Dear you,

I think you’re fantastic.

And I’ve been thinking…you know how life feels complicated so much of the time? Full of so many things to think and feel and learn and shed and change and pursue and celebrate and grieve and wonder and decide?

Exhausting, right?

I have this idea for making things more simple.

What if as you look at your life – which includes the Big Picture of it, as well as the minutia, like what you ate today, or how, specifically, you’ve just spent time online: what if as you look at your life, you peel away your layer of angst about not doing things as well as you know they could be done?

Wouldn’t that feel good?

I’m talking about EVERYTHING here, too. About exercise. Self care. Boundaries with loved ones. Leadership. Finances. Spending habits. Eating habits. Meditation habits. Listening to your deeper self habits. The sorts of things you say or feel or do when you’re angry, tired, or blue.

What if in ALL such things, and everything beyond, you peeled away the layer of angst you have about not doing them as well as you know they could be done?

Because here’s what I see:

You’re doing exactly what you can right now. And always. And when you’re able to do something different (“better”, to use your worldview), you will.

You will!

You are not set in stone. Oh, so far from it! The habits and “weaknesses” that drive you crazy about yourself and all the ways you haven’t matured like you’d wish; all the lessons you’ve learned already and continue to struggle with again; all the commitments you’ve made and then broken, and then committed to again and broken again and again; all the ways you know your power, yet consistently play into smallness: it’s all good.

I’ll say that again: It’s all good.

It’s all folding into your life’s story, and as you continue to wake up, you’ll see how essential all of it is. All of it! How beautiful. How important.

How your very addictions, your very “laziness” (your word!), your very blocks and griefs and fight-or-flight responses – all the ways you’re YOU, rather than like any of the people you shame-facedly compare yourself to: these things are waking you up in ways you cannot fathom.

So as you continue to wake up and you see something you’d like to do differently, take the action you’re able to take. When you’re blocked by your mind or fears or addictions from taking action at all, take no action. Seriously!

But either way, peel back that layer of self judgment. Of angst about not measuring up. Of acid in your gut about doing (or not doing) it again.

Whenever and wherever you can, peel that layer back.

You really are fantastic, and there’s nothing wrong or defective about you or your “limitations” or your differences from all the folks you admire.

You are fantastic, and I love you dearly,

The Universe

This week I’m thinking a lot about angst, and particularly the flavor of it connected with seasons when you feel like you can’t do what you want to do fast enough (finish a project, launch a business, clean the damn house…) or get clarity about something as quickly as you’d wish. Here’s me talking about moves I’m making to tend trust around this type of angst.

What do you do when you feel hurry-up angst? And if you know the feeling and have zero sense of what to do about it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, too! What are you facing right now? Sometimes just naming it makes it feel better.

This is the last of a four-part series (tagged “chicken wisdom”) that explores overtly what trust tending means. Click here, here, and here to read the first three articles.

Have you ever slogged through a really rough season – maybe post-natal depression…or ANY type of depression, a tragic loss, a harrowing relationship, a child in deep struggle – and found yourself on the other side?

When I was in my early 20s my whole world tilted toward Rough and I found myself in one of the longest, darkest tunnels I’ve known. The catalyst was an unraveling of my childhood faith (I was raised a leftist, evangelical Christian), but as that particular unraveling started, I felt as though my very being tore apart. My systems for knowing what was real and true – about myself, about other people, about our world, about EVERYTHING – were clanking and clunking and sputtering and shooting smoke and broken parts all over the place, and once they gave it up completely, I was left in a pile of rubble miles high.

As the breakdown was happening and then for years afterward I cried and flailed and railed and just generally resisted what was happening with every fiber of my being. It felt AWFUL. (And I’m sure was no joy-ride to watch.)

And then there was light.

Just writing that makes my heart BUZZ with resonance. Because when the Hebrew Bible opens with lines like,

…I feel them in my bones. As I flailed through my darkness, I was without form and void. Darkness was over my deep.

And then there was light.

It wasn’t like a switch turned on, but more like day arriving after night.

It was like a rough, gravel road with potholes and poisonous snakes and rock- and mud slides and treacherous ravines on every side and my own screams and cries and wailing gave way to…the quiet of a meadow mid-day. Wind through wildflowers. No more road.

My cosmic questions hadn’t been answered and I didn’t have a clear sense of identity or direction yet, but my deep darkness and intense need to flail just weren’t there anymore. Such a strange and welcome quiet!

And I could look behind me and see the road I’d traversed and remember viscerally the yuck of it all, but with a different set of eyes and a new kind of distance. A distance that said: I did that. I made it to the other side.

