Happy Valentine's Day to YOURSELF

This year, on the 13th of February, my partner and I went down to Truth or Consequences, NM, for a soak in a marvelous hot spring "wet room".  There is something profoundly regenerative in the mineral waters, as well as the reassuringly grounding stone and wood of the room itself.

the Blackstone wet room

It got me thinking about self care.  

In my practice as a therapist, one of the characteristics in how I approach my clients is that I allow myself to be energetically open to them (while still protecting myself), so that everything that I am, all my life experiences, are available to them to relate to me as a human being.  In this way, we can find points of commonality that allow us to work well together.  It is a process of communication, trust, and vulnerability.  After all, a client who places her or himself on my table is vulnerable and must trust me as well.  My open heart is my channel for helping that person do their own work.

But sometimes, life deals you hard blows.  One of the most difficult things for me in the last year was letting my youngest daughter go off to California for college.  (My older two daughters are nearby, and it didn't hurt so much as they grew up and left.)  It is truly for me a heart-breaking experience that I still have a hard time talking about without tearing up.  Also in the last year, my best friend's husband died, and she became suicidal with grief.  In her struggles, I could only stand by and offer support.  I cannot solve her sadness, nor would I want to interrupt her grieving process, but again, it has been a profoundly hard thing to do to just hold space for her and not step in.

In order to cope with daily life, as we all must, I found myself hardening up.  I closed off my own grief and found myself once again with the same kind of pain that I had near the end of my marriage.  I suffered painful somatic torments in my own body because I felt that I could not allow myself to express my sorrows openly.    Another practitioner told me my body felt as if someone had poured concrete down my spine. I did not want to feel the pain, so I just stopped myself from feeling all together.   And the key thing is that I actually knew it.  I felt it.  I was aware of it, and yet I still did nothing to fully take care of myself.

In the waters yesterday, I felt that I needed to meditate on this problem.  As I floated and sank with the rhythm of my breath, I thought about allowing myself to be supported and nurtured.  Instinctively, my partner came over to me and held my feet in his hands, and gently massaged them, taking his time over each part, working up into my legs.  It was an unsolicited act of kindness and love.   I felt the urge to cry, and finally was able to permit some of the pent up tears to flow out.  I allowed myself to trust this man deeply, in a way that I had not done so before (because there had been little enough trust in any of my previous romantic relationships).  In accepting this unconditional care from him, I also enabled a deepening in the relationship.  I allowed myself to be open and vulnerable again.  I gave myself permission to trust, to feel hurt, to feel love…. just to feel.  I trust that the Universe will take care of me, and know that it is alright to feel all these human emotions.  It is a part of being a human being, fully alive and in this body.

So my Valentine's message to you, my readers, is to love yourself.  Allow someone else to love you too, even though it may be very difficult to permit yourself that vulnerability and openness.  Trust that there are people who can love without expectation, who can love unconditionally, who will support and nurture you, who can act with compassion.  Be compassionate and gentle with yourself.  Life is full of rocks and thorns and hard uncomfortable things in our paths -- we owe it to ourselves to treat ourselves and others with kindness and love.