The Sweetness In Suffering
There’s a focus in suffering that i like. It takes all of your attention. Even breathing is hard. So that whenever there’s a moment of relief it feels exquisite.
It’s that contrast between the darkness and the edge of light.
That focus gets your attention. Then you find that pinpoint of light in there.
I’ve talked to you about ruthlessly looking for that light. That’s the way. And when everything is awful, it feels amazing to rest in it for a moment.
When I’m not suffering, I miss that.
Right now I’m not suffering.
Happiness is more gratifying. But it’s not as potent.
I don’t want to fuck up my life subconsciously just so I can go back to that emotional starkness I’ve lived in so much of the past 2 years.
I’m working with this in a couple of ways.
On one hand, I’m trying to appreciate a different, less exquisite experience. A life with more mundane tasks and household chores. As well as more creative satisfaction and laughter. This helps.
The other, I’m trying to point that internal wrestling to creative projects which are more useful and interesting.
This email project.
Figuring out how to upload my podcast without my producer doing it for me.
Talking to people about their anxiety experiences. Creating coaching plans for new clients. Solving puzzles, sorting information into the best way to help.
All of these are more satisfying than putting one foot in front of the other, one moment at a time.
Sunshine + Movement
I talked to smart, thoughtful women for 3 hours today about death.
After guiding a meditation class where someone wept. Someone often does.
My kitten Suckled on my hand and slept in my arms for hours.
My moms dog, George, close by.
It was a lot of life and death.
I felt alive and engaged at the end of the day.
But knew I needed to move all of that through me.
So I walked in the sunshine with my sweetheart. We sang nonsensical songs to each other and debriefed our respective days.
Sunshine and movement is a top tier combo for moving accumulated energy and stress through the body. Even when you feel like your goings-ons are resolved, the body takes a minute to catch up.
Help it out by moving it through space. Look far off into the distance and up close. This is a massage for your eyeballs and nervous system. Breathe. Look up into the sky and try to find the edge.
Did you know at the edge of our atmosphere it's sunshine below and darkness above?
See if you can even find a bit of darkness in that endless blue
Air Traffic Controls Instructions for Living Well
When you communicate with the air traffic control people, they want to know 3 things.
Who you are.
Where you are.
Where you're going.
Which sounds like a pretty good instruction plan for life.
Who are you beyond your roles? Who is beneath your personality? In the wordless still place between breaths?
When you have a pretty good idea that you have no fucking idea, but something major is happening in this department, you're ready for question # 2.
Locating where you are is essential. We always start here. Right here. Locate yourself in space, assess the situation. This is the first step in the 4 a's of change.
From there, you gotta know where you're going. Air traffic control probably wants more certainty than The Universe. Universe knows you're not ending up where you think you are anyway. But you gotta have something to aim for.
3 things. Answer them any time you stop and want a reset.
How to Grieve. Also Live.
How to grieve or live
Every day aim for the light
Even as the sky is black as night.
Turn toward stillness
Maybe you meditate until you find a space between thoughts where everything is peace
Maybe you pet your dog until you let out an involuntary breath
Maybe you walk, face toward the sky, until you feel wonder and your mind stills
These are enough
Every pinpoint of light adds up.
That dark sky lights up with a constellation of hope.
Put down your furious journaling
Your manic figuring
Stressful meaning making
And see what you find on the other side of stillness.
One star at a time.
Prepping For Her Death Anniversary
My momma’s death anniversary is coming up.
I don't want to precode myself unnecessarily into thinking it's going to be hard.
But I'm already pretty sure it's going to be hard.
It’s a fine line between thinking something will happen and making that inevitable. (Hello Law of Attraction)
And knowing that something is already inevitable and taking steps to make it better.
Sometimes we gotta accept what’s here and roll with it.
Sometimes we gotta accept what's here and change course.
In any situation, choose the approach that feels the most peaceful.
Around the middle of August I’ll have a dip.
It will feel like lethargy and lack of focus.
