Surrender over self-improvement
What I long for most in the world freaks me the fuck out
Announcements:
✍🏽 December Writing Workshop: Grab your spot here (Sunday, December 18, 10am - 12pm PST). This is our last workshop of 2022 and I hope to see you! FIVE spots left <3
💖 Ritual and Reflection: A Winter Solstice Workshop. Overjoyed to again be in collaboration with Anne Marie Cribbin for this very special end-of-year wind down. You'll have the opportunity to both reflect on 2022 as well as be guided through a process to discover your "word" for 2023. Sliding scale!
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Horn tootin’ time:
“I came across SELF MADE at a time when my sobriety was fresh, raw, and incredibly lonely. I was deeply sure this was the right path for me and was excited about the insights I was having into my patterns and the brightness I saw emerging in my life. I was also buried in shame and had no one else in my life at the time to fully share these experiences with. My first meeting flooded me with a sense of belonging that I hadn’t experienced before - I was welcomed in so warmly, and was held so compassionately while sharing my story. The experience of resonance with others, of belonging and shared experience, was powerfully connective and healing for me. This group has helped me feel stronger in my sense of self, more sure of the joy I experience in sobriety, and more capable of holding the pain as well. It has also been a key ingredient in my path towards greater integration of self and sense of wholeness - this space has allowed me to examine and share pieces of myself I’ve rejected. The love and compassion I am met with each time helps me show that same warmth back to myself, and allows me to belong to myself a bit more each time.”
K.O., SELF MADE community member
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To this native Californian’s perennially parched ear, waking up to the drumroll of rain against the windows is the sweetest music imaginable. It’s been raining, for real, rain all day, streets slick, sidewalks bright, and a deep greening already afoot, which for you folks who actually get winter, is maybe a weird thing to imagine, that California goes green in December, but we do, and all of a sudden all around are little shoots of grass popping off on all the hills, so many hills, and it’s so quiet and still, if inconvenient, especially since precious little Tater refuses to walk lest he get his paws wet, and then there are San Francisco drivers, ay, don’t get me started, and I can’t warm up at the gym, and the days are too short and my apartment is cold all the time but my god, give me all the rain, good luck falling from the sky, exhale, yes, thank you.
December tends to be tough. I get stressed. My anxiety and worry increase. And then there’s the pressure of the holidays, and that’s the thing that feels impossible to shake. I want to want to get into the “holiday spirit,” you see. I want to want to be invited to parties, and to get excited about scrambling around for gifts that maybe this year won’t end up collecting dust on a shelf (hi, dad), and to feel something other than hot rage anytime I hear a goddamn Christmas carol. Mostly, I just sit around feeling resentful, and instead of taking some time to examine that, maybe figure out my own restorative rituals and traditions, I just dissociate through New Year’s, head down, get this shit over with, get me to January, get on with things, bleh. And then of course I feel guilty, because I know better than to wish even one second of my life away.
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
I know I’m not alone in my end-of-year bah-humbuggery, and the reason I know this is because I’m in conversation with all of you every day. In my recovery community, I’ve had a long running joke that I’m going to buy a school bus, and drive it around the world, collecting everyone as I go, and we’ll end up at some glorious beachside retreat—each of us with plenty of alone time and our own private cabin, naturally—where we’ll drink coconuts and eat mango and stare at the horizon and play in the water and most definitely be in bed by 10pm.
One day, y’all. In the meantime, we keep showing up. We tend to recuperating mothers-in-law. We work-from-home despite a COVID+ test for a job we just landed last week. We cling to our practice even through the heartbreak of witnessing the people we love most inside their own struggles. We move the stupid-ass elf around the stupid-ass shelf, showing up for our kids despite the grief, the shadow, the heaviness we carry. We find reasons to pick up that one thing at the market so we can steal thirty minutes of time to ourselves on the drive there and back. We drag the dog around through the rain.
When things are hard, my tendency is to go into project manager mode. I start to move faster, to hustle, because checking things off boxes gives me the illusion of control. I try to “hack” the holidays, reading article after article about “reclaiming the season by creating our own rituals,” pouring over winter crafts I might experiment with, me, a person who has not made a craft since 1999. I keep up the push push push of habit instead of resting when I drop into (yet another) cycle of insomnia. I do the opposite of everything I suggest to my clients in our 1:1 sessions.
I want a resolution for the angst, and when resolution doesn’t come—because I don’t think there *is* one—I fall back on the coping strategy that has mostly served me well, except for when it hasn’t, which is chasing self-improvement. To be fair, compared to, ahem, previous coping strategies, this one is decidedly less destructive. And, try as I might to keep up appearances of having an easy-breezy holiday season, the constant striving for self-improvement can be yet another way I distract myself from what I actually need, which is to “vanish from sight;” to let the chaos of this time of year work itself over me, to be in the crucible, and to emerge having *actually* shifted and adapted, instead of landing in January exhausted because I did the known thing of just grinding along at my same old bummer patterning instead of surrendering to what that wiser part of me is calling me toward.
“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: With kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”
―Katherine May: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
For the past two-plus years, my work has been to engage with my life as a trustworthy partner, rather than as an antagonist. To receive my life, rather than micromanage my life. To shift my core beliefs enough that in moments of chaos and uncertainty, pain and terror, I can rest in the steady waters of my own painstakingly cultivated, no-matter-what-happens-I-can-be-with-it, intrinsic well-being. That inner wellspring that is always there, those waters I so often avoid right when I most need their nourishment. I’m scared to let go, if I’m honest. Even though I’ve always made it through hard times, and despite so much evidence that I am finally a person who can handle her life, this time of year still freaks me out. But that’s the thing I’ve learned about trusting my life—that in order to do so I must turn toward my life, instead of running/shopping/distracting/numbing/box-checking/money-hustling/calendar filling. And that’s what I’m recommitting to right now, this second, writing these words to you the morning after watching Mars cozy up all cute next to the full moon, a celestial wonder I watched rapt from my TV-free living room.
I’m not sure how to do this. So I’ll be going slow, reading and walking and minimizing (UGH) screen time. I’ll trust my baby business to take care of me. I’ll keep staring out the living room window, gazing on a sky which at this moment is aglow in sunrise. I’ll look to Tater as teacher, maybe finally learning to nap. I’ll hang out in the bathtub. I’ll pay attention to the greening, reminding myself that my own greening is on its way, if I let it.
My friend Meg Brackett over at The Yoga Brain and I had a conversation earlier this week about the evolution of my own recovery practice, and I answered some questions about my upcoming “EVOLVE” program. Have a watch and let me know what you think <3 Or go ahead and apply and let’s kick it in 2023 🫶🏽.
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, coach, and recovery advocate based in San Francisco, CA.
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