I wrote last week about “my beauty”. I cringed a little as I wrote it, wondering if it would be misinterpreted, wondering if I needed an explanation or a disclaimer. I left it. It haunted me. Beauty is a loaded word.

My first boyfriend told me I had no idea how much my physical appearance impacted my life. How being considered “beautiful” paved my way. I laughed at him. I wanted to be beautiful, but in my eyes, when I looked in the mirror, I wasn’t. When I was dancing professionally in my early twenties, a man who saw the show every night said to me once after a couple of drinks, You’re beautiful in real life but when you’re on stage, you’re not at all. Or something to that effect. In theater school, the head of the department told me I was a chameleon – that on any given day I might look completely different than I had the day before. Meant as a compliment, it made me feel strange. Like a shape-shifter. Someone with little definition. Someone easily forgotten.

For many years I believed I was invisible. It still haunts me from time to time, particularly in this world of blogging and tweeting and suggested Facebook friends. When I became a mama and everyone was drawn to my daughter’s big blue eyes and lit-from-within smile, I began to believe my days of being anywhere but the background were over.  Not that I want to compete with her in any way – I am thrilled that she shines. I just wanted a glimpse of my pre-baby self when I looked in the mirror. I struggled to lose my baby weight. I got a horrible hair cut. I thought to myself, At least I’m kind. People like that.

Along came 2010 and my relationship with my body went haywire. After the broken leg, I started my pregnancy with Ben pounds away from what my full-term weight had been with Ada. With nausea, bed-rest and then grief as my companions, I stood on the scale one day, shortly after his death and read 203 pounds. I felt like a foreigner in my own skin and when I looked in the mirror, all I recognized was my eyes.  There are few photos of me from this time but here I am, well hidden, at Ada’s 3rd birthday party, 11 days after Ben died.

I wanted to be healthy again. I wanted my feet to stop hurting from carrying the weight. I wanted to run and jump and play with my child. The quest began, the only rule being no dieting. The path was a lesson in acceptance and love. Somewhere along the way – I think shortly after I stopped eating gluten – I began to feel lighter inside. An internal weight lifted and I could feel myself in there. I could see in my mind’s eye the body that existed under the grief, under the protective layer I had carefully built up. I learned to see the beauty in my full belly, my big thighs, my back that looked so much like someone else’s. I honored where I was, knowing that the healthy weight goal I had set was attainable, that there was no rush, that I would find my way.

I reached that goal just over a year after I set it. 53 pounds shed alongside thousands of tears. I feel healthier than I have since I was a kid. I have a fitness goal now – to move my body doing something I love six days a week. But the biggest benefit of all of this work I’ve done – physical, emotional and spiritual  – is that I feel more beautiful than I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s not the cat-call inducing physical beauty of my teens and twenties. It’s not the stunningly put-together beauty of some of my friends. But as I watched myself stretching on my Pilates reformer the other day, singing along with Snatam Kaur’s angelic voice, I realized I am in love with who I’ve become. Not everyone will see it, and it’s clouded some days, but there is a glow coming from inside that is so bright, when I catch a glimpse I am awed by it. I will never look like this again:

Or this:

Or this:

I wouldn’t want to.  I love the wisdom and groundedness almost 40 years has given me.  My belly hasn’t yet recovered from carrying life and it will, or it won’t. Some days it bothers me. Most days it doesn’t. I’ve grown accustomed to the gray in my hair, though I’ll likely continue to use highlights to smooth it over for another decade or so. When I wrote of beauty, of my beauty, this is what I meant. I’m not about to win a swimsuit competition or take anyone’s breath away with perfectly coiffed eyebrows but just as I see what is beautiful in (almost) everyone else, I now also see it in myself.

Do you see that beauty when you look in the mirror? Do you see your own inner light? If not, what would it take to let that glow out? What would it take for you to fall head over heels in love with yourself?

I first published this post on November 30, 2010. It’s been calling to me in the quiet moments just before sleep. Here it is again – a reminder for us to be gentle with ourselves and each other.

I wonder how many of us walk through the world appearing to function normally, but if the right button is pushed, the right music is played, the right question is asked, the wound we wear beneath our clothes begins to ooze. A lost child, a failed marriage, a dead parent, an act of violence witnessed or experienced. I wonder how many of us have the courage to meet that ooze with love, honesty and compassion, to allow the tears in front of strangers, to make the messiness visible and admit we can’t tie it all up in a shiny package with a Martha Stewart bow. I wonder how many of us harden against the vulnerability of it. How many turn unshed tears into fortress walls, heartache into armor, grief into rage. We are wounded and so we wound. We tighten instead of loosen, harden rather than soften, put on our best game face while we crumble inside.

As I wonder, my heart fills with compassion for all of us. We humans, the walking wounded. We do the best we can for our level of awareness. I do my best. Sometimes I fall short. Sometimes I rise to the opportunity I have been given to soften into love, grow into myself, sit in my own oozing skin.

