I’m finally back from my 16 days in SoCal — it feels to me like I was gone for far longer because of the energetic toll that hit me in body, mind, spirit. It also feels like I’ve slept about 20 hours a day since I’ve been back.

The re-entry process back into regular life when I no longer feel like a “regular me” has always been a tricky one. As a policy, I never book flights immediately before or after out-of-state live events like most do; I know my body well enough to know that I require some serious aftercare to come back down to Earth.

It’s not because I’m a diva or because I’m rolling in mega-riches — it’s because I’ve developed a relationship to my body of respect and love. What that means is when I haven’t taken care to make sure I’ve got the space I need after going really hard, I would end up paying for it.

Can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve absentmindedly lost something valuable (a passport, a purse, about four different iPods) or got physically lost because my brain was offline and I didn’t realize it. And this isn’t just a post-stroke symptom; it’s just become about 1500% amplified since the injury.

To deny that this shit happens only guarantees that it will happen in fuller force. It’s a part of me, and I’m getting better with it all the time, but denying it definitely wasn’t helping.

Can you love the body you’ve got as it already is, now?

Like, not just “warts and all,” but for serious — warts, rolls, freckles, moles, grey hairs, wrinkles, whatever — plus all its other “defects”? How about all its ways it tries to get your attention?

A lot of those “defects” can feel like wasted time in the moment to try and prevent, but can I just point out how much time, money, energy is spent trying to recover from losing track of important stuff/things/people etc. after the fact?

Although beauty is important, this goes way beyond aesthetics. This touches everything about you and your experience. So you’ve had a stroke; maybe one side of your body, like mine, feels a little “behind.”

Can you let that be okay? Can you, despite any impatience around how slow progress may feel, still hug yourself and send love to yourself, let your body know that you see it’s been hurt somewhere very profound — because it has been! — and that it’s okay as it is, right now?

I remember the first time I ever sent loving energy to my left arm. I released tears I didn’t even know I’d been holding onto for a decade. The experience changed my life.

Try it for five minutes today.

And five minutes tomorrow.

The relationship to your body takes time and nurturing to build — and if you can do it (I know you can), it will change your life for the better.

This will be hard if you have never given yourself permission to give yourself what you need, and all you know is to fight that you have any needs at all.

How has that been working for you?

You know what to do. Incorporate, comment, share. Because I care about you, and you do too.

Warmly,

Pamela

Happy New Year!

Some things:

1. My word of 2019 is “lighthouse.” I’ll be experimenting with broadcasting in fun, fresh new ways, more often.

2. Since that is my intention, the content is not always going to be as long-form as some of my past posts. I’d like there to be a variety of long and short creations in my “portfolio,” as it were.

3. None of this will always look very polished. I’ve been honing my writing chops for 2/3 of my life and am very comfortable hiding behind the written word — but by committing to becoming a lighthouse and experimenting with creative license, there’s gotta be some room for me to put out content that’s done, but not perfect. Be prepared for a little ghetto fabulosity.

A note on new beginnings, and incidentally, the piece for today’s Forgiveness Friday:

Today coincidentally is my eight-year anniversary with my partner, and over the years, we’ve been steadily building a foundation of shared values as we uplevel our relationship. As this has happened, I have found myself unconsciously “testing” him and myself because there is some old junk from our pasts that hasn’t yet been fully resolved or cleared out of the way.

This is super normal in any close relationship that has withstood a long time. Even with people who are so like-minded that everything generally feels easy peasy, closeness always comes with checkpoints where “stuff” needs examination. I’m the first person to say that relationship duration is only one factor in relationship strength; I’ve had superclose besties that I became that close to in the span of a couple months, and acquaintances of several several years whose life aspirations and preferences I couldn’t even begin to tell you.

Intimacy is always evolving, and it’s a practice. It’s a commitment to self-care, so that you can show up energized and generous with others, and vice-versa.

You know why resentments build up between people whose lives are very close, but lack emotional intimacy? Because one or both (usually the case) of the people is holding on to baggage from the past and carrying that baggage from year to year. They aren’t clearing what’s preventing them from being as generous and loving as they’d like to be, and they’re allowing that resentment to build a case for not being giving and not loving that person.

And if you’re doing this with another person — your partner, your friend, your family member — then, chances are, you’re doing it with yourself, too. (Even if that’s a lack of forgiveness for a post-stroke condition.)

