Dear Empath,

If you’re an empath (or any super sensitive human), here, let me give you a hug. 

Cause that shit is hard.

I basically didn’t get out of bed for actual years. 

I Netflix binged like a seasoned pro, scarfed Pringles and gummy bears like I was being paid by the pound, and - well, honestly - kind of loved life. Except for the part where I was clinging to financial solvency by a thread because 1) energy and 2) I didn’t believe I was allowed to have money if all I was doing was taking care of myself and writing whatever made me happy. 

(NEW WORLD ORDER: I AM ALLOWED TO HAVE MONEY - LOTS OF MONEY! - IF ALL I DO IS TAKE CARE OF MY ENERGY AND WRITE AND MAKE WHATEVER FEELS FUN.) 

(Sorry for shouting. I’m doing my best to rewire my brain and sometimes that requires yelling over the old stories.) 

I spent so much time curled up in bed with my stuffed therapy otter because I was so exhausted from trying to carry the pain of the world. 

Remember Marley’s ghost at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, carrying all those chains behind him? Yeah, it’s like that. Only empaths carry all that clanking weight because they’re trying to be good people. 

It’s a hell of a pickle. Empaths without boundaries are in for a rocky ride on this planet.

We tend to think we’re required to heal the world by taking on its pain. So we do. Pass a homeless woman on the street, pick up some stray trauma and deep loneliness that we carry for years. If our partner is angry - whether it’s at us or something entirely unrelated - and we start feeling that anger too, thinking it’s our anger, and acting on it. Oops. 

You can make a hell of a mess when you act from someone else’s feelings rather than your own. Often, it takes empaths a lot of practice to know which is which. 

Vacuuming up all the emotion in our vicinity takes an impressive toll - on our energy, on our relationships, on our ability to do the things we love. 

My sensors were fried from trying to process other people’s emotions my entire life. 

So, bed. It seems reasonable. And often felt like the only viable option. 

I was in a very slow and profound healing process for a long time. I was cleaning up a lifetime of accumulated emotional baggage, toting it out to sea and tossing it overboard. Leaving it on the ground, feeling it leach out of me as I lay in the grass. Engaging in the slow grind of learning what was my pain and what belonged to others. 

But here’s the good news, if you are an empath on this journey. 

IT GETS BETTER. 

(I’m not yelling at you, I’m yelling at the story in your head.) 

What you clear makes room for joy. For peace. For inspiration.

Where you set boundaries gives you fresh energy to do the things you want to do, experience what you want to experience, create what you want to create. 

Doing this work is hard, but it’s worth it. 

You get to engage in unabashed napping. You get to learn who you are and what you feel, rather than being constantly overwhelmed by everyone else's hulk-smash emotions. You get to step into the person you always knew you were meant to be, you just couldn't quite get there and you weren't sure why. 

There is nothing wrong with you. There never was. You were just learning how to operate your superpowers. 

Love, 

Amber

Locked Out and Muddy Subtitle: Fuck Friday

After I pressed publish last night, I sat down on my bathroom floor and sobbed. Like something deep yet mysteriously prominent had rearranged itself in that quantum box where I keep everything I don't fully understand. (It's a really big box.) 

Sobbing on your bathroom floor is never fun - I've done it a fair few times in my life, and somehow, it's always on a white bath mat. Perhaps I should only use colored bath mats from now on. Because the color of my Cost Plus purchases are obviously the culprit here.

I've given up trying to explain my feelings. They've always been a mystery tsunami, like just hanging out on the beach in the sun with lemonade and your dog and then all of a sudden, "HOLY SHIT THERE'S A SEVENTY FOOT WAVE RIGHT ON TOP OF US."

(Don't worry, the imaginary dog is a champion swimmer.) 

That said, It felt like I was grieving something I had only just realized I lost, but had disappeared long before. I still can't explain why or what the good green earth was going on. 

All I can do with feelings is ask whether or not they're mine (half the time they don't, being an empath is annoying). If they do belong to me, just let myself feel them in my body without letting my brain attach a story to them. I'm usually only about 37 percent successful at this, but that's better than the last decade's .003 percent success average. 

For reference, attaching brain story to feelings often looks something like: 

Feelings of anger, sadness, loneliness, pain, grief, etc, from apparent nowhere. 

