Faith

May 17, 2022

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  When I stopped writing back in December I really did think it was only going to be for a short week. As I had never not written to you for the last ten years.  But when the first Friday of 2022 arrived, the voice inside said something unexpected. It said don’t write this week. When the next week arrived, it said the same thing.  During that time I was writing my new book.  In many ways I was still writing to you.  So many of you reached out and asked when will the letter come back?  I appreciated that, as I was reconsidering the actual impact the letter was having.  Was there still a point to keep writing? Who was really reading?  Was it meaningful? Necessary? These questions only came a few weeks into the not writing.  When the quiet emerged. When there was space for something else.  I was finishing the book. I was about to turn 50.  It was time to question my journey. Time to be honest with myself. Maybe even ask the question. What about me?  My daughters were both in college and now one of them was graduating.  I had spent ten years teaching and writing about living life again after a loss.  I had created a new life. One I was proud of.  I had done it while caring for my kids, my new husband, his kids and the world at large.  But, what if I turned caring to myself? What would that look like?  To my surprise it was harder than I thought it would be.  It was easier to help others rather than myself.  I decided to stay in the quiet longer, to hear the voice that belonged to me beyond the tragedy. Beyond the surviving, and even some of the thriving.  What kind of life was waiting for me there? I started to walk in it, secretly.  It sounded like a lullaby at first.  Gentle like the wind you could stumble upon on a late spring morning.  I sat on a rocking chair, letting it take me for as long as it needed to.  I rocked and rocked. When something would come and disturb us, the wind would carry on. And I would do the same.  You see, the entryway to the life that is meant for you, is always different to what you thought it would be. For me it was a windy melody, hypnotic in nature so I could ignore the echoes of the old life long enough for the new life to grow roots.  They say, it takes a village. The kind of inner village that is equipped to build a new world is the type that has to come forth with tools from another planet.  I recognized I was at a similar crossroad I found myself in 2010, when I resigned from the corporate world to come find you. It felt like an alien experience once again.  At the time, I felt I was wrong to leave it behind to start something I could barely see.  But I trusted that alien voice, the village that came forth with tools that belong to the new world ahead. This time I have something I didn’t have then. Faith.  I have faith to trust the timing of my life.  But most of all the voice that tells me to stop walking down the path I had been in, in the last ten years. It is a scary proposition to say the least.  Who would I be if I did that?  I do know that, the answer to that comes to us the longer we stay on the new path.  The more we trust ourselves to carry on.  Uncertainty is the only certainty on this path and we must learn to trust it.  I now know what makes me happy and what doesn’t.  Ignoring the truth of that is not healthy. It is the opposite of healing.  The opposite of life. I am now finally ready to live my life for myself.  I can assure you that it upsets people. It makes things complicated.  It makes us step into a phase where we become divergent.  We appear selfish to others.  I stayed sitting on that rocking chair, listening to the lullaby from the wind.  Unchaining the chains that belonged to a life that was no longer mine.  One by one. Easy does it. I stood up.  And braved my way to the alien world once again.  I hope you do too.  With quiet winds, Christina P.S. More letters coming ahead. Sharing more of my journey, to help you reveal yours.

Read More
0 Comments.

The Unexpected Lessons of 2021

December 24, 2021

It has been a year of many surprises. Both professionally and personally.  My lessons are for my own life’s journey but if they can help you too, I will share them with you. Who I was when 2021 arrived is no longer here, but lessons don’t make our lives better, happier or easier. They make our lives different. Here are the learnings the unexpected moments of 2021 gifted me with.    1. The sooner you start trusting yourself the more at peace you will feel in the long run. Stop questioning the voice inside that knows better. 2. Loneliness will be a part of your life the same way bread, water, and oxygen is. A natural component of your habitat. Unless you find what makes you come to life and wrangle it enough to be your daily companion. Life translates loneliness to solitude when we persist in seeking it. It rewards hustlers. Dare devils. Thrill seekers. Self actualizers. 3. When you have spent your life giving to others and never asking for what you need for yourself you will realize that unless you announce you need help, nobody will offer it. Unless you grab a megaphone and climb on your kitchen table and yell help me, they won’t hear it. They have been conditioned to believe you don’t need anybody’s help. Un-condition them. You need help. You always have. You always will. 4. Long term relationships will end for the greater good of your future, even though it may appear as the worst possible scenario for it. Trust the unexpectedness of your life, it has intelligence that is ancient. It has knowing that is timeless. Don’t question the ancient self that resides within you. 5. Don't ever stop bringing up your loved ones in conversations that take place in the present moment. Include them in your life in permanent ways. It has nothing to do with your grief, or your healing. It has everything to do with love. Honor. 6. You are not here to please your parents, your relatives, or your friends. 7. Take care of your body, it will always give to you all that it has, until its last breath. It is the only place you can be yourself. 8. Postpone work. Never postpone play. 9. Make friends. Partner with people who love and engage with your mind. 10. When something feels wrong, it always is. 11. You can change your mind about the choices you made about your life. 12. Read to free yourself from anything that imprisons you. Books are gateways to other worlds. Go to them as if your life depends on it. It does. 13. Your world is as large and as small as the minds you choose to befriend, love, and interact with. Choose wisely. 14. Write down everything you think about, every day. Capturing your thoughts should be non negotiable. It can save your life. It can give you the next step. It is an invaluable daily practice. 15. Don't lie to yourself to avoid loss. It is unavoidable. 16. Your looks are always influenced by your internal world. You look as good as you think. As kind as you are. As loving as you feel. 17. Use your life as an example of a life well lived, and let that be the gift you give to the world. 18. Pay your bills, put food on the table. But use whatever remains for adventures. The only material goods necessary are those that help you express yourself. 19. You will always be imperfect. Make the most out of those imperfections. They are meant to light up the dark sky. 20. By the end of your life you will realize you knew nothing at all. And now that you finally understand that you wish you could go back to the beginning. Rest assured that you are to begin again. 21. My favorite author Joan Didion passed away today. Honoring her life I will end this year of letters with her words. “Character, the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life - is the source from which self-respect springs.” Rest in love dear Joan.    I will take next week off to greet the new year so let this serve as the last letter of 2021. Thank you for being my pen pal.  May 2022 bless you from its very first day.  And let the Holidays be what they need to be for your spirit.    With many lessons, Christina 

Read More
0 Comments.

