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Notes on caring for yourself in a lockdown

Today in Boston everything feels different. The city is slowly drawing to a close. Schools are closing. Colleges are sending (or have already sent) students home for the rest of the semester as campuses empty out. The grocery stores are bare of eggs and milk and anything canned or frozen. 

Today in Boston everything feels normal. No one I know is sick. Our case totals of COVID-19 are growing, but so far the numbers remain small. Access to testing is still very limited so there may be many more cases that we do not know about, but for now the official totals are reassuring. The state of Massachusetts has not yet recorded its first death from COVID-19, which is also reassuring.

Today I am settling in for the long haul. I have been instructed to work from home as much as possible in the coming weeks and have no plans to return to the office for the foreseeable future. Very happily my job can be performed remotely and I have adequate paid sick leave and good health insurance so I am already so much luckier than so many here in Boston and around the world.

Today in Boston everything is okay, and yet I know that very soon it probably won’t be. An epidemic is a slow moving crisis that seems okay a while and then suddenly isn’t. Here in Boston we’re still waiting for that tipping point to arrive and until it does we won’t have a good idea how bad things are going to get. Right now the disease is spreading slowly and silently and in the absence of mass testing there’s really no way to know how far it has spread until people are gravely ill.

Today I’m finding myself restless. Perhaps today you are feeling restless, too. Perhaps your restlessness is an attempt to quell a thinly veiled sense of worry or panic. Perhaps mine is, too.

All of my routines have been upended. I won’t be going to ballet classes again for the foreseeable future. I won’t be going to restaurants or to the movies. I have had to choose which doctor’s appointments to keep and which to jettison as I try to balance the importance of keeping myself healthy in other ways with the risk of contracting COVID-19 and possibly spreading it to others.

Social distancing doesn’t require total isolation but it does mean far fewer contacts with people. I’m trimming my social circle back to just a couple of the most important people. Everyone else will be transitioned to digital-only interactions. Many of my loved ones are already remote, so we will be talking on the phone more often and caring for each other from a distance. 

Today I am grateful to live with a roommate who is also one of my dearest friends, rather than a quasi-stranger from Craigslist who I only vaguely tolerate. Living with a good friend feels like a blessing always, but especially in light of the weeks of close quarters that likely lie ahead of us.

I’m also grateful that modern technology makes it possible to connect with the people who matter to me remotely, so that we do not have to gather in person to feel a part of a community in quite the same way as was true before cell phones and the internet made it so much easier to be together from afar.

In just a few short days COVID-19 has changed life from normal to different. Today we are struggling to patch together new routines. We are trying to learn how to stay emotionally and physically healthy when we are trapped indoors in ways that we are not accustomed to. 

I too am struggling with these things and so I don’t pretend to have answers for you. The only thing I know is that it is okay to find this transition disorienting and to struggle to find a new equilibrium. It’s okay to feel restless and anxious and scared for our loved ones who are most at risk and sad for the trips that were cancelled and the activities that we have had to give up.

My plans for the coming weeks involve:

  • Enjoying as many remote interactions with people as I can.
  • Doubling down on my at home yoga practice, as well as adding other forms of at-home fitness to my daily routine. It’s really important for my wellbeing that I don’t just sit on the couch all day.
  • Deep cleaning the apartment, doing some mending, and otherwise getting to all the nagging chores that I always mean to do but never have time for.
  • Writing more — especially working more on my memoir, which I’ve been working my way through re-reading in preparation for beginning work on the second draft.
  • Reading more — I have a huge backlog of books on my kindle that are waiting for me so I’m excited to put a dent in my list.

If you’re looking for books to read while you’re in lockdown, here are some books I’ve read and loved in the past year: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, The Bear & The Nightingale by Katherine Arden, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.