Brain, ever helpful, hops quickly in: "It's completely logical that you feel this way, because x, y, and granny smith apple happened last week. In fact, we should probably obsess about x and granny smith apple for awhile, or maybe forever, so these feelings never happen again." 

Helpful, brain. Thanks. 

Anyway, post traumatized-bathroom-sob-for-no-apparent-reason, I wake up feeling much better and ready to greet the morning with vim and, I dunno, vigor - or at least coffee. And then there's another quantum collapse. I don't have a better description than that. Kinda like the black cat in the Matrix. The one you see after they've changed something. 

I'm reeling from latest quantum shift when I realize I don't have my keys. They're just...gone. I search my path from house to car, and conclude I must have locked myself out.

IS THAT WHAT THE MATRIX CHANGED? IT TOOK MY FUCKING KEYS? Come on, Matrix. Be better, 

Peering in my back window to ascertain location of said keys - are they really in the house? did I drop them on the stairs and they're now in the ivy? shall I call a locksmith or try to engage a wily raccoon? - I slip on my rain-slick deck and fall on my ass in the mud. 

Fuck Friday, is basically what I'm saying. 

Hours later, after licking my wounds at Starbucks and driving almost two hours to means-of-unlocking-my-house-without-my-key (luckily, I had a spare set of car keys in an accessible place), I get back into my house.

My keys aren't there.

It's like they slipped into another dimension.  

Which would've been pretty sweet, except no. After retracing my steps for the seventh time, it seems that, actually, they're IN THE GARBAGE CAN. Couldn't the Matrix at least try? Try and make a slightly cooler shift in my reality? 

But this is the joy of blogging again. As I'm hopping mad on the freeway, because of course I don't have time to drive multiple hours today just to unlock my door, I think, "At least I have something to write about now."

Even if I'd rather Friday would slip casually into another dimension, maybe the one where my keys were hiding.  

Grinch of Las Vegas

My heart grew three sizes this weekend.

While I’m definitely the Grinch of Las Vegas - my 70-something mom and aunt both out-gambled and out-drank me - it was more than just fleeing the Strip for the rocks and the lakes.

Vegas has nice rocks. 

It was seeing my brother happy. It was exploring caves and riding a train with a stuffed fox-toting seven-year-old, and buying his love with vanilla ice cream. Sitting by a lake in the twilight while bugs hummed, kids ran, and a new baby kicked.  

Some people go to Las Vegas to gamble. I go to sheep-gaze.

It was wholly unexpected and so perfect. My heart definitely grew bigger, and that gives me more faith in myself and my capacity for love.

Before I left, I was telling a friend that I 100% expected this trip to be epic, I just wasn't sure what that epic would entail. Las Vegas epic makes most people think of slot machines and unexpected marriage certificates under an empty tequila bottle on the bedside table - not freshly-hatched babies or a field full of big horn sheep. But that's the kind of epic I prefer these days - and it doesn’t even require a hangover.

But going to Las Vegas with your family will definitely test your empath boundaries. I started to see where some of this grief I've been carrying around for years isn't my own, and realizing anew how hard I have to work to stay clear of what's not mine. When you feel it, you assume it belongs to you, especially if you've been sponging up other people's pain all your life.

It's the challenge of the empath - to remember to ask to whom this emotion belongs. Even when your brain can logically assimilate it to your own experience, pointing to a specific event and saying, "This. Yes, this is why I feel this way. It makes perfect sense." When, in fact, it isn't yours at all - and there's no sense to be made. 

God love you, smart empaths. It's not an easy road. Someone told me recently, "You're very smart. But more often than not, your brain completely fucks you." Well...yes. 

Luckily, having a stuffed therapy otter in your purse helps.

As we circled Las Vegas, getting ready to land, I got the hit that my father had just reincarnated in India, because he doesn’t want to miss this time, this rebirth of ancient wisdom that's beginning to sweep us clear of multiple dark ages. He hit the re-set button and landed back on planet Earth, ready to go. 

Honestly, who knows. As with most intuitive hits, they’re impossible to fact check. You just have to trust - and realize that, in the eternal sense, it ultimately doesn't matter. But it was fun to think about, in those last moments before we landed.  

We're all connected to our people - those we know and those we don't yet remember - on this plane and beyond it. It's like my relationship with my brother - fathoms deep and about half an inch wide. Like, we had no idea he had a girlfriend. He just...showed up with her. There was a lot of frantic rearranging of facial expressions, let me tell you. 