Maybe you’ve lived some alternate version of this story.

My story continues, of course, and I’ve traveled on new roads and taken shortcuts and longcuts and experienced struggle and fear and frustration and confusion and every other emotion and route that’s normal to us all.

But I carry that utter-darkness-turned-to-light experience with me now, and it shapes how I feel about new darknesses I face. It adds hope to them. And patience. And a hint of a slowly-nodding, knowing, squinty-eyed expression that says with almost a warmth of recognition, “I know you. I’ve seen you before.”

Totally NOT what I felt in my Season of Flail.

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After our chicken died, and death’s reality stared us all in the face for a time, we decided we needed some chicks. Three of them.

And, good lord, these chicks are cute!

Their names are Cookie, Lovely, and Lucky and their presence felt and still feels like a dawning. A day after night.

I made this video for the grandparents soon after we got them, and since almost none of you are my kids’ grandparents and can’t be expected to watch this much footage of someone else’s children, maybe go to the 9:44 mark to hear the song/see the images that capture the reason why I’m posting this video at all. Substitute “new hope” or “fresh life season” for the “you” in the song:

(If video doesn’t appear above, click here to watch.)

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There was a season after my flailing when, like the day we brought home our chicks, life took on a golden hue. I didn’t have kids and I was spending most of my time writing a novel and I had time to exercise regularly and journal and eat well. I started my first blog and used that as a practice of naming, via essay, who I WAS, rather than always who I WASN’T (as had been the case through all those years when life looked grim). And I was attending fascinating lectures at the nearby university, and taking writing and spirituality and Tai Chi classes, and reading wonderful books.

It was an amazing season. Mhm, it was good!

And then, of course, as life tends to do, that season shifted and I was deep in young motherhood, feeling lost and lonely and low. Completely unprepared for how UNdomestic and unskilled at household management I was turning out to be. Trying still to write and feeling more blocked, on every level, than I ever thought possible. And feeling incapable of understanding my blocks, let alone finding pathways around them.

Can you guess, by the pattern so far, what sort of season happened…is happening…next?

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The day after we brought our chicks home, our dear Charlotte stepped with boots on one of our chick’s feet. Poor chick limped the rest of that day and all of us felt sick when we saw it.

And of course the irony wasn’t lost on my husband nor I that the chick whose foot got stomped was named Lucky.

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Tending trust is, among other things, the practice of noticing life’s pattern. Which invariably involves stretches of darkness and turmoil and gut-clenching fear – and for many of us, the feeling of being completely undone and remade through some of those stretches – and moments or days or full on expanses of beauty and joy, peace and light. Sometimes ALL of it – the darkness and the light – are rolled up in the very same Now.

And tending trust, in that noticing, is nodding with increasing recognition at life’s hardships, learning to be less and less scandalized by them. Less and less surprised that shit of all kinds happens.

But more than that, it’s learning to hold all of it – the glory and the grime – loosely. Not unfeelingly – because glory is worth celebrating, and grime really does suck (pretending like it doesn’t is not what trust tending means) – but with streaks of hope and patience and levity striped through it. Streaks of “at-some-deep-level-I-know-this-too-shall-pass”. In greater and greater measure as trust takes deeper root.

It’s nodding with tears sometimes, and laughter at others, that yes. YES. I, too, am Lucky.

This is the third of a four-part series that explores overtly what trust tending means. The first and second can be found here and here.

As many of you know already, my family moved in early June to a rental home that came with five chickens. My husband had chickens as a child, so he immediately picked these ones up and held them with ease. The kids and I…well, it took us more time.

Chickens don’t stand still when you move toward them, so there’s an art to getting near enough to catch them. Eli (our 6-year-old) learned this art quickly, but when it came to the decisive SWOOP necessary to actually hold them in his arms, he’d balk. He’d get the chicken right at his feet and then freeze.

Charlotte (age 3) spent the first couple of weeks watching the rest of us play with the birds, petting them when they were in some else’s arms. But once her courage grew big enough, she took off. She was less about the art of anything and more about persistence combined with reaching, mid-sprint, for good, firm fist-holds of tail feathers.

The magic of it all has been ALL of us have learned to hold chickens. These birds are BIG, and their beaks and talons long. Honesty they STILL intimidate me. But by spending enough time in their presence…or watching other people doing so…and testing out our own methods of getting near and making contact, all of us can hold them in our arms.

I think fears are a lot like chickens. They’re often big – or appear to be with all those feathers – and their beaks and talons long. We know they’re in our yard (our bodies, hearts, minds…cities, nations, world) – we hear their sounds and scratchings and step often in their poo – but we haven’t learned to be with them comfortably. So we do our best to ignore them, or turn the volume up on everything else to drown them out: we drink wine and eat chocolate and schedule and surf ourselves silly. We stare at our smart phones and plan for trips and weekends and pour self help and creativity and positive thinking and entertainment and drugs en masse down our throats.

