Home » Healing

Tag: Healing

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.

Choosing to stay with the struggle

Here’s an often unwelcome, but ultimately unavoidable truth: sometimes life is just hard.

I feel like 2017 more than other years has been a hard year for me — as evidenced by the fact that I’ve barely written anything for this blog. But in some ways I can see that 2017, more than other years, has also been a really good year for me.

Yes, my health has been fragile at best and, yes, the daily news cycle has trampled my heart 3,000x over. But I’ve also mostly managed to stay reasonably cheerful and engaged in the face of adversity.

In some ways I consider this to have been my greatest triumph for 2017.

That life fell apart a bit and I didn’t spiral down into the depths of despair. That, slowly but surely, I’m learning to surf life’s sneaker waves instead of being bowled over by them.

Which isn’t to say that I never have days when everything seems like a mess and I can’t keep my tears to myself — because 2017 has definitely been enough to bring me to my knees from time to time. It’s just that the hard stuff hasn’t been what defines my experience.

I firmly believe that living this way is possible for all of us.

There’s no magic to it — and at the same time it’s still the most magical thing I know.

The secret is as simple as this: to the best of our ability, we choose to stay with the struggle.

This is a lesson I first learned on the meditation cushion, a lesson I first learned working with physical discomfort as chronic back pain often turned a simple meditation practice into an exercise in working with agony.

Sticking with the practice despite the discomfort turned out to be a useful training, even if I did not fully appreciate its value at the time.

The truth is that life is uncomfortable.

Reading the news breaks our hearts each morning. Disasters, big and small, plague our existence. We lose the people we love, we give our hearts away and have them thrown back in our face, we put everything we have into our dreams and fail anyway.

This truth is the very nature of what it means to be alive and human.

The only thing we get to control is our response to difficult circumstances.

Do we numb out and stuff our feelings down deep inside of us so that we don’t have to experience our own discomfort?

Do we lash out and blame others, pointing the finger anywhere but here, certain that our pain must be someone else’s fault?

Do we run — fleeing the job, the city, the marriage certain that if only we found the right job, city, or relationship that it would ease our discomfort and finally make us happy?

The truth, as best I know it, is that none of these strategies ever really work.

We can’t numb away our discomfort without numbing away our joy.

Blaming others brings no lasting peace because a part of the problem still in some way lies with us.

Running brings no escape because our demons follow us wherever we might flee.

The truth, as best I know it, is that lasting freedom comes only when we choose to stay with the discomfort, when we choose to stay with the struggle.

If I could wish one thing for you, it would be this: that you might have the strength and the courage to not abandon yourself in your moments of distress.

I believe that choosing to stay with yourself through the agonies of physical pain, illness, heartbreak, terror, or shame is the kindest thing you could ever do for yourself.

I believe that choosing to stay with ourselves through the storm is at its very essence the way we reclaim our true power.

Because when we practice living this way we develop the ingredients necessary for courage.

We develop the willingness to acknowledge that we are struggling, without judgement about whether or not it is reasonable for us to struggle.

We develop the capacity to engage with our difficult emotions instead of hiding, blaming, or running — to instead hold space for our struggle, to breathe with our difficulties, and to remember what it is to struggle and at the very same moment to feel safe.

We develop the capacity to bring our own kind attention to our hurts, to our heartbreaks, to our unmet needs. And in doing so, we learn that our own kind attention is the most basic ingredient of true healing.

We learn to engage with our struggle instead of trying desperately to escape from it and in doing so we develop the readiness, the skills we need to stand directly in the face of life’s fiercest winds and roughest seas and stand rooted in ourselves and ready — not to flee — but to transmute fear into aliveness as we laugh into the wind and the rain streams like tears down our cheeks.

It is my belief that this knowing is the essence of freedom and that, if you stand ready to face life’s fiercest storms, you stand ready for anything — awake, and alive, and firmly rooted in your power.

This is my wish for you.

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. If this post resonates with you but you aren’t quite sure how to really apply it, I’d like to invite you to consider the option of private coaching with me. While the concepts that lead us to freedom are in some sense universal, the barriers are often very individual and working privately with a coach can be the most effective way to overcome your unique barriers and see real results. If this interests you, click here to schedule a free conversation with me and learn more about what I offer my private clients.

The breakdown is also the breakthrough

Years ago at a college party someone remarked to me that drunk people walk like this: fine, fine, fine, fine — oh sh*t, falling. Parties were really never my scene, but that image stuck with me and I remember it to this day because it seemed like a really good metaphor.

