It’s been a while. My attention has been elsewhere, creating text for six webpages for my new website. With that behind me, today I found myself ready to write here again.

Before I landed here, a post came up in my feed that sounded interesting, so I clicked. This is what I read:

“Power of the tongue” is so real.
Stop saying you’re tired, broke, or depressed.
And start saying you’re grateful, capable, and resilient.
Manifest growth and speak life into yourself.”

And an instant NO rose up in me.

So here I am, with the NO.

I began a response, but then deleted it in case this was a bot. I don’t want to engage with bots. Here’s what I wanted to say:

“Sometimes we need to acknowledge that we are tired, fearful about our finances, or feeling depressed before we can move toward the gratitude, capability, and resilience that may also be there, but that we don’t yet have access to.

And sometimes acknowledging what’s here means giving it a voice. Sometimes we need to speak our experience so we can hear ourselves. Sometimes we need to be heard by someone who can hold what we share with care and help us listen for the longings and life energy underneath it.

You are asking us to take a leap that our whole being might not be ready for.

To lay a positive, grateful, rise-above spin on top of what’s hard or uncomfortable is to minimize and bypass what’s here in favor of lightness and ease, in favor of what we’ve deemed good and acceptable.

Let’s make space for it all.”

~ ~ ~

I’m writing this from a heavy place today.

I’ve been exploring some ways that I live that do not serve my aliveness, my full expression. It’s a beautiful and important process. It is also hard and tiring at times.

I’m learning to allow the heaviness to be part of the fabric of my day rather than ignoring it or letting it engulf me. This is new behavior for me over the last few years, honestly, after a lifetime of seesawing between the two.

There’s still aliveness here in the heaviness. And in the parts that are lighter. In the anger and grief rising from seeing with new eyes. In the desire to write. In tending to my work and the ordinary things that need doing. In the desire to move through today with an ear toward my capacity and well-being.

All of this is here.

And maybe that is part of what my NO is about.

No to ignoring. No to focusing only on the things that are pleasant to be with. Yes to holding it all and tending to myself along the way.

Whatever is here – the complaint, the pettiness, the strong emotion that is so often discouraged, the tears, the hopelessness, the jealousy, the exuberance – allow it.

Let it bloom into awareness so we can begin to recognize what’s actually here. Not as truth, but as a message about our current experience that wants our attention.

It’s like a child pulling on their mother’s leg, asking for attention. Can we turn toward what’s asking for our attention in the same way?

A mother can’t always turn toward her child. We can’t always turn toward ourselves either. And that’s okay too.

This turning toward rather than away is a practice, not a rule demanding adherence. It’s an invitation we can respond to when we have the capacity, a way to begin to meet our experiences – inner and outer – as they are, not as we think they should be.

Turning toward what’s here doesn’t mean believing everything we sense. Just as listening to another person doesn’t mean agreeing with everything they say, listening to ourselves doesn’t mean accepting every thought or feeling as truth.

We are simply gathering information with kindness and curiosity.

And what matters is how we meet what we discover.

So yes, we get to name our real, honest, unprettied experience – first to ourselves, and, when it feels right, with others too.

I’m tired. I’m scared about money. I’m depressed. Angry. Sad. Anxious. Bored.

Fill in the blank.

But let’s not stop there.

Let’s follow what’s here down the spiral stairway into our own experience, our own truth in this moment. Let’s see if we can listen for what it is showing us.

What is its message?

What might we need?

How can we support ourselves as we sit with the discomfort of what we’re hearing?

Maybe it’s pointing toward something in our lives that needs to change – something we’ve been avoiding because change could rock the boat we’ve been trying so hard to keep afloat.

All the while, we’re depleting ourselves as we bail and bail.

We don’t have to do anything with what we learn if we don’t want to, or if we aren’t ready.

We don’t have to stop bailing. We just get to notice what we’ve been up to.

Perhaps simply allowing what’s here, without immediately shutting it down or trying to change it, keeps us in relationship with more of our own aliveness.

One of the things I’m understanding differently these days: aliveness isn’t necessarily the same thing as feeling good.

What if the measure of a life isn’t how quickly we can move past what’s hard or uncomfortable so we can get on with our lives?

What if our aliveness resides in the whole thing?

~ ~ ~

This is it. Our whole life. The whole thing.

Not only the easy, pretty, acceptable parts.

The whole amazing, fucked-up thing.

May we find, little by little, the courage to listen to ourselves, to reach for support when we need it, and to be with all of it, for the sake of fully living this beautiful, fucked-up life.

If you find yourself longing for some companionship and support as you listen to what’s asking for your attention, this is part of the work I offer. I’d be glad to connect. My new website is coming soon, but in the meantime, you can reach me at lynnepoletto@gmail.com.

Energy, capacity, and the pull to move toward my own needs and desires is emerging now, and that feels like a new cool breeze blowing through my hair and touching my skin in the most delicious way.

I thought my autonomy was done - that even though I love Don and want to be present for him as he navigates his own journey, somehow I believed my role was to carry more than was mine and to tether myself to him in ways that diminished my own vitality.

I thought my work was done - that I would never have the energy or desire to move into the world again, that my life had been reduced to the role of caregiver and mentor/friend to younger others who are offering similar work.

