I want to be able to write about the truth of who I am with integrity, awareness, and accuracy. Even if who I am is also fluid.

I want to be able to write about the truth of who I am with self-awareness all while honoring the impermanence and natural ebbs and flows of who a human is and how they cannot show up as the same person moment from moment, day by day, month by month, year by year. We are always changing and evolving, and yet…

Sometimes who I am, is not who I want to be. 

And sometimes I can get way too attached to who I am. 

I want to know myself so I am unfuckwithable.

It’s NYE. It’s 2024. I have recently finished, what I am now referring to as, a “series of blogs” on grief and my fathers death. We have just had Christmas, the first season without my father. And the past few days I have felt the urge to come and write more, because so much more has processed. To begin the next “series”, so here we begin…

There is an infinite range and depth of emotions between the deep sorrow and darkness to the ecstatic beauty of being alive on this earth. And we don’t talk about it enough.

One might assume that seeing this child’s dead body in a casket would have traumatized me. If someone had been aware of my mini adventure they may have tried to protect me from the experience, ultimately shaming me from my very innocent and authentic curiosity. That would have been the real trauma.

Maybe if we celebrated and embraced death we would have more access to LIVING. And we could teach our children by holding space with them in their curiosity; in their experience. 

I remember probably the VERY week I told my parents I knew I was getting a divorce, he came over to help do something at the house and it was like he was a completely different person, he was the dad I remembered. I lost 15 years of time with him and I only just had him back for the last two and a half years.

It’s not fucking fair and I’m angry. I’m hurt. I’m sad. I’m grieving more than just death here. 

I can and I will… tell you now how my dad not only showed up for me, my mom, my kids, for each of you, but also for life and for living… and how that is now and will continue to have a ripple effect on all of us and the people we connect with, and this earth…
He taught me how to care about myself and the body I live in. 

He taught me how to have my feelings by having his, that it was ok to be angry and still be loved. 

He taught me the value of hard work, and the importance of education.

My dad was West Chester, Jakes Bar, and a volunteer firefighter. From the Philadelphia Eagles to the Chesapeake Bay. 

My dad was a performer, a character in his own right.

He was a devoted and loyal husband. He was a Poppy. 

He was a friend. Just look around. He. was. A. friend.

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.