by Heather Plett | Aug 8, 2016 | Uncategorized
On the plane earlier this week, I was reading a new book on narrative coaching that had been sent to me by the author, David Drake. I worked and studied with David a few years ago when we were trying to create the (sadly ill-fated) Canadian Centre for Narrative Coaching, and he’d included a piece I wrote at that time in the introduction of this recently released book. (I was pleased to discover that he also included a quote from me in a chapter on holding space.)
When I read the following sentence (a quote from Ram Dass) I had to stop and put the book down for a while…
Do not speak unless you can improve on silence.
That’s one of those powerful, weighty sentences that could change a person’s life.
“What would it mean to build that habit into my everyday life?” I wondered, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
What if I were intentional about speaking only when it improves on the silence?
Would I hurt people less frequently?
Would my words have more weight and less waste?
Would I pause more intentionally before interrupting or correcting people?
Would the conversations I’m in shift their tone?
Would I be more fully present for people’s stories?
Not long ago, a participant at a workshop I’d co-facilitated gave some feedback that hurt a little at first, but was valuable for me to hear. “Sometimes you talk too much,” he said. It caught me off guard, because I try to be very intentional about not claiming too much space and allowing all of the voices in the room to be heard. (That’s the nature of The Circle Way – especially when we pass a talking piece around, each person has equal space to be heard.) But after I sat with it for awhile, I realized that there was truth in what he said.
Sometimes, I do talk too much. When I’m feeling insecure about the content I’m teaching, I talk too much. When I notice people disengaging and I begin to worry that they’re not catching on, I talk too much. When someone disagrees with me and I feel the need to defend myself, I talk too much. It’s not just in teaching settings – it happens in my daily life too. When I’m frustrated with my children and I need them to understand me, I talk too much. When I’m feeling misunderstood by a friend, I talk too much.
For me (and maybe for you), talking too much is directly connected to my ego. When my ego feels threatened, I talk too much. When my ego needs attention, I talk too much.
When I am more grounded in True Self, I let go of my need to over-explain, justify, or defend, and I am more intentional about how much I speak and how much I honour silence.
In this noisy world, it’s counter-cultural to believe that silence can have more value than wasted words. Consider the last conversation you were in. When everyone fell silent, did you feel uncomfortable? Did you feel the pressure to speak, if only to fill the void? What would happen if you simply allowed the silence to happen?
One of the practices of The Circle Way is the council of silence. When anybody in the circle feels the need for a pause, they ask the guardian to ring the bell, and then we sit in silence for a few moments until the bell is rung a second time. It’s a beautiful and intentional choice to sit for a moment within the gravitas of someone’s words or the emotions that have arisen in the circle. The more I sit in circles, the more I wish we could incorporate a similar practice in our everyday conversations.
The pauses make our conversations more meaningful and they teach us how to be better listeners.
Intentional silence is one of the most important principles of holding space. To hold space for other people (and for ourselves) we have to know when to speak and when to remain silent. When our egos get in the way, we want to offer advice, improve on someone’s story, control the outcome, or at least let people know how smart we are. All of those things are detrimental to the process of holding space. They draw the attention away from the person you’re holding space for and draw it toward yourself.
“Silence is a place in which your restless minds, internal chatter, and fragmented attention can find the stillness you need to listen well.” David Drake
If you want to listen well, you have to learn when not to speak.
Sometimes our words improve on the silence, but often they do not. When we pay close attention, we will learn to discern the difference.
by Heather Plett | Jul 26, 2016 | Uncategorized
Waking up is hard to do.
First, you wake up to your own oppression,
to the ways you’ve been silenced,
to the many little stories you carry about why
your words are worth less than those who
benefit most from the old story.
You wake up to the truth that
your view of yourself wasn’t only constructed by you.
It was shaped for a purpose – to keep you small,
to keep you silent.
Then you wake up to your own anger,
to the fierce determination not to obey,
not to listen to the stories,
not to stay small.
But then, one day later on,
after you’ve learned to speak,
there’s another awakening.
You wake up to the fact that
your frustration taught you to adapt rather than to rise above.
