In particular, I’ve been thinking about how to even conceive of what is possible in that partnership when you don’t have any real-life role models for it what it looks like to unconditionally love, support, and nourish ourselves.

I know how it feels to abandon myself — to extract my energy without a care to my own replenishment, to muscle through, to ignore my body until it begs for my attention, to say yes when I want to say no, to overpromise and overdeliver. If feels like nothing. It feels like a void. A brain in space, highly focused on what is expected, desired, or demanded of me. It feels like no concept of where my body ends or the rest of the world around me begins.

There is no moisturizer in self-abandonment. Or daily vitamins. Moving my body is an unnecessary time-suck here, and is continually pushed to next week’s agenda. In self-abandonment needs are problems that I don’t have time for, and, thus, must be avoided.

I know that if I am not attentive to the warning signs, I slip into this mode of operating like a second skin.

In some ways it is easy here. I know the lay of the land. Ignoring my body enables me to be so much more productive. The more productive I am, the more external validation I receive. In other ways, it is excruciating to be a brain without a body, a mind on a mission with no time to tend to myself.

I know how easily it happens. The late nights. The promises. The heightened sense of responsibility. The delicious afterglow of a moment of praise that quickly fades and kicks me in to hyperdrive, hungry for another.

My body of work, both personally and professionally, is to bridge the gap from self-abandonment to self-partnership.

You may not identify with self-abandonment, even as you are routinely dehydrated, holding out getting up to pee as a reward for scratching just one more thing off of your to-do list, or saving your expensive body oil for a “special occasion”, only to have it inevitably go rancid in your bathroom cabinet.

You may not identify with self-abandonment, because you do not have role models for what it looks like to prioritize the actions that nourish and support you on a daily basis. This wasn’t a conversation that was happening around the kitchen table when you were a kid.

Self-abandonment cycles through generations, supported by familial lore and belief systems around what it means to work hard and be seen as a good, valuable, and worthy human being. These belief systems are powerful guiding forces, which is why learning how to partner with yourself requires more than bath bombs and buying a bouquet of flowers. Because of the collective lack of conversation around having and tending to our needs, you too often interpret the presence of your yearning as further evidence of your unworthiness.

But, the presence of your needs is a fact and not a flaw. This isn’t a conversation to have with yourself all alone while you cry in the bathroom between meetings or after everyone in your house is asleep. This is work that begs for the kind of conversation and witnessing that is best done in a community of like-minded humans.

This is what we do here, in these emails and in my classes and workshops.

Anything other than a full embrace of your inherent neediness is self-abandonment. Bypassing or ignoring your needs is an abdication of your role of tender steward and sovereign leader of your own life. When your needs are lovingly attended to, something profound inside of you shifts. With time, this tending heals the part of you that has been held at arm’s length or avoided altogether.

In “When it Don’t Come Easy,” Patty Griffin sang:

But if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy

This week, these lyrics are my role model for unconditional self-partnership.

If you break down, I will drive out and find you. If you forget my love, I will try to remind you. I will stay by you, even when it doesn’t come easily.

I will whisper those words to myself, a vow to embrace my wholeness.

I wanted to share them with you, in case you could use a guiding light right now, too.

How you are you feeling today, really?

(Chetna Mehta created this excellent feelings wheel to get you started if you need it.)

Can you take a moment to put your hand on your heart and ask?

Can you resolve to truly listen — even when you don’t hear what you expect to hear or when you feel overwhelmed by the swirling mix of feelings inside of your body?

As the feelings come forth, can you ask them what they need from you?

You might be surprised by what you hear: A walk outside. A chocolate sundae. A hug. A shower. A dance party. Banana bread. To climb back into bed and watch Gilmore Girls. Nothing, go away. To sit down for a minute.

Can you stay with yourself — giving yourself the gift of your attention for a few short minutes?

You may feel overwhelmed by your needs as they present themselves. You might feel like pulling up the drawbridge and locking yourself away behind tall walls. You might feel small and your needs might feel insurmountable.

Can you give yourself permission to not have to do it all today?