Because fear scares us. We want to keep it at bay.

My sense is that (unlike chickens) fear is the heart of every problem on our globe. And since big problems are echos of little problems and individual problems the pebbles whose ripples roll out into national and international and even galactic affairs, the ability to get comfortable enough with our own fear to look at it squarely and develop the art or persistence necessary to hold it in our arms until it’s size and beaks and talons terrify us no longer: this is the hope of our future. This is the skill that can take us to new and wonderful places – as a species, and, if that feels too grandiose a view, then as partners and co-workers and families and friends.

And absolutely not least, as individual people.

Tending trust is, in part, the practice of getting comfortable with fear. It’s the practice of looking at fear so intently that you learn to see beyond it, past its jagged teeth to a landscape of hope and possibility. Not a landscape painted over top of all our yuck, but a landscape that exists in all dimensions, right in the midst of that yuck. An environment within ourselves and in the world we inhabit that supports the changes we want and need to make, that offers the wisdom we need when we need it, that tends to our wounds and catches us when we’re in free fall.

Looking at fear, rather than running from it, is the doorway to this world. It’s the powerful threshold where hope and despair meet. It’s the possibility of living more and more of our lives in the Light.

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If you’d like to read more about this angle of tending trust, here are some related posts:

• One collective thing
• Ready in the wings
• Finding trust at earth’s bedside
• An interview with Christine Valters Paintner

And if you’re new here, my warmest love and welcome to you! If you haven’t noticed the free sketches in the side bar, they’re a wonderful introduction to what trust means here. I’ll be taking them down in September and folding them into another project, so if you’re interested in receiving them this way (30 days, by email), sign up by the end of this month.

Within the first week of our move to a new rental home, one of the chickens that came with the house threw up. On and off she did this that first week.

When she stopped, we thought: great! Problem solved. All of us get sick sometimes, right?

We held her, and stroked her, and secretly loved her uniquely – her gentle spirit, her soft, caramel color, how readily she’d let us pick her up.

So when she grew lethargic weeks later, spending entire days in the cool shadows under the coop rather than moving about the yard, the lines on our foreheads deepened. Eventually she stopped leaving her roost in the coop altogether, and the day I decided to call the bird doctor for advice, I noticed flies – LOTS of them – buzzing near her body.

It all happened so fast, and by the time we got a good look at her underside, it was clear she had an infection far beyond repair. She was gone within the hour.

In retrospect, we could have taken her to the doctor sooner. We could have checked her body diligently. We could have listened to our intuitions that something wasn’t right with her and then acted on those thoughts to try to right it.

But we didn’t. And she died.

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Bad things happen. Bad in the sense that they feel awful. And there’s no Grand Book of Awful to say what awfulnesses are how bad for whom. Loss is loss in a subjective way, as is betrayal and disillusionment and physical pain. You know when they tear your heart or body apart. Observers can only guess at it.

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When our chicken died, Charlotte (my 3-year-old) went quiet and gripped my hand hard. She needed a couple strong hugs, but mostly gripped my hand and wouldn’t let go.

Eli (now 6) wept. At first his flow of tears was steady, but then words and questions punctuated it, then conversation, then silence, and then it came at unexpected moments throughout that day and those following.

My husband climbed the hill behind our house and dug a grave.

I moved instinctively toward flowers to adorn it – gold roses because our chicken’s name was Goldie and we remembered her grace and beauty; pink because we loved her; white because she wasn’t suffering anymore. This was our family’s first graveside experience together, so we explored what it meant to honor Goldie this way, to consider how her body would become part of the earth again and the life that grew there, to wonder whether her spirit might return as something else completely. Eli asked if we could bring a bit of Goldie-earth with us if we ever have to move.

It was a sad, sweet experience that felt good in a way I can’t explain. Through the whole thing I felt such love for all involved and such tenderness for life’s losses and the different ways we find to cope with them.

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Trust tending (the name of this site) is a practice, much like yoga, meditation, exercise, or prayer. There are long-term goals one can have with it (peace that runs deep, hope that can weather life’s storms), but every bit as key is the process. The “meantime” spaces. The day-to-dayness of it. Without attention to these, one can’t know the depth of it. One can’t come to trust the enoughness of right now, or of being a mess, or of being an oscillating mix of weak and strong, childlike and adult, terrified and comfortably at rest in Life’s arms.

