love myself in a different way.
I’m currently taking a course called Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy with Embody Lab. We had a class on polyvagal theory today, and I found myself feeling some stuck, triggered energy after. My friend had sent me a photo before I went into the class.
I learned a practice today today that made me think about the relationship between resilience, states and stories. In polyvagal theory, there are 3 states that our autonomic nervous system moves between: sympathetic, dorsal and ventral. A helpful way to understand this for me is to see a corresponding story with each state. I also posted a chart below where you can see the words on either side of the arc that also correspond to the state (if you were overwhelmed like I was by the chart, just focus on the left side)
Experience: I make a mistake at work.
Sympathetic stories: “Wow I’m such an idiot, only someone stupid would make this mistake, I’m going to get fired, I’m going to get in trouble, this is “so and so’s” fault.”
Dorsal vagal stories: “I will never figure this out, I may as well just give up, I might as well quit, I’m not smart and I never will be, I don’t care.”
Ventral vagal stories: “This is a great opportunity to practice problem-solving, I’m looking forward to figuring out what I did wrong so I can help myself and my team not do this again, I’m curious about how this happened, This is a great opportunity to practice self-compassion, accountability and grace.”
Okay, so back to resilience. After class, I read that photo my friend sent me again.
“Barn’s burnt down / Now I can see the moon.”
More and more, I’m understanding in an embodied way that the most powerful way for me back to ventral vagal – compassionate, settled, grounded, open, curious – is through movement, through dance. I know I already wrote about dancing as a practice, and tonight I understand that resilience can be a choice, too. So I love myself by being choiceful, to move toward “When I feel this way, it gives me an opportunity to practice moving from why bother to why not try.”
I may not always get to where I’m planning to go. And I can love that.
30 days of self-love: worthy
Yesterday was my partner’s and my anniversary. This is the first healthy romantic relationship I’ve been in. Healthy as in I’m healthy enough to be a supportive, aware, loving, independent partner and I’m with someone who is the same.
The simple truth is that I am still with this person today because I know I am worthy of a beautiful, loving partnership. I am worthy of a partner who is kind, generous, intelligent, inspiring and thoughtful. And also, just as importantly, I am a person who is these same things for a partner.
Am I embodying these things all the time? No, and I’m striving to. I’m imperfect and I’m aware of my patterns. I’m trying my best.
I was listening to the How To Survive the End of the World podcast with adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, episode “Love: From Falling to Choosing.” , and adrienne said something I wanted to share that brought me to a reflection on an intersection of worthiness and choice in love, and loving beyond the platitude of you can’t love someone until you love yourself.
“For me so much of healing from the way the way that I learned to fall in love and the way that I’ve practiced it is that if is a choice, the first choice is actually choosing myself. And what does it mean to fall in love with myself, and to choose to love myself as I am, and to love myself in all the shaping and all the missteps and all the quirkiness and all the realities of just who I am. And my job is not to find someone else to sit at the center of my life, it’s to occupy fully the center of my life, and from that place, finding the other people who make sense to be in constellation with me in this lifetime. And so then from that place…I really have done this with friendships, it’s just looked at my friendships. Like where is mutuality actually possible? And what are the moves I make toward mutuality.
And the same thing with love. It’s like, is mutuality actually possible here? Are we both able to be responsible for how we’re showing up and for how we’re treating each other and for the ways that our trauma comes into our every day? Cuz it’s like that’s gonna all happen…I remember the first time someone said, oh, you gotta love yourself before you can love anyone else. And I was like, I don’t think that quite rings true. I think it’s more that you have to continuously love yourself as you’re loving others. Like there has to be a continuous sense of, loving myself, I’m not going to do this behavior. Loving myself I’m not going to compromise in this way. Loving myself I’m not going to hide who I truly am until we get further along into the relationship.”
For me, worthiness is in making that choice to be at the center of my own life, and to be continuously exploring what that means in my relationships, including the romantic relationship I’m in.
Worthiness is a choice. Love is a choice, an action, an intention.
30 days of self-love: unplugged
This post is going to be a quick one, as this one is about loving myself by being off electronics and off my phone.
Being present and engaged was the key today for moving through feelings and into the moment I was actually experiencing. I had forgotten my phone at home after work, which allowed me to notice all the places in my time throughout an evening when I would normally grab my phone – taking me out of where I am, and likely today, into a thought spiral with no resolution.
Tonight, I got to experience this all-female band fully, Shake ‘Em Up Jazz Band, and being able to be engaged in that experience gave me such joy, I want to share it with y’all as well. Happy listening, happy loving, happy unplugging!
30 days of self-love: imperfect
My mind is resisting self-love and self-acceptance this evening. It is a reminder that one of my dragons or shadows or whatever you like to call them is here, strongly asserting itself: perfectionism. That toxic mindset that if it’s not perfect, it’s not worth it. If I’m not perfect, I’m not worth it.
This is why I’m sitting myself down here to write this post. I missed posting yesterday, and in the past, that was all the permission I needed to stop. This self-love journey couldn’t be 30 days in a row anymore, it couldn’t be perfect, so better to just give it up.
I know this isn’t true. Messy is where the growth is. Lotus grows in the mud.
I love myself today by saying no to perfect. Yes to ambiguity. Yes to not knowing exactly what’s next. Yes to being in my body. Yes to not having figured it out yet. Yes to uncertainty. Yes to mess. Yes to mud.
Rainier Marie Rilke urged the young poet in the book, “Letters to a Young Poet” to ask the questions and “live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Yes.
30 days of self-love: gratitude for the dragons
This post is dedicated to my dragons.
In the fairytales, the dragons are so often slayed. They are horrible monsters that will destroy the main character unless they kill them. Violently.
And what if we told a different story about the dragons? Maybe they were breathing fire because they had never known love? Maybe fire felt like their only way of being after spending their life rejected, shoved down and told over and over again I wish you would go away.
I read once somewhere (I can’t remember where) that our dragons are not to be shunned or pushed aside, but rather invited to tea. I have always loved that visual. Me and my dragons (whom are ever changing – one day Ms. Unworthiness, Ms. Fear of Being Disliked the next), sitting down for a proper tea, I lovingly listen while recognizing that being unworthy or disliked is no longer my truth I choose to orient from.
So my self-love practice today, and many other days, is to talk to these little dragons I keep on my desk or nearby. I name them as they come up in my day. Sometimes they’re all there, sometimes just one. “Oh, HELLO, Ms. You Never Follow Through With Anything, welcome to the party! Have a seat and a cup of tea, girl!” This may sound silly, and I assure you IT IS. It’s FUN! GASP. Y’ALL. Self-love and shifting our thought patterns can actually be really fun sometimes. This practice makes light of the hurtful things I sometimes say to myself in the moment. It’s good to make light. Humor is why I am here today. Humor can be a way out, and that’s okay sometimes. At one point I needed it to escape, to bail out of the present and out of my feelings. Now it’s a superpower of mine, and I get to figure out how to use it in all kinds of ways that allow me to still be present. To feel. To laugh. LAUGH. LAUGH!
30 days of self-love: a gathering
Tonight I’m honoring all the women I used to be, the girls I used to be. I close my eyes and I sit with all of them. All of the moments I can remember, I let them come to me, as I was, and I gather them close. I hold them with such love in my mind’s eye, none of them is a mistake or a mess or a burden. No judgment, they are all enough just as they are.
“I am so proud of all of you. I am forever grateful to you. You have showed me the way to this moment.” It’s important to say it out loud. I feel my chest constrict and I take a deep inhale in through my nose.
I breathe out. A truth. I realize I am the woman they had hoped to be.
look up 