For Writers

IF YOU'RE READING THIS, YOU ARE A GENIUS.

Deeply gifted and full of bright potential. If you aren't feeling your genius at this particular moment, let me give you a spark:

Your writing is needed  -  now more than ever. Your words matter. It may feel like you’re just sitting in a chair, clacking away at a laptop, but you’re changing lives. You’re offering hope where there was none. Your stories offer relief and your ideas offer wisdom and your willingness to shine a flashlight on the murkiest edges of your own humanity help us see that we are all murky  - and we all have light.

We all have the key that unlocks our genius. Maybe it was buried years ago and now you need to dig for it. Maybe you tossed it into a hydrangea bush and walked away. Maybe you just need to try your key in a new door.

Spoiler alert: the key to our art is the key to ourselves, and the key to ourselves is the key to our art. 

If you’re willing to pull out the demons hiding behind your rib cage and the gremlins creeping about your skull, you will find your key. It’s not always easy, it’s certainly not always fun, but I promise you  -  if you keep moving, keep taking care of yourself, keep creating, and keep digging into the messy bits of your life and soul  -  it will get fun.

Dance of the Dormouse

In celebration of the holidays, I'm going to post an audio recording of one of the Christmas stories from my book March of the Animals every Thursday. 

I love these stories so much. I hope you enjoy them too. 

"She took to plodding rather than skipping and never allowed herself to think of deer in tutus again."

Judgmental Squirrels

Today, I rescued my Christmas squirrel from storage. Covered in glitter and toting a festive red acorn, he’s a bit of a joke to the tree squirrels outside my cottage windows. I'm pretty sure a squirrel just fell off my roof laughing. I’m concerned.

Lately, I’ve been noticing the words coming out of my mouth and how they reflect what’s going on internally.

Chances are good that precisely zero squirrels are laughing at my jolly, if rather effeminate, Christmas squirrel. There is no wildlife judgment. But it’s a bright reflection of where I’m judging myself.

Maybe it was the light of the full moon or maybe it’s starting two businesses at the same time, but all of my darkest fears and worst patterns have been making a fine showing this week. Realizing in horror how much scarcity and lack I still feel, when shouldn't I be past that already?  Beating myself up for minor infractions that are actually just normal human circumstances, and shouldn’t I be past that already?

Self-judgment has been flying fast and thick. Now I’m applying it to squirrels, who have probably never judged a thing in their lives beyond the likelihood of that hole hiding this nut.

Shadowy revelations aside, I’ve simply been pushing myself too hard. So today I cancelled my (thankfully light) day and climbed back in bed with gingerbread tea, kindle, and stuffed sea otter. And the squirrels have gone blessedly silent. 

Rooting in Words

One of my favorite ways of grounding myself when I’m flailing or disconnected from my body is to look at what’s in front of me.

Pumpkin, left over from the season of squash. Paper crane, folded out of a brightly colored napkin by my aunt and placed on my plate at Thanksgiving. Wooden box filled with essential oils. Crystals in a blue bowl. Candles in seasonally-appropriate scents. Tiny pinecones, given to me by a six-year-old who assured me they were magic. Giraffe in full lotus hanging from a silver tree. Framed print of the last Calvin & Hobbes cartoon ever drawn, the one I read to my Dad when he was dying, given to me by my boyfriend last Christmas.

Deep breath in, oxygen out. My face, pale in the light of the glowing screen, reflected in the window before me. Flame flickering, warm and golden, in a room at dusk.

Today has been rough. A lot of emotion - sadness, grief - has been appearing out of seemingly nowhere. That happens sometimes. Stuff collects without release, or something old decides to have one last hurrah before exploding in a shower of sparks. I don’t know and I don’t need to know.

But I do need to write, because I haven’t written regularly in a long time and it’s time to jump back in. It’s been a year of transition and transformation, one of grief and of joy. I don’t have many of my stories written, because I was busy with other things. But, as a writer, I can’t let myself be busy with other things for too long or the overflow begins to rise to dangerously tsunami-like levels.

Writers need to write.

We write to clear, connect, create, share. We write to put words to what’s swirling around inside us, even when the words don’t come or sound disconnected and discombobulated, as I suspect these do.

What is in me that still needs to come out? I don’t know. But I’m hoping that if I sit down to the writing every day in December, I’ll find out. 

