As babies, if we are lucky, someone looks into our eyes and mirrors our experience back to us…our smiles, our hurts, our engagement with the world. And when someone looks back at us and mirrors our smiling, this teaches us that our experience, our feeling is valid and real. 

As adults, we are having daily interactions that elicit emotional responses from us - laughter, smiles, tears, heartache. And your experience is real and valid.

In our culture we rarely make space to listen to another’s experience without going straight to analysis and judgement. I dream of a world where there is enough space to hear and validate each person’s pain (and joy). 

When I look out my window and see the trees, the squirrels, the sky, and clouds, I never think which one experience is right and more valid? Which one experience will I validate at the expense of everything else?

Each squirrel, tree, cloud, expanse of sky deserves my acknowledgment of its unique experience.

To me this is one of the messages of this season - the equinox is a time of equanimity. Where there is spacious room for night time and daylight, where each squirrel, tree, walnut, herb plant has the space and opportunity to have its OWN experience without me judging it or analyzing it. 

When we give this space to other humans - being witnessed in experience - healing and change can happen. If this cycle is thwarted, we keep telling our experience again and again, searching for the completed feeling of “I see you,” “I hear you,” “I believe you.” We are like a person with a wound who keeps going house to house requesting bandaging and being told there is no wound to tend. 

What relief when you find the person that says “come in, (no questions ask, no reasoning needed) I have bandages and soap and water for you.” 

If this is something you do not experience often, you are not alone. I find myself more and more being discerning about explaining my pain and experience. When someone texts, emails, or asks “how am I?” (Which I take very literally like you really do want to know) I ask myself, will I be welcomed in for a bandage? Or will I be met with judgement and analysis? Sometimes I do not know - so I take the chance - sometimes I am met with disappointment and other times with mirroring. 

But in all of this, my practice over and over again is to turn to myself, and deeply validate my own experience. I give myself vast spaciousness for all that arises. Anger no longer gets dismissed or needs a justification to feel it, sadness gets welcomed whether there is a “valid” reason or not, panic comes in and I try not to resist it, grief no longer gets minimized. With it all I turn to myself and say “I see your wound, let me tend to you.”

The more I do this for myself - the greater capacity I have to offer it to my loved ones and friends. I see you, I hear you, yes it is real, no there doesn’t have to be a reason or meaning. Yes, yes, yes.  

This is my prayer for each one of us. May we be witnessed and validated in our life. May we have people we can turn to who look into our hearts and mirror what is there. And may we be our own best wound tender-er - no longer abandoning ourselves, but welcoming each experience in - without qualifier, without judgement, and give respite to ourselves. 

Equinox Blessings, 

Valerie ​

Spring Equinox is here. And while I am not ready for spring (I feel like I write that every year!), I am grateful for the invitation to orient to the natural world and for the reminder that balance is really a cultural construct in our rigid way of how we understand it.

The equinox is a moment when daytime and night time are in perfect balance. For one day (out of 365) equality between these two states happens, and then the rest of the year we are moving into the extremes. I find comfort and compassion for my humanity when I consider that even nature does not have the perfect static balance we humans strive for. 

Beyond balance, other concepts I have been contemplating recently is disorientation and orientation. Often when we feel disoriented in life we have this reactionary sense we are doing something wrong. We are a focused, path forward obsessed culture, so when we feel and experience disorientation we try really hard to get out of it. We struggle against it, try to push through it, search for clarity, our path, and our purpose, as if only one way, one purpose, one path exists for each of us.

This makes sense…disorientation can feel really uncomfortable and we have been trained to move as quickly out of the discomfort as possible. 

There are some times when we need to move to comfort and orientation and then there are other times when the medicine is in the disorientation. 

Disorientation isn’t inherently uncomfortable. With a better understanding of disorientation as part of the human experience, we can give ourselves more space and compassion. And with more space and compassion, we can move into curiosity (I will say it as many times as I need to - curiosity is a physiological dependent state). But if we are fighting against the human experience of disorientation - there is not much room for self-compassion - the fighting squeezes out all the space where we might show kindness to ourselves. 

So why speak about disorientation now with the spring equinox upon us? It is a point in the natural year that invites us to continually orient… we turn our face upwards to the warmth and the light of the returning sun or we bend low to whisper words of endearment to the flower just budding. And since we are organically orienting in this season of growth, it is the perfect moment to lean into the opposite to practice the movement between two very human states.

The natural world calls us into turning towards the new life around us (orienting) and with that brief moment of ordinariness we can have a reprieve from the disorientation. And this reprieve makes turning back towards (or falling back in) to disorientation a bit more comfortable. This touching into one state and then the other is the innate wisdom of our systems before life and society got us into worshipping at the altar of unattainable consistent regulation. 

In my spiritual training I was taught that disorientation is just as important to the human journey as orientation. Disorientation if entered into with the curiosity of what gifts lie here provides the space and opportunity to unlearn so that we may relearn. Disorientation offers us the space to review and examine the road we have traversed and to pick up pieces or correct any missteps we have made. In the state of disorientation, we can let go, unwind what binds and constricts us, we can shake off what is no longer required in our lives. Disorientation can invite us to sit, rest, and turn inward while we gather energy to move into orienting to what is on the horizon. 

