Therapy with Justin

I need to hear this every day. As a recovering perfectionist, it's so hard to trust that good things happen all on their own if I just go with the flow. My instinct is to push and control out of a fear that nothing good will happen if I don't make it happen. Of course, when I let go of responsibility for the whole shebang, life has a way of creating exactly what I didn't even know I needed. Instead of trying to force something to be perfect, what if we just let it be perfect? Today I'm grateful for work that I love, for friendship, for making a yummy dinner and savoring it. for spending time in the garden and learning to appreciate what I have in ever-deepening ways. And then I'm grateful for being gentle with myself when I forget it all and start over from scratch.

One of the many difficult aspects of this pandemic is losing the parts of my life that feel essential to who I am. It hit me particularly hard this week when Burning Man was cancelled, because that is such an important outlet for my creativity, joy, and connecting with others with my whole heart. We're all feeling the pain of losing our most trusted outlets. What's happening on a deeper level is that we're experiencing the pain of shedding layers of identity. Everything w...e thought we were is being shed like a snake's skin, and now we're finding what remains underneath. It feels raw because you're meeting yourself at a deeper level than perhaps ever before. It takes courage to meet the "you" underneath these imagined identifiers, but it is also a powerful process of growth. Today I'm grateful for work that inspires me, the ability to be gentle with myself as I navigate stress, the pleasure of reading a book that I hold in my hands instead of listening to in the car, sunshine, RuPaul's Drag Race, and eating meals outside in the garden instead of in front of a screen.

(David Kessler in "Finding Meaning") I love this quote because it reminds me that what appear on the surface to be opposites are, at the core, two sides of the same coin. They come together and we can't cut grief and pain out of our life without also losing love and joy. Especially now, I find myself avoiding the truth of my discomfort by distracting and numbing, but then I also limit my capacity to fully open my heart in gratitude for the beauty of it all. May we accept life on life's terms, because it's the only life we have. Today I'm grateful for a husband who turned up the love on a day when I needed it. I'm grateful to be reconnecting with friends, to enjoy the osunds of my favorite wind chimes, to see a hummingbird, and to be gentle with myself as I pass through a wave of sadness.

In many creation myths, the universe is hatched from an egg, which has everything within itself. Just as life gestates in the egg, initiates in ancient healing rituals would withdraw into a dark hole or cave to "incubate" until a healing dream released them reborn into the upper world. On this day celebrating rebirth, let us feel our isolation as a deep incubating, and may we rediscover that our own hearts contain everything we need when we make peace with what we find there.