Was there still room for me in the professional landscape?

Did I have the capacity to move outward again ?

I had to feel my way through these beliefs to locate the voice in me that says, in no uncertain terms:

WE ARE NOT DONE.

WE ARE SIMPLY BEGINNING A NEW CHAPTER.

This chapter doesn’t mean I am destined to be Don’s ever-ready carer until my last days.

It doesn’t mean my longings for a full life are subordinate to his needs.

It means that I get to care for Don within my capacity and I get to have my own fully expressed life.

There has been deep exploration within myself and with Don around caring vs. caretaking vs. codependency, around each of us taking responsibility for our own lives, around me as support person for Don rather than taking over completely.

I’ve had to untangle love from sacrifice.

Don has had to loosen his own caretaking of me that came from guilt about “being a burden” and contributing less to our life together.

Together, we have been giving ourselves and each other permission to let go of each other in certain ways so that each of us can continue discovering life as sovereign beings.

We are working to shift our relationship toward supporting one another’s separate journeys instead of me dedicating my life to him while mine quietly falls to the wayside.

This is not easy in the face of a culture where women so often give up their lives to care for others.

And yet I am determined to discover my sovereign self while caring for Don in a more mutually liberating way.

As I began reclaiming space for myself in this relationship, I noticed something else asking for room to breathe again:

My work.

This new chapter, rising from the challenges of these past months, is showing me that it's time for a new iteration of it.

I thought I had nailed it with The Listening Space - it was reflective of where I was at the time - but it feels incomplete for where I am now.

I want to explicitly bring back the roots of my coaching while weaving in all I've learned about somatics - where discovery and exploration are braided with listening and being - and where we honor what’s present, what the body is revealing, and what wants to emerge from inner knowing rather than from shoulds or prescribed paths.

As I move toward putting this new iteration forth, I can feel the shame rising.

Doesn’t this show what a flake I am?

How indecisive I am?

How I can’t stick with one thing long enough?

The shame.

The constriction in my solar plexus.

The old beliefs about myself.

All trying to protect me.

All wanting me to stay comfortable and hidden so no one can reject or laugh at or dismiss what feels like tender, messy, authentic expression.

I am listening.

And yet there are other, growing voices to listen to as well.

The one that knows we are not static beings, relegated to a fixed label or expression.

The one that knows we are, in essence, fluid beings trying to live within internal and external worlds that want to pin us down, define us once and for all, and then determine whether we are acceptable or not.

The one that is learning to trust that even if no one else understands, we understand and have our own back.

The one that is reclaiming her desires and moving toward them without abandoning herself along the way - abandoning herself through pushing and pressure, through self-doubt and criticism, through bypassing and overriding her inner knowing, through ignoring body signals, through playing nice, staying quiet, or acquiescing in order to preserve connection and avoid conflict.

Tenderly, I will share that this is the work I most want to embody now — with myself and with others:

Helping us move toward what matters most without abandoning ourselves along the way.

This excites me. Enlivens me.

It’s a thread I want to follow.

And I love giving myself permission not to make this into who I am, once and for all.

I get to iterate forever.

I get to show up in whatever way supports aliveness, truth, and integrity in this moment.

Perhaps this is what my fierce, rebellious younger self has been trying to tell me all along:

You do not have to be one thing.

You do not have to stay who you once were simply because others understood that version of you - and wanted you to remain there.

You are allowed to grow.

You are allowed to change - anything.

You are allowed to become.

I think I’ll let her have the last word. 🩵

Not the kind of tired that comes from sleepless nights,
nor from doing the kind of work that has no end and often drains.

I’m not even tired from the presence and caregiving asked of me by the needs of my elder partner.

I’m feeling the kind of tired today that comes after a cry so raw and deep that it takes you to your knees, as you surrender to the true territory of your life.

The kind of tired that comes from the task of being awake to life and allowing yourself to feel it all.
The kind of tired that comes from welcoming all those guests that Rumi speaks of.

It’s a painful way to live at times - feeling and facing it all straight on - and yet it is the only way I know to touch aliveness.

Aliveness is what I want more than easy or comfortable.

Except on those days when feeling so much feels too much.

So yes, today I feel tired.

I also feel grateful,
and tender,
and gentle,
and filled with awe.

I’m left wondering how life can keep unfurling as I remember, again and agian, to allow what is.

This life is one wild ride, isn’t it?
🩵

I come today, blowing on the tiny ember that wants to put fingers to keyboard.

The journey has been hard. Grief, in all her beautiful, wrenching colors, has been – and continues to be – here as I see what’s been lost, pick up what remains, and piece it together with the new and unfamiliar. The unpredictability of Don’s cognitive condition has me bracing when I move into his sphere, whether by phone or at his rehabilitation facility. Living alone for these months has been restful and relieving, and now begins to shift toward an uncertain level of caregiving as his return home approaches. Who am I in relation to Don – and to myself – is changing yet again.

So much love. So much sorrow. So much weariness. So much pointing me to the truth of life – and how I often resist it.

Oh how easily I return to old ways of coping – using food to soothe when my inner and outer worlds begin to become too much to hold skillfully. I know how to support myself when intensity comes, and still I find myself reaching for the relief that eating always brings.