So before we “get our shit together” and before we have years of therapy and before we have enough experience with loss and healing to know they can, in most cases, be parts of a whole, there is tending we can do.

When it comes to death and other bad things happening – bad in the sense that they feel awful – here’s what this type of tending can mean.

• Receiving tears like a gift (ours or someone else’s).
• Doing this again and again for as long and as often as they come. (This can feel metaphorically like doing sit-ups or squats to the point of muscle failure sometimes, so strong is our rush to make sadness go away.)
• Consciously holding tender space for our own numbness when we wish we could have access to feeling.
• Holding tender space for someone else’s “lack” of feeling (it’s there; it just hasn’t been able to the surface yet).
• Metaphorically throwing away all clocks and calendars that measure how long grieving should or should not happen. Letting it take whatever time it takes. No matter what others’ comfort level with our grief is.
• Leaning into love whenever possible. This one bears repeating.
• Leaning into love whenever possible.
• When pain is so great, and love feels gone, or the expressions of it available to us frustrating or annoying or unfitting in some way, being gentle with our inability to receive it. Practicing saying, in such cases, “This, too, is part of what it means to grieve.”
• Viewing grief like the very best medicine, drug, therapy, exercise, relationship, sex, or dark leafy greens you could gift yourself with.
• Viewing other people’s grief this way, too.
• Using your heart as much as you can (rather than your head) to determine what to do with how you feel.
• When your heart tells you you feel stuck or need help, reaching out for help to someone who feels safe. This might not be the person who is clamoring to help you most.
• Not right at first, but with time, holding the possibility that this awful thing can unfold into something beautiful and deeply good. Holding this possibility is not the same as painting over your awfulness with it. It’s not the same as believing it whole-heartedly or all the time. It’s just letting it be in the room with you and occasionally, if you want to or feel ready, giving it a glance.

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When Goldie’s burial was through, we went back inside. My husband headed back to the office and the kids and I to the couch. Eli’s tears were intermittent by that point and Charlotte, still quiet, picked up a flyer that was lying nearby. It was an advertisement from an art store that showed a picture of a mandala.

Do you know what a mandala is? It’s an intricate, 2-dimensional image that represents the universe, enlightenment (or the process leading to it), or the mix of enlightened and unenlightened things. Hindus and Buddhists use them in meditation, and their beauty is so striking that people who assign no spiritual significance to them often have them hanging in their homes. (Click here or here for some examples.)

Anyway, as I glanced at the mandala Charlotte held in her hand, I remembered a video I’d seen years before of Tibetan monks creating sand mandalas. Painstakingly, and with much reverence, these monks create perfectly symmetrical chalk drawings of mandalas – maybe 5 feet across – and then spend hours upon hours shaking brightly colored sand through tiny metal funnels to fill the drawings in in vibrant color.

The end results are breathtaking. You want to sit and stare at them forever. And all the more so once you know what it took to create them.

But do you know what they DO with these mandalas once they’re through? After all that earnest work, and hours of backbreaking dedication?

They sweep them up. As a meditation on impermanence. They sweep all that sand into a large vessel and pour it out into a moving body of water as a blessing to the world.

“May this beauty,” they say, in effect, “and our releasing of it, bless everything.”

(Watch this 4-minute video to see the whole process.)

As I took in that image, sitting there with my kids after Goldie’s death, I felt the whole universe in our hands. I felt the beauty of the lives and relationships and experiences of all of us – right then, of my family and our bird at rest on the hill behind our home – and the painstaking process of reaching where we are at any given moment – the myriad decisions and factors and tendings that take us to each point of our lives – and how in an instant everything changes. All that beauty and complexity swept and wiped away.

And how that process – the jarring awfulness that it is sometimes – isn’t where the story ends. Ever. It never is. The beauty that surrounds the awful – the love, the connection, the flow of tears that aren’t only about the one loss, the learning we do about how to honor what’s dear to us, how to be together, how to grieve: the beauty in the awful is a gift that keeps giving. A gift that flows from our unique losses and touches everything.

A gift that as much as I wish could be otherwise, flows from the very sweepings up – the very deaths – of life’s greatest gold.

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P.S. This post is the second of a four-part series exploring overtly what trust tending means. Click here for part one.

P.P.S. For more related reading from this site:

• The gift of being a wreck
• On interconnection
• How nature heals us
• Everything belongs

P.P.P.S. My soul friend, Alana Sheeren, has a wonderful free resource for people at all stages of the grieving process. It’s called Picking Up the Pieces, and incorporates her deep learnings from the loss of her young son, as well as reflections on grief from many other contributors. It can be accessed here.