In the small talk sense, I know more about most of my first dates than I know about my only sibling. But it ultimately doesn't matter - I can feel his heart and so it makes my heart happy when his is happy. 

Maybe that's the reward for being an empath. I got to be so happy this weekend in Vegas because he was so happy. When there's that much love gathering, each heart reflects it like a hall of mirrors reflecting a lightbulb. And I got to feel it all - and feel my heart expand with it. 

My Heart Feels Like Charlie Brown Trying to Kick a Football

Plowing forward, filled with hope, leaving the ground with the high of the kick as you look up to the sky ...and then the nausea-inducing spinal trauma of crashing flat into the ground. Yup, my romantic life most accurately resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.

This is mostly my fault. If I try to date out of fear that I'll miss out, or because I'm bored, or because I want the quick hit of validation, or because I think I should, or before I'm completely out of the grieving cycle, that's when I get stood up four times in two weeks by four separate people or end up unraveling a tangled mass of karma. 

So I vow to be more careful a dozen times a week, to guard my heart better. But that’s not really what I want, and I know it. Even when I’m carefully instructing myself to just go ahead and be a different human this time. 

Being in a relationship with me means you occupy a portion of my heart’s real estate and you get to live there for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. Luckily, my heart is growing bigger every day, so I don't begrudge the space. Construction is ongoing.

So far, three people have annexed a corner of my heart. As much as it hurts in the healing stage, if I love someone enough to assign them a lifelong corner of my left ventricle, how could I pass up that love for as long as it lasts? I can't, and I wouldn't want to, no matter what I tell myself in the getting-over-it process. 

Minor heart fractures do fade. Karmic entanglements do drift right back out again. Melt like ice cream on a hot sidewalk, leaving only a sticky residue to eventually wash away in the rain, the cement no worse off - and maybe even retaining a hint of that invisible sweetness.

But the big cracks, the breakages, those don’t recede as easily.

Two major heartbreaks in one calendar year strike me as more than plenty - and explains all this hard-felt keening and flopping in my ribcage over the past few months. 

(This is what keening and heart flopping looks like.) 

I was wrangling last year's heartbreak around this time in Hawaii. Hey, if you have to get over something, you might as well do it on a tropical island. The big energy of those islands had me rolling through vision after vision of my not-on-this-plane-but-still-very-persistent daughter. 

As these visions drove saltwater into the cracks to unapologetically bust me wide open, I saw my heart being knit back together with gold light.

Heart breaks open, you put it back together again. With Elmer's glue, if you have to. 

A friend once called me a dating warrior. “You just keep throwing yourself back out there to get trampled.” I'm an enthusiastic warrior, but apparently not a very good one. 

But every time I hurl myself into the ring, my heart does grow bigger. It has to. 

Feeling big clears out big space. Space for unconditional love to flood in naturally, replacing the sadness and the anger and the “here are seven reasons we both royally fucked up” judgment parade marching through my brain in an alarmingly predictable loop.

When the unconditional love starts sweeping everything clean again, the space that lets everyone have their own experience and knows that the love doesn’t go away even if the people do, that’s when I start having more trust in the process.

Trust in myself - that I haven’t profoundly fucked up this time, even when my brain is pretty certain I have. Trust that the right relationship will work out at the right time for everyone involved - and that I don’t have to hurl myself warrior-style into the coliseum to be gnawed on by a tiger for the privilege.

I do want to be kinder to my heart. I'm learning what that looks like, slowly but surely. It means not proceeding out of fear or need for validation. It means giving myself plenty of space and room to nurture me and my relationship with myself. For now, I'm just thrilled that my heart is finally feeling less raw. Joy is starting to feel more natural, and all the I'm-in-a-grieving-period bad decisions and massive karmic tangles have finally stopped. It kind of feels like a hot shower and big meal after running a marathon - routine experiences that suddenly feel like Christmas morning, simply because you put yourself through the wringer first. 

It's like the universe is asking for my faith, asking me to just surrender. Because the more I try to control, the harder everything gets. But if I just trust what comes my way, and trust myself to handle it, everything simplifies. 

Meeting My Daughter

My daughter first stood in front of me on a summer day three years ago.

I was sitting in the Super Duper Burger near my house, eating a hamburger under a sunny window and minding my own business, when she showed up out of nowhere - eight years old with long blonde hair and wise eyes.

