Mind, Body, and Soul...
I sat down feeling like I’ve had so much to write about, and when I got here I was met with a full blown moment of imposter syndrome. Second guessing my right to share my experiences; wondering who even cares, what makes me important or special enough. Then, I said a little prayer asking for whatever wants to come through, to do so. And it suddenly became amazingly hilarious that anyone would ever feel like they’re not allowed to express themselves or share their experiences, especially when the motivation for doing so is to help give permission to others to do the same thing.
Our social conditioning is so weird. I’ll just leave that there.
What I’ve been thinking about is how I’ve been over here, being pregnant, and going through probably the most transformational time in my whole life. I’m not a newbie to practicing self-work and healing, either, so that’s saying something. I was trying to narrow down what the theme of my growth has been and one word came to mind: nourishment.
Mmmm. The word nourishment just feels perfect. It’s got depth and warmth and peace in it. It feels rich and true and all encompassing of what I’ve moved out of my life and what I’ve filled those spaces with. Interestingly, this month marks the year mark of my “retirement” from working in restaurants and, I really haven’t worked in a regular sense of the word for the last year.
Not working a regular job was something I felt both excited about and I also held a lot of judgment around. It made me feel weird to be dependent on my partner to support us both. I’d grown up with a mother who, to this day, taught that I should never allow that kind of vulnerability with a man because it was dangerous. The power dynamic would be off and it would leave me at the whims and wishes of my “master”. I took that advice seriously my whole life, getting a job when I was 15 and working the 5:45 am opening shifts at Starbucks before school and on weekends (around my volleyball team’s schedule of course). I’ve always had a very strong work ethic and prided myself on it.
So to quit a job and not have another one lined up, and with the intention to actually take some time off and just be…whew. Scary.
Reflecting on it now, it makes me smile because, while it was unplanned, I’ve spent the last 9 months doing the most important job I’ve ever done. Being a vessel that would support the growth of another human AND doing the work on myself - both physically and emotionally- so that I could be the very best vessel I could be.
Knowing myself, it would have been my first instinct to have continued to work a job and power through all the different phases and symptoms of pregnancy. Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with that inherently, but for me-as it turns out-I am endlessly grateful to have had the space for this to be my job. My job has been to grow this little human and the side effect of that has been this deeper journey into myself to uncover values and actually live them, to find new parameters within which I want to live (and actually do that), and discover a whole new space I’m fascinated by and find myself passionately driven to learn more about, making connections to knowledge I already held, and feeling this excitement about life I didn’t know before.
Back to that feeling of imposter syndrome and fear about writing this. I feel like a lot of what I’ve done this last year, my plans for birth, and the life I’m building are a little bit outside of the box and, in fairness, not exactly how I’ve always showed up. I’m not unfamiliar with feeling like I’m “doing it weird”, I’ve kind of felt like that my whole life, truthfully! But I feel like I’m being more open about it than before and that’s a little scary. And, it’s part of the growth I’ve been talking about. Even though I feel afraid of being judged as being a crunchy weirdo, woo-woo, hippie (amongst other things), it feels good and aligned, finally, to just show up as myself and stop trying so hard to fit into everyone’s expectation of me.
So, while for some people it works for them (and are celebrated for) to work a hundred hours/week, to go along with the social norms accepting whatever the main narrative is, buy a tent trailer and live life for a couple of weeks off every year, that’s not what I want my life to be.
I’m working on changing my internal narrative to instead of having a “productive day” to having a “nourishing day”. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not there all the time. I still have plenty of moments where I feel like I haven’t done enough, I haven’t contributed enough or anything along those lines. But the more I work on this for myself, and appreciate what it feels like to actually be in touch with my own body, my own intuition, and know what it is to truly feel good and happy and content, the more it feels like this is the kind of life I want.
I witness (and have been on the receiving end of judgement about this) in our culture an assumption that if a woman isn’t working in a traditional sense that she’s going backwards or against feminism. Or that she’s lazy, a gold digger, un-ambitious, lost, etc. I still carry around some of these judgements and am actively working on undoing them because they are not truths, they are conditioning. There’s a reverence for the woman who “does it all” and comparison that shows up in comments like, “when I was x-amount months pregnant I was still doing___________.”
Again, if that’s what works for you, hey, I’m all for it. I’m simply suggesting taking a closer look and asking if that’s truly what you want to be doing, or if there’s some other motivation for it.
What I’ve found for myself is that I’m finding so much joy and fulfillment in all these acts of nourishment. Upon becoming pregnant, one of my first concerns was about how I could best nourish my growing baby. I didn’t know shit! Few women know anything about pregnancy and how it works prior to actually becoming pregnant (that’s a different rant for another time) and there’s a steep learning curve made even more challenging by the fact that there is so much conflicting information about “best practices”.
So I started to dig, and read, and listen, and observe. I rode all the waves of hormones and felt completely powerless and like a failure sometimes, and powerful, divine and in control other times. The more I learned, the more I discovered my own power and voice in what was going on. I figured out what kinds of content, sustenance, and energies I wanted around me. And, because I also have a strong sense of wanting to protect and nurture my baby, the boundaries aren’t hard to set, or to hold. My pre-pregnancy people pleaser self has been laid to rest, my friends. And from there has birthed a new version of myself I always wanted to have access to, but didn’t know how to.
Learning how to properly nourish the self is, inherently, subjective so please keep that in mind reading this. There’s also a lot of trail and error. My journey of moving more and more inwards isn’t going to be for everyone. My desire to connect more deeply with nature and with my own body and spirit, to step away from the main narratives about what’s “right” or “acceptable” in our society and just to question it. Asking, does this work for me? Does this feel aligned for me and the life I want to lead? While the more I open my eyes and look around at how things, supposedly, “work” in the world, I see so many problems, it’s not my job to judge or condemn anything. (I can get judgey sometimes, I admit). It’s my job to peel things apart and make a personal choice for what I subscribe to and what I say “no thank you” to, that’s all.
I hope that by living in alignment with myself and by allowing the expansion and growth that inevitably happens by doing so, I’ll inspire others to get honest with themselves too. We all have the right to live vibrant, interesting lives! Lives where our nervous systems aren’t stressed so deeply that we need medications to keep anxieties at bay. Lives where we have the mental space to look up and around and delight in simplest of things, even just for a moment. Lives where we aren’t walking around on edge, feeling personally offended by others and feeling the need to engage in fights (that don’t accomplish anything positive) with strangers. Anyways, I digress.
Flipping the script doesn’t happen overnight, it happens with making small different choices every day. Little changes that feel good to you will compound over time and eventually you’ll look around and not even recognize your life anymore. If you feel a niggling, even just a little one, that something isn’t quite feeling great to you, I am sending so much love and encouragement as you begin taking steps to nourishing you Self! As always, reach out anytime. xx