A layer of sadness that makes everything heavy and immovable.
I'm in a great place emotionally right now and I regularly have flashes from her accident.
They show up in singular horror images.
Walking. Dead bird. Me next to dead mom.
Lifting a weight over my head. Intrusive thought of it falling on my face. Like my dead mom fell.
Slipping on a stair. My mom at the bottom of the stairs.
It’s always so close. Life. Death. One breath away.
I imagine those images will ramp up as my sadness ramps up.
Or maybe not.
Just in case, I’m doing what I can for my future self.
Articulating the specific symptoms I'm worried about. This awareness means I have specific ways to care for myself.
Making food for the freezer because when emotions are high, executive function is low. Meals are hard.
Getting my house clean so that I’m only dealing with whatever current mess I make. Wading through mess that’s still piled from 6 months ago will feel demoralizing and overwhelming. I’m more likely to spiral into a hopeless sense that it’s all too much. If I can’t even clean off my kitchen counter, how can I ever do anything.
Adding resource appointments like extra coaching and therapy.
Being willing to cancel it all if I want to.
Sending so much love and compassion to my future August self.
Right now I'm also sending current you so much love and compassion.
Feel it?
Love,
Sarah
The Change Framework
Why your tools aren’t working
We use a simple framework for change. This framework works in every scenario I’ve ever applied it to. If something isn’t working, looking at these 4 elements will help you figure out why not. Once you diagnose the problem, you can apply any number of solutions.
Today I’ll outline it for you with the basic idea. Later I’ll show you how this works in specific scenarios.
The framework: Awareness, Acceptance, Alignment, Action
Awareness means that you are aware of what’s happening now. What’s here.
People often skip this one because we think we already know. Ruminating on something is not the same as knowing what’s actually happening.
Mantra: start here
Acceptance means that you can be present with what’s here with some peace. It does not mean that you’re going to let it continue. Just that you stop thinking it shouldn’t be happening.
Mantra: this is happening.
Alignment means that you’re in cahoots with what you want. You’re focusing on what you want instead and you believe that it’s possible for you.
Mantra: this is possible
Action happens AFTER the first 3. If you try to move before doing the first 3, you’ll run into internal and external roadblocks. Sometimes you can take action in order to identify the direction you’re going in. It doesn’t seem like you’re aligned with what you want. But you still have to be aligned with a general idea of something better.
Mantra: Every step is a vote for what I want
Love,
Sarah
How Anxiety Cock-Blocks Your Freedom
Freedom Is when you feel like you have some control over your life.
Not control-freak level of control.
But when you feel like you can trust yourself to stay sane, focused and follow through on what matters.
This is impossible if you’re anxious a lot of the time.
Anxiety infects your perceptions, attitude, moods, hunger signals—everything. Even a low hum underneath all of it makes your life is harder than it needs to be.
Anxiety resolution is simple. But it's a whole lot more nuanced than do some yoga, meditate, and call me in the morning.
The first time my inner world fell apart I didn't know wtf was wrong with me.
So I didn’t know how to fix it.
Couldn't figure out what to google or where to find help. I was lost.
Everything I tried either:
A. made it worse
or
B. Did nothing, which made me feel even more hopeless so it usually made it worse.
It has been 6 years since that happened. I’ve learned a whole lot about how to navigate an internal world that is full of big feelings and unrealistic dreams.
I have an arsenal of tools and concepts that work not only for me, but reliably work on numerous clients with different anxiety symptoms and circumstances. These are the basis for my coaching program The Modern Anxiety Solution.
It's a rich, compassionate and effective approach to coming back home to yourself and getting back to being in the world the way you want.
I’m overflowing with insights, tools and stories that can help you navigate feeling upside down.
This is why I'm emailing most days and talking to as many people as I can.
I'm hungry to connect and I 'm thinking you are too.
Tomorrow I'll share with you the framework I use for changework. It's super simple and a great way to figure out why your tools aren't working and what to do instead.