Welcome to the Yule (B)log! I’ll be posting every (week) day in December because daily blogging is one of my favorite ways to jump back into writing after a hiatus - it slices through perfectionism and allows me to capture moments I wouldn’t otherwise. 

Shifting Shadows

Everything feels like it’s zinging ahead at warp speed. It also feels like it's moving as slow as blackstrap molasses. Life so enjoys its contradictions. 

Sign of the times, I suppose - and these are very interesting times. You’re feeling it too, I’m sure. Like everything you thought about your life has suddenly flipped inside out and situations that were idling in the garage are suddenly launching forward, sometimes straight through the still-closed garage door. While other situations have unexpectedly come to a slamming halt or changed tracks entirely.

Astrologically speaking, things haven’t been this interesting since the ‘60s and, as we all know, the ‘60s were a decade of massive change.

Spiritually speaking, we’re receiving great influxes of light. Like we’re being downloaded with what we need to shift the planet away from destructive patterns that humanity has found itself entrenched in. While this involves flux and the break-down of certain systems, I believe the possibilities are far greater than we can currently conceive.

I believe my job - and yours as well, if you’re reading this - is to hold that expanded sense of light and love and possibility. To send that love to the places in the world that are being deeply challenged. To send our brightest rays of light into places that are feeling the shadow.

In a session I had last week with one of my writers, I said that we don’t feel the shadow unless we're being touched by the light. 

When those shadows crop up in my life, when I feel the deeper spirals of areas of challenge that I’ve been working on for so long, I try to remember that we only feel the shadow when the sun is moving over us.  

I believe it’s our job to dream bigger than we ever have, both in our own lives and in what’s possible for this spinning blue orb on which we live.  

Some are diving bravely into the light and the shadow, some are resisting with all their very powerful might. As I develop my fledgling business I’m seeing both - in others and in myself.

My shadows show up in my frustration with others, always places where I’m deeply frustrated with myself in a way I don’t fully see yet, so it has to be shown to me in the guise of someone in my life. My resistance shows up in money - another spot of historic shadow. (Oh, money.) Intellectually, I’m beginning to understand that money is simply another channel of energy as well as another way to see the reflection of where we still want growth. But emotionally, I still sometimes get sucked into the morass. (Oh, the deep sucking morass of suck.) 

Money collects so much shame and so many shoulds. I should have more than I do, I should have worked harder, I should have worked better. I should be working on my writing but I’m working on money, I should be working on my writing but I’m working on money. I should be saving more, I should be spending more.

See how it’s all work? Hard and contradictory and there’s just no winning. Locking myself in with the brain gremlins and letting them yell at me is the surest way to stay in the swirl.

My task now is to breathe through each moment. When in doubt, make sure I’m inhaling oxygen - in and out, in and out. My job is to look for what feels fun, what feels like play. To inhabit my body and life fully. To write my story without judging my story or how I tell it. To see myself in others and ask myself to take any frustration I feel and look for that source of frustration in myself rather than spackling it all over the person who’s reflecting it back to me. To take things seriously while holding them lightly.

We all have a deeply important job, and it's more important than ever. My question is - and I would genuinely love to hear your answer - what feels like your task now? What feels like the best way you can be you? Which is, in the end, is the very best way you can contribute to the experience we're all sharing here on this earth. 

Carried

You are loved.

You are supported in your dance with life and change.

You are given everything you need, if only you ask.

Your requests don’t need to be sent to a person, they can be sent into the sky, into the wind, into the ground beneath your feet.

You are supported in every way possible, and those ways are far more than you could ever know.

So don’t question how it will be done, only ask that it is.

Your only job beyond that is to trust. Trust that you don’t need to steer the ship of your life.

You don’t need to plot and curse at the stars and wrench at the wheel. You simply need to choose the direction and allow yourself to be carried by the ship.

Banishing the Brain Gremlins

You know those terrible "you're not good enough" "why are you even trying" "you'll never have what it takes to do that" thoughts that plague even the most evolved and grounded of individuals? 

Yeah, they bug me too. Now, instead of battling them (which only seems to make them bigger and angrier),  I use a trick given to me by the amazing Trina Harmon.

The video down there shares my favorite exercise for gently whisking the brain gremlins out of my head and into my heart, where they drop quietly to sleep. Perfect for when your head and all those mean little thoughts are getting in the way of something you're writing, doing, or being. 

A Love Letter To Writers

Dear Writers, 

The world needs you desperately.

