🎂 Birthday lessons

HBD to me! Part 1 🦀🦋✨🍄💛🌺

Hello angels,

I hope you are doing wonderfully today! I’m sending you all the loving vibes. Yesterday was my 28th birthday 🎂. I’m so grateful to be alive, truly. For my birthday week, I wanted to share some wisdom that feels top of bodymind for me at this time. If this reaches you, I’m proud of myself because I overcame creative resistance to complete and share it. Ideas are so fun! Oh the things we could make! Follow through is so treacherous! Oh the anxiety of the making! These four sentences define my creative life.

With that said, here are the first four slices of my birthday wisdom cake. More to come tomorrow! Please feel free to add your own in the comments.

No words can shield us from the messiness of the human experience. But there is something that feels cosmically aligned about trying. Wow, bars.

I used to be in the habit of labeling difficult emotions — loneliness, despair, fear, pain, betrayal, envy — as problems to solve and obstacles to overcome. I’ve learned to accept (but never glorify) these emotions as part of the human experience, not exceptions to it.

Darkness allows us to sleep and therefore live. Rain enables life and growth. Soil/dirt/mud is critical to life on earth. Everything in nature has its attendant yin and yang and forms an integral whole of contrasting, dynamic forces. Our emotional lives are similar. The major difference: violent and highly unnatural exterior systems shape our emotional and interior lives. So that’s why I don’t want to glorify the suffering we are made to feel on a daily basis, I just want to share the idea that some difficult emotions are trying to teach us something meaningful about what it means to be alive at this time, and point us towards how we can help support or seek support from the collective.

I’ve been feeling a lot of loneliness in the past few weeks, having spent the vast majority of my time alone. When I face the pain of these experiences head-on, I connect very truthfully with myself and with so many other precious beings on this earth who also feel the pain of loneliness. I learned this in Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chodron. I can use my imagination to feel that this difficult emotion is connecting me to all sorts of people.

When I fully feel painful emotions, I find that I involve myself more sincerely in trying to help heal these emotions in others. Instead of being the parent to myself who says “Cheer up”, fleeing the painful experience, I can choose to sit with and validate it. I can cry, I can feel sorry for myself. I am sorry. No one should have to be alone in a planet filled with people! That’s the great irony of the imposed scarcity of capitalism — scarce connection, food, shelter, clean air, water, pleasure, thriving — on a literally abundant planet! Wild!

If I never felt lonely, I would never be able to relate to the loneliness that so many of us feel. I wouldn’t be able to open my heart to trying to help others feel just a little less lonely through my content and through this space. I wouldn’t try to think of ways to do more, here and elsewhere, to help people find more connection. What is the universe trying to express through my loneliness? How will it succeed if I repress and deny my feelings?

There is nothing inherently shameful about you. There is a whole host of shame that has been imposed on you by social conditioning, education, puritanical views, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, ablism, and on and on. The result is feeling ashamed, carrying shame. But there is nothing you possibly are in your Being or have done or have had done to you that makes you shameful. You are nature. You are precious. You are just like the mountains, the butterflies, the oceans. Made of the same magic. You are the sublime, the divine, the collective. The universe speaks through you, and your consciousness and presence here helps make it whole. You are not shameful! That thing you find shameful about you, connects you to millions of people on this earth who carry the same shame. I think they know the earth would shake if we had the skills, safety, and space to talk about our shame together, to dance and heal and sing and cry and grieve together. Who would we be on the other end of that experience? What would we be capable of collectively?

Nature offers such an abundance of lessons and wisdom and models and frameworks to understand and to face our experience here on earth. I am reading the Hidden Life of Trees and I am in awe of how much there is to learn from these majestical friends:

The most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods

I will leave you with this question. Some days I ask myself, what would the most loving version of me do today? It’s very powerful what happens on those days and in those moments. I try to integrate love into my daily life, especially through talking to my best friends. I am super behind on texts and as much as I am against urgency culture I also know the feelings of neglect and anxiety that not hearing back from someone can produce, so I think my response to this question is to get responding to people who cared enough to reach out to me in some way! If you are one of those people, I love you and I am sorry and you’ll be hearing from me very soon!

How can you be love today, or this week?

What would your most loving self do next? ;) ily