A short blog post to start out the new year …
If you’re heading into 2022 with a heavy heart, you are not alone. We are still in a global pandemic, and many of us are grappling with immense loss and grief on personal, collective and ancestral levels.
Society puts a lot of pressure to implement resolutions, to better ourselves, to be more productive, to continue striving toward some unidentified “ideal.” When we’re processing grief and navigating continued uncertainty around what the world will look like, this messaging can feel even more jarring.
What if, instead of making a resolution to do more and be more, you gave yourself radical permission? Permission to feel. Permission to grieve. Permission to love your body, just as it is. Permission to rest – not to to be more productive, but to reclaim your divine right to rest. Permission to feel drained, exhausted, and scared at what turn the pandemic will take next. Permission to take a bubble bath and turn off your phone for the rest of the day. Permission to watch comfort shows on TV and re-read your favorite book. Permission to honor any emotion that arises and realize that it too belongs in this life.
What if you granted yourself radical permission to honor what your spirit, mind and body need in this moment? Whatever you are feeling, it belongs. And it’s ok to give yourself permission to tend and befriend your feelings, regardless of whether they fit the narrative of what you “should” be feeling at the start of the new year.
I’ll leave you with these words from Adrienne Maree Brown, from her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds:
“Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow. P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: that the broken heart can cover more territory. That perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. That grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. That grief is gratitude. That water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. That the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. That death might be the only freedom. That your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. That your body will feel only as much as it is able to. That the ones you grieve may be grieving you. That the sacred comes from the limitations. That you are excellent at loving.”