It all started with a question:

“Mom,” my 5-year-old asked, “how long are umbilical chords?”

I showed him with my hands and he went silent. Then he said, “Couldn’t that be long enough to wrap around a baby?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“Well does that happen?”

“Yes. It does sometimes.”

“And then what?”

“Most of the time nothing. It’s normal for that to happen.”

“But what about the other times?”

(Ah, son. You are my boy.)

“Sometimes it can go around a baby’s neck and make it so blood can’t flow to the baby’s brain.”

“And then what?”

I spoke gently. “Sometimes babies die when that happens.”

“Die?…” His voice trailed off. “They die before they’re even born?…”

His chin began to quiver.

“I think that’s very sad,” he said.

“It is, love. It’s very sad.”

He laid his head on my lap and wept for a long while. I joined him a little bit, too.

The next day both kids and I were a-buzz with a new stack of books from the library. We made it through one, I think, before Dr. Seuss’s Lorax was placed in my hands. I hadn’t read this one before, but soon learned it’s the story of a businessman whose lust for money destroys an entire ecosystem – trees chopped down for their soft, leafy tops, waters filled with factory sludge, surviving animals mournfully migrating in search of food.

It finishes with a teensy drop of hope – the last literal seed of the trees that were destroyed, held by an altar inscribed with one word: Unless.

You might guess my son’s next question.

“Does this actually happen, Mom? Like for real?”

“Yes, love. It does.”

“People do this to our earth?”

“Yes, love.”

He looked out beyond our windows to the green on the hills nearby. And he wept.

(Lest you wonder, there was much discussion about this book and the still-birth questions the night before. We cry, but we process things verbally, too.)

So the next day, when one of our chickens disappeared, Eli’s heavy heart sunk through the floor.

“WHAT IF SHE’S LOST?” he panicked. “What if she gets cold tonight? She always sleeps next to Scritchy. Scritchy is going to be SO SAD to not have Scratchy next to her tonight. Mom, what if another animal tries to EAT her?”

The chickens are cooped up every night for warmth and protection, so all of us knew Eli’s fears could come true.

Eli cried himself to sleep that night, holding on to the tiniest, spider thread of hope that maybe – just maybe – Scritchy would find her way home.

I spent the next while combing through the yard again and my husband through the neighborhood, hoping for some lifting of the weight that Eli’s heart had come to bear.

“If Scritchy comes back, wonderful,” my husband concluded after our unsuccessful search. “But if she doesn’t, maybe that’s good, too. There ARE huge losses in life, and maybe it’s a mercy for the kids to be able to process some of them together like this, in safety, and at a time when they can learn to let the tears flow.”

Yes, I thought reluctantly. That’s right.

But in the morning, when Scritchy was calling on the outside of the coop’s closed door, half-crazed with hunger but every bit as well as all the days we’ve known her, something dove deep into my heart, past the joy and celebration, to a place where I hold my life’s greatest gold.

Life IS suffering, I thought. But that’s not the whole.

And that, right there, is one of the biggest boons to trust that I know.

Trust and fear start with innocent questions always, don’t they? How old are people when they die? Will I get what I really want? Is this owie going to get better?

And as we grow, the questions multiply. Will I ever find a mate? Can I ever land a job? Can I move past my blocks? Will my kids turn out alright? If I show you who I really am, will you still love me?…

We ask our questions and watch for life’s answers and since life really has a lot of suffering in it – hands down – we conclude in some private, inner place that expecting the suffering, assuming it’s most of what there is, is a lot safer and less disappointing than any other choice.

We wear this conclusion on our sleeves, sometimes, consciously checking ourselves when joy gets too close or big or hope grows too robust. We pull out a “See? I knew it would happen” when things go wrong.

But maybe just as often we wear it underneath a layer of optimism. A mask of, “Life is GOOD!” or “Things will be alright!” that sometimes feels to those around us like a threat, or an impenetrable shield they can’t reach or hold or hug our tender hearts through.

But here’s the thing. Those innocent, spontaneous questions that start our fear-cycles rolling in the first place? They can take us down a different road.

They can take us to Scratchy coming home.

And in light of that return (and all of your own equivalents), they can call into question the deep-down assumption that this new challenge that you’re facing or that new calamity or that other imminent change or likely loss – that any or all of it – will end or unfold in a way that’s inevitably tragic.

Tending trust, for me, is a lot about asking new questions in the face of life’s up-and-down game. Questions that sometimes feel like spider threads of hope in the face of sure awfulness. Questions that sound less like, How can I cope when things inevitably go poorly? and more like, What if this (this life, this tragedy, this unexpected fork in life’s road) unfolds into more beauty, more wonder, and more of what we really want than I could hope to imagine?

