Do Not Stop Moving Toward Love

Do not stop believing in peace

(cover photo from artist Clifford Prince King)

Little by little I've been noticing residual habits from spending the majority of my life as a highly anxious person without really knowing or understanding it. It makes me feel a lot of complicated things. Shame, guilt, fear, sadness. It also makes me feel deeply grateful for medication and this current experience of navigating life with a new energy, one that is just so much more discerning and patient. It’s extremely disorienting at times. I often catch myself feeling calm and curious in stressful situations instead of restless and desperate, and my brain has to do a double take as it wrestles with confusion over our new reaction. I can’t tell you how much of a relief this is, though. It’s like my chest was filled with a hive of honey bees my whole life, just working, working, working endlessly and tirelessly. Also, those bees didn’t know they were making honey, they just knew they were supposed to be making something. Doing something. Investing in something. That urgency never truly went away. And now, suddenly, it’s not there? It gives me such great pause to experience it. The adjustment process, although supportive and positive, can feel emotionally disorienting. It’s very much that potent moment when the old energy rises up and crashes into the new until it all finally evens out and finds its footing.

All in all, a journey I feel grateful for. I still need reminders to focus on being present instead of covering up my emotions with staying busy and distracted, but the process is so much smoother and there is so much less internal criticism.

I started goat-herding on twice a month too, and this has been deeply soul soothing.

Another huge help is that I recently moved into a new house just a few minutes up the road from my folks. It’s been nothing short of a miracle. This whole situation fell into my lap beautifully and lends itself perfectly to where I’m at with myself right now, which is exploring (in so many new ways) what my relationship to space is. I’m good at being alone, but being alone is a lot different than occupying space or honoring the space of someone close to you. I’m also putting more space between myself and old habits and challenging memories that seemed to linger, and in that space I’m taking a seat and just gazing from a healthy distance. This is a difficult practice, but now I live somewhere with giant windows in my living room where I can look out every morning and see pine trees and a barred owl gliding effortlessly through them. Before I can find stress I first find a family of woodpeckers on my feeder. I don’t take this special place for granted, and I’ve been so excited to share it with the lovely people in my life. It’s going to evolve in such interesting ways over time as I grow and make a home here, and I’m so happy to finally have the chance to really nurture a space. Cowboy’s pretty thrilled too, and has shown me his excitement through rolling in deer shit every other day.

I want to remember this time and this house as years that felt deeply healing and expansive, a time where I built more community and made pancakes for my partner and hosted Christmas for the first time. I also want to remember that a blue jay was the first bird to show up to my feeder and I once caught a mouse in my kitchen sink and the whole first week in my new room all I did was dream about having choices.

What’s happening in Palestine and Israel continues to be a daily heartbreak. I hope you’ve continued to take your sorrow and alchemize it into loving action, both toward those who need it most as well as yourself. Being alive at this moment in time is a gift and it also feels like a curse, I know. Do not stop moving toward love. Do not stop believing in peace. Love exists so much more fully and resonantly than fear and anguish. Make sure you serve yourself daily reminders of that love in everything you do, from the way you wash your face (and repeat to self as you splash water all around the sink: I love you. thank you for taking care of me) to your morning coffee routine to turning off the lights to go to bed. You’ll find that love is so eager to be invited in, and it’s not here to influence you to bypass reality — it’s here to amplify it, and to help you know the truth, and to think clearly and confidently. It’s here to help you take the action that sometimes feels impossible.

I recently guested on a new episode for my dear friend Sean’s podcast, Everyone is Everything (you’ll find the episode out in early January, but I’m also on episode 4 if you want to go back and find it), and we found ourselves talking about love, as we so often do. I was lamenting about the coaching community and how so much of it is filled with coaches who build expensive packages centered around healing trauma and letting love in, but so many of them don’t seem to understand love’s true functions. They use love as a blinding blanket and as a defensive shield rather than a thoughtful tool that allows them to be in relationship to everything. We also chatted about Kali, a major Hindu goddess, a destroyer of worlds and harbinger of death, and how the message of Kali is about embracing the difficulty and destruction, and how if you do so with love, you can so much more easily invite true healing and support and perspective shifts toward you. The more we ignore the difficulty, the worse it feels. You cannot love yourself away from pain. You can only love yourself toward it, and once you crawl into that cave you’ll find MORE love is lying in wait, a new kind of love that is empowering and thoughtful and alchemizing.

How is love serving you in your practice of self-actualization? Does it make you feel more capable? Or do you find yourself avoiding the pain of your experience? If you spoke to me between the years of 2015 - 2021, you’d find me masking deep trauma with LOVE AND LIGHT. I wasn’t necessarily advising others to do this, but I sure as hell was doing it to myself. It’s been a fight to get out of that trench, but here I am, and here I will stay. Love is action. Love is an opening. Let it be.

As always, til next time. Wishing you deep, messy, transformative love during this holiday season. Also wishing you many slices of pie and unexpected moments of clarity.

Love you.