hey, sweetie
On allowing love.
The Top 5 Positive Affirmations for Women
You roll out of bed and it’s early. Everyday it feels too early.
Brush your teeth, examine your face in the mirror with pink pillow line indents still migrating on your cheeks, and you shuffle into your clothes. Is there coffee? Maybe. Or perhaps just green tea this morning because you’re trying to be healthy. Out the door and off you go.
What’s missing, gals?
What is your intention for the day? Have to offered your next 12 hours any direction . . . like fruitful and bountiful thoughts? Or are you on autopilot to just take whatever comes? Let’s fix that. I know I don’t talk enough about affirmations, but they are one of the most important intention-setting aspects of your day.
I always see you loving yourself last
I always see you loving yourself last.
Why are you doing that? Loving yourself last, I mean. Who taught you that? It’s terrible. Stop doing it. Stop it so your own kids won’t learn that from you.
Oh someone told you that good people put themselves last? Do unto others before you do unto you?
You ever see those old Looney Tunes Chip and Dale cartoons?
The two chipmunks are so over-giving (“You first. No you first!”) that neither of them gets anything. They can’t receive. It’s a lose-lose. And we laugh at it since we get it so deeply somehow.
And forget that stuff about being a saintly martyr. You aren’t a martyr because you like it. You hate it. It boils your blood and makes you feel lonely and righteous. These are horrible feelings.
You put yourself last because you’re scared, baby. You’re scared that if you put yourself first, all those delicate relationships around you will get rocked. You think your family will suffer, your friends will call you braggy, and your boss will wonder why you’re no longer a team player.
You think that if you shine, and give yourself what you need first, you’ll be a selfish little pisspot like all those other selfish little pisspots you see and hate out there. Self-serving bitches.
Except, you could never be that. You don’t ever need to fear that.
Mining the dark
How to stop feeling stuck and learn what slow periods in your life really mean.
Sword of Damocles
Caution: This is a morbid yet strangely happy post. It’s a weird post for me. It’s for all of you who are fogged out in the stressed-out “just getting by” zone, and for those of you who are just depressed as all hell. I have words about this. Read on.
I just got my second clear MRI. No cancer.
MRIs suck. It’s not the needle in your arm, the cold medicine injected up your veins, the tight white sterile tube you’re sucked in, or the grinding, deafening sounds that rip through your body. That’s all fine.
It’s the wondering what they see. And that you have to wait. And that those pains I have might go unexplained, which is better than if they DO get explained . . . as cancer.
I rose up high in relief for an evening after my doctor emailed me that they saw nothing. Year 3. You got more time, Sum.
My peyote healing
We sit in a teepee.
It’s moist and chilly. I had to drive down the mountain from the coast at 4 a.m. this morning so I could meet the elders as they broke for their morning fast.
At 5 a.m., they opened the teepee flap and Native Americans emerged. They all wore jeans and t-shirts (mostly). I felt my preconceptions crack.
I’m at my aunt’s house sipping badly flavored vanilla coffee before dawn and I’ve just been diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer a few days before, and I’m watching a bunch of Indians groggily exit a two-story-tall teepee on the edge of her property. Sur. Real.
It’s only been a week since my doctor called with those words you never want to hear: It’s cancer.
No, really, stop, I’m only 43. This isn’t supposed to happen for another 30 years. I’m right in the middle of shit. I have two kids in grade school. You can’t be serious.
And now, the sun has just woken and I’m entering a tent overfull with men, women, and kids who’ve all been awake all night – healing, connecting, and doing something I can’t put my finger on. Frankly, I’m too aware of myself to see what’s really going on. I’m a foreign intruder with my old aunt, mom, and uncle in tow, all entering someone else’s sacred circle because we own their land. How can it get worse? Which means in my heart, I’m feeling it’s still all about me, although soon it will be all about them and I will just have to catch up to that.
My aunt bought her house on what she discovered was Native American land – traditional land for celebrating and connecting. Years ago, some tribespeople approached her and asked if they could still celebrate on her land. Of course, yes (embarrassed that I own your land). So every month or two, a big teepee and picnic tables and Porta Potties appear, and an all-night ritual commences to connect us to the stars.
My aunt was blessed, right?
She called the tribe when she learned I was diagnosed. They said yes we’ll take your niece. Come before dawn.
