Word of the Week: Allow

Life Lesson:

My heart has been heavy lately.

I’ve been yearning for “the way things were.” I’ve been more sensitive than usual, raw, easily thrown off course. I’ve been feeling insecure, full of self-doubt, and questioning everything. My work. My purpose. My relationships. The ways I interact with people. My co-dependent patterns. Why I always feel like “too much.”

At first, when all of these feelings bubbled up, I wanted to dissect them all. In fact, I tried to. I spent hours journaling, talking things out with my best friend, rehashing scenarios in therapy.

And then I caught a cold and was forced to rest (I’m sure you’re wondering how the hell I caught a cold during shelter-in-place; I was wondering the same thing. I blame Zoom).

One of the things I gave up during this period of rest was trying to understand everything. Trying to make sense of all of my different emotions. Trying to get to the bottom of my sadness. Trying to understand what shadow work I was being called to explore.

See, sometimes those pesky perfectionistic tendencies worm their way into our healing work. We get all uptight about trying to be THE BEST VERSION OF OURSELVES that it becomes just another chore on the to-do list, something we bring a brute-force mentality to as if it were another homework assignment we’re falling behind on.

But here’s what we have to remember: healing ourselves isn’t linear (neither is anything else, for that matter).

Just like you’ll get burned out if you work on a project all day, every day, you’ll get burned out if you work on yourself all day, every day. You are not a project that needs fixing. You aren’t falling behind. You are living a messy human existence, just like everyone else.

That’s why it’s important to practice the art of allowing. Allowing our emotions to pass through us. Allowing ourselves to sit in the discomfort of weird conversations. Allowing things to happen without needing a next step, a solution, a resolution.

Not every emotion needs to be processed. We don’t always need to know why something upset us. Sometimes we need to just let things be.

Ask Yourself: Is there something that’s been tugging at your heart that you can give yourself permission to just sit with, without needing to fix or change it?

Weekly Mantra: I don’t always need to know why.

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