My mind wants to tell me I’m failing and should be doing better at this point. But what’s really happening is that I’m doing my best to tend to myself under challenging circumstances. Sometimes I choose food over a somatic practice. It is all care when grief is big.

There is an aliveness in grief. When we don’t allow ourselves to feel the depths, we close off essential parts of ourselves – ones that allow for the fullness of our lives. If not allowed, grief - like depression - can hold our energy captive.

Allowing our whole experience is the way, I am learning. And we are not meant to do the precious work of allowing alone.

People who can attune and not fix or gloss over. Animals. Nature. Movement. Music. Moments of play, laughter, rest, connection. We need to be surrounded with care and gentleness as we move with grief.

The kindest, gentlest thing I can do is let the dreams and desires and expectations– the pull to be somewhere other than here – fall away for now, and allow myself to be with what is. This is not business as usual. This time calls me to something deeper, less visible on the outside, so that the meaning of my life in this phase – with these circumstances – can reveal itself.

For in the depths, in the grief, from the embers, something new and life-serving can emerge – often in unexpected ways.
🩵

It has been a profound and consuming journey. I have been so very present to it all. Love and crisis will do that.

In the early days, there was fear for Don’s survival, then fear for his wellbeing going forward - whether he could return home to the engaged, independent life he lived before. Alongside that lived another fear, whether I have the capacity to care for him, and whether doing so might cost me the fullness of my own life.

And still, love flowed like a river through it all.

The depth of love between us rose to the surface, stripping away the mundane and the mental noise. Small concerns and meandering existential questions fell away, exposed for their irrelevance. What remained was a gentle love between us, and a fierce love in me to care for this man in his vulnerability.

There has also been grief. Don’s grief, as he faces the loss of life as he knew it. And my own - for him and what he’s experiencing - missing the man I knew, wondering what our life will become.

I’m grateful for my ability to listen and validate his experience without minimizing. This is love in action, along with the advocacy.

We have been held by extraordinary love from friends and family. I had to learn, quickly, how to receive it, and how to ask for help when I had no capacity to manage on my own. Rides through snowstorms. Help getting Don into our home, where he stayed for a week before returning to a rehab facility. Household support in these early days. Deep listening from exquisite space holders. Bodywork, Prayers and Reiki. Visits with Don. Information, validation, and care from skilled staff with enormous hearts.

I am relearning, again, that love is a mutual flow, not a one-way street. How often do we block that flow by trying to do it all on our own?

There has been tremendous uncertainty.
Will Don survive? Unknown at first. No, yes.
Will he be able to return home? Unknown.
Will I become a full-time caregiver, losing my own life in the process? Unknown. Still, I am deeply committed to having my own full life while ensuring Don gets the support he needs.

Love. Fear. Grief. Laughter. Tears. Hugs. Exhaustion. Sweet moments. Sadness. Delight. Anxiety coursing through my body. The “full catastrophe” as Zorba the Greek said.

My somatic practices helped, when I could remember them. Coming back to my body. Noticing. Feeling. Tending to myself as best I could. Sometimes that meant nourishing meals. Other times it meant binge-watching The Traitors. Whatever kept me going.

And sometimes, honestly, I couldn’t come back to myself at all. I was so “out there”, with Don, with medical teams, with friends and family wanting updates, caring for our dog and home, driving long distances, seeing clients when I could. I needed to numb just to keep moving.

That, too, is okay. We do what we can in moments like these. Crisis calls forth the animal in us, the part that is “on”, hyperalert, and ready to respond in an instant. Over time, as the shock softens, we begin to reorient to the new reality, and back to ourselves, in ways that allow us to continue on an unfamiliar path.

Today is my first day of not being so oriented toward Don’s immediate needs. He is in good enough care. A friend will visit him. I will tend to myself. The to-do list can wait.

I am orienting to myself today, discovering a rhythm in this new reality, moment to moment, that can sustain me, Don, and us in the days ahead. 🩵

I’ve tried to restrict it, banish it, and power over it, but she returns – over and over again.

She wants me to listen.

Finally, I can.

In preparation for my upcoming small group intensive, I recently placed a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) on my arm. I’ve been curious about how my body is managing under the weight of the sugar binges, and the actual physical weight she carries.

I weep over what I’m learning.

My body is resilient. She has been handling, and continues to handle, all that I throw at her, into her, without tipping into prediabetes or diabetes.

My body is strong. She holds so much extra weight that her joints hurt and movement becomes unwieldy. And yet, she moves. She shovels. She walks. She carries. She continues.

My body has an intelligence I have not appreciated, let alone listened for, until now.

It amazes me how a technology like a CGM can usher me into a state of reverence and awe for this body.

This body that has carried so much since before I was born, the profound distress my mother was living with flowing into me.
This body that has kept me alive through well-meaning but harmful ways of coping.
This body that shows up with wisdom, day after day, despite my ignoring her.

This is the true homecoming.

To end the resistance.
To honor all she does for me, with me.
To begin to listen.
To begin to tend, not to change her, but to embrace her as she is and support her flourishing.

