9 Key Reflections on 2020: and what I'm choosing to remember into the New Year
As the last few days of the year play out, I’ve been reflecting and I’m sitting with the learnings, and medicine it brought, and what I’m choosing to remember going into 2021.
Some of it is impacting on my plans for 2021, and while I’m not ready to do a big reveal about exactly what I’ve got swirling in the soup pot just yet, I did want to share with you, my delightful email subscribers, some of the main lessons I learnt this year, personally and professionally.
Perhaps this will spark your own reflection, digestion and integration if you haven’t done so yet?
It is so important to spend time on reflection. To sink more deeply into what has passed, to identity what lit you up and what did not and then to uncover the lessons within. In doing so we have an opportunity to further solidify foundations and step more surely into the future. It also allow us to course correct, instead of getting stuck in the same old, same old.
Here are some of my reflections:
Embrace solitary instead of resisting it
To be completely transparent, when the corona virus hit and we starting to shut down I breathed out a sigh of relief. My life is pretty quiet generally, but all of a sudden it was far less demanding. Different people took to this differently, but I for one embraced this time as a sacred pause, a time to be quiet, and not pressured to do, or be anywhere other than where the day has taken me. I loved finding myself in wild solo adventures with my daughter, and in de-cluttering my life I found freedom. To be alone time is spacious, and spaciousness is freedom.
I have spent so much of my life resisting my introverted side, but now have a growing permission to allow this further while balancing it with my love and desire for community, and raw connection with others.
2. Rest is productive
I’m not great at rest. It takes some very strong will for me to actively choose rest over doing. But I tried it out.
What I realised this year was just how embedded my need to keep doing, and to be productive is.
Productivity can be a trauma response, a way to avoid or cope with that which has been inflicted on us personally, collectively, and ancestrally. For me, I see clearly how patriarchal conditioning has me hold the sub-conscious beliefs that my worth is dependent on achieving, that success (however you choose to define it) comes with hard work, and that resting is lazy.
Choosing rest, and choosing to soften, instead of to do and drive, has helped me to interrupt these ingrained patterns, and see them for what they are.
It has allowed me to realise that we can grow through rest. That we can receive through rest. That we can rest with no other intention then to value the rest.
3. Body first: Self care is paramount.
Too often we keep pushing through with little regard to our bodies. But under the feminine economy there is the understanding that everything, everything we create, do and produce comes directly through us.
On top of this our nervous systems run the show, so we need to ensure that we’re tuning it every single day. Holistic health care is paramount. As is choosing a self-care practice that you can engage with daily. My personal choice has numerous healing benefits for my nervous system, helping to unwind old patterning, as well as providing me with calm, with lightness, and clarity. My morning (and sometimes evening) non-linear embodiment practice has been essential to how I show up each day, and have provided me with profound insight as well.
I am committed to choosing my body’s needs first, and everything else second.
4. Protect your time fiercely
As a solo-mumma & solo-preneur 99% of my time is dedicated to my daughter or my business, and half way through the year I was feeling the strain. I chose to adopt another day of care for my daughter so that I could block out time for myself. But… I didn’t even get to that full day. My calendar quickly filled and this 6 hours was not mine anymore, completely out of my own doing. I hadn’t established this boundary firmly for myself. To be honest I don’t think I had felt totally deserving of it, and so it was easily broken.
Next year will involve me establishing an embodied boundary around my time, with the belief that I am worth it, and the knowing that I and everyone around me will benefit for it.
5. A more inclusive future is now
We have been part of, or at the least witness to, huge global racial and social justice movements around the world this year.
Yet inequalities persist. We need to step up more.
Personally I was called out on White Fragility very early in 2020. I was bewildered, and heartbroken as I didn’t really understand what had transpired. How could good intentions go so wrong? It led me into deep enquiry into how I personally uphold and internalise systems of oppression, how good intention is not only insufficient but also dangerous, and how my simple being born white, middle class, I hold a degree of inherited privilege that other intersecting identities do not, to no fault of their own.
I was one of those people who thought that I wasn’t judgemental, that I was aware of my inherent biases, but I realised that it’s people like me who perpetuate the status quo.