The Petalling

December 17, 2021

If I had one wish for you, it would be to grant yourself permission to live the life of your choosing. To courageously understand the reasons behind your life’s choices to date, and allow for new choices to emerge that are generous towards you.  These choices would exclude pleasing other people, considering everyone else's feelings first, making your life about only serving others and not yourself. Whether it comes from kindness or societal pressure.  This letter is for you if you are constantly sacrificing yourself for others.  Always making choices that would benefit your family, your friends, your neighbors.  First and foremost thank you for your contribution.  Please know how much value you have offered to everyone in your life.  Some of this selfless giving will continue but let that not be the default setting of your actions unless you are in the aftermath of a war, natural disaster, poverty stricken community, or in a hospital where everyone is in need of help.  If you are a full time caregiver, this also pertains to you, as it is critical that you give to yourself the right kind of daily life experience. Even if it can only last an hour. That hour can nourish you profoundly.  Now that all of the above is said, let’s dive into what it means to choose a life, a day, a dream, an experience for yourself and only for yourself.  It starts with the thought, the act, the willingness to view yourself as a valuable and finite part of the world.  It is the quest of valuing your existence enough to accurately witness life through it while given this opportunity to be alive.  The irreplaceable source of inner health relies on your ability to do just that.  Offering experiences to the self where the noise of the voices around you are quieted down, equipping you with the ability to listen to your own.  Especially the noise coming from the tired part of you, the whispers of suppressed truth, the inhales of burdens that are not meant to be in your life’s bucket.  When you spend time just occupying the true space of you, you change the direction of your future.  You change the fabric of your reality.  We have undoubtedly been conditioned to think of the self as selfish.  We are being quelled. Squashed, subdued, suppressed.  In this context, we have devastatingly quelled ourselves as well as being quelled by others to live a life that either no longer belongs to us or never has.  Whether for meaning, for helping, for doing good, if done without balance it can diminish our existence.  It can cause grief.  Grief for the unrealized true nature of the self that has arrived here to become.  Imagine if you were born a daisy and you lived your life as a rose.  Still extraordinary, and beautiful but never a daisy.  Dying without ever seeing your white petals in the sun, living among the abundant wild greens, is the grandest invisible loss there is.  Don’t finish this life without shedding the rose costume you’ve been wearing.  Start by giving yourself one hour to be, do, experience whatever you want. I call it the petalling, the Greeks before me, called it petannynai, which means to spread out, to fly.  Here’s to granting yourself permission to petal every day of your life, unquelled.    With self generosity, from a modern day Greek :) Christina

Read More
0 Comments.

Your Messiest Drawer

December 10, 2021

Sometimes, change comes in ways you never expected.  You feel a force pushing you to do something that is confusing at first.  Trust it. It carries a message.  The only way to know what the message is, is to take the action.  And only then you will figure out what in the world is moving around in your life.  Because something is moving.  It doesn’t look like what you thought it would.  Quite a few changes have taken place this last year for me.  Some very unexpected. Some timely.  But the changes of this past year started to have a say in other parts of my life.  Even the parts that were not to be changed.  The parts that were supposed to be good.  The things I never truly questioned. Oh, my world.  When the questions started to come in I was shocked.  I sat with the questions.  I wrote about them. I cleansed them in my journal.  I walked inside the words I wrote. I started to see something.  Something that was waiting for me to visit it.  I had parked it there a long time ago when my life was a bigger battlefield and I could only fight two or three battles at once.  I left this part of my life there and said ‘it is ok for now.’  Certainly better than everything else I have going for me, let it be my ground, my foundation.  I was grateful for it. I still am.  But now after all these years I no longer have the same level of war in my life. The thing I left untouched, is now asking for an upgrade.  In other words, it is asking for its own battle.  So I brought it front and center to see what needed to be done.  Of course, in my head, the voice says, oh no, not this too.  But yes, this too. Especially this.  And everything else that will go along with it.  Don’t you ever think that when you change one thing, only one thing changes.  Everything around it will rise too.  And since this is the part of my life that kept me going while in battle, it is the final part of me that helped me survive.  As you can imagine my life in the last couple of weeks has been messy.  Painful too. But how else can you do this?  This is the part that most people never change, never question.  And it always holds them back from a more deserving life.  We have 20 days left in 2021 and I am shedding everything that was part of my life that was good, but not good enough.  Along with this, I am emptying drawers, closets, going through everything, and taking it out of my house, my life. Everything must go.  I am done with all the parts of me that cannot stand up straight.  Your homework is to go back to the parts of your life that got you through and ask if you still are in dire need of them. It is time for them to be upgraded, shed, cleansed, and do what you must do with them.  If it's ever time, it is now.  If it ever was a question, answer it.  If you don’t know where to look, go to your messiest drawer.  Open it. Pull it out. Empty it.  Write about it.  See what that drawer has to say.  And start from there.    With empty drawers,  Christina 

Read More
0 Comments.

Sign up to receive Christina’s Second Firsts Letter every Friday