You shape-shifted to be more like them,
to work in their hallways of power,
to survive in a world that didn’t want your voice.
You became one of them to be heard by them.
Then your anger wakes up once again,
and you have a new determination.
This time, you speak with your true voice
whether or not it is heard.
You begin to live in the centre of your true life
whether or not it is acceptable to them.
You risk dismissal and disdain
because you are no longer willing to go back to sleep.
But then, one day later on,
you realize that there is something else going on,
and this will require yet another awakening.
This will require that you look with more clear eyes
and speak with an even more clear voice.
You begin to wake up to other people’s narrative,
other people’s oppression, other people’s silence.
You begin to see that those whose skin
is different from yours,
whose gender and love is different from yours,
are waking up too,
and their waking up is asking you to be uncomfortable.
Their waking up
is asking you to look more clearly and unblinkingly
at your own life.
Then you begin to wake up to your own privilege,
to the ways that you have benefitted from their oppression.
You begin to wake up to the pain in them,
and you begin to hear the cries of the silenced,
“we want to be heard too!”
This waking up is the hardest,
and you want to ignore it,
to resist it, to deny what you now see.
You want to return to your own narrative,
to your own uprising,
because in that you can feel victorious and liberated.
In that, you don’t have to face the truth
that maybe you, even you, are holding the keys
to someone else’s chains.
But finally, you can deny it no longer.
Your awakened eyes see that you are only truly free
if they are free too.
And so you wake up,
and you face the hard truths.
And you feel the hurt
when your micro-aggressions,
and white fragility are pointed out.
And you do the hard work to peer with unwavering eyes
on yourself,
and to see both the shadow and the light,
and the space in between.
And when you are awake,
you begin to see it all,
and you can’t look away.
And finally you see,
that when you are truly awake
and truly honest about your place in the world,
it is no longer threatening to stand by those
who are also waking up.
And your anger burns anew.
And your fierce determination rises up once again.
And this time, your love is big enough,
to hold their hurt along with your own.
And this time, your voice is strong enough,
to speak their truth along with your own.
And this time, your courage is deep enough,
to let them speak a truth that is
different from your own.
by Heather Plett | Jul 17, 2016 | Uncategorized
image credit: Sydney Sims, Unsplash
During an interview for a podcast recently, I was asked “what’s the opposite of holding space?” Though I’ve done many interviews on the subject of holding space since the original post went viral, that’s the first time I’ve been asked that question. As is typically the case for me, the right question can crack open months worth of thought, and this one did just that.
As I contemplated, I searched for a term or word that might describe the opposite of holding space, but I didn’t find one that fully satisfied me. Finally, I came up with this:
The opposite of holding space is hijacking space.
When you hijack a vehicle (a plane, train, ship, etc.), you illegally seize it for your own purposes and force it to a different destination.
While holding space involves supporting without judging, fixing, or controlling the outcome, hijacking space involves manipulating, disempowering, and imposing various forms of judgment and control.
When we hold space, we liberate. We give someone the freedom to be who they are, to make sovereign choices, and to control their own outcome. When we hold space, we leave the person feeling supported and empowered.
When we hijack space, we violate. We take away a person’s freedom, limit their ability to make choices, and take control of the outcome. When we hijack space, we leave the person disenfranchised and weakened.
While holding space offers people an open bowl for their journey through liminal space, hijacking space puts a lid on that bowl.
Some forms of hijacking space are obvious and intentional (such as violence, abuse, overpowering, or bullying), but other forms are much more subtle and inadvertent. Many of these more subtle forms of hijacking space include the kinds of behaviour of which we are all guilty—and usually more frequently than we care to admit.