Your words matter. It may feel like you’re just sitting in a chair, clacking away at your laptop, but you are doing more than you will ever know. You are changing lives. You are shifting energy — yours and that of your readers. You are offering hope where there was none. You are a spark where darkness once reigned. Your stories offer relief and your ideas offer wisdom and your willingness to shine a flashlight on the murkiest edges of your humanity shows us that we are all murky — and we all have light.

Your life and your work and your art are required — now more than ever. Your writing matters deeply to the quiet souls who will never reach out to you, because they’re clinging to your sentences like life rafts. Your writing matters to those who do reach out but are less kind than your tender artistic soul might hope, because they’re so lost in their own misery they don’t see the beacon you’re shining for what it is — until many years later when something you once penned comes to them in a broken moment and offers a crack of illumination to their midnight. Your words matter to the friends and family and readers who adore you, both for yourself and for the words you give them for experiences they can’t explain. You bring hope, connection, healing, and light to those who can’t always find it for themselves.

Your words matter. If something is hiding in you that you’ve been longing to type out for others, then you are a writer — whether you have five readers or five million. And you have genius.

Don’t be alarmed by the word “genius.” Throwing that word around can be a trigger. Utter the g-word and every brain gremlin that ever assembled around your frontal lobe to cackle over your perceived failures and missed targets shows up with pitchforks to spear you. Roasting you over the flame, they howl so loudly that the voice of your wiser self — the one who knows you cannot fail, that you are whole, that you have worlds to offer — is drowned out.

But genius you are. Because you are here, because you have lived and you have stories and heartbreak and a command of words to illuminate what others can only feel. But if you’re not feeling your own genius right at this very moment, let me give you a spark.

{Strikes match.}

See that small light, right here in front of you?

It’s faith.

Faith that I will hold for you until you can hold it for yourself.

Follow this small light.

As you do, trust that other sparks will appear — sometimes off in the distance but often right in front of you.

Follow those small lights, those small sparks, and you will get where you need and want to go.

You will find your path.

And realize you’ve been on it all along.

I truly — madly, deeply, right-down-to-my-very-soul — believe you are here right now, reading these words, because you are a genius. Deeply gifted and full of potential and bright love tempered by messy humanity. You love what you do, you feel compelled and pulled and drawn by something you rarely understand — and you are so deeply needed in this world.

I’ve become obsessed with helping other writers (and artists and creators and makers and dreamer-doers) because I believe that together we can help each other learn our secrets — the secrets of our stories, our souls, our own innate wisdom. I’ve logged many years and many miles down this path but, as we all know, that path never ends. It’s always stretching out before us, ready to show us something new, something surprising. In one twist the path can shatter our world. But as we move down the next curve, our world is set to rights and our faith restored.

Sometimes with just one small match.

We all have the key that unlocks our genius. Maybe it was buried years ago and now we need to dig for it. Maybe we tossed into a hydrangea bush and walked away for awhile. Maybe you just need to try your key in a new door.

The key to our art is the key to ourselves. The key to ourselves is the key to our art.

In my experience, the key to life is simply feeling better. However we can from where ever we are. Learning how to feel better peels away the layers and shows us new doors and reminds us where that damn hydrangea bush is.

Art is meant to help people sob to their favorite country song or watch a movie and hope or read a story that gives them courage to confront what feels insurmountable. Artists make that stuff to help the world feel better. But artists need help feeling better too.

I want to help you to feel better — about yourself, your art, your path through the world, and the progress you’re making.

As we begin recognizing ourselves as the whole, loved, and profoundly human beings we are, we watch our writing soar. We write the pieces of our lives and souls that we long to write — and we help shift the world. Because that’s what writing can do if you’re willing to know yourself, dig deep into your soul, pull out the demons hiding in your rib cage and the gremlins creeping about your skull. It’s not always easy, it’s certainly not always fun, but I promise you — if you keep moving, keep taking care of yourself, keep creating, and keep digging into the messy bits of your life and soul — it will get fun.

Instead of constantly pushing, you’ll feel pulled. Instead of wondering what’s next or what do I do now or how do I do it — you’ll allow your intuition and a deep sense of quiet knowing to guide you. And it will feel right and propel you farther and faster than you would’ve dreamed possible.

