[While I’m on creative sabbatical through the end of the year, I’m pulling some of the most popular posts from the archives and sharing them again. With the busyness, and sometimes loneliness, of the holidays upon us, I needed this reminder. I thought you might too.]

It is okay to be gentle with yourself.

It is okay to treat yourself with the tenderness usually reserved for a newborn child.

It is okay to set the day’s intentions gently aside and look for solace, for comfort, for peace, for a taste of joy.

It is okay to be raw, even when the grief is old.

It is okay to lay down, to stop, to rest.

With deep love for your wounded heart and compassion for your humanity,

Tell yourself,

Believe yourself,

It is okay.

[While I’m on creative sabbatical through the end of the year, I’m pulling some of the most popular posts from the archives and sharing them again. This post was originally written in July, 2012. Next week, November 25, is the third anniversary of Ben’s due date. This week marks the first anniversary of the death of a beloved friend’s husband. It seemed like the perfect time for this gentle reminder.]

Tonight I lay with Ada in the basement of my brother’s house, waiting for her to fall asleep and feeling resentful. We’re in Edmonton and it’s light until after 10:30pm so the time between kids finally quieting down and adults collapsing seems nonexistent. I hate being grumpy with her and there’s been too much of that this week. Buttons pushed by travel, heat, and fatigue. She’s been scared and needing me in ways I’ve had a hard time meeting. Steve gently wondered on the phone if it has to do with the time of year. I finally realized how quickly July 29th is approaching.

The second anniversary of Benjamin’s stillbirth.

My sister-in-law mentioned feeling sad that while the two older girls bounce and run and giggle together, their youngest, who was born 5 weeks after Ben died, has no playmate. My brother wondered if Steve and I had talked further about adoption. A friend sent a link to a picture of this statue.

My baby is gone but not forgotten.

Lying in bed, I forgave myself for my struggle. Breathing deeply, my mind wandered to those I know who are in the midst of a journey with cancer. It drifted to the story of Anita Moorjani and her near death experience. I haven’t read her book, but the words came to me as though I heard her speaking them:

We are Love and our sole purpose in this life is to be Love.

My body relaxed, my breathing deepened, my muscles unclenched. And I remembered. We can’t do it wrong, this life. It’s impossible. We can make it easier on ourselves, or harder. We can feel victimized or empowered. We can live as love or live in fear. But we can’t do it wrong. I can choose to agonize over the little things, or not. I can fight what’s in front of me, or accept it. I can stress about the lack of vegetables in my daughter’s diet and the fact that I’ve been eating too many Trader Joe’s Root Vegetable Chips, or I can loosen the strangle hold of control, trusting that one day she’ll love kale and next week I’ll get more exercise.

I can’t do it wrong.

Happy, grumpy, tired, inspired, ecstatic, imperfect, heart-broken, human. It takes the pressure off. Can I do it better? Sure, if that means more in alignment with who I believe myself to be. If better means getting out of my own way more often and not letting fear keep me small. I’m like that airplane on autopilot, self-correcting whenever I get off course. The destination isn’t in doubt (though I have no idea what it will look like when I disembark) and the journey is both magical and brutal. It helps me to remember I can’t do it wrong.

Neither can you.

Forgive yourself. Take the pressure off. There’s no wrong decision. No bad choice. Live it. Learn. Auto-correct. You can’t help it. You’re brilliant. You’re human.

[While I’m on creative sabbatical through the end of the year, I’m pulling some of the most popular posts from the archives and sharing them again. Today’s post was originally written in March of 2012.  I also have a special announcement so make sure to scroll all the way down for the exciting news!]

I had coffee Monday morning with pleasure catalyst and fabulous new friend Kerrie Blazek. As she told me about a weekend retreat that had put her deeply in touch with her body, one thought circled my brain, demanding to be heard:

The body is the foundation.

If we’re not in our bodies, we’re not in the moment. If we’re not in our bodies, we’re cut off from one of the biggest information centers and conduits of sensation and Love in the capital “L” sense of the word.