I think for a lot of us life goes something like this: fine, fine, fine, fine — oh sh*t, falling apart.

I know it goes this way for me sometimes.

Sometimes that’s just the way things are. Sometimes life is unexpected and hard and we didn’t want it to be this way and then suddenly it is and we’re falling apart. Sometimes it’s all beyond our control.

But sometimes I think there’s something else at play — sometimes I think it’s the same for us as it is for the drunk person: we’re trying so hard to prove something (that we’re doing okay, that we’ve got this, that we’re fine, no really) that we don’t see our downfall coming until we’re landing on our face.

The truth is that pretending works for a while — right up to the point where I start to feel a just a little more confident, start to think that maybe this time I’m going to get away with it… And then it catches up with me and I trip spectacularly over how not-okay I’ve been all along.

I’ve been thinking about this recently in the context of chronic pain (but the lesson applies more generally) — because about a month ago I spent a week walking in Wales with a friend and experienced seven glorious, pain-free days and because my back wasn’t hurting and I was tired from walking, I actually slept. Which is to say that by the end of the week I actually felt kind of amazing.

It’s been a very long time since I felt amazing. So long that I had mostly forgotten what amazing feels like.

And then I came back to Boston and my back started hurting and I stopped sleeping well (the two go together for me), and all of a sudden there I was: tripping over how not-okay I was and fraying apart at my edges.

I’m not even sure that the last four weeks have been worse than “normal” — I think maybe it’s just me that’s changed. Because I’d forgotten what it was like to feel good, until suddenly I did.

In the end it doesn’t matter: the truth is simply that I am in need of a new “normal”, that I am no longer willing to push on as I have been.

Somewhere in the last four weeks my strength for fighting through being in pain ran out. All of my toughness disappeared on me.

This is what the breakdown looks like.

It’s not always loud and messy and tear-soaked. Sometimes it’s quiet and gentle.

But here’s the thing: I’ve fallen down and out and over enough times now to know that the breakdown can also be a really, really good thing.

Because reaching the end of your rope is always immediately and immensely clarifying.

You thought you still had some wiggle room, but then suddenly there it is: the end of your pretending leaves you with nowhere left to hide from your truth.

It’s terrifying and terrific: the breakdown is also the breakthrough. Or at least it can be if we’re willing to let it be both.

I used to be so afraid of falling apart that I never learned how to let the breakdown become the breakthrough. Whenever I felt myself falling apart, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I held on to anything I could reach as tightly as I could, to try and keep the pieces of myself together.

But in order to get to the breakthrough we have to stop pretending.

We have to hit the bottom and let ourselves shatter a little.

We have to stop to take a really good look around, instead of immediately getting up and heading on our way — hoping that no one noticed our stumble.

The breakthrough demands our curiosity, our willingness to linger, to take stock of what hurts and what’s broken and what are we no longer willing to put back together.

What is true for me today is this: I am no longer willing to be tough on pain.

What is true for you will inevitably be different. Your breakdown and your breakthrough are yours, and yours alone.

But you’ll know when you’ve found the truth you’re looking for because it will land in your body with a thump, an almost-visceral sensation that lies somewhere between a punch to the gut and an enormous sigh of relief.

And if you thought that getting to this knowing was the hard part, I have unfortunate news for you. The truth is that knowing is only the first step that makes the journey possible.

Insight without action is really just another form of hiding. And (because the truth is always a paradox…) there’s really nothing wrong with hiding.

It’s okay to be not-ready.

Just be honest with yourself that not-ready is where you’re at. Say: not today, but maybe someday — and let yourself sit with that.

Someday you’re going to be ready and, when you are, you’ll get to face the scariest part: the part where you take your knowing and you use it to reshape your life around some new principle you’ve never lived by before.

For me, today, that new principle is this: I want to be soft with pain. Wherever pain shows up I want to meet it with gentleness.

None of this will be easy. Change never is.

Our lives aren’t designed to accommodate the messiness of our human needs. 

To be soft with pain I’ll have to make changes at work and at home, I’ll have to have uncomfortable conversations with managers and untangle old habits to make space for new ways of being.

Being soft on pain demands that where pain shows up I will pull up a chair and give pain its very own seat at my table. It demands that I carve out new spaces in my life, to make room for pain to be present and to allow pain to have whatever it needs.

And the very worst part: I have no idea if any of this will be “worth it”. I have no guarantee that any of this will “work”.

After seven years of chronic pain, I live perpetually in a state of both really believing that not feeling this way is possible, and not really believing that any particular change will be the one that finally makes a difference. (I keep making them anyway, because you really never know…)

But what I do know is that I’m tired of fighting with pain and I can choose to put my weapons down.