I descend from a line of impossible perfectionists. The levels of toxicity that would build up in my body holding grudges against myself or others who didn’t meet my (often completely unreasonable) expectations kept me so blocked off from true closeness with others that I’m actually astonished I had any friends prior to 2015. Yup. That recently.

A lot can change in a really short time, even if it feels like transformation can take forever. Hint: It goes faster when you’re willing.

I wasn’t truly willing to take the chance to ask for what I needed, which suddenly increased in a huge way after having had the stroke. Obviously.

It felt like too much to ask, to ask for anyone to slow down as they walked beside me, or to give me more time to physically do things.

Instead of empowering myself to voice these things, I just hoped for the best. Hoped friends would intuitively know how much time I needed to go from A to B, hoped men I dated would read my mind.

I got lucky sometimes, and other times I lost people because I didn’t know how to talk to them about these new things I needed. (We definitely don’t need to go into how the mind-reading thing went in my love life!)

Part of it was that I was only 19, part of it was that I wasn’t raised with modeling of effective communication, part of it was a lack of discussing any of this in therapy at post-stroke rehab. Regardless, I hope that my 15 years of practice in powerful communication and developing self-trust models some valuable tools for you.

So the first practice of 2019 I’d like to leave you with today is the practice of getting to know what your needs are. Your needs can be practical (“I need a full week to pack a suitcase before I travel anywhere,” “I need my phone to be fully charged at the start of the day”), they can be basic (“I must be fully fed before I start my workday,” “I need eight hours of sleep a night”) — in fact, I encourage you to start there, and they can be emotional (“I need to ask for five minutes to vent before I can move forward”). The last area often feels the hardest to ask for, in our emotionally constipated society, but it is KEY.

Just blindly going through your life not even knowing what your needs are is a great way to not get them met. It’s a great way to add to the baggage everyone’s carrying around year after year (especially you), and that’s frickin’ exhausting. Right?! Stop the madness!!

You have to name it to claim it, and that’s the first step to letting it go and creating more space and less conflict in your life and internal experience.

Don’t get caught up in creating a list that consumes you. If you’re a recovering perfectionist like me, you could go on forever with a list of grievances/demands. If that’s you, start with a list of five things only, and know that even if only one of those needs started getting consistently met that would be a huge improvement from where you were before.

If you find yourself consumed with despair at how many unmet needs you may have right now, there’s a part two to this exercise. Balance this list with a second list — a list of appreciation. Flood your mind (and ideally, your heart) with everything and everyone that you do have in your life that you truly are grateful for and remind yourself there is no lack in your life. Let that list be as long as possible. Really let it into your heart and mind and bathe in that feeling.

Take a deep breath. Know that you’ve taken an essential first step to taking ownership of your own personal power, and that that’s something to celebrate!

Questions? Comments? Share what comes up for you below, and share with someone you know. I would love to hear how the exercise adds to your life!

To new beginnings and renewed aliveness,

Pamela

It took me a while to face the discomfort I felt for not getting a handle on the messiness of my life’s unfoldment over the last few days, but alas, I’m here and that’s what counts.

Let’s lean into this though, because I know I’m not the only one who gets paralyzed by her own unmet expectations.

There’s a relentless overachiever driving me forward at all times. Scared to pieces of not getting life “perfectly,” convinced that there is a way to do life perfectly.

The problem with this relentless overachiever? She’s exhausted, because she’s constantly fueling this illusion of perfection, which leaves nothing untouched. NOTHING. She spends her energy constantly putting out fires — fires around what we create, how we move, how we look, what we do.

And there’s no doing right by her because with her attitude, perfection is completely unachievable. Even the infinite magnificence of the Universe gets dwarfed by her myopic need for control and personal will.

I bring this part of me up today because historically, we’ve had a strong love/hate relationship. I loved how she pushed me to artistic mastery and expression but hated how miserable I felt living with her criticism all the time.

And when I felt miserable, so then did the people around me because I stopped really seeing and appreciating them, and I projected onto them the relentless and unrealistic expectations that I had going on inside of me, too. (I’m actually shocked I had any friends growing up!)

Everything that exists in us has a purpose. Our shadows hide our light, but ultimately, when they’re welcomed back into the light, become the light themselves.

So what happens when my relentless overachiever grabs the reins, unchecked? I start viewing everything from the lens of suffering, of “never enough.”

