It all serves.
—Joi Sharp
Strange, perhaps, this path
to learn to love myself—
throwing back Mad Dog 20/20
in a raucous backyard party.
Letting college boys touch me
just to feel wanted for a night.
The journals I kept to calculate
how many calories in a bowl of All Bran
a banana muffin, a cucumber, a plum.
I don’t know why I had to date
that man who took what I
did not want to give. Why
I became quiet, quieter still.
I don’t know why I told that lie.
Don’t know why I couldn’t contain
my anger that one morning. Don’t know
why I said yes when I meant no.
But I do know I am the sum
of all these stories, and maybe
I had to go through self-loathing
before I could practice self-love.
I know all those choices brought me here
to this garden in late summer
where, despite a lack of rain,
the nasturtiums are thriving
like tiny orange teachers in how to be soft.
There is a love so much greater than I am
that guides me to wrap the arms of my heart
around all the younger versions of myself
as if they are my children, helping me trust
there is nothing they could do
that would make them unlovable,
even when their actions caused pain.
Look, I say to my past, to myself. The roses
I thought were dead are blooming.
Things grow in the most surprising ways.
Soon, there will be sunflowers.
Posts Tagged ‘self-compassion’
Some of the Stories
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, love, self-compassion, self-loathing, self-love on August 4, 2025| 11 Comments »
For When I Am Hard on Myself
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Regret, self-compassion, shame on August 4, 2025| 3 Comments »
If you can soften your body, your heart can settle, and if your heart can settle your mind can listen.
—Augusta Kantra
When you are full of self-regret and turn
your fists on your own heart, I hope you will
recall that summer afternoon when you
dove headlong in the pond and floated there
until your fingers pruned, until hard thoughts
were soft as milkweed down, until you were
a gentle thing without a thorn, until
you were the song of birds and frogs and dusk …
I know how shame and not-enoughness turn
us on ourselves. And that is why I plant
this seed of memory. When shame shows up,
remember, self, you float. Remember, you
can soften. Love, like water, gentles us.
Such gentleness is how we learn to listen.
Self-Talk
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, opening, self-compassion, self-talk on February 22, 2025| 10 Comments »
Because I know in my body
the power of spaciousness,
I command my heart, Stay open.
Stay open, I growl,
as it clenches and hardens
and granites and steels,
but my terrified heart
keeps clenching anyway,
tighter and smaller and stuck.
I said, Stay open,
my voice a demand,
as if with intensity
I could force a release.
And the heart curls in,
intent on survival, like a pill bug,
like an armadillo, like a heart
that has learned before
it is not safe to love.
And it hurts to be small.
And it takes so much energy
to clench, that finally
it’s exhaustion that helps me
to hear the softer voice
beneath the command,
the quiet voice that arrives
like the slightest of waves, the voice
that arrives like low morning sun,
and the voice enters the clench of me
like gentle rain meeting dry earth,
and it says, Of course, you’re afraid.
For now it’s enough to remember
the possibility of opening.
Inviting Spaciousness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, breathing, connection, self-compassion on November 4, 2024| 21 Comments »
Today when the heart is a small, tight knot,
I do not try to untangle it. I don’t tug on the strings
in a desperate attempt to unravel it.
I don’t even wonder at how it got so snarled.
Instead, I imagine cradling it, cupping it
with my hands like something precious,
something wounded, a bird with a broken wing.
I cradle my heart like the frightened thing it is.
I imagine all the other frightened hearts
and imagine them all being held in love.
And I breathe. I breathe and feel
how the breathing invites a spaciousness.
I breathe and let myself be moved by the breathing
as I open and soften. Open and soften.
And nothing changes. And everything changes.
The heart, still a knot, remembers
it knows how to love. It knows it is not alone.
After All These Years
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, body, self-compassion on September 25, 2024| 15 Comments »
Once they were slender,
this arm, this waist,
and I loved them
when they were slender.
Though that’s a lie.
I did not love them.
Never once did I think
they were slender enough.
But I was happier then
with my body, wasn’t I?
When it was lean and smooth
and strong? No. It’s a lie.
I was cruel to that body,
and pushed it and starved it
and glared at it in the mirror
with hateful, critical eyes.
It’s so strange that the body
I’m learning to love is the one
that once disgusted me.
This one with its strange roll
around my waist, this one with its
thick upper arms that stun me
in photos. This one with its
marbled flesh. Is it true
I am learning to love this body?
Perhaps it’s more true
I’m learning to love the one
who is learning to love this body.
How gentle it is, this learning.
How layered. How slowly it arrives.
How quiet, the invitation
to turn toward the one
who could despise this body
and not push her away.
To wrap her instead in these
thick soft arms and choose
to love her.