Here are some of the ways that we hijack space:
- expecting them to experience or interpret situations the same way we do
- acting as the “tone police” when their emotions are stronger than we’re comfortable with (ie. insisting that they calm down before we’ll talk to them)
- gaslighting them and making them believe that they are going crazy and/or are no longer in control of their own emotions
- one-upping their story with a better one of our own (and thereby dismissing the value of theirs)
- implying that our emotional response to something is more important than theirs
- dismissing the value of their work and/or taking credit for it ourselves
- not allowing them to trust their intuition and insisting they do things our way
- interrupting them
- acting dismissively when they share a personal story
- not hearing them when they ask us to change our behaviour toward them
- ignoring and/or dismissing their emotional state
- fixing their problems for them and taking away their power to fix them themselves
- taking over their emotions and feeling those emotions deeper than they do
- apologizing too much so that they become responsible for making us feel better
- expecting them to feed our egos
- passive-aggressively trying to manipulate their behaviour
- shaming them for feeling too much, speaking too much, eating too much, etc.
- over-explaining things (with an assumption that they can’t understand otherwise)
- expecting them to educate us about how we should be in relationships with them instead of doing the hard work ourselves
- worrying about them in a way that implies we don’t trust them enough to look after themselves
Hijacking space, at its worst, is a tool of oppression. Those who uphold the patriarchy or white supremacy, for example, are usually masterful at hijacking, whether or not they know they’re doing it. We have all seen it happen – the person in power dismissing, fixing, shaming, interrupting in ways that keeps the other person disempowered and fearful. Even in race relations work, where people are conscious and intentional about being in conversation and reconciliation, I have seen people’s ideas being dismissed, emotions being shamed, and/or problems being fixed. (I have even, admittedly, caught myself doing it.) It can feel surprisingly threatening to see an oppressed person claim agency over their own bodies, emotions, etc., and, in response, those who are used to holding the power fall back on the tools of hijacking space that have been passed down through the generations.
(For a powerful example of how People of Colour have had space hijacked, watch this video of Maya Angelou.)
But we can’t simply dismiss it as something “they” do. Each of us finds ways of hijacking space. We do it to our children, to our friends, to our spouses, to our employees, and even to our parents. We even do it to ourselves when we police our own emotions in order to make other people feel better (ie. the inner patriarch that Sidra Stone talks about in The Shadow King: The Invisible Force that Holds Women Back).
Just this week, my teenage daughter came home from film camp complaining about a girl in her group who annoyed her, and I was tempted to jump in and assure her that it wasn’t really as bad as she said it was and that she needed to be kind to people no matter what, etc. If I’d done that, I would have immediately disempowered and shamed her. Instead I tried to listen without judgement and speak with compassionate guidance. The next day, she figured out how to deal with this person on her own without me needing to intervene.
We also do it in situations where we’re trying to increase our power in a relationship. Consider a time, for example, when you felt intimidated by someone, and, consequently you interrupted them, dismissed their emotions and/or tried to control the outcome of the conversation. Though it might have felt good, in the moment, to be doing it to someone with seemingly more power than you, it doesn’t serve either of you well in the end. Change doesn’t happen when space is hijacked.
In the talk I gave at a conference a few months ago, I talked about holding space as “being the bowl” for someone else. After a Lego house falls apart, I explained in my analogy, a bowl serves to contain all of the broken pieces before they can become what they’re meant to transform into after that. The bowl doesn’t intervene – it just holds, protects, and creates safe space for the brokenness and emergence.
As hijackers, instead of serving as the bowl that holds, we become the mold that shapes. Instead of creating safe space for the emergence, we break the house and we force it into the shape of our choosing. We manipulate, direct, and judge.
Consider, in your own life, how often you have made choices that weren’t authentic to you, simply because you didn’t want to stir someone’s anger or because that person was shaming you for your choices? Sometimes it’s the subtlest of behaviours that have the most power.
It takes a lot of emotional maturity to be the bowl instead of the mold. We have to do our own work to dismantle our inner patriarch and to look deeply into our shadow. We have to address our shame and our fear, and we have to practice releasing control and sharing power. We have to find the spiritual practices that allow us to detach from other people’s emotions and their outcomes and to allow them their autonomy. We have to practice trust in ourselves and in each other.
by Heather Plett | Jun 26, 2016 | Uncategorized
Fear. It shows up in nearly every coaching conversation I have. Sometimes it’s bold and in-your-face and can’t be denied, and sometimes it’s sneaky and disguised as anger or laziness and has to be coaxed out into the light.
