Getting twisted in our many roles…

What are the ways you describe yourself? As a father, therapist, athlete, and man searching for meaning, I often feel twisted at this stage of the game. After spending 15 months in my garage, my midsection favors the door while my head focuses on the Zoom camera. Secondly, my head has barely wrapped its head around zoom school and new protocols for school reopening.  At the same time, with much anxiety, I have been tested for Covid-19 and acquired the vaccine.  I have also tried to maintain moments of quiet and the need to pivot roles once again.

We’re all going through it

With all this change and reopening, I wonder does connecting remotely give way to the need for human touch? Or are in-person interactions risky and too much too soon? Even pondering these thoughts on a daily basis is just anxiety-provoking. Others feel it too. My practice is filled with those with similar anxieties. I have both a waiting list, and a welcome sign. Some of us have waited well beyond our need to come up for air.  Let’s not forget my own back. It landed me back into a place of pain and treatment, a place I had esteemed to never visit again.

The body gives signals

After three weeks of training at 6 am, a full caseload, and increased activities for the kids, I realized my back and my twisted self might need a reboot. Interpreting my wounds and pain as weakness feels more and more like an area of vulnerability and challenge. My body is letting me know just how much I have been carrying and just where I need more support, rest, and rejuvenation.

Take an inventory

I often try and plow through this message as do many of my clients. We refuse the call to slow down, to take time off, or set the dreaded boundaries. It begs the call, where do we override the necessary messages for self-care and where can we tune in a little further? It could be that our twisted selves need a little more support or a little more guidance back to health. The first step for today is to take an inventory of where we are getting our self-care and connection or how we can build the habit, even in minutes or moments a day, to launch ourselves on a trajectory towards healing space.

Build habits

Habits build confidence so you may be setting sail on uncharted waters but I am here to ask you to pull out your map and paper and this week, chart a course. I’ll be right there with you, taking small breaths and slowing down and tuning in, and turning on a new way of practicing self-compassion and care as we venture forward.