I’ve had visions before, especially when I was younger, flashes of downloaded information about how we all connect as souls and how the universe works. But this was my first holy-shit-I-can-see-her-standing-in-front-of-me vision.

She was my daughter. In my future, but already so present. Her name jumped right into my head as we looked at each other and I started sobbing into my lunch.

It shifted and rearranged me on a cellular level. Not having children was no longer an option, because I had seen her and felt her and knew her as mine. I loved this vision that, even a year or two before, I might have chalked up to biology-driven yearning or low blood sugar. Which is probably why she waited to visit.

When I accidentally got pregnant a few months later and my new boyfriend was panicking, my rib cage released a few terrifying questions: Is this my daughter? Will I have to do this alone if he bails? Will I have to make a choice that will break my heart? In a channeled session with my teacher, my daughter told me that this wasn't the only chance, she could always come in another time, another way. 

I ended up miscarrying, and coped by developing a rather intense attachment to a stuffed sea otter. 

So many relationship decisions have been drastically affected by that summer lunch I spent crying into my french fries. Can’t commit to children? Bye. Not ready to even have the discussion? Bye.

Sometimes I wonder if I should give those relationships more of a chance, if maybe the flesh-and-blood human in front of me should win out over the etheric vision. But she was so powerful - as an energetic being, as a part of my future - that if this man wasn’t ready for her, I couldn’t stay. Because I wouldn't be sacrificing my dream child, I would be sacrificing some essential piece of myself.

She looks like me, but lankier, with light-filled eyes she'll get from her dad. 

She left for a few years, as I struggled through that relationship and breakup, but when I was in Hawaii last April, my daughter started showing up again.

Wearing goggles and bumblebee wings and racing around a grassy farm fueled by a delirious hybrid of pure joy and epic sugar high.

A toddler, handing me a lollipop because she sensed I was sad.

In the last vision, she tugged on my hand, dragging me through the zoo as I ask, “Where’s your daddy?”

I cried a lot in Hawaii, is what I’m saying.

She’s been quiet for the last year or so. But I’m sure she’ll show up again. It would be super convenient for me if she really would point out her daddy. But I don’t think children are that biddable, especially spirit-realm-children you can’t threaten with loss of television privileges.

I turn 39 in July, which is terrifying on one level, but on a deeper, more peaceful level, I know I have time. I’m healthy, pretty damn fertile, and still working on healing my own wounds and releasing ancestral patterns so they aren’t passed on to her.

She’ll be like me, and probably even more so, a ninth generation sensitive with superpowers that will likely be both a gift and a terror. The more work I do before she’s born, the more I’ll be able to help her when she lands on this planet in the haze of forgetfulness that we souls sign up for.

Or maybe she’ll be born fully realized, knowing exactly who she is and how she’s here to contribute, and just needs me to feed her and clothe her, and drive her places. I don’t know. But I’m really excited to find out, and finally hold her in my arms.

Living in the Crucible

I am so, so, so ready for a change. 

When you feel stuck, it’s often because something energetic, emotional, physical or spiritual needs to be unraveled before you can move forward.

But unhooking the threads of karma that bind you is no small task. It’s like picking apart a tapestry and re-weaving shadowy demons into white dragons. You can’t leave any loose threads or they’ll form a pathway to let the shadows to walk back in.

We’re entering a six month cycle of great change and, in order to be ready for this change, I’ve been deep in releasing mode. I’ve been burning things, tossing things into the ocean, doing rituals, and throwing a few hissy fits in the general direction of god. (Or in the general direction of my bed pillows, but if god is everywhere, it’s basically the same thing.)

People have been telling me for years that I have self-worth issues. I mean, yeah. I get it. But unearthing your self-worth from the landslide that buried it often means digging without a map - it can be hard to know where to aim your shovel. You have to rewrite the stories you’ve absorbed from others, untangle the knots of normalized abuse, peer at the karmic baggage you may have grabbed - and empaths are so much more likely to carry other people’s bags as well as their own. For the first three decades of my life, I was basically a martyred hotel porter.

When I look at the Facebook highlights of the past ten years, it looks like a litany of loss. Death, miscarriage, getting fired, trying-and-failing-trying-and-failing, getting fired again, breakup after breakup after breakup. My ego has been thoroughly thrashed.

When I scan through the loss litany, relatively unbroken by brag-about-able triumph, my life starts feeling like a crucible whose only purpose is to burn me down to the bone. 