Fear fills a lot of pages in self-help books. Everyone’s trying to master it. Some tell you to befriend it, others tell you ignore it, and still others tell you to stare it in the face. Do an image search of fear quotes (see above image) and you’ll find endless memes about how you can conquer, befriend, embrace, or ignore fear. Or, if you’d rather, you can dance with it, kick it to the curb, or pray it out of existence.
The problem with much of what is written about fear in self-help books is that it is oversimplified. Diminish fear into only one dimension and it’s easier to give you a meme-worthy quote about it.
But fear is a multi-dimensional creature that requires a multi-dimensional response. It can’t be contained to a simple meme or a singular response.
Diminishing the complexity of fear can have devastating results for those who read self-help books. Sometimes clients come to me even more beaten down than they were before they read the books. Now, not only do they still have the fear, they have accompanying shame that they weren’t able to address their fears the way the self-help books told them to.
There are at least four kinds of fear that I have encountered in many conversations and much research. (I suspect it’s even more complex, but this is at least a start in understanding it.)
- Warning fear. This is the legitimate fear that shows up to tell us that a course correction is necessary in order to avoid injury or harm. It’s the kind of fear that makes sure we don’t climb into the lion’s cage at the zoo, and it’s the quick-reaction fear that tells us to swerve out of the way when a car is headed straight at us. It’s also the fear that nudges us out of bad relationships or bad business deals. This fear serves as a valuable protector and shouldn’t just be “kicked to the curb.”
- Ego fear. This is the kind of fear whose job is to keep our fragile egos safe at all costs. It’s the fear that tells us to stay small, to not ask for too much, to avoid shaming ourselves. It’s also the fear that tells us to protect ourselves from people who don’t look like us or who don’t share our belief systems. (Sadly, it’s the kind of fear that seems to be making far too many political decisions these days.) This is the most slippery of the fears. It’s hard to pin down and it’s got a million ways to lie to us. It’s the kind of fear that many of the self-help books are talking about when they tell us to befriend our fear or let it take the passenger seat in the car. This fear needs to be examined and deconstructed so that it doesn’t control us.
- Invitational fear. Sometimes, what feels like fear, is actually a message from our bodies that we are on the right track, that we are about to step into something important and life-changing. It’s an invitation rather than a warning. I often refer to this kind of fear as “the trembling” because, for me, it’s often accompanied by a physical vibration in my body. This is the kind of fear we befriend, because it leads us into our right work, art, relationships, etc..
- Trauma fear. Trauma has a way of embedding fear so deeply into our bodies that we can barely understand it or control it, let alone conquer it with a few tips from a self-help book. Trauma changes us so fundamentally, that it’s been known to alter not only our DNA, but the DNA we pass down to our children. Some of our trauma fear has, unbeknownst to us, been inherited from generations before us. Trauma fears are often irrational and can flare up at the slightest trigger, causing a fight, flight, or freeze reaction that nobody who’s witnessing it can understand. To treat this kind of fear with a simple self-help book approach is to do an egregious disservice to the person who’s suffered from the trauma. That’s like giving an aspirin to a cancer patient and telling them to go home and think good thoughts. Instead, you need to seek out the right expert who can provide support, tools, body exercises, etc. to help you understand and cope with the long-term impact of the trauma.
So… how can you tell which kind of fear is showing up for you? There is no simple answer to that. Instead, there’s a life-long practice of mindfulness, discernment, and experimentation.
Here’s a place to start…
- Be quiet. Unless the fear demands an instantaneous response (ie. swerving out of the path of a car), give yourself a time-out when fear shows up and be quiet with it. Go out into nature or sit on a meditation cushion and let your fear know that you are willing to listen. Noise and/or the wrong person’s advice can intensify the fears, so find a place to be quiet and honest with yourself. Be alone or with someone who knows how to hold space for you.
- Pay attention to your body. Where are you feeling the fear in your body? What is your body asking of you? What do you need to do to be kind to your body in that moment of intensity? When I feel fear in the pit of my stomach, for example, I like to place my hands gently over my belly and hold the fear like I would a frightened child. Your body often understands things your brain doesn’t know how to process, so you need to learn to pay attention. (You may want to explore body-related practices such as yoga, reiki, or something more specifically related to trauma, such as TRE.)