This is my vision for us and I would love to hold it for you. Until you’re ready to hold it for yourself — and for others. Or, if you’ve been doing the holding — for so many people, for so long — let me pick it up and carry it for awhile. You’ve been pushing that boulder up the hill for long enough. It’s time to let it crest the hill and be swept up in the joy that comes from chasing that boulder, laughing as it picks up speed, careening through grassy knolls and ancient redwoods and past startled elephants. As we’re pulled by the work we’re here to do, we find the peace that comes from claiming the path we know is ours.

Love and all the matches I have,

Amber

We are all bigger and brighter than we know.

We are all built for more than we can currently envision. We are all reaching for the place where what we can't yet imagine has popped like magic into our lived reality. 

We're all just looking for magic. For love. For truth. For peace. For what we feel - down to our bones, down to our souls - we're truly meant for. The irony, of course, is that magic exists inside of us, fully formed, just waiting for us to dig deep enough to see it. We already have more access to more love than any human can hold. We have access to truth and peace in every moment.

I believe this more than I've ever believed anything. 

But I am also just a person in my own body and my own experience and my own brain and sometimes what I know to be true gets clouded in a haze of humanity. We're all in a haze of humanity. Those who blast through the haze create genius. Those who peel away the wispy layers of fog reveal brilliance. Those who make it their sole mission to know who they are realize that they're already everything they ever hoped or dreamed. 

So here's a toast. To blasting, to peeling, to lurching and soaring our way through this human experience. To becoming so fully human that we feel the divine and lifting so high into the divine that we realize how deeply lucky we are to be human. 

Whatever's holding you back, blast through it. Whatever's asking for your courage, show up as the mighty being you are. Whatever wants to be expressed so strongly that it burns you up if you don't let it out, commit yourself completely and fully to that creation. Commit yourself, know yourself, be yourself. For you are mighty and brilliant and strong and a blazing star through this human plane. 

Cycles of Receiving

Sit back. Settle. Read. Know that all is happening in perfect time. Know that you don’t need to force or push or plot or strain or strive for what you desire. There is a time for action and a time for reception. Now is the time to receive. Receiving looks like putting aside the to-do list and letting yourself flow through the day, as you feel prompted both by joy and by nudges toward what’s necessary. Receiving looks like valuing insights and quiet over hustle and check lists.

You aren’t being given more than you can handle, you aren’t being given more than you want or need. You are being given exactly what is needed now. Now is the time to allow the cycle to flow - you have given, now you receive. Now you settle in for a few days and let life show you what’s next. Follow the steps and the sparks of light that are being laid out in front of you and practice being with your intentions and your desires, rather than doing them.

You can’t force receptivity. So if you’re always pushing and striving, you can never receive in the way you long for because you never slow down long enough for that bounty to catch up and walk in. Slow down and let what you want and what’s needed now catch up to you.

Fear Is Only a Shadow

Fear grinds slowly and painfully or hot and quick. Fear is that subtle sense of danger, that roiling blackness in your diaphragm or running rampant through the folds of your brain. But fear is a choice. You can choose to give your energy to fear and its agenda or you can choose to ask what purpose that fear now serves. Is it to keep you out of clear and present danger? Did that quick sense of danger prompt you to jump out of the way of a speeding bus? Or is that fear the product of some long-ago decision or some family system?

Ask if that fear is necessary now. Ask if feeling that fear is in your highest good. The answer you get back will probably be a soft but firm no. But whatever answer you receive - listen. Question it. Fear doesn't like to be questioned but your higher wisdom adores it. Your higher self, the self that has access to so much more information and assistance and knowledge and wisdom than we can imagine, wants you to question it, to ask for what it can share, what it can offer you. It lives for this. It loves it. It wants you to understand more fully what is truly available to you.

Fear wants to stifle. Wisdom longs to share.

So if you're ever in doubt - fear or wisdom, blocks or intuition - ask yourself how it feels. Does it feel open and expansive? Or does it feel like it's pressing in on you, forcing you into a box, telling you to take up less space? Does it welcome your inquiry or does it want to shut you down?

Fear dissolves in the light of your true self. Fear disintegrates when you shine in its face. So do whatever it takes to light yourself up, to shine fully. Because that will show you that what you fear is only a shadow.

Daily Dance

If you've been working too hard and vehemently not practicing what you preach - "take care of yourself! take naps!" she croons blithely while waking up at o'dark thirty, reaching for her laptop, and going under for ten hours -  a face swollen with poison oak and an optometrist who says "how did your eyes get that much worse in a month?" is a bitch slap to wake up. We teach what we most need to learn. It's why I'm always on about self-care and self-love and connecting with yourself. Because I will actively and insistently not take care of myself - I don't have time! I need to attack my to-do list! I need to make money!* - until my body is required to battle with a vicious plant and basically blind me to make me stop.