This requires finding other ways besides food to support her, while at the same time not exiling eating to the dark corner as I so often have. This is the middle way, one I find so uncomfortable to inhabit, when the binary of all-or-nothing feels better, safer, more familiar.

It all comes back to listening, like a child telling a parent a really hard thing, and being believed.
And then advocated for, in service of her greatest wellbeing.
🩵

I am learning to listen, to rest, to make space to integrate after long years of swinging between striving, accomplishing, and over-responsibility, and burning out and giving up.

The Feminine energies of allowing, receptivity, listening, sensing, and trusting have full permission to step forward, as the Masculine energies of directing, striving, deciding, and problem-solving take a much needed rest.

With seven days remaining in this year, my system is drinking from the gentle waters of the Feminine.
Letting go.
Making space for what is to come.

My birth day arrives just days before the New Year. People often feel sorry for me that it falls in the midst of the holiday season, but I feel the auspiciousness of being birthed as a beginning forms.

There is dark and light in a birthday like mine.
A wintering.
A rooting.
A gathering of life force for what is to come.
A thread weaving me through the darkest day of the year and into a new beginning.

Because I have let go of the push and returned to my body, I can hear more clearly now that this time is for acknowledgment and celebration, for all that has transpired over the year, the patterns loosening, the reorientation toward listening rather than overriding, and the call to tend to what’s here in me rather than looking out there for the next thing, the next person, or the next sugary sweet to settle my system.

It’s a gentle time.
A quiet time.

The wind creates murmurations of snow as it falls from the gray December sky, mirroring inner murmurations, calm, then a swirl, then calm again.

The rhythms of my highs and lows are gentler now, and they pass more easily. I feel content and settled often. This feels both miraculous and familiar, a returning as I turn toward sixty-six.

It is possible for life to shift and surprise, even at this age.

I tell myself, and I tell you, it is never too late to find your way back to yourself.

The Slow Path Is the Harder Path

Slowing down brings us into the present. In the present are the very things our substances, behaviors, and busyness help us avoid. It is so much easier to overlay a simple solution or quick fix than to turn toward what’s here and listen.

“Let’s do an eight-day water fast,” my inner fixer recently suggested. “I’ll cleanse the body of all this sugar, I’ll journal, and I’ll reconnect with myself spiritually. It’s going to be amazing. It will break the spell cast by carbs.”

How many times have I done things this way, cold turkey? An austere clean-eating plan. The supplements that are going to heal my body. The comprehensive workout routine where I never miss a day. The next certification program to make me a better practitioner. An expensive retreat that’s going to change everything and lead me to bliss. A relationship that’s a better fit.

These are all external strategies to change me into the person I think I should be, as quickly as possible.

I want the one-and-done.
I don’t want to lean in to the slower, harder work.

And there’s also a quiet ease in the slower path, because I’m no longer asking my body to do what it can’t.

The real challenge is surrendering to the fact that nothing outside me is the answer, and allowing this to take the time it needs to unravel.

Giving up the seeking in order to arrive here, in this body that carries old patterns from younger traumas and a nervous system that learned to seek appeasement rather than stay with pain. Pain is danger to a nervous system that is oriented to the past.

I see the alternative more clearly now. The actual “solution” that I can talk about, write about, and practice at times with relative ease, except when it comes to binge eating.

What I’m seeing is that if I really want to free myself from the compulsion of turning to food as a habituated solution to emotional discomfort or distress, then I have to stay with the moment when the urge arises.

I have to interrupt the automatic, unconscious reaching for relief and look directly into the inner place I’ve been avoiding. I have to sit down and listen.

Each time I can do this, even for a few seconds, I begin to widen the gap between the urge and the eating. Slowly. One cannot sit with discomfort for very long at first, when the body has been working overtime for decades to protect you from it. One cannot give up addictive behaviors cold turkey. Think of giving up your phone.

Believe me, I have tried.

None of those strategies stuck because they were about dominating the body instead of being in relationship with it. I feel the resistance at the thought of pausing and sitting with an urge and the urgency it carries. It is so seductively easy to slide into the behavior and leave myself behind. To leave conscious awareness for the bliss of numbness. Leaving myself behind feels like a mirror of how I often felt left behind earlier in life, but that is for another post.

My mind can easily convince me that I will start paying attention on some future day, when the moon is new, when all the ducks are in a row.

But the opportunity to create small openings in the pattern is right here, right now. Nothing else is required, only my willingness to listen.
🩵

Binge eating is not a pathology. It is a strategy the nervous system discovered that works to dampen the incessant hypervigilance and freeze that can arise from living in environments where safety couldn’t be reliably felt.

There is wisdom and practicality here for a system whose job is to keep us protected – safe – alive.

I have long since left that environment, but the body remembers. It often perceives threat where none exists.

And so the eating gets reinforced, until it becomes the primary tool in the toolkit for managing emotional unrest.

To find new ways to tend to the inner terrain is to learn, slowly, that there is no actual threat here. It has nothing to do with the food. It has everything to do with the body’s capacity to feel safe when the inner gales come, when the white water moves beyond Level II.

This is the work.

I can change my eating – been there, done that SO many times – but without new resources to help me navigate, I will, yet again, return to the old protective ways.

