Checking myself before I'm wrecking myself.

Who knew that would actually be great advice on how to stay sober?

I drew the Temperance card on Sunday and like always, The Wild Unknown tarot is like a direct mirror of my heart.

Lately, I've felt like a balance scale, you know, the kind with the pans on either side. In one pan is so much life-y life, like my inability to control time. And maybe you're thinking, "Like duh, if there is one thing we can't control, it is the passage of time." And yet, I want to harness it, stretch it out so I can get everything done that I want to do, slow it down because I know I'll miss this liminal space we're all in, speed up to what I can only call 'normality' because even though no one can possibly know what life will look like in six months, my brain wants to desperately attach to "before Covid" (while knowing that was not even close to idyllic). 

My conflict with time also reminds me that I'm still bumping up against the same ceiling that I've bumped my head on as an entrepreneur for going on two decades now. I'm frustrated. I feel like I've missed the boat, my boat...ALL BOATS and I feel like that ceiling will never budge for me. And both of these, my inability to control time and financial success, bring me a lot of shame, just to rub it in. 

However, over in the other pan is impermanence. Impermanence makes the first pan out to be a whiny baby. People are dying in the impermanence pan, people that I know, that are my age, that were very much alive just a week ago. That pan is telling me things like, "You can't worry about your business if you're, you know, dead, so figure out what is consequential here and stop wasting your energy on the rest." 

But if the objective is Temperance, avoiding extremes to achieve a balance, then it's both. I contain BOTH energies, even when they are contradictory. And if I don't try and push one or the other off, I can experience equilibrium. And THIS is healing. 

How do I know this is healing? Because I don't think about drinking alcohol as a way to fix this, numb this or change this.

Accepting and tempering all of the energies inside of me at the moment is a consequence of the work that I've done to heal the part of me who before would have been confused, who thought in the binary, "If I can't feel good, successful, loved, fulfilled, whole, [fill in the blank]...then I may as well drink."

We've all heard the term 'self-sabotage', and that is exactly what I used to do before I gave myself the chance to process, download a new idea, pivot, strategize and do something different. That I can hold opposing energies at once without sabotaging myself is a direct byproduct of healing, healing that took lots of nurturing, intention and attention. 

If it's time to give your healing some attention, if you're done with self-sabotage and ready to hold all of you---your good/bad, right/wrong, productive/lazy, worthy/worthless, righteous/shameful---and all of your energies in equal balance, I can help you come up with creative practices in which to do that. I'd love to work with you.

We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said, and very well then.
xoxo