Welcome to the Greenhouse 🌱 where we plant seeds for the week ahead with a tarot reading, a digital altar, and more! Consider this your digital quiet place to exhale, read, and nourish your busy lil brain to ground you for the upcoming week. Maybe we’ll bask in the sun a little, too (wearing SPF, of course!) So if you haven’t already, please consider upgrading your subscription!
This week’s seed 🌱: Your expansion should scare the shit out of you
The compost 🪱: The Devil
Earlier this week, my grandma wasn’t feeling well. She called me one morning, and when I asked her how she was doing, she said, “I’d made an agreement with my body that when all this stuff [her moving into a new home] was over, I’d rest. And I didn’t honor that agreement, so I think my body is mad at me.”
I’ve thought about this conversation ever since, about the agreements we make, consciously and unconsciously, with ourselves and others; the agreements we made when we were children trying to keep ourselves safe in an unstable world—the ones we still hold tight to even as adults.
One agreement I made with myself when I was young has recently been begging to be reexamined and renegotiated: As long as I am accommodating to everyone else around me—even if this means abandoning my own needs—I am safe. Be accommodating, no matter the cost. This is how I stay safe.
Even though this strategy worked for sweet little 10-year-old Ayu, it certainly does not work for almost 30-year-old me—especially now that I’m a mother. Being accommodating may keep me safe-ish, but it also keeps me small. And exhausted. And resentful. And lonely.
I don’t want to be small anymore, physically, energetically, any of it. I want to take up some fucking space. And that’s exactly what The Devil is here to herald.
This week, I want you to think about the agreements you’ve made that keep you small. When and how do you shrink for other people? When does it not feel safe to take up space as your authentic self? Maybe you get into an anxiety spiral trying to fix everyone else’s stuff around you while neglecting your own needs. Maybe you hold everything in and then act out passive aggressively instead of communicating your needs. Maybe you try to be what you think everyone wants you to be instead of just being yourself. Or you do all of it, like me! Yay for dysfunction.
When The Devil shows up, there is an invitation into expansion—but very specifically, an expansion that scares the shit out of you. One that feels like, if I even take one step through that door, everything familiar and safe will disappear and fall apart. But the thing about playing small is that it actually continues to wear you out and shrink you smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s a form of self-abandonment because we aren’t making embodied choices, nor honoring our needs and boundaries. It’s scary to stand up for yourself, especially when your own brain is the bully. And if your brain is anything like mine, she’s constructed such a convincing argument for staying in my cute dysfunctional lane! Why would I leave!
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