This is why this round feels different. Scarier.
Hell, just naming this out loud is scary – because it requires me to look around and see
that I am the only one here who can captain this boat,
not just be a deckhand arranging the chairs.

I’m still finding my sea legs. I’m learning what it’s like to live from the inside out, where safety born of self-connection leads, and behavior naturally follows.

Until there’s more capacity on board, I will continue to turn toward the strategy that once saved me from going under.

I’m practicing not making this wrong, remembering that it’s a placeholder until there are more supportive options available to me.

Please pass the family-sized bag of Almond M&Ms.

Brief note:

Disordered eating – and other compulsive behaviors – tend to exist in hiding. They often happen in isolation.

Bringing them into the light, whether by asking for help or simply naming what’s happening, is a big, scary, vulnerable deal.

And yet, the light of awareness is the medicine, not keeping what lives in the shadows under wraps. 🩵

It seems there’s just enough capacity
to turn toward a long-held pattern –
using food to suppress my aliveness,
ignoring the physical body
until she becomes more acceptable to me,
and to a culture obsessed with a narrow (pun intended)
form of beauty.

This turning toward asks for change –
in my relationship to food,
in how I inhabit my body,
in how I inhabit my life.

For decades, the eating kept the call for aliveness
out of hearing range –
aliveness too risky to listen for
and hear what it might ask of me,
protecting the status quo,
helping me survive.

Luis Mojica offers this definition of addiction:
Addiction is the result of not knowing how to find safety inside yourself.

I’ve spent much of my life chasing safety –
through food,
through men,
through excelling,
through conforming,
through healing,
through trying to become someone else.

To realize that safety has been here all along
is surprising –
and a relief.
And a compass to help me find my way back home.

As I find more ground inside myself,
I can face the way I’ve been eating
and how it no longer serves me
in the ways it once did –
when safety was harder to find.
An outdated protection,
now asking for care.

That’s all I have for today.

This is what comes when I listen.
It is –
I am –
enough.
🩵

Still, the murky, shadowy, sometimes piercing moments are here too. I can wake up with that familiar solar plexus tension - like this morning - or get blindsided by a rogue wave.

It’s an awful feeling.

For years, my mind interpreted my discomfort as depression. I’m no longer convinced that’s true. It may never have been depression. It was a label I used for experiences I didn’t know how to accompany - or be accompanied by others.

This healing path isn’t about getting rid of the discomfort of being human. It’s about noticing what’s here - the full range of discomfort and lightness - and relating to it with care and respect. It’s a profound shift away from fixing or ignoring. It’s what Rumi points to in The Guest House:

“…Meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

I understood this cognitively for a long time. I sensed it was the way toward more ease. What I lacked was the lived skill. And I am learning to live into it.

The place I still struggle - deeply - is when the intense craving for sugar arrives. It pulls me toward sweets in a way that feels compulsive, drug-like. I can sometimes peek at it from a crack in the door, but it knows how to force its way in, seducing me into unconscious eating.

I don’t yet feel I have much choice. I can go for a while, but once it knocks and flings its way inside, I’m a goner.

“Binge eating” is yet another label I’ve used for experiences I don’t yet know how to accompany. But I’m taking tiny, tender steps in that direction. I’m no longer willing to use that label to shame a survival strategy my body learned for a reason - one that once worked.

It’s all here — like a long tangle of yarn — waiting for me to work the knots slowly, one by one, following wherever the thread takes me, listening all the way.
🩵

If you’d like to receive these reflections, you’re welcome to subscribe.

Subscribe now

There is room for me.
Me.
As I am.
Right now.

I don’t have to twist myself into a pretty pretzel to earn a seat at the table.
I don’t belong at every table.
I am not for everyone - just the ones who are welcoming of my particular nature, my flavor of freak.

I no longer have to be all things to all people as a survival strategy.

What’s happening now is this: I am choosing the table.

I am making room for myself instead of waiting for someone to give me permission to sit down.

It has exhausted me to my bones to try to become who others want me to be - what my internal critic demands I be - in order to belong, to get the coveted seat.

I’ve lived the cycle of going for gold or buckling under the weight of the critic when I fell short.

But now my marrow is creating cells from new substrate - from love and regard for myself.

From here, the world in and around me feels more inviting, less intimidating - less like a hammer waiting to nail me.

When we allow even a little love, kindness, tenderness, and care into the mix of our existence - just a little - the critic can begin to soften and rest. For she, too, gets to be a recipient of love.

She, too, gets a seat at the table, but she no longer gets to sit at the head of it.

There is a new voice rising from the marrow, changing the DNA of my existence.

There is love in this voice.
Not a sickly-sweet love that coos and soothes and bypasses the hard.

It’s a voice that says:
I see you. I hear you. I get you. And I am here with you.
You are a precious being, and you matter.

What a relief to have her so close when the old, familiar voices - pointing out every inadequacy - are working so hard to protect me in their well-meaning but harsh and disheartening way.

How different - enjoyable - it is to walk through life with this growing voice of love in the mix. What a relief to have her in her rightful place at the table.
🩵

If this resonates, you’re welcome to subscribe.
You’re welcome at this table. 🩵

Subscribe now

I hadn’t expected these waters to rise into my writing so soon.