The Momentum In A Hostile Universe
You know how, when you're pissed at someone, all you can see is more reasons to be pissed? All the times you've been pissed before.
It feels so real.
Stuck in a hostile universe full of danger and pain.
This is momentum. When you focus on something more and more it get stronger and stronger. Even the narratives you get stuck in when you're hurt.
This is also true, by the way, of narratives that feel good to you. Focus on them more and more and they'll get stronger and stronger. You're literally rewiring your brain for happiness.
Here's a story I hear people tell all the time when their feelings are hurt:
He doesn’t care. You’re not important. He’s been taking advantage of you all this time and you were too blinded because you were just stupid, apparently. And you’re going to have to stay mad because you only remember how awful everything is when you’re mad. Maybe he's a narcissist. You’re going to have to delve into attachment theory and heal your wounds and heal his wounds and change all of the patterns and childhood trauma and whatnot so that he won’t have to be such a selfish asshole and finally, FINALLY, all of this will be healed and you can feel good again…
After you process it with a coach or therapist or take a nap, you feel a little better.
Simultaneously, the terrible version of events in your mind gets a little less terrible.
Soon you are in a completely different universe that isn’t terrible at all.
This version also feels real.
Almost like none of it is real.
Everything is made up.
There are certain facts that actually happen, but how we interpret them—
how we spin the story in our mind about what those facts mean—
all of that is made up by us.
And you really, honestly, get to spin every single situation in a way that puts you in a universe that you like. The Modern Anxiety Solution makes this easier. You don’t have to fight so hard between those different versions. That’s enough to make a lady crazy.
Sarah
How To Change Your Favorite Color
Hi there.
Mind games are fun.
On any random Tuesday you will find me in some combination of lavender glasses, pulling my. lavender phone out of my lavender purse, wearing lavender shoes, shorts, or bra.
Because I decided to make lavender my favorite color, just for fun.
To see if I could.
I did it and it stuck.
And became such a part of me that I forgot I ever didn't love it.
Until I handed C, my partner, my glasses to hold while I took off my shirt, revealing my lavender bra, recalled the lavender Teva’s I just took off and I said,
WTF is up with all this lavender?
He reminded me that I did it on purpose. And then I remembered how, just a year before, bright emerald green was my #1 fave. Lavender was fine, but not on my radar.
Now I love both.
These aren’t life and death shenanigans, but it’s pretty fun to practice deliberate focus, over and over, in areas where the stakes are low.
That way, in areas where stakes are higher, your focusing skills are better.
This matters because you get what you focus on.
If you want to be more in control of what you get,
Be more in control of what you focus on.
From Joy to Bent Over Sobbing With A Baby Bird
I was walking this afternoon. Buoyed by sunshine and Taylor Swift. My shirt at my waist, sweat and sunscreen stinging my eyes.
Just bopping along, feeling good. Alive. Sunshiney and satisfied.
When a fuzzy baby bird slow blinked at me from the sidewalk.
This little buddy stared at me, its chest rising and falling slowly.
Buggy little eyes staring.
A sweet little nature connection. I wondered what to do for them.
When I looked over and saw its sibling close by, upside down, wing askew.
Dead.
It’s so fucking close. Sunshine lifey gratefulness.
Death.
I bent over, sobbed. Flooded with sensation.
That awkward little stare blink looked like me, a lost child. Its dead beloved right there.
I remembered my mother laying next to me, almost dead.
I relive this scene a lot.
Then I took a pic of the alive fuzzy one and walked home.
Is there a better way to end a scene like that?
I’m so used to moving from joy to despair and then cutting an apple and changing clothes.
Life, I guess.
I used to get stuck for hours and days in despair. Still do when it builds up, unprocessed and unexpressed.
Often, I move in and out like the sun moves through the clouds.
Flexibility and compassion are my goals these days.
No promises you won’t still cry a lot.
But when you do, you can cry until you’re done and then get back to the rest of your life.
Bookmark for When You Lose Your Keys
Meet Tony.
The Patron Saint of ADHDers
Also known as St Anthony, the finder of lost things.