Plus a few of the books I’m looking forward to reading while I’m stuck at home: The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

There are also some things I will be doing less of:

  • I’m limiting how much time I spend reading the news. I want to read enough to stay informed, but not enough to induce panic. I will also be limiting myself to just a few reputable sources: one source for local news and one or two national papers.
  • I’m limiting social media (especially Facebook). I won’t be pulling off of social media altogether because some of it is good for me. I get updates from loved ones in my extended network on social media and my women’s memoir writing circle has a group there which is lovely and nourishing. But also: I will be temporarily muting anyone who shares too many articles about coronavirus or otherwise fills my news feed with fear. 

Most of all, I’ll be trying to shape my life in a way that allows me to remain healthy and sane and well-rested so that I can do my part to keep everyone safe by staying home and continuing to do good work and checking in on my loved ones.

I share this list not because I think that these ideas will be exactly right for anyone else, but because we should all be making plans for a lockdown now. And while most of us have thought to stock up on toilet paper, food, disinfecting wipes, cold medicine, and any prescription medications, we have perhaps not thought about how we will need to reshape our routines in order to keep ourselves sane and healthy through the worst of the outbreak. 

But this is important work, too — much more important than refreshing the news one more time to see what the latest infection counts are.

In addition to taking care of myself, I am also going to be looking for ways to donate financial resources to those who will be most affected by the coronavirus. As businesses close there are going to be many in Massachusetts and around the world who won’t be able to make rent payments or afford groceries. The economic fallout of the shutdown is going to be devastating for so many. As someone who is lucky enough to have financial resources and to be earning a paycheck during the outbreak, I’m looking for ways to give back some of my surplus. If you know of or hear about organizations doing much needed relief work during the outbreak, please hit reply and send suggestions my way!

Wherever you are reading this, I hope that you are well and that you are safe and that you have food and shelter and health insurance and paid sick leave and all of the things that human beings deserve. And if you do not have those things and are frightened or scared then my heart goes out to you. If there’s any way that I can help, please hit reply and let me know. We all need each other more than ever right now — even as we remain socially distant and physically far apart.

Much love,
Jessica

Reclaiming my relationship with myself

It has been many months since I have written. There are so many reasons for my long silence that it seems foolish to try and catalog them all. Some of them are health-related: my health reached a new low late last summer which was good in some ways and bad in others. On the good side, I got some useful diagnosis and treatments. On the downside, it has been nearly a year and I’m still not really well.

There are a lot of things about being ill that aren’t particularly glamorous. These days my list of non-negotiable self-care is long and my well-being deteriorates easily if I let things slip. But in general I’m actually doing okay. If the previous paragraphs made things seem a little bit dire, the truth is that it doesn’t really feel that way right now.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about today: no matter how grim the circumstances are, there are some fundamentals which will always make being in those circumstances easier to bear — possibly the most important of which is our relationships to ourselves.

This is why I’ve also been radically reinventing my relationship with myself.

Because I truly believe our relationships with ourselves are fundamental to our happiness and well-being — and most of my life I’ve been in a really bad one.

I have been unkind.
I have been judgmental.
I have shamed and berated and bullied myself.

I have done all these things in the name of motivating myself to be better: to do more, to be braver, to earn other people’s approval.

But the truth is that none of these things have happened (except maybe the last one). If I have done more it has only been out of terror. My self-bullying has only ever made me more scared and never once made me braver. And whatever approval I might have earned from others has always been at the cost of my approval of myself.

And I know these things now, but that knowledge has been hard-won. Rewriting the rules of how I relate to myself has been the scariest and the best thing that I have ever done.

It’s a problem I’ve been working on for a while and I’ve written about it before (see here and here and here).

But I really don’t think it’s overstating things to claim that the quality of your relationship to yourself is the one thing that really matters. All the problems we worry about, all of the times we question our worthiness — it really comes down to this: if we learn to love ourselves enough, none of those things matter.

We learn that we can have problems and make mistakes and still be worthy of love and belonging — and it is this knowledge that makes all of it okay.

Self-compassion is strong enough to carry us through even our worst difficulties.

Self-forgiveness enables us to face our wrongs, make amends where we can, and live with the parts that can never be made right.

