Hi dear ones,
It’s a cold afternoon here in Montreal and the sun is streaming in through my office window. I’ve had an intense love-hate relationship with winter for as long as I can remember. This Arabtina is happiest when it’s hot and sunny and there’s a beach nearby, but lately I’ve been learning to appreciate winter as a season to slow down and go inward. This feels so counter-intuitive, especially when we’re bombarded with messages telling us that we always have to do more.
The truth is that I can’t come into clarity if I can’t first admit where I feel instability and uprootedness. I find myself often doing (and thinking) too much and I’ve had to learn that in order to tap into my inner knowing, I have to get really intentional about carving out time and space to be sensitive to what is showing up for me in any given moment.
The practice of slowing down and tuning out the noise is something that I always work on because my moments of quiet often bring up all kinds of emotions that I’ve been actively trying to avoid. As one of my teachers Lama Rod Owens likes to say, “I can’t get to joy if I’m always running away from pain.”
Instead of always reacting and resisting, what if we could just tend to our hurts and consent to being broken hearted sometimes? What if we could remind ourselves that we can be broken hearted by life and still cultivate gratitude and joy?
I challenge you to allow yourself to have a full range of emotions and experiences to meet life as it comes, and to practice showing yourself love in small and big ways, every day. I’m here to tell you that joy and ease can be armors against a future that feels so uncertain.
Here’s to brighter days ahead and the promise of spring.
With all my love,
Vesna
The love list:
Watching: Somebody Somewhere
Reading: This article in The Atlantic about friendship
Listening: Oliver Burkeman talking about time management with Krista Tippett