Secular friends, hear me out.
You don't have to be Catholic or believe in ghosts to call on him.
He can be your imaginary finder guy. It will be fun.
Next time you lose your glasses, say this:
Something is lost and cannot be found;
Dear St Anthony, please look around.
I've used him ever since that time when I was 16 and I lost my car keys on a grocery store shelf. My bestie prayed to him and we found the keys on a random shelf.
Good enough for me.
That was a big store and I did not think I was going to find those keys.
Tony has about a 90% success rate. The 10% failures are probably when something got actually thrown away or destroyed. Like my keys I lost last summer that are at the bottom of the river.
I've also seen him find:
Dogs
Cats
Keys (so many keys)
Lipstick
Money
Wallets
Children
I won’t even help my kids find anything unless they’ve asked St Anthony.
That's the end of my sales pitch. Now it's time for you to listen to me.
You and I both know you're going to lose something in the next 24 hours.
Try asking St. A. When he finds it, say thank you.
Report back.
Atonement and LOA
I didn’t mean to almost break my foot but since Law of Attraction is always working…
Several years ago my grandma dropped a candle on the top of her foot.
When she called me for help, I was on my way to grab a stack of pizza to feed a group I was facilitating.
I told her I would drop it off and then be at her house.
She was pissed.
Should I have dropped the pizza idea and run straight to her? Or should she have waited the extra 45?
I never reconciled this.
Yesterday, when my trainer almost dropped a weight on her foot, I remembered that interaction.
I went deep inside and talked to her in the in-between. On the gym floor between shoulder presses, I acknowledged her fear and sense of lonely betrayal that I didn’t come immediately.
Sent deep love her way and to my younger self as well. Both my grandma and I confused and trying to attend to our beloveds.
Both of us failing.
Last night, I opened my fridge door and a jar fell on the top of my foot.
Goddammit, that hurt.
My kid attended to me. Brought me ice, took over dinner prep, said nice things.
Every time I have a painful accident there is a terrified loneliness that sweeps through me. The vulnerability of our bodies, coupled with feeling so alone in the terror.
I saw my grandma in that same state, fully alone in her home. Her granddaughter taking her time to arrive.
Alone. In pain. Afraid.
When my mom fell, I was there. I told her so repeatedly.
“I’m right here. Here. I’m here.”
“I got you.”
“Help is on the way.”
I did that one right.
My kid did it right for me.
This is atonement.
That Joy Practice Worked
When I’m drowning it takes all day to breathe again
Turning toward joy again and again.
Sometimes only getting so far as one deep breath.
Always at least one.
During one heavy season I’d get up before sunrise every day.
March to the bridge.
See the sun coming up one more time, its golden hope turning the river warm.
Grab the railing and sob. Turn around. March home.
I am so moved, writing this.
Seeing myself then, from the perspective of this woman I am this summer morning. I'm upright and cogent. Happy.
Watching the me of then: doubled over, in a white running vest, freezing. Trying.
I had no idea how to stand it.
But I took such good care of myself while I found my way back again.
Turning toward the light, stubbornly trusting it would work.
It worked.
A Practice That Helps
Here’s a practice that you can do anytime.
No altar required.
Turn toward joy. Just for a beat.
This works even when you're buried so deep in emotion that you can't see anything else.
Even during the darkest night of the soul.
Even on a normal ass Tuesday when nothing is wrong but everything sucks.
It’s easiest to focus on the negative.
Your achy knee.
That email you don’t want to send.
The debate.
What you focus on you get more of.
Want more achy angst?
Me neither.
Even while your knee, unsent email and election looms, do this:
Get your brain out of the gutter and point it toward joy.
Joy.
It feels so good, doesn’t it?
Like the warm sun.
Like watching a beloveds chest rise and fall while their mouth twitches in their sleep.
Like throwing your head back, laughing.
Remember?
Notice a little lightening right now as you remember?
Let that feeling you have right now settle into your bones.