- Ask what the fear is trying to protect you from. An honest inquiry can help you discern whether the fear is rational or irrational, a warning or an invitation. This is something I often do in my journal, by starting with a few prompts such as “I feel fear about… This fear is trying to protect me from…” Keep writing until the fears beneath the surface start to tell you their truth.
- Ask whether you can and/or should survive whatever your fear is trying to protect you from. If it’s a warning fear, then just because you CAN survive it doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Act accordingly. If it’s an ego fear, then what it’s trying to protect you from is probably worth surviving because it will mean you’ll move into greater freedom and/or authenticity. Again, act accordingly.
- Consider whether you need outside help addressing the fear. If you can’t understand or address the fear by doing the above-mentioned practices, it may be time to seek professional help. If the fear seems irrational and easily triggered, look for a therapist with expertise in trauma. (I would especially recommend someone who takes a wholistic, body-centred approach and who understands that trauma can’t simply be treated with talk-therapy.) If it doesn’t seem to be trauma-related but is instead connected to some old stories you’ve been telling yourself, coaching might help, but be discerning about who you choose for a coach. Someone who glosses over the complexity of fear will not be the right person.
There is nothing wrong with turning to self-help books (I’ve read quite a few myself), but if you find that those books make you feel worse about yourself instead of better, they might not be the right books for you. You have the right to toss them in the recycling bin, even if everyone else in your social media feed seems to be eating them up.
Seek out what’s best for you and do the work that heals you and makes you stronger.
Note: If you’re looking for a coach, perhaps I can help. Check out my coaching page and book an informal conversation (for free) if you’d like to explore what our relationship might look like. I will be happy to work with you AND I promise that if your fears are beyond my capacity to support (ie. trauma fears), I will help you seek out the right kind of therapeutic support.
Interested in more articles like this? Add your name to my email list and you’ll receive a free ebook, A Path to Connection and my weekly reflections.
by Heather Plett | Jun 13, 2016 | family, Uncategorized
I have been contemplating the above quote ever since I heard it on the radio yesterday. We are, all of us, products of the “crooked timber of humanity”. None of us has ever emerged perfectly straight.
Before being shaped and carved by the woodworker’s tools – life’s chipping and sanding away of our imperfections – we are all irregular, imperfect, and unfinished branches of the crooked timber of humanity. Even after the shaping, our imperfections continue to show, but we learn to cherish rather than hide them.
I have a beautifully carved necklace made from a slice of a branch (see photo at the top – made by Windy Tree). What I like best about it is the way the artisan incorporated the imperfections of the branch, turning it into the rugged edge of a cliff out of which a tree grows.
Last weekend, I had the pleasure of spending a few days with those closest to me on my crooked family tree. My three siblings and I took a trip down memory lane together, visiting our childhood haunts in the rural part of the province where we grew up. We drove past the high school we all attended and talked about our favourite and least favourite teachers. We ate lunch in the Chinese restaurant that’s been there as long as any of us can remember. We played on the swinging bridge that crosses the White Mud River where we all took swimming lessons and were baptized as teenagers. We stopped to see the cairn that was erected at the place where our elementary school once stood.
Our parents are both buried in a graveyard on a sandy ridge close to our home town, under the towering poplar trees. As we stood near their graves, we marvelled at the fact that they are really and truly gone, that we are forever orphans, that they are part of our past and not our future. Though we are all near or past 50, it still feels far too young to have lost both of our parents. Perhaps one never feels old enough for that kind of loss.
Our last visit was to the farm where we grew up. We moved there when I was one year old and Mom and Dad moved away after we’d left home and my brothers and I were all about to welcome our first babies. That farmyard holds a lot of our family’s stories.
As we walked around the now-dilapidated farmyard, we reminisced about all that we’d lived through on that piece of land.
“This is where Grandpa collapsed and died on our lawn.”
“See that concrete pad? That was the front doorstep of the tiny green house we first lived in when we moved here, before we built the new house.”
