when a supportive practice slips 🫤 - a mindful musing

Happy good day to your kindred spirit ✨

My mind feels like a weird space today, which isn’t necessarily abnormal, but it’s worthy of recognizing. I’ve got a lot swimming around in there the past week so it feels like a big balancing practice with ups and downs 🎢

The other day, I thought I was in a good space to have a challenging conversation, but I hadn’t prepared in some of the usual ways I find supportive, and the conversation started to quickly fill with tension, and big feelings began to outpace reason. I felt a bunch of insecurities swarm in and I was heading offline fast. Essentially, it stopped being a productive conversation, and this really needed to be one.

I’m grateful that I recognized that this wasn’t working in the moment and that I asked to revisit the conversation at a later time, but even this felt extraordinarily hard and now I find I’m kicking myself a bit for not preparing. I didn’t lay the groundwork for myself that I know is important, not just so my needs can get met, but so I can also remain open to listening to the other person.

My supportive practice involves writing a sort of challenging convo agenda that helps me reflect on where I’m coming from, set clear intentions and expectations, and make sure that it’s all within my purview. Seeing things outside of my brain like this gives me the distance I need to gain a more neutral perspective. It tells my brain I’m safe to take a good hard look — that I have the time and space to fully explore what’s going on — and it gives me a tangible thing to ground with in live challenging moments when my trauma brain wants to take over and my body is abuzz with murmurings of fight, flight, or freeze.

Most of the time, this helps me feel much more confident and capable of using the power of my voice. And sometimes I need to check myself before I wreck myself 💥

I felt like I let myself down because I know better, and I didn’t fully show up for myself, which cascaded into me not fully showing up for this important conversation. I’m grateful that it didn’t backfire in some large-scale way, but it did have a negative taste, and even those small things bruise us and our relationships with people.

I share this today because I want to invite you to muse over what supportive practices in your life need to be more consistent. What fuels you so that you keep firing on all cylinders? And what can you set into place so that you show up for yourself in those ways?

If you have a practice that you love and would like to share with me, I’m all ears and eyes. Consider me the eternal student. Drop me a line with a reply or a message on the social medias 💌

And as a reminder to all of us: the spiral staircase of experience is real, we all need reminders, nothing is permanent, and vulnerability looks stunning on everyone ✨

With much love and good energetic tidings 💚

photo credit: Pawel Janiak on Unsplash