Where I go when the crucible feels extra searing. 

But the up side to all that fire is that I've gotten really good at transmuting dark into light. 

Diving into the depths of the bubbling muck of your soul and swimming around even when you’re afraid you might suffocate and hitting the same problem over and over again from every angle will show you what you're made of - and I'm made of pure tensile strength, baby. I am whittled down. Sometimes I feel like I'm two taps away from breaking, but I haven't broken yet. I've bent, I've danced, I've sobbed like a broken doll, I've set fire to the branches, and I'm still standing. 

I’ve gone from unconscious empath to understanding that if I’m angry for no reason, it’s not because I’m slowly and methodically going insane, it’s because I just sucked up that anger from someone else. I’ve gone from hating myself for being too sensitive to recognizing that sensitivity is my primary superpower. From words that were funny but flagellating to being able to write my story from a place of deeper, if less amusing, compassion. From trapped in the hell of my own head to relatively accessible joy.  

If it took that litany of loss to get me to a place where I’m mostly free of the hell my brain spent most of every day re-building, it was worth it.

But I'm not here to swim in my own stuff forever. I'm not here to heal everybody else. I’m here to feel joy. I’m here to share what hits me in the solar plexus and expands from my rib cage. I’m here to be a gift to the planet, just as you are.

So I’m re-weaving the patterns of my life, unraveling the threads of the images that don’t serve me and tying off all the loose ends. It’s not easy to keep track of all those dangling knots. And just when you think you've tidied everything up, you find a whole new room full of yarn. 

But we can’t be that gift until we see ourselves as that gift. So that’s where my effort is going now. Into the day-to-day process of keeping my energy and gratitude and joy high. Not to heal myself or anyone else, but to know that ascension from the hell of your own head is possible. Because it is. And it’s required.

And sometimes that means spending the evening watching TV and eating ice cream straight from the carton so you can get up in the morning, light the match, and ask what the crucible has for you today. 

Your Feelings Are Changing The World

I turn 38 in a few days and I’m feeling entirely lackluster about the whole situation.

Newsflash: Woman in her late 30s not super thrilled about late 30s getting later.

I guess I feel like more should have happened by now - besides the death of a parent, a miscarriage, and a rather startling collection of breakups. But you really can’t measure your life in Facebook events. Because that is a soul-withering road.

We all want the highlight reel, the one we’ve decided will make us happy. The partner, the baby, the job, the shiny accomplishment that looks oh-so-slick in a snappy bio.

But does all this really make us happy? Oh yes, absolutely. In moments. I imagine some of the very best moments in life are holding your baby for the first time or feeling so deeply grateful for what helped land your goal or marrying your person in a haze of mutual adoration. But these highlights, these moments, don’t necessarily equal a lifetime of bliss.

Any moment can bring joy. Even the painful ones, the ones that crack you open. Because eventually you’ll learn how to mend the pieces. How to put yourself back together like Humpty-Dumpty did after the king’s men wandered off and the story ended. Or you’ll realize that the scars have healed themselves, as wounds often do. The lightness that follows pain is its own joy.

My highlight reel feels a little sparse - and, yes, I do care about that perceived paucity - but my soul hasn’t withered. I’ve tended to it, often relentlessly. Just as I’ve tended to my heart. Both have been filled with light, and the cracks filled with gold.

One thing I have learned: Those of us who are deeply sensitive, who feel a lot, who process a lot, who sometimes think we are doing nothing with our lives but feeling and processing - we aren’t just feeling and processing for ourselves. We’re feeling and processing for everyone.

It may feel like you’re just sitting in your bedroom crying - but you are feeling for the entire world. You are healing thousands of people, maybe even millions.

When you process that heartbreak, you are making the heartbreak of others easier to bear. When you feel that grief, you are easing the pain for others on the planet. For those who may not have the luxury of time or access to the tools that we have.

It won’t win us any awards or commendations, no one can even prove we’re doing it (yet) - but I would argue that this is some of the most important work a human person can do.

Lately, whenever I work with a client and they ask why it feels so hard, why the world feels so heavy right now, I always receive the same answer: Because you aren’t just feeling for yourself, you’re feeling for the world. Because you aren’t just healing for yourself, you’re healing for the world.

It’s so easy to forget that this applies to me too. To get down on myself for not having done more, having been more. But shame has no place in light, and it doesn't get to take any more of mine. 