Stay there for a beat. Just a moment is enough.
Whenever you remember, stop what you’re focusing on and remind yourself of this warmth.
Cozy.
Alert
Peaceful hum of being exactly in the right place at exactly the right time.
It will lower your pain.
Increase motivation.
Help you tap into the solutions we need for what’s next.
You don’t have to do this very well.
Just keep picking up your negative pointing brain and point it towards joy.
You get what you focus on.
Focus toward joy and that’s what you’ll get.
You Know What I’m Talking About, Right???
When I write to you, you are a collective of specific people. Like my imaginary best friend/student I carry on my walks.
The other day I couldn't quite feel you.
Could feel your presence just out of reach
Tried to solve the disconnection with familiar thought patterns.
Asking myself marketing and sales questions like:
What does he need?
What is she looking for?
What is she dying for a solution to?
Those questions are fine if I'm wanting to market to you instead of create connection and understanding.
Instead, I thought:
What’s here
I’m walking
Sunshine
Exhale
My energy is spinning upward as I think
It’s high pitched
The hum of worry
What’s here
Pull it down with my
Breath. Left
Right
Hearts on a telephone pole
Low flying heron
Sunshine
An insight:
They know what you’re talking about
Then I heard the voice of the internet marketing squad: don’t use coach speak. No coach speak. Coach speak bad
bad
badddd
My energy constricted, swirling up again. Belly tight.
They know what you mean
Exhale
Exhale
Exhale
Trusting this is true,
The Crucial Element of Time and Space for Easy Loving
My mom died in the first thirty minutes we were together that day.
Before we had so much time together that we were on each others nerves.
Telling that part of the story later, I realized how crucial that element of proximity and time was.
Have never considered severing our relationship.
Some seasons we talked every day.
Some every couple weeks.
I have liked her more and less at different times. And she me.
Never a question about our commitment to each other.
After a while together we’d get a little gritty.
I saw how this is true in other relationships.
My level of attention and pleasure wavers with time together.
My best friend and I go long periods without talking. Once, we didn’t talk for 5 years. Now we talk every few weeks. When we do we dive in for hours, breathing each other in. Tight. Connected. Then we separate for a while until it’s time to come back.
That’s the shape of our connection. It needs great space and closeness to maintain.
Separate from our commitment which remains like a solid line, impermeable across the multiverse.
When You Love Them More
Don't bother policing every sentence that comes out of your mouth. It's the energy underneath that really matters.
The sentence and the results that follow are tendrils of influence growing from the energy.
You can say the same thing multiple times with different intentions and get multiple outcomes.
Consider this impossible task of quantifying love.
I wrote to you about it yesterday.
Yesterday I was focused on being loved less. This is a passive construction. It implies something is happening to me and I am helpless under it. Victimy and powerless.
Today I'm contemplating loving more.
That's almost the same concept.
But totally different.
I love my kids a lot more than they do me.
This feels great to believe. It supports a fantastic parent-spawn relationship.
Why doesn't it bother me that my kids love me less?
Partly it's because that's the way it usually is between kids and parents.
They pop out helpless and covered in goo.
Entirely dependent. Dependency isn't love.
Though caring for and being cared for surely engenders love and connection.
I started entirely in love with them. Helped by science with all of the built in instincts of protection and chemical reactions to seeing their sweet little faces.
It's more than that though.
I think about it like "I love them the most."
I do. I love them so much. I take great pleasure in our unrequited love.
Sometimes they give me a particular look that is a combination of annoyance and softening and appreciation. The heavens ring and my entire soul flashes.
But I don't need this from them to sustain our relationship dynamic.
We go weeks and months sometimes without that sweetness between us.
The way I think about it has a different focus.
With my partner or anyone else where I can feel insecure and not loved enough, I'm focusing on the "less than" part.
Thinking he loves me less than I love him.
With my kids I think "I love them the most."
The emphasis is on the most loving. Not the least loving.
It doesn’t really matter if what you tell yourself is true or possible.
