Welcome to Meet Yourself Here - a (new-ish) gentle monthly invitation for you to pause and be with yourself in this moment, in beautiful, self-reflective and soulful ways. Sometimes a guided meditation, sometimes a simple ritual, sometimes a journaling process, a self-coaching tool or an experiment. Always looking through a seasonal lens, with a voice note to walk you in and the invitation to continue the conversation, share your thoughts and have access to me to ask questions in the comments.
Meet Yourself Here in June
This is coming to you a few days later than I’d planned and during those few days delay it’s become an entirely different invitation to the one I thought I’d be sending you. I kind of love my reasons for letting it evolve because there’s a lot of compassion within this for the season I’m in. I hope it helps you bring a whole heap of compassion into your own current season, whatever is going on for you…
June has turned the lanes around my house into an almost impassable riot of green. Everything jostles for space, reaching higher and further to soak up the light. In the garden everything is bursting out of every corner. It’s untameable.
Life and parenting feel equally as wild and unbridled. We’re in a very fast season.
I’ve checked a couple of times to make sure I still only have two kids because between school trips, residentials, a DofE expedition, school festivals, athletics events and sports days it feels like surely I have more. I don’t have to tell you how many lists I’m tending to. I know you have your own.
After school and at the weekends it feels like there’s not a minute when something doesn’t need tending to. The Summer term juggle is in full swing. And yet somehow, even though this is knackering, there’s an energetic pull that beckons. Do more, it says, go to the Summer places, say yes to this and that and this… do all the things that make the warmer days joyous even though there’s already loads to do.
There’s an outwards pull. I want to be at the riverside. At the beach. The school holidays wave to me a few weeks away, asking for plans and adventures and delights that I’m not even sure I have energy in the tank for.
There’s a lot of motion. Little stillness.
I remember to check in with myself as I walk around barefoot in the evening watering the veg patch that also wants my tending, as I feel the sun on my skin on a lunchtime dog walk. I feel briefly embodied in these moments but wonder how much has my body become a vehicle for all the outward doing, the tending, the Summer busying.
This buzz of Summer activity was all entirely ok with me until my body threw in a surprise Winter season on an otherwise lovely, summery day…
Winter in Summer
I hadn’t had a period since November (perimenopause is in full swing) and, truth be told, I’d been sorely missing the groundedness of a regular cycle. So my first response to a surprise Cycle Day One was almost that of greeting of an old friend. Except this old friend quickly revealed herself to not be the same easy company I’d been used to in recent years, deciding to announce her arrival by mowing me down with a truck. Fun.
I had a ton of things to do that day, I told myself I could not just bend to this and stop, but I felt utterly dreadful (energy-wise and pain) and in the end I had to.
It seemed completely at odds with the busy of the Summer season to retreat. The sun was out and all the things wanted tending to. But I did the only thing I felt I could do in that moment. I sunk into a favourite nest-like armchair and gave in to what my body needed: a complete absence of doing.
I read the gentlest, most enchanting book about a woman who makes nests for wild ducks on a island in far-reaches of Norway and bizarrely felt as though each page tucked me further into my own nest.
I got up only for (decent, nourishing) food and more tea.
I cried.
I didn’t ask myself to think all that much.
Nothing on any of my lists got done.
And guess what? The sky didn’t fall in. The world didn’t stop turning. Nobody had an opinion and I wouldn’t have cared for it anyway. Nothing went wrong.
Imagine.
The view from the nest
My mind’s eye was on the Norwegian island with the eider ducks, but I was also fully present in my own nest. I watched the way the light danced across the room as the day passed. I listened to the birdsong. Said hi to a butterfly who fluttered in and back out again. I silenced the pinging class Whatsapp groups and ignored pretty much everything else on my phone. I took in the feeling of not doing and of jobs going undone and found it just didn’t matter all that much.
I’d tend to the lists when I felt better. Anyway, I’d do a terrible job if I attempted any of it just then.
My husband cooked that evening. I washed up and went to bed when my kids did. I felt so much better the next day.
The stories we tell ourselves
I wondered afterwards: if I hadn’t have felt quite so bad would I have listened and tended to my body in the same way.
Would you have?
As a coach who helps people untangle from patterns of over-doing, over-giving, people pleasing, perfectionism and proving ourselves through our attachments to things like productivity and being good enough, I’ve done lots of work on my own self-doubt driven patterns.
Even so, had I not felt quite so dreadful that day, I might have found a whole bunch of stories about why I couldn’t possibly write the day off. Those stories would have felt very true to me in that moment.
And, I wonder, are these stories about what we ‘must’ do more true than the one our body or our heart holds about the tending we need. Or do we just give them more airtime. More weight.
Something I know
As beautiful as the Summer season can be and as alluring it’s pull to be out there doing all the things, it’s a season where we easily get pulled out of balance.
So in this month’s invitation to meet yourself here, I’m offering you a rebalancer with an in-built permission slip which you can reach for anytime you need.
