In the past two weeks since his death, I have handed my infant baby to my father. My father at 23, in his dirty white t-shirt. She is so happy there.. I took care of her. She trusts me. I am holding my adult self now in my grief and he is holding my infant self. There is more hair on his head. He walks across the top floor of our first home holding me with a gentle bounce. He is calm and seems like his most true self, exactly what my infant needed at the time. I see and feel the way the light shines into the windows, just how I remember it as a small child. When I am sad about his death, many of my parts come and show up for me. And when I check in on my infant, he has her. He is calm with a gentle smile and assuring that he’s got this now. 

It was brief, but I could remember thinking to myself over and over: “there is no pain here, there is no pain” and I could feel this tingling release sensation filtering out the right side of my body

Then we talked about it. Like fucking adults. It was scary and amazing - to have that kind of difficult conversation with another person and stay present and name all the things. It’s one of those transformative moments in communicating and relating with another that I hope has made an imprint on my system. 

Days later I met him. The one who would take my breath away. The one who would show me my patterns more than I knew possible. The one who would show me what I really wanted. If bachelor #1 set the bar for me, bachelor #2 raised it.

And it has been absolute bliss and absolute hell. I hear the best way to transform your patterns and grow as a human is to be in a conscious relationship, so the second best thing to that must be dating… Consciously. Open to being aware of your patterns…

I haven’t written a blog since before I started grad school, and let me tell you… now that I have told you that I am going to write a blog I am resisting the fuck out of it. Now that I have told you all of the ooey gooey things I have to say, I am resisting.

In case you didn’t know, I am currently earning a certification to become trauma informed in order to not only better serve you in my yoga classes, meditation class, and reiki sharing, but also for my high school students, and ultimately every human I have the privilege of connecting with.

Resentment: There’s a lot to unpack here… y’all ready?

Resentment is hard to admit. Hard own.

Resentment comes from the energy of “can’t you see I’m busy”

Resentment comes from taking anything personally.

Resentment is making someone else wrong for not following your unspoken boundaries.

Resentment is I-Told-You-So energy.

Resentment is wanting things to be different than they are.

It’s quite amazing how opening up a box of pancake mix, and then noticing the clip on the bag inside the box can trigger a sharp grief response. It’s been a year since I made pancakes. If it has been held up tight inside of you for a while without a safe space to release, if you let it, it can send you down a slow spiral of much needed grief.

So I write. I write about my internal wars. I write about the external shit I resist. I write to show you that mindfulness and meditation are forever, that even as a practitioner I have shit I face and shit I have to work through. I write to bring awareness to it, to help you bring awareness to yours. I write to normalize the inevitable pain of being human. That suffering is real and beautiful and even more so when we open to it. That it’s less when we are in approval of our suffering.

But there is another way I can do things. Another way you can do things. Another way I have done things that feels in such juicy alignment.

It’s called trust.

Just trust.

I’m feeling in a weird space today. An in-between. A limbo.

As you must be well aware of at this point in my writing… I am a single mom. And I just conquered my second Christmas season as a single mom.

This is the story I live. A story I’ve been telling myself, a story that stems from a victim-ness, poor me, a “please witness my struggle” energy.

I had a significant lack of confidence in myself through, well, pretty much always. I’ve only just begun to learn to walk that tightrope of confidence. And I know now that a last name is only an extension of your mindset. A name is not where your confidence comes from, because if it did, I’d be the most confident person ever with a last name like Hawkes.

I’ve been working with the concept of self-abandonment. And let me just start off with saying that self-abandonment is subtle as fuck!

I thought self-abandonment was when we say “yes” when we mean “no”, when we say we like something when we don’t, when we do things so we people will like us.

And this all IS self-abandonment, for sure. But it is so grossly conditioned within us that I’m sure most of us are self-abandoning when we think we’re not. I am sure because I watched myself do it 100x times this MORNING.

I want to be seen. I want to be gotten. I want to be understood. I want to be connected with.

I WANT.

I long for.

Connection.

I want to be entangled with another person in body and mind, having deep connective conversations about life, spirit, integrity, values, energy, humanness.

I want to drive down the road on an adventure laughing with each other, falling into each other.

I’m fucking lonely.

Today I was on a mission.

I was on a mission to spend time with myself.

I’ve been lonely as fuck lately. I have come to the scary recognition that I am afraid of being alone.

The only cure for the fear of being alone is to spend time being alone.

I was riding high there for quite awhile. I was riding so high I forgot I would need to come down. I thought:

“It's only up from here.“

It’s been so long since I felt that good, I clung hard.

I got hooked on a narrative and the feelings I thought it was producing.

I drove up the spiritual by-pass on-ramp.

Today I am going to allow myself to dive into a deep portal of love and safety so that I can allow myself to be fully vulnerable to discover who this is. She will be seen and captured on film but not exploited.

A portal so safe I can come undone all the way down to the edges of my skin, raw naked beauty, lovingly admiring my power.

Out of this portal I hope to retrieve a confidence and trust in myself I have been yearning for.

By the actual 4th I was on my new back deck, listening to the fireworks from all sides around me, witnessing more fireworks than I anticipated through the dense thicket of trees, and enjoying a whole new, literal and metaphorical, view of July 4th, laughing at what a difference a year makes.