Can you remind yourself that your relationship with yourself requires your presence and not your perfection?

Can you ask yourself what feels DOABLE today?

Can you commit to doing less than that?

It might feel too small to be worth your energy. Do it anyway.

Today, let your feelings guide you. Let them tell you what you need. Let them lead you home to yourself.

Just for today, can you carve our five minutes to listen?

It will be worth it.

Over the years women have been told me they are afraid of accepting themselves because that means they will never improve. They say, Well, if I accept myself as I am, aren’t I just lazy? Aren’t I just avoiding the hard work of making myself better?

They don’t believe (YET) that they can motivate themselves to grow into the humans they desperately want to be through love, respect, and acceptance of the human they already are.

Years ago I remember feeling petrified that if I allowed myself to succumb to self-acceptance, I would wake up months down the road watching daytime television, covered in Dorito dust, and having gained 50 pounds. I remember not trusting of my ability to lead my own life without following someone else’s plan and the mere idea of it left me anxious and overwhelmed.

I didn’t trust myself to know what was best, because I had never taken the time to get to know myself. I was an expert in knowing who the world wanted me to be (thin, rich, successful, pretty, compliant, nice) and a complete novice in knowing what I wanted for my life.

I was an expert in working harder to earn the love I so frantically wanted to receive.

I was wrong about everything.

Accepting yourself and where you are right now is a vital step to becoming the person you want to become.

If you don’t take the time to get to know and appreciate your TRUE self, your self-improvement will always be guided by who you think you Should Be instead of who you actually are.

This is why all of the quick fixes and formulaic plans for success haven’t worked. They were based on who the world is telling you to be instead of who YOU actually are.

This faulty foundation is comprised of fear instead of a deeply felt sense of belonging to yourself.

This is why you are still stuck trying to find your way out of your misery and self-loathing and into the light of day where you see confident, happy people living their lives and not getting paralyzed by what other people think about them.

I believe the best improvement is born out of love for and acceptance of ourselves as we are. There is nothing stagnant about self-acceptance. There is also nothing inherently motivating about forcing yourself forward through fear and threat of punishment.

I have seen, in my own life and in the life of my clients, how much explosive, joyful, and forward moving change is born out of being kind to yourself.

Here’s the real truth: Self-acceptance is the answer and there is no shortcut.

No one can do this work for you.

No one can totally tell you what it’s going to look like, either.

This is about building a relationship with yourself through compassionate dialogue, curiosity, and a refusal to abandon yourself no matter what.

My work is supporting you while you (re)build your most primary relationship with yourself and providing opportunities for conversation and recipes for connection to help you along your path.

I cannot do the work for you, but we can link arms with one another and do the work side by side.

We can cheer one another on. We can co-create a dynamic and undeniably authentic community of humans committing to their own care, courage, and, sovereignty.

This permission is contagious because when you show up as your fullest, truest self, it gives others permission to do the same.

I can feel it from miles away. It exists somewhere on the spectrum of the discomfort of wearing a scratchy wool sweater over your naked skin to the violence of being dismissed when when you are at your most vulnerable.

It starts like this.

I spill out everywhere, messy in my own humanity. With tears running down my face, I share my newest understanding of myself and the world around me. These words are barely formed, but they tumble out of my lips. They want to be heard. I want to be heard. I want to be seen. I want to feel accepted, as I am.

And then, it arrives.

Well have you tried… ?

I know what you should do! Here’s this 10 point plan to get it done…

It’s really not that big of a deal. I don’t know why you’re so upset.

The words that slam the door. The words that aim to be helpful in an attempt to bypass the messiness of your experience. The words that tell you, in no uncertain terms, that you are a problem to be fixed and there is an easy solution for what ails you.

Over time, conversations like this teach us that our messy vulnerability is wrong. That we are a burden. That our tears and unformed words are the unmistakable signs of our needing to be fixed in some way.

Now, in this situation we may indeed need or benefit from support, but I truly believe that FIRST and foremost, we are begging to be seen and loved as we are. As incomplete vessels. As our imperfect human selves.