And these two things together allow us to find our courage in the face of our fear. 

Because to dare is to take a risk and to risk is to be willing to fail. And in order to survive our failures and keep on trying we need compassion for our fear, forgiveness for our errors, and to love ourselves for being brave enough to have tried in the first place.

But what I’ve been learning more recently as my health has been improving and creating more energy for me to work with in my life — self-compassion, forgiveness, and love are essential, but there’s one last piece that I’d been missing: self-trust.

This is what I think it boils down to: Do you trust yourself to keep the commitments you make when no one else is watching?

I am terrible at this. I will kill myself trying to keep the commitments I make to other people — but the promises I make to myself I break thoughtlessly, as easily as breathing.

But I have underestimated the cost of breaking the promises I make to myself.

I underestimated the cost of not sitting down to write on all the days I wanted to, but didn’t.

I underestimated the cost of choosing what was easy over what was important.

I underestimated the cost of using my health as an excuse to avoid the things that mattered — when the truth was that I avoided those things because they scared me.

That cost was my trust in myself.

My trust that I would make what mattered to me a priority, that I wouldn’t let other people’s needs or preferences walk all over mine, that I would show up for the activities and events that really mattered to me even if doing that was terrifying. My trust that I would be on my side even when no one else was.

So I’ve entered a new phase of my self-relationship rehabilitation program.

Over the past few years I’ve become really good at what I now have come to see as “phase one” of rehabilitating my relationship with myself: I have become really good at noticing what is true for me, offering myself compassion in the face of difficulty, and forgiving myself my humanity, my mistakes, and my imperfections.

I believe that these skills are the essential foundation without which trust can never be built.

And now in phase two I’m building that trust — I’m learning to keep my promises to myself.

To not shelve the projects that I care the most about just because they also scare me.

To not put off the activities that really matter unless the reasons are truly beyond my control.

To show up for my dreams and my passions, even if that means I show up imperfectly.

Today I showed up for myself by showing up for my writing. By taking myself out of my apartment and sitting down at the library to write this blog post (because I knew if I stayed home, I wouldn’t).

I made the commitment and I kept it even though yesterday that meant going to the library in the rain, and today it meant going in boiling heat.

I kept the promise even though my to-do list for this weekend is already a mile long and the floors in our apartment haven’t been cleaned in roughly a thousand years and I feel bad about that.

But I showed up anyways. Because right now my writing is the next-most-important thing after the non-negotiable self-care that keeps my life running. Because keeping my commitment to my writing is keeping my commitment to myself, and that matters to me more than anything.

It matters because how I feel about myself improves every time I keep a commitment, and deteriorates every time I had the opportunity to keep a commitment and didn’t.

And I really do believe that how we feel about ourselves is everything.

I shan’t promise that this commitment to my writing means that I will be showing up on the blog here more often — my real priority right now is working on my memoir which I have finally returned to after literal years of neglect (and which I am determined to finally finish). But my hope is to be here more often, for whatever that might be worth.

I hope that all is well with each of you.

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. For a deeper dive on what trust really is, and how to cultivate it (with others and yourself), I highly recommend Brene Brown’s SuperSoul Sessions talk, The Anatomy of Trust.

What to do when your comfort zone feels like a prison

Here’s a puzzle for you: what should you do if your comfort zone feels like a prison?

I used to feel this way a lot. My job was comfortable, but I hated it. My hobbies were comfortable, but they bored me. Living in Boston was familiar, but I hated the ceaseless bustle of the city.

I felt like I was perpetually chafing against the edges of my life, haunted by the idea that surely there must be more out there than this.

Maybe you’ve had this problem, too.

Maybe your life is familiar and comfortable… but maybe comfortable is also kind of awful. Maybe you’ve secretly dreamed of running a way to a cabin in the woods and hiding there forever (or at least until things seem less-awful).

Or maybe it’s just me.

But here’s the interesting thing — in the past year almost none of my circumstances have changed. I still have the same job. I still live in the same apartment in the same city.