“This is where we had to drag cattle out of the water that one Spring when there was so much flooding. Oh how we hated Dad when he came to wake us up in the middle of the night because another cow was stuck.”
“We used to climb into the rafters of this barn to find the new kittens.”
“What was that Low German word Dad would use when we were helping him build the steel bins and he wanted us to know a bolt was tightened and we should move to the next one?”
“Mom would have loved to have seen all of these lilacs she’d planted so fully grown and in full bloom.”
“Remember all those times when Dad had to climb down into the well to prime the pump and we stood at the top praying that he’d make it out safely?”
What emerged, as we peeked into broken-down barns and climbed over discarded fence posts, was how harsh and beautiful our childhood on that farm was. Some of our memories still held a touch of the pain those moments had caused. Others were pure joy. Some of them brought back old resentments of the decisions our parents had made. Others honoured them for their courage and resilience.
We were poor and life was often really hard on the farm. We hovered on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes the phone was cut off or creditors would show up on the yard. Some of our hard luck was due to sandy soil, harsh weather, and the myriad of things that make crops fail or animals die. But some of it could be attributed to our parents’ poor choices and lack of business sense.
And then there were the other things not related to money that were hard – Dad’s anger and impatience, Mom’s way of over-apologizing and never believing she was good enough.
Our parents were imperfect – products of the “crooked timber of humanity”. They made mistakes. They let us down. They made us angry sometimes.
But that’s not the whole story. They were also full of goodness. They taught us how to love. They modelled integrity and morality. They made sure our home was always safe. They made sacrifices on our behalf. Dad taught us to love learning and Mom taught us to love stories.
Harshness and beauty. Kindness and anger. Insecurity and compassion. Poverty and abundance. All mixed together in one imperfect family.
My daughters will some day gather, after my death, to similarly reminisce. They’ll talk about some of the hurt they carried because of me, but they’ll also talk about the deep way I loved them. Because above all, I love them, just as my parents loved me.
And in the end, we must believe that love wins. And imperfection is less important than love.
We are put on this world not to seek perfection, but to learn grace.
We are put here to learn to make beautiful things out of imperfect branches.
We are put here to discover our own resilience and courage even as we hold our pain.
We are put here to love, to forgive, and to persevere.
One of the questions I ask my coaching clients, when they talk about people in their lives who are challenging, is: “How is that person your teacher?” Everyone – those who love us and those who hate us and those in between – can teach us something.
Not everyone in our lives will be good to us and not everyone will have our best interests at heart. Some of you may, for example, have had much more horrible parents than I had and you’ll be struggling at the end of this article to find any good in them or to forgive them for what they did. When I say that “we are put here to love and forgive”, I do not mean that we are meant to put up with all of the harsh treatment that comes our way.
No. That’s not it. You can learn to love with boundaries. You can end relationships that cause you great harm – even with your parents.
BUT, even the people who hurt us can serve as our teachers. Perhaps they teach us to respect ourselves more and not let them treat us that way. Perhaps they teach us our own courage. Perhaps they teach us boundaries. Perhaps they teach us forgiveness with detachment.
Instead of seeking perfection in others or yourself, seek for the lessons each relationship teaches you. Seek for the ways that you can grow because another person has been part of your life. Seek for the pinpoints of grace. Seek the piece of art that emerges from the imperfect branch.
I am writing this newsletter, once again, from my perch in the limbs of the large tree in my backyard. I am surrounded by crooked limbs, and I am grateful for the way their crookedness carved out this space that so perfectly cradles my body. I’m grateful for the smaller crooked limb that juts out at a strange angle that’s perfect for propping up my laptop. I am grateful for the canopy of crooked limbs that spread out above me, giving me shade from the sun’s heat.
Straight limbs are over-rated, especially in family trees.
p.s. If you need to talk to someone about your own crooked family tree and the ways that people serve as your teachers, perhaps I can help. I’m taking on a few new coaching clients.
ALSO, please consider joining me in Australia later this year. I’ll be hosting two retreats (Writing with an Open Heart and Living with and Open Heart) at Welcome to The BIG House. Early-bird registration ends at the end of June.
by Heather Plett | May 30, 2016 | Uncategorized
I am slowly, one breath at a time, finding my way back to equilibrium.
