Wow. Big time WOW.

I was re-reading posts from 2018 today. I wrote some amazing stuff and made some incredible growth in myself. However, all of that work is on lock down and you won’t see it. Why?

Because it often references my past relationship, and it’s still affecting me. His name is in it. I don’t want it still bug me, but it does. It’s been two years since we split this month. I would like to imagine there is ZERO left to process, but that’s a lie. When things remind me of him I turn away. I ignore, I move on, I turn the page, I do anything to AVOID. There are many trigger images, words, events, sounds, scents, calendar dates that bring up that energy and for the last two years I have just pretended they weren’t happening. That’s not sustainable.

I’m taking a class this year called Reclamation, a class led by the same woman that does Holiday Council which I’ve done with her for 5 years. I can feel already that this is going to be a year of dragging out the shadows I haven’t wanted to acknowledge out into the light so I can actually process them.

BUT I DON’T WANNA.

I know it’s going to be okay, though. I know I am in the emotional space to actually process them now. I’ll be okay. I have support. I do have to say, I did deal with a lot of it while doing my house. But the work on processing that trauma halted there. When the bathroom was done I rolled those thoughts up and stuffed them in the attic of my brain.

I often look back on pictures of my house, Lucy, when I need to remind myself of how far I’ve come. The picture above is what my kitchen looked like in June 2019. The bathroom before was so harrowing…but I can sort of face it. Isn’t that funny? The bathroom, the archetypal room of the home that represents nakedness, bowels, sex, cleanliness and purity, is the room I can’t really look at before pictures of. I don’t want to remember the me before it was done. I can look at what it looked like when I bought it. But looking at what it looked like after I did deconstruction is hard to take.

Again, these are obvious shadows I have to process.

My class starts in a little over a week, and I know that this is partially what I’ll be working through in 2021. But I also know that life isn’t only the shitty stuff.

The shitty stuff and the joyful stuff are happening simultaneously, all the time, every single minute of every single day. Non-stop. Unrelentingly life just keeps doing life, the joy and the pain. It is literally up to each of us to focus on the good stuff. Because damn. We all know there’s a lot of horror and pain out there. But what makes you feel good to think about? It’s not slacking, I promise, to think about the joyful things.

I think this is what people mean when they talk about being mindful. It’s a great practice to sink into our breath, or to notice what our body feels like, or to drink a glass of water and fully experience how it feels to drink it. The glass on our lips, the cold perfection of the water, the way it hits the back of our throats and we swallow.

Just for a moment, step away from the joy or the pain right now and just notice. They are two sides of the same thing-they are just life. They are the miraculous evidence that you are living.

Promise me you’ll pause and notice.

Namaste.