As the three-month somatic weight-balancing intensive in January approaches, my binge eating has flared after a long settled phase. I can’t get enough sweets right now.

Plus, it’s winter, when many mammals pack in the calories for a long hibernation -probably not with Almond M&Ms or jelly donuts, though.

The young one inside fears her safety strategy will be ripped away, leaving her alone to hold what sugar has been holding for her.

And yet I know Luis’ process is never about removal. It’s about adding in what nourishes biology, body, and being. That young one will need reassurance along the way. She certainly isn’t convinced yet.

Sugar has been my drug of choice since childhood – my comfort, my companion, my constant when the big people weren’t. It was always available because my mom had a sweet tooth, and I could buy more with a few quarters at the five-and-dime. I had a drawer filled with Sweet Tarts, Fireballs, Sugar Babies, and those paper straws of colored sugar – oh, Pixie Sticks! – the early formation of hoarding and hiding food stashes.

I’ve tried so many times to take sugar out, only to be pulled back in with a single bite – like an addict chasing a familiar fix.

I understand what the practice will be in this program: feeding myself nervous-system-balancing foods; not restricting the dysregulating ones; listening for the need underneath the eating; and slowly building other ways of soothing – expanding my menu of comfort instead of sugar being the only option.

The hope is that as I return to myself and learn new ways of tending, the urge to binge will naturally ebb.

I had a glimpse of this at Luis’ retreat this summer. One night there was a big party – dancing, joy, and tables piled with my go-to foods: pizza, fried nibbly things, every decadent dessert imaginable. I didn’t want them. I had one bite and stopped. I was so full from the aliveness of being in community, and from being held with such care by Luis and the support team, that I didn’t need food to meet needs it could never meet.

I was satiated by life.

Which raises the questions:
Where am I not satiated in my life?
What do I need in my life to experience that quality of satiation felt at the retreat?
What is food trying to meet that it can’t?

Oh friends, this part of the path is a doozy. I feel it in my solar plexus as I write. And I’m up for it. It just has to be gentle, slow, and kind – more a spiral than the straight line my mind wants. I have hurried toward “the other side” so many times. But there is no other side - no end game - only a process to live into that keeps returning me to myself, with more real pleasure and satiation in the mix.

I hear the message rising inside me:
“Sweetheart, you’re ready to receive and apply the true medicine for the wound eating has been protecting. You have enough self-connection and self-regard now to navigate these currents and stay afloat. This is a solo journey, but you are not alone.”

And now I see a boat holding my long-swim team – one worthy of Diana Nyad – watching for sharks, jellyfish, and my own wellbeing, encouraging me the whole way.

I am ready.
And I am trepidatious.
Who wouldn’t be, when the first plunge into new, deeper waters can shock the body – until, slowly, you acclimate?
🩵

I played that game. I lost 100 pounds several years ago and shared the photos, convinced I had shed my disordered eating and fat-girl shame along with the pounds. If I can do it, you can too!

(Until I couldn’t - and the weight and binge eating came roaring back.)

We marvel at the athlete, the actor, the artist, wishing we had that kind of natural talent. How fortunate they are! What we don’t see is the hard work behind the achievement — the hours of honing the craft, the struggles and obstacles, the lows and pull to give up along the way.

I couldn’t sustain a healthy-for-my-body weight back then because I was doing it from a place that believed I was inadequate, unacceptable, and unmotivated. From there, I forced my body to comply — doing what I had to do to “fit” into a world that loathes fat… and by association, me.
(Clearly a projection of my own self-loathing.)

Here I am at 65, a good 100 pounds over what supports my physical well-being. But my days of hardcore CrossFit workouts and food restriction are over. My body, after years riding the binge–restrict cycle, says a very clear No. Not again.

The inner and somatic work I’m doing now is helping me embody another way. A way that honors where I am and that follows the body’s wisdom. A way that moves slowly and gently instead of powering over and through. A way that lets me explore beneath the surface behaviors of soothing with chocolate to ask: What actually needs soothing? What is calling for my attention that I’m using food to suppress?

So far, following a different path to whole-body-and-being wellbeing looks like slowing down, resting, taking small, doable, nourishing steps, and tending to the parts that find this journey really hard sometimes. No quick fix here.

I’m not talking about a journey of weight loss. I’m talking about a journey home to myself - where the need to binge eat is no longer needed, and my body finds its natural weight for this stage and age of my life.

It is an undoing of so many ways of being that no longer serve. It doesn’t look productive. It’s messy and nonlinear and confusing. It’s the chrysalis phase, where everything turns to goo in service of creating something completely new and beautiful - something with its own wings.

So I write from inside the chrysalis, sharing my messy experience along the way. There is no before and after, just an ever-evolving experience of life as me, emerging - one gooey moment at a time.
🩵

Brief note:
On January 7th, I begin a 3-month small group intensive with my teacher, Luis Mojica. It will be a deep dive into my relationship with food, eating, body, and being. My inner journey ‘til now has prepared me for this. The timing could not be better. I’ll be sharing my experience along the way, no doubt.