It happens in conversations with other people, often, but it also happens in conversations with yourself.

Today, I want to address the way that you show up for yourself during these conversations.

How often have you closed that door on yourself?

How often have you made your messiness mean there is something wrong with you?

How often have you punished yourself for your imperfections or judged yourself for being the only person on the planet who doesn’t have her shit together?

How often have you shut yourself down in an attempt to alleviate the fear and confusion that new information can elicit?

How often have you refused to see and hear yourself?

This has to end.

You are allowed to not have all of the answers without making it mean there is something wrong with you.

You are allowed to be human. To be messy. To not have your shit together.

You are allowed to be in a season of discovery and deep repair. You are allowed to be unformed and wordless as you change. You are allowed to pour time and energy into inner transformations that no one can see but you.

You are allowed to validate your own enoughness, accepting yourself in each and every emotional state you pass through over the course of the day.

You are allowed to no longer be who you were five minutes ago.

You are allowed to fumble as you iterate.

If someone rushing in to fix you doesn’t feel good to you either, let the first change be in how you speak to yourself. Use your self-talk to teach yourself the kind of treatment you deserve and long to expect from the world around you. Model the kind of treatment you would like to receive.

Love yourself this way, so that you can learn what it means to be loved exactly as you are.

Stop abandoning yourself when you need yourself the most.

Need a reminder of this post? I made this just for you.

The way that I am easily able to understand what is mine and what is not.

I remember the times before it felt this way when my inner landscape felt like a plot of land available for anyone to trespass upon it. When I routinely hopped the fence into someone else’s realm of responsibility and left my own plot to its own devices.

During that time my inner landscape bore the unmistakable signs of neglect.

The gardens were overgrown. The fence was crumbling. The flow of energy and traffic was rampant, running over my non-existent boundaries. Nothing was mine or sacred. Everything I had was available for use.

When I teach I talk about your realm of responsibility this way. As if your inner landscape were the lush, vibrant ecosystem I know it can be. I talk about tending to yourself the way you might tend to the land – by digging your hands into the dirt and devoting yourself to your own upkeep. I talk about fences not because I am overly concerned with land ownership, but because they are a convenient metaphor to help you understand when you are operating within your realm of responsibility and when you have hopped the fence into someone else’s territory, taking responsibility for something that is not yours to own.

Your responsibility is your words, behavior, actions, efforts, mistakes, ideas, and consequences of your actions.

Other people’s words, behaviors, actions, efforts, mistakes, ideas, and consequences of their actions are not your responsibility.

This is the line that delineates what is yours to own from what is not.

This is the fence between even the most intimately adjacent properties of lovers, families of origin, and children.

This is what is mine to tend.

I notice that respecting this boundary enables me to protect and maintain my energy so that I might put it to good use in my life.

To pour into the projects that are most meaningful to me.

To wash the sheets and bake the bread.

To risk the vulnerability of being my truest self in my relationships.

To rest, knowing that I can trust others to take responsibility for what is theirs to own – even if I feel profoundly uncomfortable about how they go about handling that responsibility.

To feel my own discomfort and know that I can feel a feeling without making it mean I need fixing.

My greatest work is in eradicating the lie that I must do it all or be everything to everyone in order to earn my rest, peace, and care. I can do this gently, both hands in the dirt feeling for unexpected places where this lie might still be deeply rooted.

My greatest work takes place in tending to this realm within my boundary, making it as beautiful and lush and vibrant as possible. Inviting others in for tea light lit dinner parties and early morning coffee dates. Owning what is mine to own in order to co-create the world I am here to co-create.

My greatest work is padding around this corner of earth, taking responsibility for what is mine to own with grace, grit, and an awesome sense of my own personal power.

Need a reminder of this post? I made this just for you.

You absorbed the threshold of what you allow yourself as you observed the adults around you interacting with their needs as you were growing up.

You filed these experiences away in categories, “good” needs vs. “bad” needs.

The good needs are fairly simple. They are the ones that are met with little fan fare or fuss. The ones that you can easily accommodate without causing anyone around you to rearrange their schedule. The ones you can meet in secret, around the periphery of your life. The ones that you tend to late at night when everything else has been set to right.

