A week or so shy of my birthday, I decide to call a truce and make peace with my spirit word, SPEAK.
I slip away to my neighborhood coffee shop, sip a drink a cappuccino, channel courage, and purposefully sit down with SPEAK to reckon and reconcile with the lessons from this 28th orbit around the sun.
Caffeine and generous doses of compassion dissipate my resistance to openly and bravely listen to my spirit word’s teachings.
SPEAK reviews the journey of this past year. With a long breath, I realize the turbulence of the pace, the grittiness and harshness of the tone, the ache, a repeated ache, pressing forward for healing.
SPEAK shouts and shouts about my needs left unmet, my self-respect forfeited for ambition and people-pleasing and states that actions that lead me to abandon myself result in slashed esteem and dark hurts.
SPEAK reaffirms – in well-documented, detailed cases – to trust my inner voice, because instinct and intuition discern intelligence from an intricate system of higher consciousness. (And yes, it is that profoundly simple to pause, breathe, and intuit the answer, but my struggle resides in trusting that response enough to ACT on that wisdom.)
SPEAK reveals that this year’s difficulties circled around my failure to speak.
I fail to speak. I fail my spirit word. I fail, spectacularly.
I share this failure with my loves, and they all respond the same way:
“Oh, no, Meredith, you didn’t fail.”
Oh, my loves, how I soak in your belief of me, and heart-boom at your support, and yes, I did fail.
And this is all right.
This allowing for failure shows my healing into wholeness. Failure and success do not define me. They are water and tides to swim through, experiences to feel and stay centered in my witnessing as they sweep around and pass by. I learn to breathe space between me and the external, so I live in the remembering that I am not my failures and I am not my successes, but the expansiveness of the spirit.
I incarnated to learn, to get gloriously messy and evolve. The road is not easy, but I can create ease into the roughness of it.
I stretch to choose SPEAK.
There’s unprocessed pain in this word for me. And as the year progresses, I accept freeing an inky anguish that reaches far deeper than I anticipate.
A collection of stories I absorbed as a truth about my voice, about how I speak, about how I express and teach, resounds and regulates my daily conversations, how I present myself and how I stand up and fail to stand up for myself. There’s a current of insecurity, hesitancy, self-doubt that chastises and compares, seizing power from my life-force.
“Meredith just needs to trust her voice.” My teacher tells me this after I spill out the critique over how I speak, and I cry in a circle of teachers whose love cradles me now as I write this.
SPEAK questions if I feel safe being me, and if I accept, support, love the expression of me.
The failed attempts to speak up for myself signal a hard-to-process and absolutely necessary answer to hear: No. No, I don’t.
All those failures to speak let me fall into my greatest healing.
SPEAK serves me the root of the wound, shows me the layer of self-hate, and says, “raise it to the light. Love yourself to the light.”
I walk away from SPEAK knowing that my voice is worthy and deserving of being trusted, heard, celebrated – by me.
And as my birthday nears, I contemplate the emergence of a new spirit word, one that will encompass and lighten what I’ve been searching for during my twenties.
Belonging. Kindness. Realness.
Magic. (Perhaps for when I turn thirty.)
And I have faith that when the word presents itself and makes itself known, I will have the courage, the trust, the self-love to speak it aloud when the time comes.