* fear, fear, fear - something I remember when I'm taking care of myself

I can't do the work I do - write and create and channel - without taking care of myself. First. Not as an after-thought. Not after my body wrestles me to the floor and makes me beg for mercy.

Every morning is for me, not for work. I need to run or dance daily. Every breakfast is to be eaten on the deck in the sun, with no devices and no distractions. Every meditation is to find out if my heart has something to say or if it's just my head hosting a gremlin party, cackling and poking my fear-centers with their pitchforks. I need to plop down in front of my altar and re-find the peace. If the day goes south at any point, I need to haul my butt right back there and remind myself of what is true. Pull my thoughts into the center of my head and drop them into the calm well of my heart. Peace, not noise.

Because writing from my head doesn't do anything for anyone. Thoughts, old voices, static. But when I'm taking care of myself, I get pulled. Pulled into something that needs to be said, something that comes from a place of love and occasional near-tears.  That's when it connects and resonates and the magic happens.

Bonus: More naps and less worrying.

Trusting Yourself

Sometimes things happen that we don't know how to handle. This is a part of life. You handle it the best you can in the moment, you ponder what else could be done later, and you move forward with the lessons you've learned. Nobody knows how to handle life at all times. Nobody has all the information they need at all times. We all have connection to the source of the best information we could have, but it can sometimes be hard to tune in at the precise moment you need it. With practice, it gets easier.

Trust that every action that comes from your best self is enough. Trust that any help you offer is enough. Trust that you are enough. Trust that you being you in this world is the best thing for all of us. 

You Are Your Own Best Guidance System

Usually I type the channeling and pretend I'm a giraffe, but sometimes I have to admit I'm a human and use my vocal chords instead.

Drink water. Dream bigger.

What is needed today? 

Rest, care, whole foods that grew from the ground, water with lemon. What is not needed today is recrimination, self-doubt or amorphous worries about things that are beyond your control. Just for today, assume that everything is beyond your control - except your own self-care.

How do you best care for yourself? Do you meditate, do you get slammed into the jiujitsu mat, do you write, do you make a big salad with an expensive ingredient that makes your taste buds mambo? Whatever it is you do that is truly loving for your mind, body, emotions, and spirit - do it today. Allow time to be made. Allow whatever it is you truly need to be your first priority.

Because when we deeply love and care for ourselves - as a verb not a noun - we are coming into alignment with the fullness of the universe. When we are in synch with the powers that are both greater and completely integrated with ourselves, unimagined opportunities appear. Money knocks on the door. People flock to us in wonderful and astounding ways. New truths and clarity about ourselves and our lives float in on a quiet breeze.

And sometimes none of these things happen. Sometimes we must continue to care for ourselves - deeply, tenderly, and with loving intention - as we keep putting one foot in front of the other. As we keep trusting that what looks dark now will brighten and that what we would like to experience will show up. While keeping our minds and hearts and bodies open to the idea that there might be something greater out there than our current information allows us to imagine.

What is needed today is full and loving care of ours minds and bodies and emotions, while expanding our imaginations and allowing ourselves to dream bigger than feels possible.

Life-Shifting Questions

What is needed today? 

Gentleness. Tender care of your life, your body and your soul. It's easy to push forward, to try to get ahead, to attempt to cheat time and move faster than you're meant. But this road only leads to fatigue and burnout. Nourish yourself. Care for your home, care for your body, care for your emotions.

Ask yourself, What do I need today? Wait for the answer to rise up in you. If nothing comes, ask yourself, What do I feel drawn to today? What would I do today if the factors of time, money, and what-I-think-should-be-happening didn't exist? Whatever comes to you, investigate it by asking if this would truly feed your soul and your body. If the answer is yes, allow yourself the space to do it - even if only for a short time.

You are worth it. Your life will shift into greater happiness and alignment as you expand into what brings you joy and what feeds your spirit.

You Are Worth All The Soup

A teacher gave me an assignment a few months ago and I would tattoo it on my forehead if needles didn’t make me squawk like an indignant chicken:

“Your only job now is to raise your vibration.”

