The days leading up to the winter solstice are my favorite time of the year. I love the longer nights which welcome cozy evenings at home and an early start to bed. I enjoy bundling up for chilly walks and the Christmas lights that bring whimsy to the neighborhood. I used to think I was so weird for this being my favorite time of year when summer is often highlighted as the season of fun. But the winter suits my nature and my sensory system best. I feel less resistance to being me this time of year. 

And that is the beauty of being human, we can each have our own predilections and propensities. Where it gets murky is when societal (and individual) expectations send messages of what we enjoy and embody are wrong.

I am passionate about fertile darkness, nighttime, the hidden mysteries, grief, sadness, and loss. I love talking about them because for many of us these are topics not welcome in our daily lives. We haven’t been taught to be with each other in our pain and discomfort without rushing towards fixes and answers. But for grief, loss, sadness, and pain - often the fix is being with, offering spaciousness, and time for us to feel what is within us. 

Now I do not want anyone to be stuck in their suffering, or to feel alone in it. But if we are always pulled out of our very natural experience of discomfort it will stay a wound prone to festering. I dream of a world where someone asks me “How am I” and they really want to hear the answer. They want to enter into my humanity with me. There is no greater gift than being seen, heard, and deeply understood. But how do we package that up and put it under the tree or the menorah? 

So, this solstice my invitation is who can you give the gift of witnessing them in their humanity? Offering them all the time, spaciousness, and regard the human soul is worthy of. To invite them to share what love looks and feels like to them, what heartache and regrets they carry (as we all carry them), and the joys they hold close but are too afraid (embarrassed, shy, worried, etc.) to share. To show them they have your love no matter if they fall to pieces, lose control, or inhabit the messiness of their humanity. Gift them companioning because their humanity makes them worthy of companionship instead of having to earn it by putting on a smiling face and a mask of happiness. 

This is my invitation and my prayer for each one of us. That we have those in our lives who can witness and hold us in the full range of our humanity. AND that we have the courage and willingness to be the person who is the witness for others. 

Solstice Blessings,

Valerie ​

I am not one for forced gratitude. I am not one for forced anything...joy, happiness, smiling, socializing. I am not for it possibly because I am not good at it. That is not to say that I do not think gratitude is vital to experiencing life with more gentleness. But gratitude has become one of the tools of spiritual bypassing. Often our suffering is met with “focus on what you are grateful for.”

While the intention of redirecting our energy is admirable, this invitation often comes from outside ourselves from a person who cannot accompany us in our suffering. The invitation is more about them than us.

Or maybe this forced gratitude comes from within, because we are not able to accompany ourselves in our suffering or we have internalized the cultural message of “good” people are grateful. So we turn away from it, and focus on the good things, the happy things. And in this turning away, the happy things are not quite as happy as they could be because we have not attended to what is also in the room: our pain and discontentedness.

During this time, when so much of the world is in crisis, gratitude can feel complex for some and a welcome relief for others. You do you. But my invitation is why do you do what you do? Do you think you should feel happy and grateful right now?  Are you continuously overriding your impulses and feelings to appear grateful? No judgment - we all have cultural conditioning to unpack. This unpacking is what leads us to become more of ourselves…and sometimes we unpack and find that Yes, we do want what we have been taught to be.

Personally, this year I am grateful for the invitation into gratitude. It has been a challenging year in my household. I have witnessed the difficulty, made space for it, railed and resisted against it, accepted it, and bowed down to it. And because of this, I believe I have space to meet the gratitude invitation more fully (ask me in a week or two and you may get a different answer).

In the research of gratitude, specificity is crucial to the honoring. I would also add that being truthful to one’s self is a valuable ingredient…you don’t have to profess to be thankful for something that you aren’t. So yes I may be thankful for the surgical interventions that have saved my life, but I am not grateful for the pain I experienced (as one of my teachers says, pain is an overrated teacher).

When things are difficult, I focus in on the smallest thing I can truly be grateful for (although sometimes I do not get to this step). Wherever you are in your relationship to gratitude - a huge fan, a skeptic, in a break up -  honor it.

Gratitude, when not a societal construct or something to check off our spiritual personality trait card, is a natural state we ebb in and out of. The ebbing in and out is one of the keys to knowing if it is a bypass or a more emergent state. 

If  gratitude is something you are considering this holiday…the recipe to explore is specificity and not lying to one’s self, and also making space for the difficult.

I am grateful for those I call friends and family this year because they have helped me remember that I matter when I have forgotten, and that has made life more meaningful and less lonely. I am grateful for my clients because I am continuously reminded of the beauty of humanity, opening up more access for compassion - for myself and others. I am grateful for my animals for showing me everyday what it means to be an animal, and this remembering helps me to lean into my own animal nature, offering spaces of more ease and resilience. And I am deeply grateful to each one of you who takes the time to read, reflect, and reach out after each of these newsletters because without you, I would not learn, grow outside myself, and create as much as I do. And creation is one of the very acts that keeps me here on this earth.

Holidays are complex, stressful times for so many. They are bittersweet moments if we have loved ones missing from our tables. Or holidays can touch our wounds of othering and marginalization. They might require us to turn away from our needs and desires so that we may tend to family, safety, and to our survival. However this holiday lands for you, I hope you know you matter. And how you feel and what you do doesn’t change your worth. You matter and I am grateful you are here connected to me through these words and this screen.

