I open my palms.
Morning air gently streams through my fingers, cascades over my lifelines, tickles my bare shoulders. Wisps of my hair free themselves from my sleepy ponytail. The sky blushes. I meditatively move my hands up, as if I’m painting the start of dawn, and gaze beyond my fingertips to birds who astonish me in their freeing flight.
I lift to ground.
Open palms turn inward and press to my heart center. My heart rises to my cradling hands ready to embrace and encourage a connection to all aspects of me, to this life that radiates around and within me.
You can be happy, affirms my heart.
You can feel beautiful, cheers my heart.
You can be your joyous self, unapologetically, declares my heart.
I experience the truth of these spirit carried messages through an embodied response of liberation: an expansive breath, a sigh that softens the holdings of subtle tension in my shoulders, a natural rising through my spine and a majestic widening across my chest.
My body confirms what my heart knows to be true.
I am free to choose happiness, beauty, joy.
I have complete permission to support myself and fully live a life aligned and guided by these sparkling sages. And the one who needed to grant the permission was me.
I emerge with this spring after a winter spent excavating conditioned behaviors and getting cozy with my fears.
In the honest conversations and internal witnessing, I recognize my engrained condition to caregive and to secure validation and obtain conditioned love based upon what I do for others.
In a heart-seized with compassion, I realize this often leads to resentment, empathetic burn out, a complete disconnect from my needs (because if I am caring for others, their needs are automatically above mine), and even if I do know my needs, I struggle with speaking them confidently.
This awareness clarifies my past, pours gentle and clear understanding into why I behave the way I do, and propels me to choose differently, because now I know that I can. The practice becomes caregiving for my inner child, for my wild and wise body, and for my creative gifts.
The practice becomes shifting my attention away from external authority to my inner knowing and not looking out to the world to approve of my joy, my happiness, my beauty.
I’ve been detoxing from people who struggled with their own joy, and therefore, projected and questioned the intelligence and strength of my joy. And I allowed their arrows to make puncture wounds because I harbored insecurities about my joy, too. I’ve been forgiving myself for taking on the beliefs of others, for falling into the trap of self-doubt, for giving over the power of my shine to play small to keep people comfortable.
I’m not here to play small.
I’m taking back my inner Queendom. The crown has been readjusted. The throne polished and glistening in gold. I reclaim my power by cultivating comfort in choosing my happiness, my joy, my beauty.
And by beauty, I mean the activated aliveness that flows from exuberantly existing in a body that is a glorious universe.
I mean the beauty that is finally felt when “fixing” and “I am not pretty enough…to be successful, to be loved, to belong” has been called out of the dark and pulled into a fierce hug of compassion, because damn, it’s hard living in a culture that prioritizes an unattainable appearance that is manufactured, purchased, fake, constantly judged to be improved upon.
The mystic and star-inspired writer, Rebecca Campbell writes that beauty is a portal to the soul.
I dance in the doorway of this portal.
I decorate my wrists with bracelets that jingle and sing throughout the day.
I follow a nudge of intuition and buy red tulips for my sister, who later shares that she was just thinking about how she needed the gift flowers.
I relish in the clicking of my coral heels against marble.
I slow and pause to purposefully acknowledge and name my emotions and let them emerge in their teachings, in their manifested movements of embodied expression.
I wake with the sun and practice yoga and meditation on the back porch.
My golden retriever, Gavin joins, and situates himself like a magnificent lion on the blanket of lush grass. Gavin is an excellent mindfulness instructor. He exudes such contentment and enrapture in present moment. Watching his nose constantly twitch, sniff and trace the stories in the wind could entertain me all day.
I take a cue from him.
My morning yoga and meditation is now a disciplined practice devoted to nourishment. I no longer go on autopilot through my yoga routine, or strive to stay centered on my breath. I’m gentler with myself.
I ask my body and my heart what I need.
I set an intention for the day, or really I just let the intention speak from the chambers of the back of my heart, from my core.
Choosing connection.
Embodying radiance.
Expressing play.
These are a few of the intentions that have emerged from the course of the past week, touchstones that I return to throughout the day to reenergize and infuse my focus with heart-aligned purposefulness.
Synchronicities wink. I see white butterflies, a sign that I am where I am supposed to be.
In a prayer, I spontaneously give thanks for hummingbirds and open my eyes to see one in a nearby hush, hovering auspiciously.
Three of my spiritual teachers say the same phrase in the course of one day:
“I want to be happy.”
And this unearths a quiet longing for me.
I want to be happy, too.
Surprisingly, when I admit this to myself, there’s an instant illumination of a masterful underserving belief that has blocked me from even considering life options that would attend to my happiness.
This again relates to the conditioned caregiving role, and now that has been cracked open, I see and especially FEEL that choosing to prioritize my happiness and support my happiness nurtures an embodied worthiness.
This rooted sense of worth exudes a self-respect and self-acceptance that I want to teach my sisters, heal in the women that came before me, and flow forward to my improv and yoga students.
My happiness is essential. My happiness gets to be a priority. My happiness serves my soul’s growth, and so it has a divine seat at the table.
And I’m learning that all parts of myself – my anger, my despair, my insecurities – have a seat at that divine table. Curiously, as I’ve begun to include and embrace my edgier emotions and shadows with loving kindness and compassion, I’ve started leaning more easily into radically allowing beauty, happiness, and joy, too.
As I layer my hands over my heart center, I witness my inner world – sensations, emotions, thoughts, the entire package of being a human acknowledged. At the depths of this witnessing, flickers an intense joy, the joy of being alive and attentive to what can be such an agonizing and astounding life.
The joy to be a feeling human, to abundantly care, to exist and express myself in this moving miracle of a body, to know that wanting happiness, beauty, joy mirrors the same fundamental desires of the people I share this planet with.
The inner universe reflects the outer and vice versa.
And here on the edge of the back porch, at the conclusion of my thirtieth year, with Gavin my golden nearby, I weave these lines into a loving-kindness meditation that circles me with you and everyone else underneath this rose-hued sky:
May I be happy. May I experience my joy, freely and completely. May I recognize and celebrate my embodied divine beauty.
May you be happy. May you experience your joy, freely and completely. May you recognize and celebrate your embodied divine beauty.
May we be happy. May we experience our joy, freely and completely. May we recognize and celebrate our embodied divine beauty.
Shine.