Another round of deep thanks to friends who have made it possible for me to participate. 🙏🩵

There is so much to do. And shouldn’t my efforts be going into bringing in more work to help keep our often financially unsteady boat afloat? Don’t those dust bunnies and paper tigers need corralling? And what about my stretching routine?

My parents were workers. I mean, WORKERS.

My father was a mechanic in a paper mill, working long shifts, only to be called in the wee hours to fix machines so the unceasing production of Kleenex and Huggies could continue. When he was home, he tinkered on the cars and mowed the lawn and built things in the garage…a beer in hand or nearby. I always thought it was just one beer, but later I realized it was one after the other.

I remember feeling so proud whenever my father asked me to help him with a project. One of my clearest memories is the two of us sweating in the summer sun as we dug up a large area for a new leach field. It was one of the few times we spent time together, even if there wasn’t much talking.

My mother created an amazing business: The New Milford Telephone Answering Service, long before answering machines existed. After the foundation was poured, my father and others built an addition to our home to house the business in the basement. Five switchboards with 100 phone lines each. Around 100 private home and business alarm boxes that rang to signal us to call the appropriate town’s police. Twelve town’s fire and ambulance radios to alert emergency crews. (No 911 back then.) Eleven employees (why we needed a new leach field!) -plus me and my mom - working the switchboards and radios 24/7/365.

My mother, battling lupus and RA, managed the whole thing, with me helping out with bookkeeping and shifts during summer breaks. She would cover when someone called in. She would sleep on the little cot for night shifts when what her body needed was deep rest. I covered nights sometimes too, but it left me feeling off for days. How did she do it?

One day when I was a teen, I found her holding herself up by her arms, bracing against the kitchen counter, crying. (My mom was not a crier, like me, but a very private, inward woman - unlike me.) She said her feet, so twisted by arthritis hurt. I implored her to SIT DOWN - only then did she allow herself a few minutes before returning “downstairs.”

Two parents with two highly physical, stressful, all-hours-of-the-day-and-night jobs - making it work however they could - to give my brother and me a good life, to their own detriment.

Urgency and emergency were woven into the fabric of our home.

Love came in the form of providing and doing and the occasional vacation. It was the only game in town for a middle class, working class, family.

I hold so much admiration for them, and also sadness that they did not have the privilege of rest and honoring capacity that I am finally learning to give myself.

This is the soil I grew in: rest comes, if at all, after the work is done. And there is always work to be done.

So many of us have learned that productivity is rewarded, pushing through is admirable, and rest is for the weak or unmotivated. We get to unravel this, though.

A friend told me about a book she’s reading, Rest is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life, by Tricia Hersey (aka The Nap Bishop). This is next on my reading list as I find my way beyond the internal pull to push.

To listen to the body and give it what it needs is countercultural. And it’s not easy. There is little validation for a lifestyle that honors the physiological wisdom of the body. So we give it to ourselves, and we find sister/brother journeyers who get it and are trying to live into their own rhythm too.

With the morning to myself, I curled back into bed, despite the voice rattling off the to-do list. My nervous system knew something before my mind could grant permission. I picked up my book and continued reading about Woniya Thibeault, a woman following her own rhythm as she prepared for and experienced life alone in the Arctic as part of the History Channel’s survival program, Alone.

I read. I napped. I melted into the mattress, allowing the warmth and holding to unburden whatever I was carrying.

I rarely allow this. There are so many internalized messages about resting when there is work to be done.

But I am here for it—this countercultural evolution of rest and rhythm.
🩵

Brief note:
The book I’m reading is Never Alone: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey, by Woniya Dawn Thibeault. I watched her on Alone and found her journey and connection to the natural world spiritually profound - something I experienced as a child and long to return to—a reminder that I can honor that connection here and now, in my own rhythm, without leaving home.

The body seems to be ready to bring me pieces of unprocessed memory, like a child bringing a bouquet of dandelions or dirt-encrusted worms to show her mother. While the body feels safe enough to reveal these “delights,” it also finds them hard to hold – and very uncomfortable.

This is where my tending comes in: sitting with the tension and discomfort in my body while also orienting to what is okay in this moment. Both get to be here, instead of living from the binary of either bypassing the discomfort or hyperfixating on the pain.

I lived most of my adult life being hyperfixated on emotional pain and what’s wrong with me - using food to dissociate from the chronic inner onslaught. Now, I’m learning to notice what is truly wonderful and good around me, rather than taking pain as a sign that I – and everything – have gone to shit.

The sensations were intense this morning. I sensed into them, feeling how the tension and vibration in my solar plexus moved up into my chest and face, then back down again, like a lava lamp – those orbs ferrying tightness as they rose and fell.

I looked around the room to orient to the present moment - a kiosk map quietly saying, You are here. And, All is well.

I returned to the tension. Still here. Not trying to get rid of it. Just accompanying it as it does its thing, rather than making it mean something negative or letting it eclipse the ease and peace and beauty that are also here.

This is the practice that is showing my being and body that it is safe to feel – that I am safe, and that I have my own back. Thank you, Luis Mojica, for teaching me this.

I understand why we avoid opening these places that hold memories, pain, and joy. It’s a lot to hold while living a householder life. Capacity is real, and there are limits to what we can attend to in any given moment, day, week, or season.