My invitation this holiday weekend in the US (and everyday from here on) is, find some small drop inside you that believes - without a doubt and without any need to do anything - that you matter…and tend to that seed drop by drop until it is a whole forest within. 

With much gratitude for your beingness…

Valerie
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This year marks 25 years since my father died. My father got sick when I was a senior in high school and died the year after I graduated college. It was the crucible my adulthood was forged in.

Grief became something of a curiosity (special interest) for me. From that moment  on, the only certainty of life I knew was that some time, some way, I would feel this complicated, complex, compounded set of emotions again and again.

For 30 years I have been actively dancing with grief. Mystified and humbled by it, I go to bed every night acutely aware of its possibility, and wake up every day with it as my companion. Because what I know of grief is that while it may shift and lessen in intensity, it is there just below the surface, and one little scratch brings it back.

The other day I got a message from a client asking me to remind them how to move through heavy grief. I am always humbled, honored, and deeply compassionate with a request for healing grief. It is probably one of the most complicated, complex, bewildering emotions that humans face.

Grief is a visceral, physical, heart- and head-hurting experience. When we are in it, most of us wonder how to get out of it. We want it to end. We put a time frame on it and think that once it is over, we can go back to living as we once did. But as you know, there really is no going back.

Grief is a tender time to lean into what soothes, while making space for the painful and uncomfortable.

So how do I move through heavy grief?

I give it time to be. I give it much more time than I “think” it should need (and what our society deems acceptable).

I give grief space. Space to be present. Space to talk about it, to cry, to yell, to sleep, to comfort eat, or to not eat at all.

I give myself permission for anything that brings some comfort and feels like what my body wants to do - or not do. I honor my body’s wishes.

What I don’t do is ignore it.

On grief anniversaries, I plan for them - I take the day off and let my loved ones know I may be "in a mood." I give myself space and time to tend to my emotions. I lean into memories (I can remember everything about the day before and the days after my dad died, and I let myself remember them).

And when the grief anniversary is tied to a person, I celebrate them - my dad loved shopping and eating ice cream, so that is what I do on his day.

There is no quick way to get out of grief. And getting out of it isn’t really an option. It becomes a dance partner who at first makes you feel awkward and raw. Slowly it morphs into a partner who one moment is filled with the grace of life, and the next is stepping on your toes and dropping you to the ground. It’s the most human dance of all.

I wish that grief would never visit any of us. But as the saying goes, “grief is the price we pay for love,” and my greatest wish is that we each know love. So my prayer is that when we find ourselves in grief, we may feel the gentle holding of the earth and be companioned by those who carry the medicine of time and space.

Sincerely, 

Valerie ​

One of my favorite tarot cards is the tower (you can see it below). I used to be afraid of it: the upheaval, destruction, the lack of control. But now when it shows up in a reading I have equal parts excitement and concern. To the card when it appears I say “thank you. Thank you for being clear and honest with me.” When the tower shows up with its shock, unplanned timing, its tearing down of what seemed to be so stable, it can be hard to orient, to breathe, to take action because the wind has been knocked out of us. When the tower is struck, we react because it is a crisis moment. 

AND because the tower is a known card in the deck of life, we can have some safe rails in place when the tower appears. The card is a reminder that upheaval, chaos, renewal is a natural part of life. And for those of us who reside on shaky ground the reminder can be a welcome relief that we aren’t doing anything wrong and we are definitely not alone.  

I have been afraid of thunderstorms my whole life. You won’t see me dancing in a  storm, or admiring the light show. I am squarely hunkered down when the storm rolls in. But I do not question the usefulness of the storm. It exists for a purpose. A purpose I benefit from even if it doesn’t agree with my system. 

For the last several years, the world has seemed like a never-ending tower card. The upheaval in culture, government, and climate. For  most everyone the landscape is rocky. And this is the moment to embrace the lessons of the tower. 

The card invites us into honesty. It strips away denial and false structures. It asks us to take an honest accounting of what is happening within and around us. What structures appear secure but are hanging on by a thread? What relationships appear strong but the red flags are there? What feelings do you notice again and again but push away? Once we have met the moment with compassionate and tender honesty, we can rebuild, hopefully integrating the wisdom we have learned. 

To rebuild after a tower moment is to take Maya Angelou’s words to heart. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” This is a painful experience - we want so deeply to believe in the potential of everyone, and this can harm all involved.

Angelou's amazing gift of insight not only pertains to others and our ability to be an honest witness to their capacity, but we must also be an honest witness to our own. This is a path to enlightenment, liberation, and ultimate freedom. An honest accounting of ourselves and the world around us. Not with the awful truth, but with the compassionate truth. The truth that gives full honoring to each one of us in our most complex and multifaceted essence. Is it possible that what you judge yourself so harshly for is your greatest trait that the world needs? 

My wish for us all is that we continue to know ourselves. That we meet ourselves with gentle honesty and a true awareness of our capacity so that we may offer this to others. My hope is when the tower strikes for each of us, some small aspect within you can see it for the gift it can be. 

May this season’s storms be tomorrow's growth and stability.
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Blessings, 
Valerie