We are born knowing this, knowing that our bodies ground us in our lives. As infants we don’t need to think to know if we’re hot, cold, hungry, or needing to be held. Our bodies tell us. As a dancer, my body was my vehicle for expression. As I began working in physical theater I needed to know my body even more intimately as there was no choreographer to move me across the floor – every note that was hit, every word uttered, my body responded to from impulses deep within. My body was my tool and my craft.

Then I quit. I cut it off. Shut it down. Left it behind in favor of my mind. And I was miserable. It’s taken years to recover, finding my way back into myself slowly, searchingly.

The body is the foundation. If we are not present in our bodies, we are not fully alive.

It doesn’t matter what your body can do, what matters is that you live INSIDE of it. Embody your life. Embody your love. Feel life – taste it, touch it, experience it all through your body.

It can be terrifying. Our bodies hold memories we’d prefer to forget. They are scarred and wounded, vulnerable and strong. They are powerful beyond measure. As is our mind. But a mind disconnected from its body tells half-truths.

So many of us ache to escape what we see in the mirror. We judge it, berate it, cut ourselves off from it. We over-feed and under-adore. We struggle to make peace. Many religions and spiritual practices tell us to distance ourselves from our flesh, tell us that heaven is only reached when our body dies, tell us that to connect with the spirit realm we have to go up and out. I say the way to heaven is both in and through the physical. I say in order to be truly awake, we have to be able to live inside ourselves, deeply connected to our own inner wisdom. Our bodies are miracle babies, a union of Nature and the Divine. They speak powerfully. It’s time for us to listen.

What is your body telling you right now?

**********

And now for the news…I’m excited and proud to announce that I’m featured in the new book, Watch Her Thrive, out today! Inside you will find 83 stories of hope, courage and strength. Contributors include Jennifer Louden, Marci Shimoff, Tara Mohr and many other wonderful writers.

The book and the Watch Her Thrive Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving women who have survived rape or domestic violence, are the work of my friend Kimberly Riggins. All proceeds from the sale of this book will go directly to Women for Women International, a charity working with socially excluded women in countries where war and conflict have devastated lives and communities.

Grab your copy today (Nov 12 only!) and receive over $1000 worth of bonuses as well as helping give back to women in need. Check out the bonuses here (the next round of Shine is included!). Of course you can buy the book anytime after today too and feel good about doing good.

Click here to find out more and order your copy now!

P.S. In the book I’m sharing a very vulnerable story I’ve never written about publicly before. I’m taking lots of deep breaths and trusting that it will help someone, somewhere, feel less alone.

[While I’m on creative sabbatical through the end of the year, I’m pulling some of the most popular posts from the archives and sharing them again. This one feels very relevant right now. As I dive deeper into myself, releasing layers of resistance, I’m finding even more hidden below.]

I’ve been pondering resistance.

I happen to have a fair amount of it. I resist sleep (always have) until I’m over-tired. I resist being organized (even though I crave it). I resist setting up a creative space in my home because then I’d have to actually show up and paint (hello fear and judgment).

It hit me today, in a moment of blinding clarity, that I’ve started resisting some of the very things that grief taught me to soften into, and that I’d better return to those lessons before life hands me another kick in the pants. This was after I woke from a dream where I got a phone call that my daughter had been killed in a car accident at the age of 22. (She’s currently 5)

I talk often of life – and grief – being a spiral. We revisit situations, feeling their familiarity and the frustration of not having it all figured out (I thought I dealt with this already!). But we do it from a different vantage point on the spiral. We’ve changed. Life has changed. We’re ready to release, or learn, or heal on a deeper level.

Which brings me back to resistance.

What if, instead of judging ourselves (okay, myself) for feeling it, and trying to talk myself out of it (you KNOW you need more sleep Alana, what’s wrong with you?!) we fall head first into it. Why not feel the resistance fully, even if it means throwing a tantrum like a tired two-year old, and get to what’s underneath it?

I can figure it out, in my head, which does me little to no good. If I allow myself to feel the resistance in my body, to drink it like a camel at an oasis, to scream at the sky, my cluttered desk, my bed, “I don’t want to!”, I wonder what I would discover.

How about you? What are you resisting right now? Are you willing to find what lies underneath? I’d love to know.

Wishing you an enjoyable + enlightening tantrum.