In a moment of clarity I see that my work in this world is to turn toward ease and joy, to say yes to life, to allow the waves of fear, indecision, and uncertainty to wash through me, then come up for air with greater understanding. Life happens – moving, traveling, unmet expectations. I lose that clarity, that vision. I get grumpy. I throw a nasty look at the young man who cuts in front of my family in line, wondering at his sense of entitlement. I sigh when my daughter asks to be picked up for the umpteenth time when I’m trying to get something done. I look in the mirror and forget to love my body – this body that has carried me, carried life and now carries grief. I forget that the wound is there for a moment until my judgment cracks the scab and I see blood. Ah yes – there I am. Human.
Raw. Feeling my way back to whole.

This morning Steve took Ada to school so I could have a little more time to myself. As I walked the ocean path with our dog, I found myself feeling the tiniest bit guilty for how happy I was to be by myself, moving my body through space, listening to music that makes my soul light up. There’s still a touch of post-Benjamin fear in me that if I’m too happy when Ada isn’t around, she’ll be taken from me. I wondered at the lightness I felt, the sense of ease that comes most often when I am alone. We have fun together, our little family, but lately there’s been a cloud of stress hanging over us. Still recovering from Ben’s death, financial worries and emotional challenges have kept us from experiencing the ease I so desperately wanted at the beginning of the year. I believe that I can choose ease in any situation, it just seems easier when I’m on my own.

I don’t always take advantage of my time alone. I get stuck answering emails and trying to catch up on my favorite blogs. I’ve hardly sent a tweet in weeks (months?) and while my head tells me I need to do these things in order to keep up, my heart is telling me I am in a time of fallow. I am burrowing into myself, into the center of my life. I am deepening my connection to Spirit, I am spending time in Nature, I am journaling instead of writing publicly. All of those things are necessary and I have given myself permission to do them.

Still, there’s a desire to get more done. To have 8 hour days to commit to my work.  To want to cross more things off the I-really-want-to-do-this list. To fast track my earning potential.  Then I look at my daughter’s smile and her bright eyes. I listen to her conversation changing, her thought processes developing, her made-up songs and nonsensical words and I think how privileged I am to be able to witness this, to find joy in it. I realize how privileged I am to love this deeply.

It is hard for me to rest. There is a voice in my head that talks of momentum and reach and whispers should in every other sentence. I recognize that voice now and I know it’s not mine. I am seeing my stories more clearly and am working to love them and let them go. I need them less and less as I grow more into myself. There are stories about parenting, about marriage, about being liked, about making money. There are stories about sex and betrayal and wounding. There are stories about family and friends, about community and being left behind. In getting quiet, in meditation and dance, in writing and doing yoga, I am learning where the stories stop and I begin.

I think that’s why it’s easier to feel joyful when I am alone. There’s no one else’s story to get wrapped up in and I’m more able to drop my own. They’re fun to look at, to turn over in my hand like a piece of sea glass, marveling at how the waves smoothed the edges and churned it from beer bottle to jewel.  But I am not that jewel, as pretty as it is. I am learning, slowly, remembering what I am. The waves of life, the waves of grief, have smoothed my edges enough that the light is shining through.

In those moments when the stories drop, the joy comes in and the ego steps aside, I recognize my beauty. I feel the warmth of my light. We are meant to be Love. We are meant to shine.

I’ve been listening to this song on repeat, and on this day, the 2nd anniversary of the first time I hit publish, it feels like a beautiful version of happy birthday to me.

I’ve been a bit lost since the retreat ended. For many months after Benjamin died, my only goal was to get through the day and stay connected to my heart, my grief, my family. There was a purity to that existence, a rawness that comes when the world stands on its head. I began the slow climb out of the hole I had dug myself into in my twenties and early thirties. The hole that came from never measuring up, never being enough, never doing enough. The hole that I knew I wanted to move out of when my daughter was born, so I didn’t pass that kind of living along.

Day after day passed, I wrote, I danced, I sobbed and laughed and grew. The world shifted again and I was ready to begin stepping out into it as myself – the new-old me. The one who came into the world knowing, but then forgot and has begun to remember what I’m here for. Picking Up the Pieces was born – the guide, then the retreat. For five months my focus was intense, even as I continued to grieve and heal and live my life.

Then it was over.

Space opened up and I fell in. I am still processing what happened. I continue to write about the retreat, recording moments and thoughts to help with the next one, and the one after that. I’ve put down on paper everything I want to do, simply to get it out of my head. My husband and child are ready for more of my attention. My days have been full and somehow, I’ve fallen back into feeling like there’s not enough time, despite having more of it to play with.

I am being kind to myself.

This is a new practice for me – a gift from Benjamin. I’ve instituted a daily sacred hour of power – 20 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes of writing, 20 minutes of moving my body. If nothing else I know doing those three things will keep me connected to myself. I’m allowing the void to be there, this place of not knowing exactly what’s next, of where my focus needs to be. I have three or four projects that are on my hot list and I’m asking for guidance, waiting for clarity. It’s both uncomfortable and peaceful. I feel empty and full. I am immensely grateful for my life.

Where are you right now? Are you in hot pursuit of a goal or floating gently in the void? Are you empty or are you full? How are you taking care of your heart?