You’ve probably heard the term lightworker, and if you’re reading this right now, chances are good that you are one. Because you’re infusing this planet with much-needed light and desperately-sought love. Even when you don’t know you’re doing it.

Next time you’re feeling sad or lost or unsure, pull light into the experience. Imagine light filling your dented heart. Pour light over a tricky situation. Ask for light to be applied to any moment, any event, any hurt. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you just have to request that it be done - and it will be.

Light. You have it. I have it. No matter what our Facebook feeds look like.

(That said, I really hope 38 is the year my highlight reel gets dusted off and starts rolling again.)

The Relentless Roar of the Ego

There is a fierce and relentless section of my ego that roars in fury whenever I see someone else doing what I want to do. Shame is triggered when my heart sinks because an essay I wish I had written, or did write to a far quieter reception, is splashed all over the internet. The piece of me that feels that this reaction is bad or immature or not spiritually enlightened (whatever that means) is reflected in the reactions of others when I share that I feel jealous over the words of others or the number of people who see what they do.

But maybe in some twisted way, this ego serves me. Because it only quiets down when I’m doing my work - writing or sending out that writing or even resting when I know that it isn’t the time to write because I need to rejuvenate before I can create. When I am consistently in the space of creating and sharing what I create (or consciously resting in preparation to create), my ego is quieter, calmer, more centered in a space that can appreciate what others do without feeling a deep and shameful lack in myself.

Writing this made me feel better, and isn't that what writing is supposed to do? Purge us, calm us, and help us realize that the monsters we feel lurking deep in our stomach aren't the terrors we imagine them to be. 

Resistance Fighters

Building a business will yank up everyone of your demons and wave them, skeletons rattling, in front of your nose.

I’ve spent the last five plus years looking inward. Clearing out the gunk, connecting with my soul, going into the shadows so that I can trust the light.  

But in order to build my work - both my writing and my work with writers - in the way I want and need to, I don't have the luxury of dancing with my demons any more. 

Oh, they’ll show up, and stronger than ever. But I can’t give them as much of my time. In order to help people transform in the way I know is possible, in order to write the words I know will help, I have to ground myself in simple forward steps. I have to take care of myself. I have to pay rigorous attention to my thoughts and where my focus lands.

Last week was intense. I got sucked into all the swirling negativity of my head. You aren’t making enough money, you’ll never make enough money, too many things have to happen before you can make the money you need, you have to increase your audience by a zillion before you can do the work you want to do. Et cetera to infinity.

It happens. Especially when you’re pushing so far out of your comfort zone that you can't even remember the zip code where your comfort once resided. But I just don’t have time to let the brain gremlins brought forth by the demons get the better of me.

So they won’t. Resistance will be weeded out and the demon skeletons will be sent to rattle elsewhere. Because I have work to do. 

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. 

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.

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 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.

Where Money and Emotion Tango

So many of our human issues are tied up in money. Both on a global scale and on a deeply personal one. Money in and of itself is a neutral force. But money easily absorbs whatever emotions we want to plaster on top of it. Money represents so much to us - love, power, success, freedom. Any one of us can have any one of these things without money, but we throw money up as a barrier to what we want. I know I sure do.

My tendency to under earn throughout my adult life has affected my self-esteem and my belief in my talent and my success. At times, to an unreasonable degree. Lots of people slam face first into this particular brick wall - especially artists.

When tying my self-worth up in my belief that lack of money equals lack of talent, I also had to admit that I never really invested in myself or in the kind of writing I truly want to do. Sure, you don't necessarily need money to do this, but you do need energy. To be fair, much of my work over the past five years was to get me to the point where I felt like I could invest in myself this way. I've been blogging for almost ten years. I wrote stories I cared about. I used words to preserve pieces of myself and my history. I did my best to adjust my lifestyle so that my energy was solid and my sensitivities managed. When I hit rock bottom, I did what I could to lurch upward. When I hit rock bottom again, I flailed and then I found help in the upward lurch. Some writers need writing to find themselves, some writers need to find themselves before they can truly write. I needed both. Not that we are ever found, of course, that's kind of a dumb phrase. We're always here, but maybe we're buried. Or we've slipped away from ourselves, our intuition, our deep knowing of who we are and what we're here to do.

I spent a lot of my thirties hunting for myself, digging through the layers until I found my center. Then I lost my center, found it,  lost it, then I found it again. So it goes with center-finding. Balance is never rock solid, it's always at the mercy of the wind. Until you realize that the wind can't blow you any farther than you choose to go.

