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

Let’s talk about the walls we build to protect ourselves.I’ve been extraverted all my life — yet, I have a highly developed introversion to me too that’s confused a lot of people (particularly me). I’m highly sensitive to people’s energies, especially their anxiety.

During the course of my recent travels, I only just found out that the “highly sensitive extravert” is a thing, and not only did I find relief from that validation, but I also was able to resolve an unsettled, unanswered question on my heart for a long time.

If you live in the US, we live in a society where extraversion and being very outwardly expressive and around people all the time is celebrated and expected.

That’s all well and good until you feel like you’ve got something to hide, whether that’s inside of you or something to hide from. (For me, it was the internal impact of the disability.)

The thing about most extraverts (me included until maybe four years ago) is we don’t hold much back. We can come on really strong and we tend to dominate conversations.

Which is also all well and good until boundaries start to get crossed — which they inevitably will if you’re used to exerting your own will out into the world and never getting any pushback. And especially if historically you’ve had a lot of your own boundaries get crossed in your home life. Nobody is exempt, because as humans, each of our personal preferences vary.

I’m talking about a responsible use of our power as opposed to forcing ourselves onto others, which is not power, but an abuse of it.

I bring this up because also historically? Family members — whether extraverted or not — tend to exert their will onto one another. At the end of the day, human beings are a social animal, and animals, as much as we may love ’em, just do what they do until they are trained to otherwise.

I had to develop a strength in myself to hold true to my own needs with respect to my family. When I fall back into old patterns, then I practice loving them from an appropriate distance.

Right after my stroke, my family was great. They amazed me, in fact. Everything was about making my life easier — about supporting me so I could learn how to function again. They had me take the semester off of school. They were really patient with me, helped me walk up and down the stairs, gave me plenty of space to be.

That worked for a while, even until after I moved back from undergrad several years later and asked for a year to focus on my rehab before I’d enter the workforce.

After that year, though, I still wasn’t ready to enter the world again as a functioning adult. I didn’t have the awareness to vocalize my needs at the time, but what I needed was some space from the hovering voices of my parents trying to hurry me along and get me moving on with my life already. Unknowingly, I still needed to heal a lot of the trauma from the emotional impact of the stroke before I would actually be willing to “get on with life.”

Also, it needs to be said that while my family members unequivocally love me, and fiercely so, they also did not have the emotional capacity to understand my need for space for that processing.

Not only would I need to grieve my losses (with plenty of room for all emotions, btw) and give up the burden of hating my body for what I felt was a huge betrayal, I’d also need to grieve how I once showed up in the world so that I could create a new way of being.

But this was not the way my family operated, or anyone I knew at the time, for that matter. Instead, I tried the old way of just pushing through, believing there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Like, why couldn’t I just check my ego and get a job? Why couldn’t I spend hours and hours and hours every day at the gym concentrating on my rehab?

So it took me years and years of fighting with my family’s (and my own) expectations of me, of wasted energy, money, and perceived failure as I slowly, slowly uncovered the layers of my emotional wounding.

Much later on, through my mentor Kristin, I found a community, a sisterhood, of women whose foundational agreements lay in 100% personal responsibility, which made honest relating and emotional intimacy possible. Personal responsibility is the practice of actively living from the fact that we all have a hand in co-creating any experience, especially our interactions. It includes conscious relating at its best, while also leaving room for imperfection and mistakes. It’s a no-blame zone. When we make mistakes, we behave with accountability and clean them up.

Through the sustained practice of this intimate communication of my internal truths, I was able start to cracking open to who I was deep down. I started to develop accurate language and really valuable tools for relating to others vulnerably — and not in a manipulative way.

I began to embody and truly understand for the first time that not only was it okay to tell people what my boundaries (my needs and preferences) were, but that once I was clear in my no, could I be clear in my yes. And if I wasn’t clear about these things and the interactions between me and others became muddy, it was because there were some obvious leaks in the container that was allowing a lot of unintentional harm to happen.

So like, when people first start learning about boundaries often it becomes all about them and what they will or will not tolerate. Which is fine — but can quickly turn into a black-and-white testing facility that shuts most people out. Boundaries of that nature become a prison of your own making, rather than a two-way, mutually beneficial energy exchange.

When I was in that stage, it used to look like, “I won’t be friends with people who disagree with me.” And since I often unintentionally polarized the outside world, that qualifier ended up being a lot of people.

I was so afraid of being hurt or emotionally triggered that I would just energetically shut out anyone I held a grudge against — which did not leave me with many warm bodies to spend time with, to hug, to be in life with. If that person was someone I “had to” be around (such as a family member or a coworker) I would let those grudges and triggers build up, build up, build up until our relationships became very uncomfortable to all involved.

Let’s go back to my extraversion. The truth I denied for forever was, I love being around people. They energize me and they make my life infinitely more enjoyable. Nowadays, when I’m overwhelmed, all it takes for me to recharge is to close my eyes for a moment and reconnect with my body. Then I’m back and ready to play!

I’ve noticed this is severely different from the people I’m close with who are at their core introverted. They need to actually physically remove themselves from overstimulating environments in order to recharge, and even when they’re well versed in socializing (and even expressing in a very extraverted way for long stretches of time), they need their downtime like I need my food. (If we’ve ever eaten a meal together you’d know I eat the lion’s share at every chance I get.)

When it comes down to it, we all have a mixture of intro- and extraversion. We all have our own needs for closeness and for space. It’s normal and doesn’t need justifying. We all must find out what those needs are and also be open to the possibility of those needs to evolve over time.

As I cultivated more and more space to practice voicing my own needs and preferences within my sisterhood, I began to understand more deeply how I did not need to shut people out anymore for not being how I wanted them to be.

And eventually, once I began to truly and consciously integrate a deeper spirituality and love for myself, my internal landscape became more spacious, too. I made a home and a partner out of my relationship with my body through a combination of healing, intimate connection, space, and divinity.

By this, I mean if you’re like me and can hold grudges easily, you must make a regular practice of forgiving yourself and others — and if you’re just starting out, make a practice of revealing your truth, not to manipulate but simply to better be known — surrendering that up to something greater than you, and knowing that that resides in your heart. As long as your heart beats, you live, and as long as that is true, you can connect to it. Because that’s who you actually are.

I include this piece in the “body forgiveness” series because true forgiveness transforms the entire body, not just the brain. It’s no longer some lofty idea (“wouldn’t it be nice?”) but is true to your actual experience of life.

That’s why now, all I need is a moment to close my eyes and breathe before I can be out in the world.

Since this started, I’ve noticed myself feeling more and more safe to show the world who I really am and safe to trust the people I meet. It’s a deepened sense of self-trust, which (for those of us who lost that a long time ago) is only the result of self-care and practice.

In fact, right before I sat down at this coffee shop here in Venice, CA, I randomly had a really deep, 40-minute conversation with the woman sitting near me. We were like souls, and we were only able to find each other because we were willing to move through the world with open hearts and strong cores.

A strong core means that no matter what, you know you’ve got yourself. There’s absolutely nothing to hide, to hide from, nothing to defend, and nothing to fear.

Since a lot of this can’t be understood mentally (it is embodied), I’d love to hear what comes up for you. I’m here to answer your questions or hold space for your experience, so please contribute your comments below and share this with someone who could benefit.

Much love,

Pamela