The bad needs are the ones that require significant investment of time, energy, or money. The ones that take you outside of yourself to advocate on your own behalf. The ones that require you to set (shudder) boundaries with the humans you encounter. The ones that cause friction as the need bumps up against your equally important need for belonging to your relationships and communities.

And yet, a pressing need in and of itself is the need to acknowledge everything you are hungry for – the “good” and the “bad”, the easily accommodated and the complicated matrix of what you desperately require for your wholeness.

Water, yes.

But also warm hands tight around your waist. And time to write. And other women willing to soberly look you in the eye as you whisper back and forth about the crazy wild ideas that keep you up pacing the floor when everyone else is asleep. And multiple orgasms. And the ability to utter the word no and have it be a complete sentence. And clothes that fit. And a church that resonates. And opportunities to look at your body in the mirror with open tenderness in your heart. 

And… And… And…

This is where you begin backing away from yourself. You become overwhelmed to inaction your needs start to feel like a downward spiral without an end, an abyss without a bottom.

This is where, in the past, you have caved to the intense urge to abandon yourself.

You would have told yourself, let’s just push that away for now, as you stuff your needs into drawers with old ikea instructions and extra wires from the cable box. This is where you put need needs that you can’t deal with to patiently wait until “their time” has arrived.

When you’ve gotten the promotion. Once you’ve lost the weight. After you’ve found the person you’re just right for. When the baby goes to kindergarten. When you’ve figured it all out and have a moment of relative calm in your life.

It is safe(r) to tell yourself that tending to our needs is the thing that you do before you get back to doing the things that matter. But, in your heart you know that your needs are doorways into what matters deeply, the connection to the things that make your life unique and worth living.

This is why you do all of the right things and still feel empty, still feel under resourced and uncared for, because those doorways have your name on it and you feel the ache of their need when you neatly put them away for an undetermined date in the future.

You have needs and they are not just permission to take a break to go to the bathroom before you finish going through this file. Or make your way through your entire to do list.

You want more. You want the hands and the community and the right words and the delicious dinner and fresh salty air and the time to create, hands messy and deep in the process without interruption.

You have many needs, each need a doorway into deeper relationship with yourself.

Your needs are not a distraction.

They are teacher guides here to provide you with turning points to truly know and honor yourself. They are opportunities to tend to yourself, and being cared for allows you to create and serve.

They are invitations to selfishly claim what is yours to have – space in your own life.

You cannot need too much.

You cannot be too much.

You can cultivate a capacity to embrace your enormous appetite for nourishment each and every time you allow yourself to need.

Need with me

If you are ready to commit to the brilliance of your needs and embrace your appetite for nourishment, I want to hand deliver you a very special invitation to circle with me this year in Tend.

Tend is a 9-month group coaching program dedicated to helping you figure out what you need so that your needs can (finally, joyfully, tenderly) be met.

Truly taking care of yourself is such a deep and private matter. You hold it close to your heart and bear the burden of believing you should know how to do it all without assistance.

I believe 100% in your capacity to get to know yourself and to learn how to tend to yourself with ease, but I offer myself to you as a guide.

Over the course of our time together, I will help you unearth the fullness of your needs in a safe environment, practice honoring your needs with my (gigantic) bag of tools and energetic support, and advocate for your needs as you gather your strength and find your voice.

If you are ready to feel peaceful in your relationship with your body and trust yourself to show up to have your own back – no matter what – I have created Tend just for you.

>> Dance on over here to learn more and claim your seat

Your skin, the rugged and dimpled map of where you’ve been as you’ve walked the earth. Each line, each crevice a small piece of your story. Each chicken pock scar. Each faded silver stretch mark of where your body stretched and grew, once.

You carry too, the stories that you tell yourself about your many parts. The judgments that cling to your back about how you look and what that might mean about you a human being. The forgiveness and ease that chosen imperfection allows. The tension or expansion of your personal narrative.

You are sacred land.