But one of the things I still struggle with is money. Lucky for me, now I can struggle with money while actually having some. When my dad died, he left $40,000 buried in the woods (true story) and a piece of property that we decided to sell. Buried treasure doesn't last long when you have hospital bills and mortuaries to pay, but the property sale helped me get to the place where I always believed I should be at this age. Namely, solvent.

Some of me felt guilty that it took a parent dying to get me there. Sometimes it felt like blood money, but most of me didn't feel that bad about that. I was perfectly willing to look at it as a paycheck for dealing with the pain, anguish, stress, grief, and crazy details of death more or less gracefully. (Mostly less.) What I felt guilty about was that the money made so much of a difference to me. Shouldn't I have gotten there on my own? Shouldn't I have figured out money by my mid-30s? Shouldn't I have been more frugal? A parent's death shouldn't be a get-out-of-debt-free card. Maybe yes, maybe no. But spiritual counter-arguments of the "we all have our own paths and timelines" persuasion fall on deaf ears when you're eager to feel terrible about yourself.

Money guilt, even though I'm not in the same dire $257-away-from-being-flat-broke straits as I once was, still rears its goblin head to stick out its tongue at me. Especially when I choose not to earn it.

A few months ago, I did a scary thing. When my last two big freelance contracts ended at almost precisely the same time, rather than engage in my usual six stages of coping - panic, worry, panic again, get over it, write things that excite me for awhile, hunt for a new client, find a new client - I opted to skip the panic part.

Instead, I decided to buy myself two months to write what I wanted to write, to work on projects that fed me rather than drained me, to both invest deeply in work I want to do and take the adult's version of summer vacation. Three days after I made the decision, I finished my book of animal stories. Vindication! My choice was the right one! Tainted by only the smallest amount of guilt. Yes, part of the deal of buying myself two months of writing was that I wasn't allowed to feel bad about it, but the gremlins devour good intentions like candy corn. Then a few weeks later, my channeled blog was born. Now I'm creating some stuff for writers who want to learn how to use their intuition to make the whole process of writing easier and more fun and hopefully more likely to wow the world with their mad genius. (Do you know any writers who'd be into this? Send 'em my way! Are you a writer who'd be into this?) It's fun and I love it and now I get to love rather than dread sitting down to work.

But now I'm at the end of my two months. I deeply want to keep investing in my own work and I do have the means to do it, but the Real Adults Make Money (Preferably Lots of Money) belief is tough to elude. So are the gremlins of "this is self-indulgent" and "who are you to think you can make money doing what you actually want to do?" and the "lucky you, you certainly couldn't do this if you had a family to take care of!" All I can do is confront them head on and decide what's truly important to me. While doing my best to untangle my own issues around money and trust in myself and my abilities.

My issues with money are mostly just my issues with myself - where I don't trust myself, where I don't trust my work, where I don't trust the world. But trust is a muscle. All you can do is lean on it and hope it grows stronger.

What To Do When You're Cranky

Be cranky. Don't desperately try to snatch at some feeling you think you should have instead. Allow yourself to be cranky. Maybe you need an hour of being cranky. Maybe you need to kvetch to a friend for twenty minutes. Maybe you need a whole day. Whatever you need, take it. Don't try to wrench yourself into some state of being that you think is better or more appropriate or not so inconvenient. Be inconvenient. This is not to say that you should wallow. You know if you're prone to wallowing or if you're more inclined to soldier through. If you're a soldier, ready for action at a moment's notice and never offbeat: give yourself some space. Take an hour off from your life to feel, to take care of yourself, to do something that brings you joy. If you're a wallower, take some action: write an angry letter and rip it up, stomp around for awhile, take a walk. Search for the feeling below the cranky. Your crankiness is probably hiding something deeper. Maybe anger, maybe jealousy, maybe sadness. Allow that emotion to float to the surface and just feel it for awhile. If your emotions take you to a real place, take care of yourself once they're done whipping you around. Take a bath, take a walk, go see a movie. Do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. Feelings can be hard work, but they're some of the best work you can ever do.

What to do when you're cranky? Be cranky. Until you aren't cranky any more. But recognize that crankiness is no greater or lesser state of being than any other. It simply is. When you can simply be with the cranky, you may find that it dissipates that much faster.