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Sometimes tragedy really does strike, and I want to honor that deeply and even devote the next whole article – another lesson learned from a chicken – to exploring what trust tending means in the midst of great suffering.

In the meantime, though, if you’d like to read more articles related to the angle explored by this one, here are a few from past months:

Nevertheless
Life beyond fear
Life beyond fear lizard-brain

Hi everyone! Popping in here at summer’s full bloom to tell you about some changes afoot at Trust Tending.

For the last 7 months, I’ve written around monthly themes, and posted roughly three times each week. I have LOVED working with themes, and grew so much because of the depth of focus made possible by them.

In the interest of sharing more real-time stories of trust tending from my life, though, and of making time for creative projects beyond blog content alone, I plan to post here roughly once per week going forward, and to experiment with going theme-less for a while. We’ll see how it goes!

(As ever, I’m delighted for feedback, and would MORE than welcome your input about what you’ve loved or found helpful here so far, as well as what you’ve found less so. Same for content going forward! And have I said already that I’d love to hear from you? About what you like or don’t like so much here? I would! Help me learn how my work can best help your trust to grow.)

Before complete themelessness happens, though, I want to devote August to a series of lessons I’ve been learning this summer about trust. From my chickens. :) There are four of them (lessons, I mean), and as I line them all up, I shake my head at the way each one has highlighted, for me, a different facet of the work that happens here. I think it will be helpful to make overt, like this, what trust tending means to me.

So…welcome, August; welcome, chicken wisdom; warmest welcome to new readers; and welcome, change of tide at this site, and all that lies ahead because of it! I can’t wait to share more about what’s cookin’!

P.S. If you’re new here, and haven’t seen the option of free sketches in the side bar, I hope you’ll check them out! Each finishes the sentence “Trust is…” and gives a feel for what this site is all about.

P.P.S. Part of my family’s recent move involved a change of P.O. box. So if you sent me something recently to the box in Redondo Beach, I’m sorry if it got/gets returned to you! I love mail, and hope you’ll feel free to send or resend to the new box in RPV (now listed on my contact page).

Hi everyone!

I say that with such a swell of gladness to be with you again. It’s hard to explain the love and tenderness I feel for you and the honor it is to be here, exploring such important, tender things each month.

This month, though, while guests have so powerfully filled this space with stories and questions, I have felt personally absent on most levels. I’ve been turning more inward and further outward than I normally turn – inward to try to understand some of my fears and blocks around taking my work to the next level and outward to try to see and paint some outlines of what Life beyond MY fears might be on this front.

Dyana Valentine has been an outstanding midwife through this process, and while there have been times I’ve wished I could just say, “Here. YOU do it,” about giving the actual birth, I’m feeling deeply satisfied with the hard work I’ve done and a quiet, even reverent sense of gratitude to be both responsible for my own life, and absolutely helped with that task. I’m alone and I’m not. I’m weak and I’m strong. I’m beaten down and I’m standing up on both feet, so glad to be with you again!

On that same note, there are things I want to say as our month on sexuality closes.

First, I want to say thank you. Thank you, to all who shared posts and comments this month. What an honor for the rest of us to be given such gifts! Thank you for your courage and your willingness to be seen. Thank you for helping our own wounded places find solace in your stories and your companionship and your healing.

I’m so moved by you! – teared up as I type all this.

My own experiences this month also move me to speak to those of us who haven’t felt able to engage this topic with the type of depth or energy we might have expected to engage it with – at this site, but really much more broadly, too, beyond any thoughts of Trust Tending.

Back in January, when I created my list of topics to cover each month, I looked with so much joy and anticipation toward this one. I’ve been so aware in recent years how constricted I’ve felt my whole life, how much of my beauty and radiance and sexiness and sensuality have been hidden behind fears and insecurities…and how possible it seems to me now to move ever more into the freedom I long for. Writing posts for this site has been such a powerful source of these shifts for me that I was STOKED to get to explore sexuality here.

And then this month arrived, and beyond my kids getting sick and my husband traveling, I started my coaching with Dyana, and every available emotional resource got tied up in that work. I had no idea how deep my fears went around taking my work to it’s next natural place! I’m still baffled by it, really. But the point is that I *wanted* to be focusing on sexuality, and even felt relief at the thought of growing more trust and awareness around it, but the stars were not aligned for that to happen.

