Soft Heart / Strong Back

One of the ways I know I am changing and becoming more and more authentically human is by how much I have softened as I’ve grown older; how much more I allow Life to touch me in real time. As much as my ego hates to admit this to the public (although I am betting if you know me well, this will come as no surprise to you): My innate nature is soft, open, grounded, and warm. Being in my presence when I’m fully open feels like being embraced in a loving hug in front of a fire place with the smell of stew wafting in from the stove. It’s comforting and generous. And yet, there is a firmness to it. An unwavering through-line. A strong back that will not break no matter you bring me. A rootedness that you can trust. Through my life experiences I learned to lead with this strength. It is the part of me that the world celebrated. It’s the part I was told was valuable. My strength, my capability, my sturdiness.  And I cultivated and eventually identified solely as it, and I forgot my softness. It has only been since becoming a mother that I have really touched my softness and recognized it as myself again. And if I hadn’t already been deeply committed to my personal practice, I might have believed this softness was a problem. I might have believed the way motherhood rearranged me and molded me into someone completely unrecognizable was somehow wrong. There are definitely small parts of me that believe it is.Softness is not something people want to be. We don’t want to have a soft body.We don’t want to be perceived as emotional, which is equated to weak. We don’t want to be mushy or quick to cry.We don’t want to be messy, chaotic, or uncontained.We don’t want to feel as through we are in the dark, not knowing up from down. You can see this in the way we are obsessed with lean, lithe, hardness in our physical bodies. You can see this in the way we quickly brush our tears off our cheeks, sniffing hard to compose ourselves.  Or how everyone I have ever seen cry instinctively tries to cover their face with their hands. You can see this in the way we feel our homes need to be the pinnacle of orderliness and tidiness or else we feel we’ve failed some societal test. We are so ashamed of our softness. Embarrassed by it. Humiliated by our own humanity. The more I denied my soft heart, shoving it down and away, while I pedestalized my strength, the less and less access I had to my softness. There was a long period of my adult life where I thought of myself as a complete, almost sociopathic, b***h.  This belief about myself served me earlier in my life in a lot of ways. I did whatever I wanted, never really got that close to people, and bulldozed my way through whatever thing it was I decided I wanted to do. If people got in my way; f**k ‘em. If someone around me was exposing their weakness I felt repulsed by it. Disgusted. At best, I would immediately try to “help” them by coming up with ways to fix their problems. At worst I chided them for their weakness. Using their vulnerability to climb on their backs and get myself even higher up superiority mountain. Sometimes, even, treating their humanity like it was dog s**t needing to be scraped off the sole of my shoe. I am not proud of this. My explanation now is very much the adage: hurt people, hurt people, and even though I didn’t show it, I was hurting. A soft human heart locked away in a deep, dark room does not stop aching. In my late twenties, a bit lost and starting to wake up to the fact that something in my life was not quite right, I experienced one of the deepest betrayals a human can experience. And this was the very start of a long and winding path to reuniting with my tenderness. The pain in my heart I experienced from this betrayal made it impossible for me to focus on anything else and I was forced to begin to make my way down into the depths of myself and reconnect with my softness. This betrayal is not something I see as negative anymore. It was the most incredible gift. It gave me my soft heart back. It shattered me in all the places I needed shattering. And then, I became a mother a few short years after and I was shattered again even more perfectly.  And what I’ve learned is that this is the paradoxical nature of opening to our softness, it can come through “negative” experiences and it can come through positive ones. Both are sacred. Both are happening through us and for us. That said, it has not been easy or pretty or straightforward.This reconnection to my soft center was not instantaneous. It is an ongoing practice of remembering my true nature and choosing it over everything and anything else. To see myself as this soft and beautiful thing is only barely just, in my late thirties, becoming my default. And this is what motherhood has allowed me to access. Because I was shattered so profoundly in all the right places I was able to access a deeper love than I could have before the shattering. Through becoming a mother I felt what it was like to direct that love towards someone. I love my girls so deeply and because of that I can love myself more deeply.  Because I have been shattered in all the right places, I have been able to reconfigure myself and see myself from the angle of the loving mother. And this is the most nourishing balm for my aching human heart. This is why I came to write this today because as I was in my car driving and listening to music I found myself being brought to tears. No story. No external circumstances. I was just able to feel the resonance of the song within my own heart and I let that resonance open me up. And I find myself doing this more and more; letting my heart be touched.I hear stories of other humans’ pain and suffering and I open to it. I don’t contract. I don’t protect myself. I let it go right through me. Not taking it on, but taking it in because we all need to feel more, not less. I see a mother and daughter playing together on swing set and I feel my heart bursting with love. I turn my face up to the sun, feeling the warmth on my skin and I am overcome by how held I am.I catch a whiff of rain on sage as I’m out on a walk and I let myself weep at the perfection. My soft heart feeds me. It is the source of such richness and depth. When we open, cry, are overcome with emotion like this, it is a deep release. There is absolutely nothing wrong or bad or weak about it. Crying is like taking a s**t. It releases energy that we no longer need. It’s necessary, healthy, and feels amazing. Yes, taking a s**t and crying can both be messy AND they are both part of being alive and having a human body.I stand, firmly and with my strong back, at the intersection of my own humanity and my own divinity, within the body, and my soft heart is the bridge between the two. I’ve said this many times before, but I don’t believe the world needs more “good” people. It needs more real people.Real people get hurt. Real people feel pain. Real people fail and have to stand up and try again. Real people are touched by Life. And to deny any part of this is to deny life and the sacredness of being alive. Ekhart Tolle says, “Life is the dancer and you are the dance.” We need our strong backs for what’s to come, yes, absolutely. But we are also in dire need of access to our soft hearts because, paradoxically, they are what will save the world. Current Offerings HOME BODY …is happening tomorrow, May 3rd, my birthday!, from 2-3:30pm PST. $44. Get tickets here. HOME BODY is like a yoga class for building a reverent relationship with your body. It begins with a short transmission teaching by me and then is a guided practice of self massage and a shamanic journey into the body. It is an opportunity to come and meet yourself where you are. Nutrition Deep DiveA three pack of sessions for us to go deep into your nourishment and create a personalized plan for you.We begin with a 90-minute session where we will go over your health history, current eating habits, any current labs you have (I can also order labs for you), symptoms, and health intentions and I will come up with a personalized nourishment plan for you to implement. You have to be ready to make real and significant changes to your diet and lifestyle.Once you’ve implemented your personalized nourishment plan for a month, we’ll have another 45 minute session to tweak and adjust your plan and revisit what is improving and how your symptoms are changing. In another month we’ll have our second follow up session.Within in these 3 session you’ll have an entirely new outlook on the nourishment of your body as well as have developed clear and individualized strategies to maintain your well-being as well as feel clearly what your body wants and needs.$999.**You may pay also $333/month for 3 monthsThere is always an option for more follow up sessions and/or labs if need be.To book this you can follow this link and book your first session, or just message me to set up a free connection call to feel into it more. 1:1 Alchemical Journey The deepest option to work with me. This is a one year commitment. You must do a zoom connection call with me to see if this would be a good fit. Just message me to set that up if you feel the call to this. FED | A Journey into Deep Feminine NourishmentA 6 month group journey into deep feminine nourishment.Enter your details at this link to join the wait list. 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