For those who don’t speak hippie, raising your vibration basically means turning up the dial on your joy and happiness. Even turning it up one notch above awful fulfills the assignment. Feeling whatever you’re suppressing because you’re scared or don’t have time or just don’t wanna fulfills the assignment. Stepping away from something frustrating to refill the tank fulfills the assignment.

This metaphor also works with apples. 

As I focus on my new project for writers, I'm realizing just how crucial this kind of self-care is. How crucial every kind of self-care is. I'm getting really noisy about it, actually.

I'm even getting mad. Mad at myself for being so resistant to the idea for so long. Mad at the world for telling us we aren't worth this kind of care, that everyone else deserves it before we do, that taking deep and loving care of ourselves means we're being selfish and self-indulgent. I'm not quite sure how this crossed over from "good idea" to "thing that makes me want to yell and hit things because so few people believe this is true," but here we are. (I haven't hit anything yet, but I reserve the right.)

It just makes me want to curl up and cry. When did we collectively decide we weren't worth taking care of ourselves? When did we decide that our worth was contingent on what we put out, rather than who we are and how we feel? When did we forget that everything we send out into the world is rooted deep within us and if we send things into the world from a place of need and lack and disconnection, our world will absorb that message until it's passed on unconsciously to our friends and our children and everyone else who comes after us?

NOPE. STOP. NO MORE. Because you are worth all the gentleness, all the love, all the hikes, all the naps, all the massages, all the yoga, all the emotional tending, all the however-you-choose-to-define-it self-care you can muster up. You are worth all the soup.

Soup?

Yes, soup. It's one of my favorite parables explaining the idea of growth and self-care. There's a table. You and all your friends and family are sitting around this table. You're all starving. From the ceiling descends a bowl of soup. It lands right in front of you. You are the only one who's allowed to dip your spoon into the soup. No one else can have any soup.

Here's the big question: Do you eat the soup?

Yes. You eat the soup.

Many of us fight this concept, especially if we're accustomed to believing that others are more important than we are or that belonging is more important than our own wellbeing. In some ways, it stems from a good place. We care for others. We want to be with them, we want to understand them, we want to feel connected to them. We all have a deep-seated desire to belong. Historically, we know we need to be part of the herd to survive. Stragglers get eaten by peckish mountain lions, after it chases you around for awhile to get you nice and salty.

You starving to death doesn't help your friends and family. Not even a little bit. Your pain doesn't remove their pain. You being in pain only adds to the pain of the room.

Yes, there's some guilt associated with taking deep and tender care of yourself. Because suddenly you're feeling better than people around you. But the guilt isn't because you aren't taking care of those people - you can't take care of them. They can only take care of themselves. The guilt stems from taking care of yourself when those around you aren't.

Just as your pain would only add to the pain of the room, your happiness also adds to the room. If you're in a happy space, that lightness will lift those around you, even if they don't recognize it. If you're taking care of your body and your emotions, it will show others that they're allowed to do the same. Your joy will show others that joy is possible.

Eat the damn soup. Feel better. Because feeling better is the magic bullet and I will never shut up about it.

Self-Care for Humans

Self-care is not optional. It is necessary. You do not move forward without self-care. You do not establish yourself in your true worth and your true potential without self-care. There is nothing that is more important than caring for yourself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Anything you do that raises your vibration is self-care. Anything you do that makes you feel joyful is self-care. But be careful here. Sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking that the joy of a donut is self-care. Sometimes it is. Sometimes that perfectly frosted confection is precisely what you need. But sometimes it's also a way to pretend to comfort yourself when you don't understand what true comfort looks like, or don't feel you deserve to have it. Sometimes it's a way to numb yourself. Sometimes it's a way to fit in with those around you.

As you learn what true self-care looks like, you will discover full awareness around what is true self-care and what is false comfort. When you notice the patterns and behaviors of false self-comfort, don't berate yourself for them. You were doing the best you could with the information you had at the time. Instead, gently reassure yourself that you have better tools now and it's time to play with using them.

Self-care should feel like play. It should feel fun. Sure, sometimes heaving yourself out of bed to go for a run doesn't match your precise definition of "fun", but if that's the case, look at where you could adjust your routines so that the activity you know raises your endorphins and smoothes out the wrinkles and puts the gremlins to sleep becomes a joy, rather than a burden.