Two weeks ago, I was suddenly aware of how wobbly I’d become – spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Like a toddler on new legs, I was stumbling around, bumping into things (and people), and occasionally falling down. Also like a toddler, my emotions had become suddenly unregulated and unpredictable. I cried or got angry at the slightest provocation. And I was making mistakes I don’t normally make.
I knew it was time for a pause. I knew I needed to step away from my adult-sized obligations and simply let my wobbly toddler nature stumble along until she’d figured out how to walk again without harming herself.
As I mentioned in my last post, it’s been a big year, full of significant shifts in both my business and personal life. Mix all of the ingredients of my year – rapid (and unexpected) business growth and increased demand on my time and energy, the ending of a 22 year marriage, solo-parenting to three daughters navigating the path from adolescence to early adulthood, and a few fairly significant volunteer commitments (sponsoring Syrian refugees, hosting race relations conversations, and starting a women’s circle) – and you get a recipe for stress. The wobble is not unexpected.
Though I’m fairly consistent about incorporating self-care practices into my week, it was clear that I had reached a place where I needed to take more radical action.
I knew that if I didn’t put myself first for awhile, I would not be able to be of service to anyone else.
Here’s what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks:
- I reduced my screen time to almost nothing, stepping away from social media and emails in particular. I’d noticed that my wobbliness got worse when I spent too much time online, so I got off that treadmill. This was one of the healthiest things I could have done. It relieved a lot of the pressures of having to live up to other people’s expectations, meet other people’s needs, etc. It freed up a lot of space to focus on the healing and soul care I needed to do.
- I spent a lot of time outside. Nature heals me. It helps me feel grounded and connected again. I wandered in the woods, played at the beach, and sat for hours in my backyard around the fire. I hugged trees and talked to pelicans and frogs. Mother Earth revealed her Spring splendour to me and, when I paused to pay attention, she helped to heal my hurt and reminded me of my place in the nature of things.
- I got physical and sweaty. I rode my bike, went for long walks, and dug in my garden. With each footstep, each revolution of the bike pedals, and each handful of dirt, I worked through my anxiety, my stress, and my hurt. I let my body take over where my mind had gotten stuck. I alchemized some of the ache in my heart by letting my muscles take on the aching for awhile.
- I went to see a therapist. I’d become aware that some of my stress was related to some old patterns that I’d developed over years of dysfunctional communication in my marriage. I needed help letting go of those old patterns so that they wouldn’t have control over me anymore. After listening to my story, she gave me wise, holistic advice that I’m still processing and will probably write more about another time.
- I let people help me. So many of you helped me – with your kindness, your cards, your financial support, etc. – and there are not enough words to express my gratitude. Accepting help is a humbling and healthy thing, but it’s not something my ego let’s me do very often. When I accept help, though, I am reminded that I am not in this alone and I begin to see the world through a less self-absorbed lens.
- I played, slept, and did some deep relaxation. For the first few days, after I’d canceled my client sessions and gotten offline, I slept much more than usual. Then, when I felt rested, I found ways to play. Being barefoot in the sand at the beach helped a lot. I needed lightheartedness to remind me not to take the world quite so seriously. Thanks to a birthday gift from my daughters, I spent a whole day relaxing with a friend at Thermeaoutdoor spa.
- I prayed. When I get wobbly, as I did, it’s often a reminder to me that I am trying too hard to carry the world on my shoulders and not living from a place of trust. Reaching out to a Higher Power reminds me that I don’t have to do this all with my own strength. I have a powerful God/dess on my side, so why walk alone? Like a toddler who knows her parent is close by to catch her when she stumbles, I reached out my hand and let Her hold me. “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. S/he will not let your foot be moved; s/he who keeps you will not slumber.”
- I meditated. I’m not a very faithful meditator, but when I lose my equilibrium and my mind starts spinning in a hundred directions at once, I know that one of the only ways to find balance again is to plant my seat on my cushion, be still, and take deep breaths. It takes a lot of practice to still the racing mind, but slowly I’m getting back into the habit.