With springs arrival, I hear the invitation to take the time to move between orientation and disorientation in these micro conscious ways. And if you wonder if micro steps can do anything for lasting change in our lives. I can assure you that micro steps lay a sturdy foundation (neuroplasticity is built on micro steps) to bloom anew, in your own time, in your own way, in your own dance of disorientation and orientation. 

My hope for this spring is that we take the time to orient to what brings us hope and beauty and that our disorientation is just as affirming and easeful as when we know the way. 

Blessings,

Valerie 
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Fall Equinox is upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere. Like any season, there are some that rejoice at its arrival and others that groan at the loss of leaves, the diminishment of light, and the pumpkin spice abundance. Maybe you are a bit of both. Seasons remind us that context matters and isn’t something to be disregarded. 

Seasons are an obvious context. Certain seasons invite particular clothing, indoor environments, and available food. A tomato in the winter is not the same as a tomato from the garden in summer. Context matters. 

And yet, often when we consider ourselves and other humans we take context out of the equation. We forget about the relationship of culture, lineage, community, family, connections. Is this because these contexts are less overt than the natural world? They certainly are not less important to our survival. 

Fall equinox is the invitation to turn inward. It sets up the context for longer nights and the need for more shelter. It is the still point of perfect balance before the wheel turns moving us forward to winter. With this turning, many of us are forced to forget context. Isn’t that what electric lights and alarm clocks are for?!

I am certainly not suggesting we turn away from all of our modernity. I am simply offering an invitation to explore where and when you embrace what context…because of course modernity is one context. 

Other contexts that impact our well-being are the environments and communities we were raised in. They leave their mark on us and without sacred tending can simply become part of the background noise. Sacred tending to the air we swim in helps us to become aware of the forces that impact us - much like the seasonal impact. The forces of culture, systemic structures that constrict and oppress, the familial environments that we took to be universal, all of these we carry inside us like collective internal weather patterns.  

My invitation to you this equinox is to reflect on the contexts that you acknowledge and those you wish to turn away from. To consider that context may very well be the missing ingredient to your personal growth and inner knowing journey as well as really knowing others. What generosity might come forth if we placed ourselves as well as those we engage with in context? What possibilities and guiding forces may meet us when we tune into the environments that forged us?

My hope is that this season lands gently for you and that the times ahead are filled with self-compassion and your perfect recipe of savory and sweet.

Blessings, 
Valerie ​

Equinoxes, the midpoint between the two extremes, the solstices. Here above the equator, we are heading into fall. The leaves are beginning to turn and drop, the air is a bit crisper, and our energies are starting to turn inward. At the same time, below the equator the grey begins to clear, foliage is returning, and awareness grows outward. Both points, two sides of the same coin. 

This year I have been pondering the symbiotic nature of the equinoxes of the world. While fall and spring appear so different, presenting as opposites, in reality, letting go and emerging work together to form the rhythm of life. Each one feeds the other. I envision the leaves dropping, seeping their nutrients into the ground and re-emerging into the flowers in the Southern Hemisphere and the reverse happening when it's Spring Equinox here. This interconnected nature of what was planted in the spring is coming to harvest, and what was harvested and given space to rest is ready to emerge anew. And the equinox is the still point between the two halves, a sliver of balance among the waves of change that never end in the natural world. 

And during these seasonal changes, I am reminded of the many times in my life where my insides didn't match what was happening externally. I was in winter when it was outwardly summer, or in spring when it was fall. During these times I took comfort in the possibility of a new season and the honoring of my own rhythm, even if it didn't look as it was supposed to. 

Rhythm is our anchor. We sync up with it, we attune to it. And this attunement doesn't even need to be conscious. Andrew Huberman, has a wonderful podcast that explores the inner state of our being, from the chemical to the emotional, and the research has caught up with what humans have known, we are linked.  Our heart rates mimic each other and our breathing syncs up with those we are with. We can register the internal state of others, all unconsciously, and what we register our bodies begin to turn towards. We are linked the way the trees have root systems that reach out and support each other. Not only can we be connected to each other in this elegant way, we can attune to ourselves and our own inner rhythm by a tool we have with us all the time, our heart. Sensing our hearts for our own rhythm can be a freeing anchor when the world around us swirls. And with our heart sits our lungs, the air element that resides in us. And we can bring our awareness to our breathing and notice it. And the noticing will change our breath...no effort required other than attention. 

These touchpoints of the seasons, the equinoxes and solstices, are moments that call our attention outside of ourselves. To look up from our lives and orient to what is here, now. And what is here, is the natural world's moment of balance. Two days out of 365 are moments of complete balance, and after this, either daylight or nighttime will begin to expand. Might we take a cue from the natural world and relinquish the perfectionist drive for balance? The scales of Libra are never fully still, and this moment of natural balance will fade with the sunset. I invite you to reorient to rhythm and see how that anchors you in a way that is different from balance. Rhythm makes room for what is present right now, and will continue to make room for the present, again and again. Balance is fleeting while rhythm is change and constant in one beautiful energy. May we all connect to the rhythm of OUR season and let the winds of change be our heart’s desire. 
Equinox Blessings, 

Valerie 
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