Keep believing in love (renewal, wholeness, fulfillment, embrace, care). When you’re longing and your hands are empty-handed. When life burns, when it hurts, when your heart aches, when it’s been years and you’re still waiting. When it’s the season of harvest and you’re still in a fallow season regarding something that really matters to you.
This is what it means to hope.
Do this with the longings you don’t tell anyone you’ve been holding deep in your heart. And also with your questions that don’t have answers. Let your hope be like even just a tiny flame that stays lit in the dark, quiet corners of your life. Your hope will be like a promise that more light (love!) is coming. That life is a series of seasons. That the tide must turn again, even if just for a moment.
Love is a force. In our common language, we’ve diminished the meaning of it and applied it to trivial things, but love is the most extraordinary, transformative, alchemizing energy there is. It is life; it survives death. You are love.
Browse Category by Facing Challenge
Chronic Illness, Communities of Care, Disability, Facing Challenge, Healing, Peace, Personal Growth, Resilience, Trauma, Wellness
Three Lies We Tell About Health & Healing
While in community recently, I had the eye-opening opportunity to witness many misconceptions about healing and the healing process. Sadly, many so-called healers even hold these beliefs, and perpetuate them to their clients and the broader community. I decided to share these misconceptions here and also share what I’ve learned to be true.
Misconception #1: “If you live with a disease, you are unhealthy. If you are physically “well,” you are healthy.
Health is more than the absence of disease. You might have heard this statement before, or seen it floating around the internet. It’s worth reflecting on. Health is more than just being free of disease in the physical body, and it’s not a one-time event that happens and lasts forever. Health is the sum of all the factors of our lives that intersect and form our well-being. How are your relationships? Do you feel held in community? Are you fulfilled and satisfied with how you spend your days? Are your material needs being met? How are you treated in the broader society in which you live? Do you reside in a safe and supportive environment? Do you live in a state of chronic stress? What is your relationship to your past; are you living in unforgiveness or bitterness?
Continue ReadingChronic Illness, Embodiment, Facing Challenge, Grief, Healing, Personal Growth, Reiki, Resilience, Self-care, Somatic Healing, Trauma
Embodiment and the Pain of Chronic Illness and Trauma
The body is our home for life. We live in it every moment yet most of us live in a disembodied state, rarely thinking about our body unless something is going wrong, unless we’re experiencing some kind of pain or physical dysfunction. And, maybe also when we’re dressing it, or thinking about how we’d like to change it.
But when you live with chronic illness or pain, it’s as if the body turns up the volume and regardless of whether you want to or not, you’re forced to live in a heightened awareness of the body you live in. You’re forced to live in direct relationship with it, and this relationship can be just as complicated as any other—you might experience anger, frustration, power struggles, days or moments when things are less difficult, and days when you feel more accepting towards its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. You might struggle with feeling like the communication is “off” between you and your body, like you can’t understand it and like it can’t hear you when you tell it you need a break from the pain or want to understand what’s going on with it.
Continue ReadingAffirmations, all i ever wrote, Art as Devotion, Digital Offerings, Facing Challenge, Faith, Grief, Love, Mindfulness, Peace, Personal Growth, Poetry, Prayer, Resilience, Self-care, Spiritual Practice, Spirituality, Uncategorized
New Offering: Affirmations & Prayers for Empowerment and Solace
It’s my joy to share this new digital download, Affirmations and Prayers for Empowerment and Solace.
This 26-page PDF contains the personal affirmations that have kept me afloat through all kinds of seasons. There are affirmations and prayers for grounding, blessing, self-compassion, navigating grief and sorrow, embodying power, calling in help, blessing, abundance, and protection. One of the themes threaded throughout the affirmations is embodied safety – body as home, as safe home – which makes them particularly soothing for survivors of trauma.
Continue Readingall i ever wrote, Art as Devotion, Facing Challenge, Faith, Healing, Publication Announcement, Resilience
“The Woman with the Issue” featured in Heart of Flesh Literary Journal
So happy to announce that my poem “The Woman with the Issue” is featured in Heart of Flesh Literary Journal‘s Issue Seven, released today.
This poem is a reflection on Luke 8:43-48, the story of the woman with the issue of blood. It’s a poem about difficulty and despair, daring faith, relentless hope, relationship, and healing.
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