Often we hear about the sacral chakra – the power center located in our pelvis and the base of our spine – being connected with sexuality and creativity. We hear about how growth and awakening in one of these areas (sexuality, creativity) has implications for the other, since both are so connected. And as a creative person who ALSO happens to live in a culture that lauds sexual prowess and sex appeal above much else, I’ve felt a kind of urgency about getting my game on in the sexual arena (speaking broadly here to include not only sex itself, but a kind of powerful, life force energy) in order to live the creative life and creative dreams I feel are mine to live.

I’ve felt like growing in wholeness as a sexual/sensual being is my best and next route to living my best creative life.

But hell if I didn’t cover some of the most important ground this month that I could have ever covered around healing deep wounds and preparing ground for my life’s next harvest. And that ground had nothing overtly to do with sex or sensuality at all!

So I’m moved as I write this last post to shout out to those of you who feel on the outside of some important thing when it comes to body love, or sexual healing or awakening or exploration, or the capacity to even care or give attention to such things at all. If you feel on the outside of all this, and wonder whether the work in front of you – whether it be your literal job, or the parenting you’re doing, or the depression you’re experiencing, or the grief, or the anxiety about some upcoming change – whatever it is, if you’re wondering whether the work that’s in front of you right now is way off in left field – or the bleacher seats, even – of the game you think is most important to play, I want to tell you: I think it’s very much not.

Where you are RIGHT NOW is good. It’s where your path has taken you. And if that path leads on toward something that feels way more juicy and appealing and sexy and cinematic than where you are today, I’m sure that will feel great. But skipping the lessons in front of your face, or assuming those other, more appealing ones are somehow BETTER, or more POTENT than the drip drip or slog upon sloggy-slog step you’re taking right now is the very best way to miss your life’s greatest gold. The gold that actually makes your life – the whole of it – rich in the ways you most want it to be.

(I’m not talking here about staying stuck, either – about assuming that suffering is what the gods have bestowed on you and the outstretched hands or resources around you need must be snubbed. I’m talking about staying with yourself, rather than flitting off away to try to be other, or to be like someone else. I’m talking about listening more deeply than you might otherwise do to what IS, rather than leaning your ears constantly into the future to try to receive what could or might be some future version of you.)

((The secret irony here is this: your future unfolds more beautifully and richly, and with far less angst, if you get to it this way, rather than through all that leaning.))

So here’s my best advice for you and me: Do your very best to open your heart wide to the life and lessons in front of your face. If a crack in your heart’s door is all you can muster right now, that’s more than fine, too! Be unsexy for as long as you need to be. Be uncool or out of date or off the grid or on something more like a carriage ride than a fast train.

Do whatever it takes to be…you.

In almost every way, this is my biggest life’s challenge, and I’m venturing to assume it is for many of you, too.

And the more that I rise to this challenge, in the only ways I know how, the more love I feel for my life, and the more patience I feel to watch my life’s fruit in ALL of its stages – bud, flower, hard little knot, growth, expansion, ripeness, decay – rather than only the juicy, mouth-watering ones.

It may sound strange to say, but I love you. The real you. And you have my promise that I’ll do my very best to love and be and share with you the real me, too.

Yours in trust,

P.S. Though not a typical resource round-up, I want to at least document some of the resources that I know of or that some of you have sent my way for growing trust around sexual things. I hope to explore these more (or again) when the time is ripe for it.

Eleven Minutes, a novel by Paulo Cuelho
Writings and audio by David Deida
This TED talk on female orgasm
Sex for one: The joy of self-loving, a book by Betty Dodson
The Tao of Sexual Massage, a book by Stephen Russell
The Welcomed Consensus, a website with tons of resources focused on female orgasm
Sex, Love & Liberation, a website and more
Embody Tantra, classes and resources related to tantra
Breasts, a short documentary about breasts. On demand from Netflix.
All posts from Trust Tending’s sexuality theme This links to July’s theme page

This is a guest post by Shara (bio below).

I hope you’ll feel free, no matter what your perspective, to join this conversation. Truly, all are welcome. We need to hear from each other.

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My body is the only real temple there is. A site so precious that once upon a time tribes from all over the globe worshiped at its altar. Their creation story was a reflection of the womb. And sex was considered sacred, for it truly is the dance of Life.

Now it took many years to come to this path I’m on now. It’s not a typical coming of age story, but like most it has its joys and its sorrows.

By 12 I had the body of a woman and mind full of curiosity. Deep down I knew that my sexuality was a gift and my greatest source of power. I wanted to experience every aspect of it. And I did, without shame, without fear, without judgement. By 17 my explorations opened me up to a level of love that I had never known before. With this partner sex and its meaning got way deeper, and for the first time my soul was enlivened. I had experienced Love. A love that put me on the path to seek the deeper meaning of life, to discover my purpose and understand my connection with the divine. But that journey took an unfortunate detour.

