Minding the Gap

Like many in the past few days I was captured by Oprah’s Sunday night interview with Meghan and Harry. I didn’t watch their picture perfect wedding viewed by over two billion people worldwide, but my ears were glued to the words they used to describe their process of dis-entangling from an oppressive system.

There are so many great truths in the interview but two things took my breath away.

First, I appreciated their ability to name that it was more than leaving a royal family with prestige, power and privilege, it was also about escaping a 1200 year old institution—the entrapment of a monarchy.

Second, they constantly explained the difference between what it looked like in pictures and what it felt like inside the palace.

At one point Meghan said:

When the perception and the reality are two very different things and you’re being judged on the perception but you are living the reality of it, there’s a complete misalignment and there’s no way to explain that to people.

I don’t know what aspect of your life comes to mind when you read this quote, but in so much of my story work with clients we “mind the gap”—the gap between their perception and the reality of their childhood story. It’s this very misalignment of the past that is hard for others to understand from the outside and prevents us from getting the help we all need to come out from under systems that aren’t protecting us the way they promised.

99.9% of us will never get our nationally televised interview with Oprah to set the record straight, but communities of storytelling can serve the same purpose—a chance to speak, witnesses who gasp at the appalling moments we describe and who believe us.

This month I’m offering two opportunities to learn about stepping into your own story—to tell your version within the context of safe community.

Sexual Harm Survivors Story Group Informational Meeting (Female)

• Monday March 22nd 7-8:15 pm MST

Between Touches Story Membership Group Informational Meeting (Co-Ed)

• Tuesday March 23rd 6-7:15 pm MST

Excessively Gentle

In this first week of March, I’ve been aware of two swirling, opposing forces. I’m both exhausted by the uncertainty we’ve been living in (zoom meetings, tentative summer plans, texts about exposure events) and energized by the advancing of spring (beginning of Lent, receiving the vaccine, approaching daylight savings time and kid’s lacrosse games).

This past week John O’Donohue’s poem “For One Who is Exhausted” has walked with me through these weighty days mixed with the longing of returning to missed things and my reflexive fear of additional loss.

His poem is full of so many great lines….

• laborsome events of will

• marooned on unsure ground

• forced to enter empty time

• flow of unwept tears will frighten you

• take refuge in your senses

But the one most challenging is this simple command:

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Clear, plain words that mystify my instinct to prod, cajole and force myself forward when I feel listless.

What does this even mean? How do I live this out? Gentle, sure but EXCESSIVELY gentle? Really?!?!?! What will that accomplish?

Practice:

Choose one day to be excessively gentle with yourself? What do you give yourself permission to enjoy? What do you set aside? In what ways do you feel relief? What unwelcome emotions rise up? What do these emotions threaten?

Virtual Spring Groups

“We are our stories, stories that can be both a prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

Rebecca Solnit

Sexual Harm Survivors Story Group (Female)

• VIRTUAL monthly, 90-minute sessions

• $75 per month

• 6 participants (4 spots left)

• Free Info Session: Monday March 22nd (6:00-7:30pm MST)

• Commitment: April-July (w/potential to continue in the fall)

Between Touches Story Membership Group (Co-Ed)

• VIRTUAL monthly, 90-minute sessions + Content

• $95 per month (20% discount for service providers)

• 6 participants (5 spots left)

• Free Info Session: Tuesday March 23nd (6:00-7:30pm MST)

• Commitment: ongoing, monthly membership program (3-month minimum April-June)

Sharpness & Beauty

For my birthday two years ago, my dear friend, Crystal, gave me a pair of crampons. Like I do with all gifts I don’t already have a sense of need for, I tucked them into the back of my closet where they sat until this winter. After getting back into running shape last summer, discouragement (that our first snow had turned the trails in my neighborhood slippery) sent me rummaging through my closet.

The first time I used my crampons I was amazed. Twenty dollar, elastic rubber slippers that fit over my running shoes were a game changer! I remember taking them off after my first trial run and looking at the bottoms in awe that such small, sharp metal triangles could steady my steps, allowing me to look up at the mountains instead of down at the trail.

So today, when I woke up to three inches of snow on the ground, bluebird skies and a sunny, 25-degree air temp (see picture above), I grabbed my crampons and headed out.

It wasn’t until I had parked and started down a favorite trail that I realized how gorgeous the morning would be.

In Colorado, we have fall snow and spring snow.

Fall snow is powdery and light-effortless to shovel.

Spring snow is wet and heavy—shoveling a foot of it off a small driveway will leave you sore for days.

But spring snow has the added bonus of outlining bare tree branches in a way fall snow does not. Today was our first spring snow, piled high on even the thinnest of surfaces, its flakes resolutely sticking together. Gratitude for the access I had to beauty because of the sharp metal triangles of my crampons meant I went a few miles further than I had planned.

As we approach, in this final week of February, the anniversary of March 2020 (when COVID19 became a visceral part of our lives) I’m watching myself brace for what will surface. What I thought was merely an “extended spring break” will likely become by this March 1st, a death toll of half a million. I’m nervous for myself and our communities about how we will all handle the body memories that will resurface.

What will keep us both steady without slipping and present in the reality of this time marker?

Sharpness will help us through the treacherous terrain of memory.

For each of the next four weeks I’ll be sharing a practice that will help you through this month. They won’t be easy—they will invite you to sit with the sharp pain that rises up as we look back and let all that has happened sink in a bit deeper. But I also believe this sharpness can gives us access to a beauty we won’t experience if we spend the month waiting for a full melting of all that has accumulated.

This week do one simple thing—notice how you respond to the word March.

• When you flip your calendar’s month tab over, what happens in your stomach?

• When your kids ask how many weeks til spring break, what goes through your mind?

• When you hear the word, what does your heart feel?

Just notice what you instinctively do in anticipation of this anniversary. We can’t care for what we don’t see. To be continued…