The tricky part is that our wider society really subscribes to a lack mentality. We can’t ever get enough, particularly this time of year — wild, untethered consumerism threatens to put the masses into debt each holiday season just to show people they love them. Whether you subscribe to this particular manifestation or not, chances are you’ve absorbed the lack mentality of our culture somewhere.

What if, just for a moment, we reexamined our motivations behind our unconscious behaviors? Shone a bright light on what we’ve been doing for weeks, years, lifetimes, and really wondered what we’re doing it all for?

Have you ever heard of Nick Vujicic, the man without limbs? (He’s a scintillating motivational speaker you can find easily on YouTube.)

This is a man who was born literally without arms and legs. What I love about his story is that as he grew up, he never viewed himself as missing anything. His parents treated him as they would any other child and even assigned him household chores like vacuuming.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve still got all four of my limbs and many days it’s damned near impossible for me to not compare the right, unaffected side of my body with the left, and make the latter “wrong” for not doing things the way the other side does. Even unconsciously.

The point isn’t to compare myself with Nick; it’s to point out that his quality of life undoubtedly has been pulled forward by love and acceptance, as opposed to pushed by the sting of self-flagellation and -rejection, and regularly.

Your body believes everything you say about it. How many times have I heard stroke patients refer to their unaffected and affected sides as their “good” and “bad” sides? That was me, too.

Your relationship with your body is no different from a parent-child relationship. Unless you were blessed with kind, structured, emotionally and physically present parents who made zero parenting mistakes (whatever that would look like), it’s likely your relationship with your own body could benefit from some unconditional love.

If you feel constant resistance, like I did and still do in some areas, to doing what you know in your heart of hearts is the right thing, drop into your body and put a hand on your heart. Tune in. What does your resistance have to tell you?

Invariably, your resistance is trying to protect you from something. Mine is usually trying to protect me from the harshness of my relentless overachiever perfectionist (or that part in other people) and/or reminding me that this is where I often self-abandon for the sake of my image and reputation.

Whether that image is an identity (“a generous friend,” “a good writer,” “a stroke survivor,” “a competent student”) or a commitment I made to others, I can often lose myself to trying to prove whatever it is, and trying to hide from what I fear is my actual inadequacy:

• What if my friends don’t feel the love I have for them?
• What if the article I wrote is crap?
• What if I look too disabled/not disabled enough to fit in here?

(That last one is super fucked up, by the way. The result of not accepting the two worlds we occupy suspends us in a sort of limbo where we feel inadequate no matter which we’re exposed to. We’ll go into this in more depth another time, and PS. never call yourself disabled, please.)

So you can see why there’d be a constant part of me that’s perpetually exhausted. She’s so busy managing illusion at the cost of anything else that if she’s running the show, I’ll forget to nourish myself in the ways that really count.

In other words, it is my responsibility to provide myself whatever it is I really need. If I’m afraid the people I love don’t feel my love for them, I’m probably not feeling my own love.

This morning I finally returned to my mind-body-soul practice in my zen space — something that I do, non-negotiably, every morning, when I’m not tripping over my own stuff.

Unconditional love is a lost art. It’s always the answer. You must find a way to give it (and receive it!!) for yourself, to set yourself up to win, and everything will fall into place.

It is what will interrupt the chaos of a hectic mind. The tension of too-high expectations. It will heal you faster than doing 100 reps of any exercise would.

(Ever seen a fully able-bodied person hate imperceptible flaws on themselves? You might be convinced your supposed inadequacy is based on simply your abilities — but the measuring stick of lack is always, always longer.)

Through the lens of forgiveness and unconditional love, there is only the gift of life.

This holiday season, give yourself the gift of seeing and appreciating everything you do have going for you — the fact that you’re alive and able to read this post, for example.

Close your eyes. Flood your heart with these appreciations for five minutes, and see what that does to the voice of your own relentless overachiever.

And in the day to day, also, be willing to show up even if “it” doesn’t look the way you want.

It was never about that, anyway — it’s about loving what “it” already is, right here, right now.

It’s called presence for a reason. Love love love,

Pamela

The very topic of “body forgiveness” in this series has been rather confronting for me of late — because it is with utter humility that I am noticing my own blind spots around this very thing, and if I’m honest I’m experiencing a bit of horror and shame at the existence of these blind spots.