- I paid attention. The wobbliness was there to teach me what changes I needed to make in my life, so the first thing I did was slow down enough to pay attention. I paid attention to my body’s ache for more time away from the computer. I paid attention to what the persistent cough might be telling me about what was being stifled in my life. I paid attention to what triggered the tears and anger. I paid attention to how my breathing gets more shallow when I’m under stress and how I sometimes hold my breath. And I paid attention to how my needs were or were not being met. And then I responded accordingly.
- I cleared a lot of clutter. After years of neglect, our backyard had begun to resemble the wild kingdom. I began to tend it again, the same way I have been tending my heart – tearing out the seedlings that had grown in the wrong place, trimming back the hedges that were blocking the light, and pulling a lot of weeds that were smothering the beauty. At the end of hours of back-breaking labour, I put a circle of chairs around a small fire pit in the middle of the yard, under the canopy of ancient trees, and my daughters and I have enjoyed many hours of easy conversation around the fire.
- I let myself grieve. I reflected often on what David Whyte says in this short video clip… “One of the difficulties of leaving a relationship is not so much leaving the person themselves – because by that time, you’re ready to go. What’s difficult is leaving the dreams that you shared together. And you know that somehow, no matter who you meet in your life in the future, and no matter what species of happiness you will share with them, you will never ever share those particular dreams again, with that particular tonality and coloration. And so there’s a lovely and powerful form of grief there that is the ultimate in giving away, but making space for another form of re-imagination.” One night by the fire, after my daughters had made their way back into the house, I sat for a long time by the dying embers, grieving the flame that had died, grieving the shared dreams and the hopes that things would turn out differently. When the fire was gone, I got up and crawled into bed, alone and content.
- I dared to disappoint people in order to care for myself. This is a big one for me, as I have always struggled with a fear of letting people down. But I knew that I could not continue the way I was – trying to ensure everyone around me was happy so that my world would feel safe – and still be healthy and do good work. The words of Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s poem, The Invitation, kept going through my mind… “I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.”
Now, as I make my way back to my work and begin to consider what work calls me next, I am being more intentional about how I step back in. I am working on a deeper understanding of what it means for me to be “openhearted with boundaries”. I am trying to do a better job of managing people’s expectations (ie. if you don’t get a response from an email, please wait a few days). I’m looking after what my body tells me I need. I’m shifting the way I show up in relationships. I am being more careful to protect my energy, my health, and my heart.
I believe that, when I “put on my own oxygen mask first”, I’ll be better able to care for the people around me, and my work will come from a place of abundance rather than depletion.
I also believe that, once in awhile, it’s valuable to return to the legs and heart of a toddler, stumbling around trying to find balance, giggling at things that surprise us, crying whenever our emotions overwhelm us, reaching out to a benevolent grown-up for support when we need it, and exploring the delights of the world with unguarded eyes.
I turned fifty in the middle of my time away. Fifty is a good age to become a toddler again. It’s good to be standing on new legs as I enter the second half of my life.
In honour of my new toddler view of the world, I am currently perched about six feet above the ground in a tree in my backyard. There’s a great spot, in a tree that must be at least a hundred years old, where three massive limbs separate and create a natural nook, that I always thought would be a perfect place for a treehouse. I haven’t built anything permanent yet, but today, on a whim, I carried a ladder and some old couch cushions to the backyard to make myself a makeshift little nest where I can sit and hide and get close to the birds and the squirrels.
How about you? Are you wobbling around on toddler legs? Is it time for you to pause for radical self-care and perspective shift? Is it time to say no for awhile so that you can say a bigger YES to the world that awaits?
If you’re telling yourself that “it sure would be nice, but there’s no way I could do that”, you might want to take a look at your excuses and see if they are true or if they are wrapped up in a story about how the world simply can’t function without you at the helm. You may not be able to step away in the way that I did (I understand the demands of small children and full-time jobs), but you can find your own version that works within your current reality.
p.s. If you need some help finding your balance again, or working through the stories that keep you stuck in old patterns, perhaps I can help. I’m taking on a few new coaching clients.