The pain may or may not go away — but I can choose today to end the war.

Because today I am willing to admit that sometimes our strength lies not in our toughness but in our softness. In our willingness to lay down our arms and let what is true for us right now matter more than any story we might have about who, what, or how we are supposed to be.

At the end of the day, this is always the real breakthrough: the moment we choose to end our war with reality and turn instead toward allowing what is to shape us into the people we are ready to become.

Much love,
Jessica

You don’t have to be fierce to be strong

I’ve been thinking a lot about courage and strength the past few weeks. Like many of you, I’ve felt called to step outside of my comfort zone in new ways — in forms ranging from contacting my congressional representatives to beginning work on a new ebook.

I used to have a really narrow definition of courage and strength: a definition in which both of those things revolved around fierceness and speaking up and striving.

But this isn’t the kind of courage and strength I’ve felt called to lately — instead, I’ve looking toward a quieter, gentler kind of strength.

A strength that endures instead of burning out in a fiery blast of fierceness.

This kind of strength seems different to me — it is equal parts fierceness and kindness, strong but also gentle.

This kind of strength checks in to notice how I am doing.

When I am tired, this strength listens and rests. It doesn’t push me beyond my own limits, it doesn’t tell me that I have to finish, that the work isn’t done, or that I have to keep going.

This strength puts me to bed when I am tired and feeds me when I am hungry and it asks me to take a break and move my body when I am stiff and aching from too many hours at the computer.

This strength wakes me up in the mornings and chooses to take time for my meditation because it knows that I am stronger when I dedicate some time to calming myself, to noticing my thoughts and feelings, to offering myself my own attention and dusting out the cobwebs so that the light can shine through.

This strength knows what I myself have long struggled with: that a life is more than just the sum-total of words written or Senators called. That a life is ultimately a taking-care, an act of devotion to the needs and desires of a single human body bearing a single human soul.

This strength knows that both body and soul require nourishment if they are to remain healthy — that the heart can be strong only when the body that carries it is not aching with hunger, pain, or exhaustion.

And finally I have come to a place from which I cannot see these things as anything other than what they are: the necessary things that strengthen me.

This taking-care is not a frivolous waste of time that could be dedicated to more important activities.

These are the more important activities.

Not because the other things are not important — but because without taking time for the things that strengthen me, my fierceness will burn out and when I am nothing but ash I will have nothing left to offer to anyone else.

So I’m going to say it again: You don’t need to be fierce to be strong.

A fire is fierce and strong but it burns its fuel and dies.

A tree is not fierce, but it is strong, and it may survive hundreds or even thousands of years.

Always in the past I have been the fire, burning out and then healing and rising again from my own ashes. But this time I wish to endure — to be more like the tree.

I think that now more than ever we’re going to need this new (to me) kind of strength — a strength that endures instead of burning out. A strength that takes punches and keeps going. A strength that can see through dark days without losing faith.

Because I’m sitting here with my eyes wide open. I’ve been reading the news. I see what we’re facing. But I want to believe there’s a possibility for goodness to be born here, that there is possibility that those of us who (like my favorite sign from the Women’s March) went to sleep on November 8th, 2016 Democrats and woke up Activists.

I believe that where we were asleep now we might choose to be awake. And that in our awakening we might be strong enough to change everything.

But it starts here.

It starts with us and our strength — not the fiery fierce kind that burns but the gentle, enduring kind that’s capable of standing, not just for a day, or a month, or four years — but the kind that might support us for the rest of our lives.

This kind of courage and strength starts with us.

It starts with each of us opening our hearts to what is present: our fears, our anxieties, our needs. It starts with each of us meeting ourselves with kindness: soothing our fears, quieting our anxieties, and tending to our needs so that we are strong enough to show up day after day after day — not just for ourselves, but for ourselves first and then for everyone around us.

Because where we were a nation divided, we will need to be a nation united. And I don’t know how exactly we get there, but it starts with each of us opening our hearts to what is present: the fears of those who are “other”, the anxieties that keep people awake at night, the needs of those who are different than us.

And so the question I want to leave you with is this: what will you seek to create in the coming days, months, and years?

Because this kind of strength doesn’t feed on fear, it feeds on the possibility that even darkness can be transmuted into light — if only enough people are willing to open their hearts and take a stand.

This is one those moments when we all have to choose: not just how we will fight, but how we will heal.

We get to decide what new goodness we will bring into the world to meet the ugliness around us — so that this might not just be an ending but also a new beginning.