Your lips crack as the reservoirs of water within your skin recede due to lack of attention, when you choose coffee over water for the fifth time this morning. Because even this simple act of self-care is often overlooked in the name of heightened productivity when we wind ourselves up on caffeine and sugar to keep going past the point of our body being up for the challenge.

Your body contains rivers and oceans within it’s skin. It ebbs and flows, causing you to be full when the moon is full. This simple act of taking the time to honor your thirst and allowing that water to reach all of the dry territory within your cells creates life and fertile ground wherever it reaches.

You are sacred land.

The boundaries that you create are to keep you in instead of keeping others out. They are born of the sacred contract that you have with yourself, the vow to keep yourself intact no matter what. These are the promises to nourish this space, within your head and within your heart, by choosing whose voices you let in.

This is the oath of careful inspection, the way that you have taught yourself to become judicious about the stories that you take on about who you are and what you’re capable of. You are discerning here because you know on some level that what you imbibe becomes a part of you.

You are sacred land.

Yet, no one is going to come to your house to pull you out of bed and demand that you take care of yourself with the deep tenderness of a mother loving a child. No one is going to force you to treat yourself with the compassion that you ache for.

You are alone in the choosing here, because it is only you that can grant yourself permission to see yourself in this way. To treat yourself in the manner to which only you can allow yourself to become accustomed.

As a human who is beautiful, exactly as they are.

As a human who deserves to have their needs met.

As a human who is worthy of protection.

You are sacred land.

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Over the last couple of days I have overheard people disparaging, devaluing, and underestimating the things that they can do because they wish it were more. I have seen humans grappling with the responsibility for the pain in the world at the cost of their ability to take action.

Let’s be real. If you are a White person on this planet right now, a lot of the pain in the world is a by product of the White supremacist and patriarchal system that you benefit from. This toxic Whiteness is yours to dismantle, but it is not only yours to dismantle.

Racism is not an individual act of discrimination or a torch wielding klansman. Racism is the system that holds much of the developing world together, and we will need to show up both in our individual communities and on a global scale to combat that.

It can be a lot to reckon with, but reckoning with it is your birthright.

If you were horrified watching the events of this past weekend, consider it an invitation.

Resist the urge to separate yourself from those bad White people over there.

Resist the urge to hide out and refuse to confront your own internal biases. (We all have them.)

Resist the urge to spiritually bypass your feelings by trying to will them into something prettier.

I know that it can be a lot to grapple with and yet I also hold you in the highest esteem, knowing full and well that you are capable of the deep inquiry and discomfort of navigating these truths.

It can be hard to talk about it, but we must. We must not rely on the emotional labor of people of color to do the heavy lifting. We have these conversations at the dinner table, in bed lying next to the ones we love, and when we teach our children about right and wrong.

As a White woman, I must use my voice and this platform to talk about issues of race, because self-care and self-empowerment are not just for those who exist in a privileged bubble. All of the humans on this planet require tending. Tending is the compassionate structure and loving care that enables us to show up in our homes, relationships, and communities as the strongest and most powerful versions of ourselves so that we can be of service in a way that only we can.

As we move forward, we are assisted by remembering that we do not have to do everything to be effective. The resistance needs all kinds of humans. It needs the people who are ready, able, and willing to stand in the face of fascism. It also needs people who are ready, able, and willing to write letters, call elected officials, and run for office. It needs people who are brave enough to have conversations with their neighbors and families.

Your actions don’t have to be perfect to be worthy of your effort.

This time in history is demanding. Our world is at a breaking point in so many ways. There is a lot of pain to attend to and old mindsets to dismantle.

The world needs your imperfect action and your voice.

The world needs you to stand up for what you think is right and protect those that you love.

You do not have to do it all today, but you can do something today.

You could donate to a cause that you believe in.

You could volunteer at an organization that serves marginalized communities.

You could amplify the words of people of color by sharing them within your social networks.

You could have a conversation with someone the next time you hear them say something racist in the grocery story.

Taking imperfect action is infinitely better than staying locked away behind your fear of doing or saying the wrong thing.