Nothing has changed materially, and yet today I can say that for the most part I like my job and the city doesn’t really bother me — on good days I sometimes even like living here.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what made this shift possible. And the short answer is always that I did. I changed my relationship to myself, and in doing so I changed my relationship to my job, my life, and my city.

Sometimes it works this way — sometimes uncomfortable circumstances in our life are signposts guiding us to turn inward, to look toward some way in which we are unknowingly creating our own suffering.

And sometimes it’s the opposite — sometimes situations are toxic and we need to get out of them. Sometimes the discomfort is there to help us see that it really is time to move on from a situation in which we have been comfortable for too long.

The more I experience, the more certain I become that truth is always a paradox: do what is easiest, except for when the hardest thing is the right thing for you. Stay put unless it really is time to go. Leave, unless it is time to stay.

Unfortunately, this kind of truth is generally unhelpful — which is why learning to navigate the path to your happiness is ultimately about improving your ability to tell the difference between the loud voice of your fear and the quietest whisper of your heart.

So, with that in mind, here are a few things that have helped to guide me along the way.

The first thing is this: are you moving toward joy or away from discomfort?

I used to believe that moving away from discomfort was the same thing as moving toward joy — that if I reduced my discomfort, I would inevitably experience more joy.

In practice, this never worked out for me. My attempts to make my life more comfortable left me feeling imprisoned rather than free — and today, I no longer believe that this idea to be true.

Because the truth is that we manufacture a lot of our own discomfort.

We tell ourselves scary stories that turn benign situations into nightmares. We create rules about the kind of perfect person we are supposed to be that leave us feeling inadequate and crushingly alone. We are terrified of being vulnerable but angry that our lives are so lacking in meaningful human connection.

The problem is that it’s impossible to move away from the discomfort you create for yourself. If we want these things to change, we have to be the thing that changes.

Otherwise, we inevitably bring our story with us.

I hated my job, but if I’d moved on to a new job, I would have hated that too because the problem wasn’t with my job — it was with my story about what it meant to be a “good employee”.

My job was actually irrelevant — a distraction that I used to avoid facing what was really going on.

Which, again, isn’t to say that you should never move away from discomfort — because sometimes I really believe that you should. But be honest with yourself: are actively moving toward joy or are you just trying to dodge discomfort?

If you’re just trying to dodge discomfort, get really curious about that. What’s the source of your discomfort? Is it really your circumstances (and it might be!), or is it you or how you show up in those circumstances that is causing discomfort?

Because if the problem is really with you (your story, your habits, your mindset), you’re never going to fix it by changing your situation. You’re going to have to face inward and decide to change yourself.

And the second thing is this: what do you need to be okay?

Because sometimes the problem is outside of us, but a lot of the time we’re at least playing a partial role.

Sometimes your boss really is terrible or the situation really is unworkable. But it’s worth asking yourself the question: what do I need to be okay in this situation?

And maybe the answer will just be “LEAVE”, but maybe it won’t be. Maybe some voice inside will whisper that you could learn to set better boundaries, or improve at not taking on another person’s criticism as your own truth.

(Because it’s not the criticism that hurts, so much as the moment just after when we buy into what was said…)

It’s worth asking the question because it is in the asking and the listening that we reclaim our power.

It is in the asking and the listening that we reclaim our right to choose: to choose how we respond, how we show up, how we interact with others, and what we will do moving forward.

Because here’s something I deeply believe to be true: when we trust ourselves to take care of ourselves, even disasters can be handled.

When I trust myself to check-in with myself, to ask myself what I need to be okay, to listen and provide for myself my moments of need — when I trust myself to really do this, I find that it becomes increasingly hard to imagine situations in which I could not find a way to still be okay. There is tremendous freedom in that.

I believe that the definition of empowerment is trusting you to take care of you, over and over and over again.

And when I am able to live like this, suddenly getting out of my comfort zone doesn’t seem quite so scary anymore.

Much love,
Jessica

Bringing your body back into balance

Here are two things I know to be true.