I have chosen – or more accurately, life chose for me – a path that requires the deep dive over outer activity – at least so far. The gift of big suffering is that you are forced to find a way through, especially when despair can take you down.

Years of therapists, healers, retreats, and trainings touched only the surface of what I was carrying. I was trapped in a body and a life that felt deeply insecure and unsafe.

Until I learned what the body and nervous system hold. Until I learned about somatic experiencing and how to lean into the body and its messages instead of trying to run from them.

Holy mackerel, safety is within me. No wonder I haven’t been able to find lasting peace from outside myself. I am beginning to feel it – like bricks being laid, one at a time, each time I stay with myself with care.

A beautiful life is unfolding after all these years. Slowly, nonlinearly, by allowing for pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, laughter and tears.

After all these years, a solidness and steadiness are forming, replacing the instability of a house always on the verge of collapse. It is an unmistakable, inexpressible feeling of coming home.
Amazing.
🩵

It is less of an idea as it is something wanting to express.

I have no plan. I have no list of themes to one day write about. I tried that and it felt so heavy and burdensome that I gave it up.

I only write what comes. At least for now.

I get out of bed. I hug Jack for a few minutes. I use the bathroom. I put out Jack’s food and water. I fill my Ball jar with hot water and lemon. I turn on the computer and see how the kernel of expression wants to be held in writing.

No plans.
No outline.
Just flow spilling onto the page.

I’ll start a new post for what also came this morning.
🩵

It’s not easy to express ourselves vulnerably in a world that is so prone to judging and labeling**—that is, when our wellbeing, identity, and safety reside outside ourselves, in how people respond to us.**

Two weeks ago I began writing here. I invited four friends to subscribe - dear, trusted supporters who get me and my journey. My writing flowed with ease and pleasure in the intimate container.

A few days ago, I invited people from a community of fellow inner travelers to subscribe.

With a “ballooning” of subscribers from four to now fifteen, I’ve been transported to that stage when I was four, frozen with fear.

Many of us learned early on that to comply with what big people expected of us is to stay in their good graces and avoid the dangerous territory where connection, care, and love are withheld.

Don’t be so loud.
Get the grades. Score the goals. Do us proud.
Don’t go near Dad when he’s in that mood.
Don’t share when Mom negates and trumps our feelings for hers.

“You’re killing your mother.” (words from my father’s mouth - my mom had lupus and RA)

It was safer to hide. Safer to move the furniture in my room and clean, clean, clean in hopes this would somehow rearrange and calm what was happening in me and beyond my door.

Safer to roam outside, accompanied by trees and hay and sky and rocks and dirt and cows and worms and snakes and stream.

Some of us - like me - emerge, erupt, when puberty hits - for awhile, our life force no longer able to be contained by outer expectations. (Such healthy awakening, even if not welcomed!)

Yet we continue to be met by a world - friends, teachers, colleagues, bosses, media - that, more than anything, wants us to be something other than ourselves.

Much of the inner work is about locating our true nature and learning to live from its aliveness instead of what others, society, have placed on and in us.

But it takes time to come out of that protective shell, to teach the body that we are essentially okay, even when visibility feels life-threatening.

My system is still learning that safety resides within me and not in a perceived or real audience who might throw shade - or tomatoes.

I get to remind myself that I’ve got my own back, and that whatever happens “out there”, I’m essentially okay.

So much of this comes down to orientation:
am I oriented toward care and regard for myself,
or am I oriented toward how others will respond to me being me, anxiously hoping they will get me, love me?

When I am oriented toward what others will think, I go into performance and lose connection to the joy of simple expression.

It is so easy to shift into performance over expression. I went there as I noticed more people subscribing.

I started to worry about what you smart, creative, aware, beautiful people might do with the tender seedlings of writing emerging here. Of me, emerging here. (A part of me believes I don’t really belong with all you groovy people. I’m working on it, though!)

I felt my chest tremble as I shifted from inner attunement to outward scanning for danger.

I know what this is: the present reminding my body of the past, when expressing myself WAS threatening.

Care is needed when this happens, not chastising or overriding.

I get to show this body - working so hard to protect me - that we are no longer four-years-old on stage anymore. We are not in that household where love and approval came only if I danced to their tune.

I’ve got me, more and more. And I’m beginning to trust, more and more, the steadiness of love and regard that emanates without condition from those close to me.

I am shifting, like those hybrid cars with gas and electric power, from a body and being that has long believed we aren’t worth much and so don’t belong, to a system powered by a growing love for self and capacity to receive love from others.

Judgement, and other things coming from the environment, might sting like one - or a thousand - bees.

I can apply a compress of tenderness and care.
I can remind myself: I am okay, and I will be okay.

These don’t have to be annihilating moments.

And so I return here, to express what wants to come, noticing the places that want to perform for approval, and choosing to show up - for myself.
🩵

Brief note: There is nothing wrong with performing. It is when performance is for the purpose of securing approval, love, and safety that we might want to explore, so the joy of creative expression can continue to flow.

I am Sleeping Beauty, waking herself from the spell of slumber cast long ago.

I’m not rested, yet I am reorganizing.
I’m not fully awake, yet I am coming back to life.

Like rain kissing fallow ground.