Letter to the Dead
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, river, self-compassion, softening on July 13, 2024| 10 Comments »
How many times did I stand
on the shore with you and throw rocks
in this same river simply for the joy
of hearing them splash?
But today, my friend’s daughter
suggested we use sticks
to write invisible wishes on the rocks,
then kiss the stones before we tossed
them in. Perhaps you could guess
what I wished for. Aren’t I always
longing for peace in this world?
But there is so much of me
now you do not know.
Like how today, when I got
behind the car going twenty-seven
miles under the speed limit,
I didn’t call him an idiot.
I just went slower. See?
Things change. Even this woman
who is still throwing rocks
in the same river.
Only now the splash
makes me both laugh and cry.
And now, when I drive
behind a slow, slow person,
I can’t not think
of what wishes
they might write.
The Tender Gap
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arrow, buddhist teaching, gap, pain, self-compassion on May 20, 2024| 8 Comments »
If an arrow strikes you, you feel pain where it enters. If a second arrow strikes the same place, the pain is greatly intensified. The first arrow represents unwelcome events, such as rejection, loss, failure and injury. The second arrow represents our reaction to these events, such as worry, fear, anger, criticism and despair.
—gloss of the Buddhist teaching from the Sallatha Sutta, “The Arrow”
In the moment after the first arrow has hit
is a small gap in which I sit and reel
from the pain of the tip.
How raw I am then, stunned
by the burn, by the sting.
How easy in that moment
to wound myself again
with second arrows
fashioned of shame and blame.
As if it’s wrong to be hurt.
As if I should have evaded being hit.
In that gap before I raise my own bow,
before I nock the arrow,
before the tension builds in my arm
from pulling back the string,
there, I want to build a nest,
a safe and spacious place to rest,
a place where I feel the pain
and treat myself with the same gentleness
I would offer anyone else who is hurting.
I want to weave in blue and green ribbons
of tenderness and let my body feel what it feels.
I want to curl into that gap
with all my senses open,
want to let the throb be throb,
let the ache be ache,
and surround it with enough softness
that it can heal.
Such a sacred gap, that moment
in which I choose to let my arms hang by my sides,
choose to put down the arrow
and weave the bowstring
into the nest.
Self-Compassion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged parts of self, peace, self, self-compassion, war on May 19, 2024| 14 Comments »
On a day when I am at war with myself,
when I battle my own humanness
in a longing to be good, to be better
than good, to be perfect,
when I point to myself with a snarl
and a sneer as if I am my own enemy,
then I notice how my whole body contracts
and I’m a crumpled up map, a gray lump in the throat,
a stone in the gut, a crumpled wing in the chest.
And it’s hard to breathe. And it’s hard to move.
That is when I’m grateful to have a body,
grateful for the way it helps me remember
I have a choice to meet this moment with kindness.
It’s as if, mid-combat, I’m delivered a postcard
with a forever stamp sent from my wisest self saying,
Dear woman who thinks she is not good enough,
I see you. It’s okay to feel this way.
And what looked like a battlefield a blink ago
now looks more like a vast green meadow filled
with low golden light where all parts of me
are welcome—the one who makes mistakes,
the one who judges, the one who longs to be good,
the one who thinks she shouldn’t have to learn
the same lesson again. There is no part of me then
that is not welcome, that cannot be loved,
and my body expands like a great alpine basin,
unfurls like an unending white flag.
How easy it is then to stand with all of my selves
in that field and know what it means to be home.
With Astonishing Tenderness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged failure, peace, self-compassion, self-talk, sleeplessness on January 14, 2024| 14 Comments »
When, in the middle of the night,
you wake with the certainty you’ve
done it all wrong, when you wake
and see clearly all the places you’ve failed,
in that moment, when dreams will not return,
this is the chance for your softest voice—
the one you reserve for those you love most—
to say to you quietly, oh sweetheart,
this is not yet the end of the story.
Sleep will not come, but somehow,
in that wide awake moment there is peace—
the kind of peace that does not need
everything to be right before it arrives.
The peace that comes from not fighting
what is real. The peace that rises
in the dark on its sure dark wings
to meet you exactly as you are.
Self-Compassion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, rain, self-compassion, self-love on July 12, 2023| 8 Comments »
with thank you to Joi Sharp
It’s like the scent of rain
after a month of drought—
the way it rises up and fills the lungs
quiets the body
and softens the mind—
that’s what it’s like
when, after grasping
and spinning and reaching
and clenching, at last,
exhausted with my own fear,
I lay my hand on my own heart
and see through my thoughts
and practice loving
what is here beneath my palm:
this frightened woman
and the life that lives through her—
not a single promise I will be safe,
but when I press my open hand
into the beat of my anxious heart
what was dry becomes loamy,
what was cracked becomes rich,
and a faint sweetness
tendrils through me like incense,
soothing as a lullaby
that opens in the dark.