First, things have been unusually hard for those of us here in the US since the inauguration of the Trump presidency. It seems like every time I look at the news there’s some fresh heartbreak splashed across the front page.

Second, the body’s natural response to fear is ultimately counterproductive in situations like this.

The highest priority of body and brain are to protect you from danger and remove you from stressful situations.

Unfortunately, there is no way to remove yourself from the situation of the Trump presidency.

For better or worse, we’re stuck with him for the time being. Which means that the brain, left to its own devices, will try and remove you from the situation not by changing your circumstances, but by removing your experience of those circumstances through numbing and apathy.

The problem with this approach is that there is no way to selectively numb the body or the emotions. They only way to stop ourselves from feeling the bad things is to stop ourselves from feeling everything. And if this happens to us, we begin to lose touch with our joys alongside our sorrows, and our lives become leached of their vibrancy and vitality.

My point is not that you shouldn’t be afraid — I personally think you should be at least a little bit afraid. Your fear is there to help you pay attention. Your nervous system has correctly identified a possible threat to your well-being.

The problem is that the Trump presidency isn’t an immediate and present danger you can physically fight or flee from. And when the body’s fear response is triggered in an ongoing way and the danger can’t be fought or fled, it has only two last-ditch responses: freeze or shut down altogether.

As we move forward we need to pay attention to our fear — but we also need to recognize that if our nervous systems remain highly activated in response to an ongoing situation, we’re going to end up feeling emotionally wrecked, physically ill, and possibly even traumatized.

Because when the body is locked in fight, flight, or freeze in response to fear it turns off a lot of key functions. When our fear-response is a short-lived response, a natural reaction to a passing danger this works beautifully. But in the presence of an ongoing threat, the system starts to break down.

The good news is that if we are conscious of what is happening in our brains and in our bodies we can take proactive action to protect ourselves from stress and to create a more productive response to fear.

We can begin to do this by noticing that the threat isn’t immediate and allowing ourselves to return to the safety of the present moment. Yes, the Trump presidency is awful and many heartbreaking things will probably come to pass in the next four years. And yet, for most of us, we are as safe today as we were six months ago. The worst has not yet come to pass.

So for now we can take refuge in the recognition of this fact. We come back to our body, to our breath, in this moment in which we are still safe.

This isn’t about hiding from what’s happening and it’s not about burying our heads in the sand. It’s about returning our bodies to balance so that we can be strong enough to continue to fight.

When we return to safety in the present moment, it allows the nervous system to relax. The fight or flight response eases, the body returns to a healthy equilibrium, and we become more resilient and able to take constructive action in the future.

My preferred technique for bringing equilibrium back to the body is meditation, which is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found for reconnecting with my body and engaging with the present moment.

But here’s the thing most people don’t tell you about meditation: it’s really freaking hard! It’s sort like the black-belt of mindfulness practices — highly-effective, but not necessarily for beginners. It took me years of off-and-on practice to really see a benefit from it.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, but sometimes it means it’s best to try a different approach. If you’ve tried meditation before and feel like you “can’t meditate” or you’ve benefited from meditation before but now find yourself struggling, here are a few simple things to try.

  • Focus on your heartbeat. I do this lying in bed at night sometimes when I’m having trouble sleeping. Just lie down flat on your back somewhere comfortable and put your hands over your heart and feel it’s steady thump-thump-thumping. I’m convinced there’s something primally comforting about the rhythm of a heartbeat left over from our time spent in the womb.
  • Try a guided body scan. This is a mindfulness exercise that is similar to meditation but gives the mind a task to latch onto — bringing the attention to the physical sensations in the body. You can find a ton of these on the internet, so feel free to google for one you like. If you’re new to the practice I recommend starting with a ~10-minute recording such as this one, which is technically intended to help you sleep but could be used any time.
  • Express yourself creatively. If you have a lot of stress and emotions flying about doing something creative can be really helpful. I’m a writer, so I turn to my journal for this, but you might try painting, coloring, dancing, singing — whatever you love to do, really.
  • Practice yoga. I really like yoga because it is fundamentally an embodied practice that unites body and breath. It can be particularly helpful in situations where you might be feeling too unsettled to relax easily into meditation. Yoga encourages the body to relax into movement and into the rhythm of the breath. If you’re looking for resources, Yoga With Adriene is my favorite way to practice these days.