Much love,
Jessica

Healing has its own timeline

As I’ve been watching the seasons change here in Boston, I’ve found myself unexpectedly at odds with the Earth’s natural rhythm: as the world slips into the dark winter months, my energy finally seems to be returning.

I feel hesitant to say such things out loud because this isn’t the first time I’ve hoped I was recovering only to find myself slipping back into familiar lassitude.

And yet, here I am again, quietly announcing that this time I hope it’s true.

You might think that after however many months (has it been four or five now? I’ve lost count…), I’d be used to the slowness with which this healing has proceeded, but it’s still so easy to trip over my own impatience.

I’ll have a really great day where I feel amazing and get a lot done… and then I’ll spend the next three days recovering.

But here’s the thing: this is just what healing looks like.

As much as I wish that healing was a straight line from unwell to well, a steady climb from rock-bottom to dazzling new heights, the reality of it seems to be that healing looks more like a rambling mountain road filled with unexpected twists, sudden turns, and jarring bumps.

And, just like when driving that winding road, it is easy to get frustrated.

It is easy to feel that after months of malaise there hasn’t been any real progress. But if I take the long view — if I compare where I am now to where I was three months ago, or twelve — it becomes easy to see how different things are now from how they were then.

I think that the changing season serves as a really good metaphor for how change proceeds in our lives. I can predict the first snow of winter no better than I can pin the day on the calendar when I’ll be “better” or “ready” or “healed”.

As much as my mind might wish to do so, there’s no line to be drawn in the sand — no well-defined boundary to cross between “when I was there” and “now that I’m here”.

At the change of the seasons, the weather is often volatile and contrary — a dizzying tour of hot, then cold, then hot again. And yet, there’s an underlying trend: summer’s heat yields inevitably to winter’s cold, and eventually cold will yield to warmth again. But the exact progression of days and temperatures that will lead us from here to there is impossible to guess.

I’m increasingly convinced that all change proceeds like this: a dizzying tumult of ups and downs, that mixes us up until we’re not quite sure how far we’ve come or how far we’ve yet to go. A series of largely-random fluctuations that catches us so off-guard it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

And my mind hates this.

My mind hates being unable to predict, because what I cannot predict I cannot control, and what I cannot control seems dangerous.

My mind wants to say that if I cannot predict when I will be well again then there is no way to know I will ever be well. And yet when I look at the trend over the past few months, it remains clear to me that I am getting better.

And here’s another truth: it’s when I let my fear run away with me and forget to trust the process that I trip myself up.

When anxiety wins I stop listening to the needs of my body, I overdo things, I relapse.

When anxiety wins I lose patience, I become unable to remember all the reasons there are to hope, all the evidence I can see pointing to signs of improvement.

When anxiety wins I slip back to where I was a month ago, or two — I slip back until I fall into something familiar. A pattern, a rhythm, a habit that I recognize because we’re old friends now: I spent my summer becoming intimately acquainted with their shape and heft.

And so now when anxiety wins I slip back, but in backsliding I find myself once again on solid ground. Familiar, well-worn ground I’ve walked four dozen times before.

When you think about it, it’s almost magic: the process itself catches me.

Over and over I return to where I began and each time it gets easier to crack the puzzle because I’ve practiced this now. This place is familiar but time has moved on and I’m not the same person I was the first time I landed here.

The more times this happens, the more I trust myself to hit the bottom and rise up again.

It is this trust that offers us real freedom, I think. When rock bottom is something we fear hitting, fear holds us prisoner. It becomes impossible to do anything that might trigger any sign of collapse for fear it might grow into an inescapable, all-consuming collapse.

When fear holds us prisoner, we inevitably find ourselves unable to risk anything at all.

But when we trust in our own ability to bottom out and pick ourselves back up and try again, the paths that used to seem too risky might begin to seem more enticing.

And if we can learn to navigate the dark days with kindness, with awareness, with compassion and gentleness — then we can learn to bring these qualities to the bright days, too — and ultimately everything gets better.

So if you’re muddling through a dark time right now, I’d encourage you to make friends with the process. Learn how to comfort yourself through the dark times.

Because falling apart is inevitable. 

No matter how much we try to control things, no matter how hard we work to protect ourselves — our hearts will always be vulnerable to life’s bumps and bruises.

But if you can learn to greet the dark days with gentle curiosity instead of fear or anger, if you can learn to comfort yourself with compassion instead of beating yourself up with self-judgement — then I really believe that you can do anything.

Much love,
Jessica