As an unsuspecting teen from the North East, I had no idea that “Church” was a culture down South. Religion was never a big deal growing up and I was raised in a multi-cultural home where respect for all colors, beliefs and values was the only mantra. But I was seeking God and just happened to get accepted at a university in the Bible Belt.

So instead of finding the source of the Love that awakened my search for God in the first place, I found condemnation. I was condemned for my early healthy sexual explorations and was indoctrinated into the fact that this was the very sin that was keeping me separate from the love of God. The Church’s demand for “sexual purity” got so intense that once a Pastor declared that I had the “Spirit of Lust” on me and needed Jesus! Little by little I traded my source of power for “God’s salvation”. And for the first time in my life I viewed my body which was originally a source of so much pleasure and awakened love in my heart, as something shameful, unholy, and responsible for making men lust and fall from grace. These were dark times indeed.

Luckily my quest for Truth was stronger than doctrine and I finally left the Church. But I was left picking up the pieces of my shattered self confidence, body image, and sexual expression that Church repressed and destroyed with guilt and shame for so many years. Thankfully I recovered and truly found the love of God. I understand what Jesus meant when he said your body is a temple. And I can tell you that to call the most precious gift that the gods have ever bestowed on us sinful, is the only sin there is.

Shara is a Sensual Renegade and Performing Artist who teaches women how to release the Orgasm locked deep within their hips. Sound interesting? Connect with Shara here for the latest info on classes, workshops and online courses.

This is a guest post by Alana Sheeren (bio below).

When I was 16 years old and stepping into my sexuality, I began seeing flashes of what I thought was a dream. It was as though the film in my mind had caught, and I could see a second or two of action before it became still again. In the first I was in a dark closet with an older cousin and he was unbuckling the button on my overalls. In the second, we were in his room, lying on his bed, and he was telling me he had a surprise for me as I squeezed my eyes shut. There’s more to it but I’ll spare you the details. Writing these words now, 35 years later, I am aware of the reactions in my body, the heat, the shame, the grief. When they first came, the intensity was overwhelming and confusing. I wanted to believe they were a dream and I did, until I saw a picture of myself in the overalls – bold stripes with big brass buckles at the shoulder. I crumbled into reality.

I dismissed the effects for another twenty years. I talked about it here and there, to people who didn’t know me well. I never used the words “sexual abuse” or “molestation”. I talked about it with one therapist who thought it of little import and another who wanted to work through it, so I quit seeing her. I pretended nothing had changed when I saw my cousin. Though opportunities presented themselves, I waited to lose my virginity to a man I loved. After four years together our relationship ended and I began a decade of unhealthy behaviors. I allowed myself to feel violated time and time again. I was tall, muscular, attractive and there was never a shortage of men interested. My boundaries were unclear. I desperately wanted to be loved. I got hurt, physically and emotionally.

It wasn’t until I was married, pregnant with my daughter and finishing my graduate degree in psychology that I put it all together. In my last quarter, I signed up for a workshop on feminism and sexuality from an LGBTQ perspective (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer/Questioning). As I listened to people share stories of oppression and shame, revelation and growth, the ground fell open in front of me and I saw the thread that wove my sexual story together. I finally understood that those years of allowing myself to be touched in ways that made me ache, of being tossed about in my own undertow, traced directly back to those early violations by a wounded teenager.

Eventually I told my mother, who knew something had happened, then my brother and sister-in-law and finally my father. There have been difficult moments as we’ve negotiated anger and forgiveness, boundaries and the birth of three granddaughters. Witnessing my child’s physical beauty and innocent explorations of her own body have brought tears to my eyes. I see myself through her and my heart breaks. I find myself vigilant where it might not be necessary and am acutely aware of what I could be passing along.

What my cousin did to me has ended up in the middle of my marriage too. The tapestry of this story continues to be woven. I am working to untangle the knots, smooth the bumps. Last night I cried. I mourned my innocence and freedom. I mourned an ease that my body has yet to know, to embody fully. I cried for the young woman I was, the shame that I have yet to shed, the memories of pain that still live in my cells. I cried because with my husband beside me, I am healing these old wounds, and because I am still raw, all these years later. As I turn myself toward trust, time and again, I can see freedom on the horizon. I can hear acceptance in the beat of my own heart.

Alana Sheeren believes in love, beauty and the transformative power of grief. She holds a Master’s degree in clinical and community psychology, which saved her from her former life as a dancer and actress. You can download her free guide Picking Up the Pieces: thoughts on grief and growth on her blog, Life After Benjamin. She lives and writes by the ocean in Ventura, CA with her husband and daughter, two cats and a dog.