Healing & Growing

Last month I was having one of “those” days; I wasn’t my normal “I got this” self.

There was some crying involved, something I used to try and hide from my kids but I have landed in a place that if I want my children to be emotionally healthy I need to be able to express myself and they need to be able to witness it.

My normal pattern is to sleep the hurt away, because if you’re sleeping, you’re not feeling. So when the kids went down for their nap so did mommy. I laid there not really sleeping but trying to convince myself that I was at least resting my body.

I finally had enough and made a choice. I got up, took a shower, put on clothes that made me feel good, and made my way to the backyard to start my gratitude practice. For me, being outside with nature all around grounds me and my gratitude practice helps to shift my focus to seeing the world differently.

The thing about healing and growing is that it takes effort, and it takes practice. The adage, time will heal, isn’t accurate. Time will numb the pain but without doing the work the healing won’t happen. I didn’t one day find a magical formula for pulling myself out of the depths, it took work, it took experimenting to find the tools that worked for me and putting them into practice.

The practices that I found that work for me aren’t just rituals I do when I’m down, I do them daily, this is part of doing the work.