As we slowly and persistently practice bringing our attention back into the physical sensations in the body and to an awareness of the present moment, we accomplish two important things. We learn to find a visceral experience of safety in the body in any moment which allows the activated nervous system to relax, and we increase our tolerance for experiencing uncomfortable sensations.

We begin to teach ourselves that fear or sadness or pain are just sensations we experience in our physical bodies in response to stimulus. A lot of the struggle we experience around these emotions is our own resistance to feeling what we’re feeling.

When my chronic pain flares, I make it worse by believing that pain is something “bad” and that I shouldn’t be feeling it. The truth is that pain is just a sensation — a hot, stabbing, fire in my nerves.

When I drop my story about it and just feel the sensation in the present moment, I learn something that is obvious, but easy to overlook: I’m always able to handle my pain; I’m always already doing it. In each moment, I’m already feeling the full intensity of the sensation and I’m still breathing — I’m still fundamentally okay.

When I remember this, I find the pain eases — the sensation might remain but my resistance to feeling it diminishes and the pain becomes easier to bear.

This is what I mean by returning to a felt-sense of safety in the present moment: I might be scared or hurting, but if I sit down with myself in the moment, I realize that I can feel these things and still be okay. In fact, I’m always already doing it.

I believe that being able to return to this felt-sense of safety, to being grounded in our bodies, and aware of the present moment is the foundation from which all courage is born.

When we learn to see that we are always already handling our difficulties in the present moment, it becomes easier to see how safe we really are, to see that “bad” things can happen, that we can be hurting, and still be fundamentally okay.

It is this belief in our own safety, even in difficult situations, that makes it possible to act in ways that require our courage — because courage always requires taking the risk that things will end badly.

The coming years are going to ask each of us to be as brave as we have ever been.

The courage that we will need starts here: it starts with paying attention to our fear, returning to our safety in the present moment, and helping ourselves feel safe from the inside out, so that we can show up in the world with all the courage as we can possibly muster.

Much love,
Jessica

One day, one hour, one breath at a time

Once again I find myself sitting before the blank page trying to find something helpful to say on a day when everything seems hard. I don’t know about you, but for me personally, it’s been a rough January.

I started off the year full of ideas and enthusiasm (as one does), and rapidly succumbed to a cold that I’m still fighting off traces of. But it hasn’t just been my health I’ve struggled with. It’s been hard to read the news, and last week it was hard to watch the Trump inauguration.

All of which combines to mean that I spent the first part of January mired in a haze of illness, exhaustion, and anxiety.

But I can’t help but suspect that maybe it’s been a hard month for you, too — if not for all the same reasons.

And if that’s true then I want you to know that you’re not alone, that it’s been hard for me too — and I want you to know that it gets easier.

Because this haze of exhausted anxiety is a feeling I’m familiar with; I’ve been here before.

So if this month has been hard for you and in the wake of the inauguration you’re feeling understandably anxious and fearful, here is the process I’ve been using to navigate difficult times.

Step One: Offer yourself compassionate witness

The first step in navigating any hard time is always to notice you’re having a hard time (I know this sounds silly, but bear with me). This can be as simple as offering yourself a thought like “Wow, I’m feeling really anxious right now”.

The point is to take a step outside of the direct experience of the feeling (“I am anxious”) to create space between you and the feeling (“I am experiencing anxiety”). In the first instance, anxious is what you are and in the second anxious is only a feeling that is happening to you.

This creates space which allows you to work with the emotion instead of being overrun by it.

So if you haven’t already, or if you’re presently feeling overwhelmed, take a moment to step back and notice exactly what it is that you’re feeling — and then notice that that feeling is simply a sensation that is happening to you right now.

