Ready To Press Play Again

Is there anything better than reconnecting and recharging when you’ve been feeling disconnected and depleted? Especially when you can be honest and authentic with yourself and others about where you are. After posting my last blog early Saturday morning, my first call of the day was from my best friend, who actually said these words to me, “How dare you write about my life and post it to your blog”. By the way, she was one of the main folks I was feeling disconnected from as well. She is super de duper busy with a convention she helps put on every year at this time. So it was just absolutely perfect that she seemed to be going through something eerily similar. We talked deeply and personally to catch each other up before moving on to our busy Saturdays. Since I was resting and recuperating from the flu I was able to make it to an old 12 step meeting I used to attend religiously before I started going to Yin Yoga class last summer. The meeting felt just as good as Dawny’s morning phone call. I made plans with a good friend to try out a great new restaurant called the Breakfast Republic. It was a fabulous little place with fantastic food and I got to catch up/reconnect with another friend. The rest of the weekend went similarly. I made it to two more meetings, got an errand or two done, and did a couple of chores around the house. Light stuff that didn’t wipe me out like a few loads of laundry and cleaning the kitchen Sunday night.

Today I had an honest and productive session with my kick-ass therapist. I was up front with her about referring to our therapeutic relationship as the “long goodbye” in my latest blog. I told her things felt disjointed because we had not been able to get into a solid rhythm with regular appointments. She admitted she felt the same way. We discussed her new job and schedule, along with the fact that she doesn’t live in our town anymore. Plus we may need to switch our sessions back to Thursdays again starting in April. The truth is neither of us is ready to move on from our therapeutic relationship yet. So we will take things as they come for now. With that tackled I was able to talk with her about what else had been happening for the past month since we’d seen each other. I gained some clarity about a few things moving forward and explored a growing level of comfort and confidence I developed with the truths and insights from my writing and by extension, my inner wisdom. All the while admitting I still revert back to some familiar dysfunctional coping mechanisms like emotional eating and mini television binges. For this, my therapist reminded me to be gentle and compassionate with myself as there will always be the potential to go back to old familiar ways as long as I don’t stay there.

This leaves me wanting to finish up my blog by taking it back to the A-Z Mindful Living email series with Ellie Hodges. I stopped at P for Pause. A great new friend suggested I “embrace” my P for Pause last week and that is just what I did. In a huge way that didn’t necessarily involve me completely checking out of my life or my activities. It involved me slowing down and participating in different activities at an easier, more manageable pace. At a more mindful pace. As I stated in my first sentence of the blog, I am feeling reconnected and recharged because I paused. Then I read what her email had to say about Pausing tonight and it was uncanny how much of it applied to what I’d recently gone through. I shared my experience about it in our A-Z Mindful Living closed Facebook group. Because I’m learning that ‘it’s never too late’ can apply to just about anything. How awesome is that?