No matter what it is that you choose to do, don’t forget to take care of yourself. This is really (really) important.

Positively impacting the world has to start with nourishing your body, getting the rest that you require, and putting down your devices to connect with people in real time.

Learning how to claim space in your own life and tend to your needs are the backbone of your continued ability to show up for the things you care about.

Collective tending is fueled by personal tending, because are all humbled by our human need for hydration, support, belonging, rest, community, love, and safety.

It is enormously vulnerable to remain open to our feelings and the neediness of our bodies, but so much healing can occur we are open to our humanity. We are connected in our neediness, more alike than we are different.

Refuse to take your needs off of the table when things feel overwhelming, because your needs become more important when things get difficult, not less.

You are the vessel for your voice, your personal power, and your heart.

The events that led to the violence in Charlottesville this past weekend didn’t happen overnight and it won’t be dismantled overnight either. If we want to enact real change we are going to have to keep showing up in whatever way we are able. The world needs you for the duration and in order to answer that call, you are going to have to take really good care of yourself.

Don’t look away but don’t allow yourself to get suckered into believing that “doing a good job” means “sacrificing all of your needs.”

We need one another, whole and vibrant. We belong to one another, but in order to show up honestly, we cannot forget to also belong to ourselves.

We need you, at the fullest expression of who you are.

I’m so glad to have you at my side.

xxMara

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Call my representatives. Join that group making reusable bags for the store down the street. Read. Reach out to that coach with a gentle nudge to invite a more diverse group of contributors for her offering.Take a nap. Hold the baby all night while she cries. Write the book. Go away for the weekend. Figure out how to take a greater stand, locally and nationally, about climate change. Cook dinner.

My energy becomes more diffuse with each racing thought. Tendrils of my attention run loose, traveling the length of my life as I attempt to prioritize everything needed for my work, taking care of my family, and enacting change in the world around me.

This wild race of ideas and scrambled energy does not invigorate me.

It exhausts me.

I am not actually taking action when I am in this place. I am not DOING anything.

Instead, I am spending a lot of energy every day worrying and trying to figure out what to do.

This is the internal scramble of inaction. This frantic energy causes your ideas run amuck as you attempt read the future and figure out how each decision will impact you five minutes or ten years down the line.

In these moments of prioritization paralysis, the anxious churn of rolling things over and over in your mind feels like action.

It makes us feel busy to scramble around this way, believing that we are doing something even when we aren’t sure what to do.

But, worrying isn’t an action step.

Try as I might, it is not actually possible to know how my choices will impact me down the road. There is no way to know how taking this job or making this decision or prioritizing one creative project over another will alter my life.

The only thing that is within my control is making the next best choice in any moment, given the tools and the information that I have on hand.

In this life, I cannot do everything but I can do something.

The only antidote for worry is doing something – anything – tangible.

I may not be able to alter the trajectory of our national political scene by myself, but I can make one call. I can gather with other like-minded humans in solidarity. I can financially and energetically support organizations that are doing work aligned with my beliefs. I can have the uncomfortable conversation when someone says something deeply offensive, or reach out to the organizer of an event I have been invited to participate in that has a line-up of only White speakers.

I may not be able to write a whole book today or this week, but I could write a couple of pages.

I may not be able to join every group that I am interested in, but I could reach out to one group I am passionate about and start there.

Those are action steps.

Make things with my hands. Do 10 sun salutations. Offer to carry someone’s groceries. Get on the floor to play with my baby. Cook dinner. Email a client.

Those are action steps.

They require me to pull that diffused energy back into my physical body to make the best choice that I can today, in this body and this set of circumstances that stand before me.

I can choose to let that be enough. I can choose these small successes and mundane victories, because I know that when my mind is racing with grand plans and worrying about what to tackle first, I am not actually getting anything done.

I will gather my many pieces. I will honor the fact that I am a human with many big, exciting ideas and varying interests. I will remind myself that there is nothing wrong with the fact that there is A LOT that I want to do with my life, but I will remind myself that I cannot do everything all at once.

I will choose one thing to start with and I will let that be enough.]]>