And as you do that, offer whatever it is you may be feeling compassion. Don’t try to make it go away; don’t tell yourself that the feeling shouldn’t be there.

Just step outside of the feeling a little bit and notice its presence. That’s all you need to do right now.

Sometimes I like think of my feelings as unruly children who are seeking my attention, care, and affection. But feel free to choose any metaphor that works for you.

Step Two: Slow everything down

When I’m struggling I never have the same capacity to accomplish things as I usually do (be they grand visions or small mundane things like folding the laundry).

It’s important to understand and expect this because it allows you to give yourself permission to slow down.

When I forget to do this I invariably get lost in a shame-spiral that starts with letting things I’d meant to do slip, at which point I judge myself a “bad person” for not doing things I meant to do, and get mired in guilt and shame, which exacerbates my anxiety, which leaves me with even less energy, and causes things to slip even farther.

If you have this tendency too, then I invite you to skip the spiral. Start with permission to accomplish only as much as you have already accomplished (and, hey, some days that might be literally nothing if you’re really struggling).

I invite you to let being where you are be exactly enough.

I promise all those things that you’d planned to do will still be waiting for you when you’re feeling well enough to tackle them again — and, maybe more importantly, the world probably won’t have ended between now and then just because you didn’t get around to folding the laundry.

And anyway, I’ve found that somehow the truly critical stuff always manages to get done.

Step Three: Create a sense of safety

When you’re mired in a hard place, the journey to the other side begins with safety. It begins with creating a place where you can face into the storm while remaining anchored in an internal felt-sense of safety.

How exactly this sense of safety is created will depend on you and the storm you are facing.

Meditation and mindfulness practices are my favorite approach — I can face into mental or emotional turbulence while remaining anchored in the safety of the breath. But the effectiveness of this approach depends a lot on how well I am able to separate my sense of self from the immediate experience of whatever I am feeling — and how able I am to offer myself kindness and compassion instead of judgement.

If you feel like exploring this kind of approach, I particularly like the practice of RAIN which meditation teacher Tara Brach describes here.

Beyond meditation, other ways that you may be able to face into the reality of your experience from within a safe container include confiding in a journal, expressing yourself in any sort of creative activity, going for a walk, taking a bath, or rolling yourself up in a blanket. Sometimes working with a guided meditation can also help you create a safe space for yourself.

Feel free to experiment and get creative here and, if you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, there’s no shame in asking for help.

A really important note: if you are really struggling or dealing with any sort of unresolved trauma you may be so caught in your experience you are unable to separate from the emotional experience without the presence of another person to hold safe space for you.

If this is true for you, then please don’t pressure yourself to keep trying — if you can’t confront your feelings while staying rooted in a sense of safety then it is kinder to seek the help of someone who can hold a safe space for you while you navigate the issue. Depending on your situation, this person might be a trusted friend, a therapist, or a coach. If you feel like this might be true for you I’m always happy to talk with you and help you find the help you need, you can contact me here.

Step Four: Have patience with the process

This process isn’t a miracle cure (I wish it was, but it’s not). There’s no straight line from suffering to peace… it’s never going to be once-and-done.

You’re going to continue to struggle. You’re going to have good days and bad. You’re going to have days where it feels like you’re right smack back where you started.

You’re going to need to have patience and trust the process.

You’re going to need to trust that by offering yourself compassionate witness in the murkiest depths of your struggle and by calmly, gently, kindly turning inward to face the storm, that strength and courage will ultimately prevail.

This process isn’t magic. It’s hard and gritty and it usually takes longer than you’d like.

And when you’re in the middle it can be deeply, profoundly uncomfortable because the ego likes guarantees and it wants a promise that things are going to get better. But in the middle of a profound transformation everything feels uncertain and nothing feels like a guarantee.

But the truth is that this is okay, too. You don’t need to be comfortable if you just keep gently nudging yourself toward facing into the truth.

Just take it one day, one hour, one breath at a time.

Much love,
Jessica