And isn’t that the real struggle for anyone who’s had to deal with tremendous loss? That instead of facing the real heart of the matter underneath it all, we get distracted by that top layer of “unacceptable emotions” and either try to ignore or dismiss them or cover them up with coping mechanisms, like addictions?

(And don’t fool yourself into believing that just because you’re not in a 12-step program, you don’t have any addictions.)

Earlier this year, I got back in touch with my grief. I’d disowned this emotion early on in my life as a way to protect myself from feeling the depths of my emotional pain and as a way to not appear “weak.” Literally, by the age of eight, I’d understood that it was not welcome for me to ever cry, so I didn’t. Like, ever.

So back in May, my darling furbaby Ernie passed away, two months before he would have been seven. It was all very fast and inexplicable and I really couldn’t let go. For days, I cried uncontrollably at the sudden loss. I honestly thought the tears would never stop.

Yet, shockingly to me, as a result of letting my grief run its course without judgment or restraint and by letting the people closest to me know what was going on, VERY shortly thereafter I was able to go to my best friend’s wedding and genuinely enjoy myself, whereas the old me?

Old me would have sulked for months, unable to move forward very effectively. Trust me, my journey with grief in response to loss is a familiar, intimate one. It took me, no exaggeration, a full decade to energetically complete the course of grief in the aftermath of my last breakup.

So you’ll hear me often say, “Take as long as you need” in response to the way people mourn — whether they’re mourning the loss of people, pets, a relationship, a job, an old identity — because when it comes to that 10 full years I took to truly move forward, in retrospect I don’t regret a thing.

Does grief always have to take 10 years though? I’m no expert at this (and no one really is), but my answer is no. Grief is like this wild animal that must have its way, and the only wrong way to “do” grief is to not allow it to be what it needs to be. It will have its way with you, and you will need support from a community (read: not just one other person and NOT no one!). Honestly, I didn’t have the tools at the time to deal with it healthily. I did experience lot of unnecessary suffering. The most efficient way is through — to surrender to it and let it take whatever form it wants — and in a safe container. Grief will change you. It will harden you or it will soften you. I personally chose to be softened by it, because that old attitude I used to have around not crying? It was all bull shit.

If you do a little research, you’ll find plenty of evidence that crying is actually a necessary way of releasing toxins and stress. If your conditioning is anything like mine, though, you could attend an entire week’s worth of lectures on those health benefits and still be no closer to accessing your grief.

After so many years of stuffing down those tears and wearing a mask of invulnerability, it is still easiest for me to pretend like nothing can touch me. Which is actually the biggest lie of them all because underneath that veneer, I am actually quite soft and tender.

I bring this up because I’ve noticed that an area where I tend to just push through and act invulnerable is with my body, in general. What this looks like is showing up in the world as though I’m the same as anyone else, and this is not only a bit dishonest, but also sets me up for a lot of conflict when other people expect me to be just like them when I’m just not.

And then there is the voice of shame that says, “How dare you publicly write so often about body forgiveness when clearly you aren’t through to the other side?”

Well — if I know anything, it’s that if you’re drawn to my words, it’s because we’re on a similar path. The details of your story will be different from mine, but the patterns and tendencies underneath are the same.

And for me, what has always helped me access the depths of my emotional experience is hearing voices of others who have been brave enough to put words to what they’re going through. Their words are like a salve to the soul; they allow me to know I’m not alone in my struggle even if it feels like I am.

I hope to be a voice like that for you, and I also know that if I preached at you as though I’ve got it all figured out, that would be a lie. It’d be a real disservice to you and to me, because it’s our humanity and not our pseudo-perfection that unites us.

So I promise to you that I will show up, in my chaos and confusion, as well as in my mastery and leadership.

Here’s my chaos: I feel like I live in a perpetual state of transition, of stuckness between two worlds (between “victim” and “victor”), and I waste a lot of energy bouncing between pushing through, invulnerably, and feeling or acting helpless and incapable. And my experience suffers as a result.

Here’s the area of leadership and mastery I fully intend to create for myself: a sweet spot, where I am able to show up with grace and ease and unapologetically be able to give and receive my own areas of tenderness.

Because . . . when we block out what feels bad, we also block out what feels soooo good.

That’s where the next installments of this body forgiveness series will take us. I will invite you to get in touch with what you need, and to relentlessly provide that for yourself.

Please let me know in the comments if this resonates for you. And share this with someone you know who could use it.

All love,

Pamela