Relentlessly pursuing health, success, or happiness can be exhausting and counterproductive.
Have you tried taking a sabbatical from the active pursuit?
How about doing nothing around your craft or goals for a week? Or maybe three if you want to be an overachiever at it 🙂
What will doing nothing tell you about the value and cost of your doing?
To be a good friend, a good daughter, or a good mother, it feels like we have to say “yes” and do it all 100% of the time. It doesn’t feel like there is room for “no” at all.
What if being a good friend, daughter or mother means being reliable and what if being reliable doesn’t mean that we burn out doing it all but instead that we set realistic expectations for what we can and cannot do? What if it is more appreciated by our loved ones that we say “no, I can’t get to this in time” than it is to lose sleep while trying to do it all?
No one is going to give us direct permission to say “no” – that boundary setting is up to us. But everyone will benefit from that boundary.
In Gabor Maté’s new film, The Wisdom of Trauma, he states that authenticity isn’t just a new age, feel good topic but that the expression of it is a key mechanism for survival.
What if not being our true selves is the largest obstacle to living a healthy, abundant and fulfilling life?
And if that is the case, how do we get to our true selves? How do we work through the countless layers of protection, stories and falsehoods we have used to shield ourselves from hurt, pain and feeling unsafe?
I’ve got many thoughts about this, but more than sharing, I’d love to hear yours.
Life goes down a little more easily when sugarcoated but that’s not what I’m here for.
I’m here to experience life’s salty depths and bitter nuances. Its sour tears and spicy passion. Its gritty lessons and herb-y renewals.
Life is not meant to be taken down with a spoonful of sugar. It is meant to hit our palates all over and zing our brains with the full experience.
Won’t you put down that sugar spoon and join me?
by Lisa 2 Comments
Our children are born with spirits that have an innate knowing of who they are, discernment of what is safe and unsafe, a natural curiosity, and an openness to receive from the world.
In this way, they are born perfect, no matter their cognitive or physical abilities.
Believing this, I often say that I try “not to break” my kids as the journey to growing up brings experiences that can shut down those natural tendencies and tear down that spirit.
The human experience is a chicken and egg situation of flawed people parenting these little perfect beings into inevitably flawed beings who continue the cycle because, as humans, we parent imperfectly due to factors like the ego and trauma responses.
The antidote to this chicken and egg conundrum is to start where we can – with ourselves – by reparenting ourselves, trying to undo those flawed experiences and getting back in touch with that boundless spirit we came into this world with because we/I/you were born perfect.