At the end of the day when you are in the midst of your exhaustion, I invite you to pause and remember what matters most. It isn’t what you haven’t accomplished yet or what you have. It isn’t the argument that your mind keeps coming back to. It isn’t money that is or isn’t in your bank account. It is how much you cared, how much you opened up to being loved and how much you loved.

Loving doesn’t mean you do everything that others like. Sometimes loving and being loved involves placing healthy boundaries around your relationship. What is OK and what is not OK to be said and done by both parties? Where are you stepping on each other’s boundaries? Where can you re-establish healthy boundaries that would work for you both?

Loving doesn’t need you to sacrifice yourself to the point of becoming exhausted. It means knowing your limits and making sure that you are not the only one who has an enormous amount of responsibility. It means we don’t ‘help’ each other. All of us living in the same house have and own an equal amount of responsibility for everything we do. We can divide up the tasks according to what we do best. But noone feels like they are drowning under a pile of tasks that they don’t like.

Loving doesn’t mean that you will say yes to everything that is knocking on your door. In fact, you will say more ‘no’s, and you will say more ‘let me check my calendar’s before any ‘yes’s. It also means you will do yourself a favor and clear any electronic news, emails, ideas, apps, social media feeds that are leaving you feeling unnecessarily stretched thin.

Loving doesn’t mean that you have to lock everything inside to the point of numbness or sickness. You will allow yourself to feel what you feel. And sometimes, you will let the people you love or people you trust can support you, to see these feelings. You will share what scares you the most, what you cannot even think about carrying on your shoulders anymore, what’s eating at you day and night that you can’t seem to get to the bottom of.

Loving doesn’t mean that you need to take a bubble bath every single day. There will be days that you do. On the days that you aren’t able to, you will still brew a cup of tea with love and hold it in your hands to feel the warmth, reminding you that this is OK, this will pass and you will still be there to take care of your precious self.

Loving doesn’t mean that you need to be present for your loved ones 24/7. The truth is, they need their own time to grow and learn too. But you will take the 20 minutes you have together, setting aside your phone, shutting down the TV, and you will look into their eyes. You will get interested in their lives and ask probing questions. You will then get excited about what they are excited about. And you will get to know them again and again as both your lives evolve and shift.

May you be loved, may you love deeper than you can imagine, may you navigate your life always and always through the lens of love.

With love and light,

Damla

Stress is a constant companion in our lives. Yet it takes a toll. We all have some tools or strategies to deal with it. But it keeps coming back to haunt us. Part of the reason is the way our lives are set up. Through our work, relationships, and environment, we are constantly bombarded by stress.

As a healer, I am more interested in the other reason: what’s underneath the stress? Which wound is replaying itself every time you get stressed? What strategies that you downloaded from your family or formulated in your early years are no longer helping? And most importantly, are you able to decipher when your stress points you to what in your physical and emotional life needs tending to?

More often than not it is not just the wound energy that needs to be neutralized but also how you deal with it. What strategy have you picked up from your parents, teachers or grandparents that is no longer serving you? What can you change about the way you handle life to not use up all your energy resources? How can you shift your perspective not only for your wounds but also for what you assume cannot be changed (aka your strategies and patterns)?

Here’s what happens when you tend to the wound underneath: suddenly what seems stressful doesn’t affect you the same way. You find yourself more resourceful and a lot more present to be able to deal with whatever life throws at you. With an increased capacity for presence, you are able to see the patterns that come up to the surface. You can then choose a new pattern, a new strategy, a new way to better handle your reality.

With love and light,

Damla