It’s incredibly uncomfortable to realise this. But nothing changes when we think we’re good-enough, or when we let things slide to avoid discomfort.
True ally ship is required of us. That means to do your inner work first. To be aware, to be compassionate and curious, and explore ways to actively promote the movement towards diversity and inclusivity. This may mean giving up some things, releasing profits, it may mean calling-in a friend for anything from using sage to cleanse their space (cultural appropriation) to hate-speech.
Yes it will make us feel uncomfortable, yes it requires us to take responsibility for our own self-care, and YES it’s absolutely the right, and necessary thing to do.
6. Depth over breadth (and before direction)
I’m probably a Jack of all Trades, Master of None type of person. I have a tendency to consume material en masse. I love exploring and learning new things, I always have multiple books open on a diversity of topics, and I absorb these new passions into my life and my work. But this year, in the midst of a great deal of other things going on, I also leaned into depth. I have dove, and dove and surrendered to the dive. Supported by practice, community, and mentors I’ve found this approach to be so very rewarding. With beautiful rippling effects into my way of living, relating, thinking and working. The world I dived into was that of feminine embodiment, a classical tantra meets your nervous system kind of world, and as I dove deeper I have seen incredible links and patterns everywhere, how everything is in some way related to each other and reflected in each other.
In a beautiful way the depth has given me breadth.
7. Life is cyclical
A cycle requires a period of slow, before a period of growth, times of death as well as life. There’s profound gift in each phase. Yet we’ve grown up in a society that celebrates the active, visible doing, and is set on a linear path, one that requires us to work 9-5 each week day, to produce the same each day, and to keep showing up bright and sparkly.
I’ve just had my first full year of natural menstruation after several years of amenorrhoea and child birth and nursing. I spent a year and a half leaning into the cycles of the moon in place of my menstrual cycle, and when my cycle returned I embraced this way of being even more. To live cyclically invites us to listen closely to our bodies and our wants and needs, and when we honour the internal messages we find the gifts and boons within each phase – not just the sunny ones.
I have adjusted my calendar and my to-do’s around my cycle, I honestly look forward to my bleed time for the deep insight it gives me, and the opportunity to lean into the Destructive Reckoning, that point where I energetic chose to let go, and without any attachment to outcomes allow what wanted to be released, released.
We are not linear beings. We are wildly, and beautifully cyclical. Choosing to live cyclically is choosing life.
8. Exercise doesn’t serve me
This has been a slow letting go for me. I have always been athletic. I used to be addicted to the adrenalin spike after a solid gym session, or a long run, or swim and could frequently be found doing back to back spin classes. But this year I haven’t exercised once. I have continued to move, and explore, but it has been for the sheer joy of being in my body, to explore nature or breathe in the fresh air than any desire to workout per se. I have moved for movement’s sake, for the pleasure it brings to me, not for any desired outcome or impact on my body. In the doing so I have embraced my body more than ever. I am delighting in the softness, in the folds, the rise and dimples of skin in my own unique landscape.
I know I for one will not be joining any gym membership in the New Year!
9. Unresolved trauma is at the root of nearly everything
We ALL hold trauma, be it little t or big T trauma it’s present in all of us. But how it shows up, and how it impacts on our lives is unique.
Perhaps your adaptation to it is overworking, or hiding, emotional outbursts, online shopping, shutting down, emotional eating, or whatever you may do in response to the abc….xyz triggers we face each day.
It’s becoming more, and more apparent to me that when we address emotional trauma, we address everything. What we may be resigned to us ‘just us’, is so far from the truth.
Your trauma is blocking you from your divine truth and from stepping out as the fullest expression of yourself. The good news is that we can work with our nervous systems to support us, to unwind the hold of trauma on our bodies, to contact our truth and to Come Home to our unapologetic selves.
What reflections have you had over the past year? What will you be choosing to remember for the year ahead?
I’d love to hear what yours are!
And if you haven’t already, grab your free gift from me to you, Embodied Self Care Rituals to Awaken Your Feminine.