Most of what you tell yourself is subjective and unprovable.
Might as well choose a narrative that feels good.
When They Don’t Love You As Much As You Love Them
Hi there,
Sometimes I think my partner doesn’t love me as much as I do him.
Do you know about RSD? Rejection Sensitivity Disorder? Every Neurodivergent or tender hearted person I know grapples with this. It was my hyperfocus for a few years and I know a lottttt about it and how to resolve it.
Feeling like you’re not loved enough or as much is a component of RSD.
It’s not real, but it sure feels like it.
In my case, I know it’s not real because of these three things:
A. It feels awful when I believe it.
Anything that feels awful isn’t useful.
I find myself trying to be cool in my most important relationship. The one place I feel most like myself. Except when I’m buried under this dark belief and attendant feelings.
Then I’m off kilter and withdrawn and embarrassed at how insecure I feel. To compensate, I try to be cool which is an impossible proposition.
B. It’s impossible to quantify.
How can you possibly know what two people are feeling in order to measure the love inside?
Do you measure the size of fond feelings? All of my feelings are huge.
Do you measure the way each show love? Everyone’s love personality is a little bit different. My partner loves to cook for me. I love to rub his forehead. We’re different people with different demonstrations. As soon as I think he should do for me what I do for him, we’re in trouble.
C. I can feel like this in most of my relationships.
If it’s true across the board, the problem is me.
Clearly the issue is my perception and not the situation.
Now, if you can get out from underneath the veil of this belief, you may want to look at the balance of your relationship.
Is it balanced in a way that works?
Do you give and show affection and support and fuck each other in ways that balance out and feel nourishing and supportive?
That’s a sane investigation to start.
You don’t even need to be unhappy for this to be a useful contemplation.
It will create more intimacy. Probably with each other. With yourself for sure.
Against Streaking
Hi there,
Why I'm posting most days, not every day.
Streaking is a perfectionist nightmare.
A streak is when you do a thing for consecutive days.
A lot of people like this approach to habit creation.
It’s not a bad way to get started on a new behavior. It takes less energy to commit to something every single day. When you allow some flexibility, your commitment can be a little softer than it needs to be for daily activity. Some people worry that if they allow flexibiillty, they'll never do it.
It's more likely that if you will only do something within a rigid structure, you're not fully committed anyway.
If you want to gamify something sort of meaningless like Wordle, have at it. The Times will even show you how many days in a row you've done it.
Once you get into a streak, you adopt the identity of someone who streaks every day.
This is not the same as the identity of someone who integrates a new behavior into their life.
With a streak, you miss a day and your identity crumbles.
Do you want an identity of someone who meditates every single day without fail?
Or someone who has a regular, consistent and supportive meditation practice?
The identity of doing it every day isn’t the same as someone with this behavior as part of their lifestyle.
Then when you break your streak the mental obstacle between stating over at day zero and getting back to where you were feels impossible.
You’re more likely to put off starting again.
You already screwed up. Screw it. Start again tomorrow.
Or the next day.
Or just later.
Which can easily turn to never.
The Beginning
Hi there,
My mom died last August.
Sometimes it’s all I want to talk about.
I even started a podcast so I could talk about it.
The farther away her death, the less I do.
I now spend entire days thinking about other things.
Mostly things related to navigating our internal world with peace and intention. And how to make it easier for you.
Her death though. It’s only just a connection or two away.
For example, I was appreciating my sweetheart this morning.
Thinking about how good and normal it felt to say goodbye. Familiar and impatient and sweet. So much like any Wednesday.
Her death one thought away.
First this: I loved the feeling of his hug when he came to the hospital.
Then: I love the way I felt curled up on his lap at her bedside.
Next: How it felt to curl up in her bed
And: For him to hold me up during her honor walk.That longest walk down the hallway where they took her body for its organs to transplant into others.
Appreciation and death are so close.
These scenes are all their own entire chapter. Probably too much for a first post.
Hi. Here I am with TMI, an obsession with death, and a need to write to you most days.