Self-care looks like being gentle with yourself. It looks like accepting yourself fully. It looks like investigating where you don't accept yourself and bringing the old voices and the old patterns and the old decisions into the light. Often, when we shine a light on our darkest places, what we feared simply evaporates. Sometimes what we fear comes out to waltz with us for awhile. This is when the deepest self-care is necessary. It's when we need to trust that we are dancing with our demons so that our demons will leave us in peace.

When you're tired, sleep. When you're hungry, sit down for tasty nutrition. When your brain has stopped functioning, allow it to rest. When you sense that your life or habits or routines need an upgrade, ask yourself how you can create something that serves you better. When your emotions are calling for attention, give them some love. When your back hurts, take yourself to someone who knows how to handle painful lumbar regions.

Allow others to support you in your self-care. Many dedicate their life's work to helping others feel better, helping others heal, helping others find what they need to do their own life's work. As you step into nourishing yourself and releasing the self-judgment around this kind of work - for self-care is work - you will find the perfect people to help you find your way.

You are valuable. You are worthy of being cared for. You are allowed and encouraged to care for yourself. Caring for yourself is one of the most necessary and defiant acts of service. Defy the voices that whisper otherwise, defy cultural assumptions that tell you how to be in the world, defy what informs you that you aren't worth this kind of space and care and love. Those voices are only speaking from their own pain, from their own sense of lack. 

Fill yourself to the brim, so that you do not feel that lack. If you begin to feel lack again, know that it's time to refill the well. Fill it as best you can. As with anything else, the more you practice caring for yourself, the better you'll get and the easier it will be. Self-care is the easiest and happiest road to the life you desire, and the one you were meant to live.

Our Stories

His story is not your story. Her story is not your story. Your story is yours alone. Yes, you share your story with others, others play a role in your story as you play a role in the stories of others, but you are ultimately responsible for your own life and how you view your life. You have power over your story. Yes, you can be hurt. Yes, you can be sad and afraid and worried. That can be a part of your story. Once you have allowed your feelings, heard them, asked for what they have to share with you, your story is allowed to change. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to feel what's sad, feel what's painful, feel what's hard, you're allowed to rage against the universe, and then see what that release brings you. Once you send your pain and your fear out into the air, into the space that is meant to take those feelings and transform them for you, your story will change.

Listening to another's story without judgement, without equating it to your own story, is one of the best services to humanity we can provide. We all want to feel heard. To know that our story matters. To know that our story matters every bit as much as another's story. To know that your story does not negate my story, even if we have different experiences.

This does not mean we are required to forgive the unforgivable or sacrifice our own wellbeing on the altar of another. It simply means that we release that which does not serve us so that we can focus on the sweetness of life, the tart lemon of experience, and the heady joy of swirling it all together.

Every person's story matters. Every voice is crucial. Every life is a light and when we can accept our own light and the light of our fellow humans, that light will power the universe.

The Power of Five Minutes

When you're flying apart - not in a dire way, not in the life-has-just-crumbled-around-me way - but when you feel like you have too many things to do without sufficient clock-time to do them. This is when you sit quietly for five minutes.

Yes, it feels like the absolute very last thing you should be doing. But this is when it's most important. When the world is tugging insistently at your hem, you need to sit down and listen to you. What truly needs doing now? What's your best next step? How can you care for yourself when so many things are happening? These are the questions to ask and, if you listen, the answers will become clear. Allow yourself the space to expand your ribs with quiet air and the time to allow your brain to draw in all its thoughts, pull them to the center of your head, and drop them into your heart space. In that moment, you can allow your heart to lead you into what needs to be next.

It may be the next thing on your to-do list, it may be something entirely unexpected. That quiet voice inside you may say, Now is the time to work. Or it may say, Now is the time to rest. You may even get lucky and hear, Nothing you do today will turn out well until you take the time to walk on the sand or shift your feet in the cool grass.

If that voice tells you to do something, life will be smoother and kinder if you do it.

If you're worried about listening to the wrong voice, use your feeling center as guidance. Does the advice bring you peace? Or does it make you agitated? If you feel agitated, you're probably listening to fear or one of a hundred voices in your head and your life that have their own agenda. If it makes you feel peace, then it is most likely your intuition. If you still aren't sure, ask for confirmation.

If it still feels haywire and awry and you're not sure what to listen to or what to pay attention to, that's okay. Intuition is a muscle - the more we use it, the stronger it gets. Five minutes every day will take you far.

And it may take a mere five minutes to realize that your to-do list isn't the hell-frazzle you suspected. Maybe it's now full of ease, even joy.