For those who’ve experienced trauma, there may be a recurring time of day where you experience a heightened sense of hypervigilance, a heightened sense that something is wrong.
This can happen no matter how much time has elapsed since the trauma actually happened.
You may find yourself in these moments looking for evidence for what is still wrong, and you may find many things wrong.
These pieces of evidence that everything is wrong might all meld together and leave you feeling privately drained and awful, even though you still may smile and be your best self for everyone else.
You may find yourself secretly desperate for an elixir that might help let you have a little peace.
You may find you notice all this more when you’re by yourself, where there are less distractions and less attractions.
Whenever you find yourself in this uncomfortable predicament, please remember that there is a space within yourself where you are safe. It may be just the tiniest apartment deep within yourself, but it’s yours whenever you’d like to visit.
The walls of this space are built with boundaries, boundaries built not from animosity for others but rather built out of love for yourself.
This space can be here for you to be just as you are and just as you aren’t. Where you can sit on a cushion of empathy and observe all that’s right or wrong but from a less triggered place.
Where you can simplify your actions to breathing in, knowing you’re breathing in, and breathing out, knowing your breathing out.
You may also find comfort that you are not alone here. That there are so many others like you building similar spaces, learning how to not be held hostage by their circumstances and by other people’s behavior.
Sending my love to you, you who gets secretly triggered everyday. You’re not alone. I send you peace from my tiny apartment to yours.
-JLK
So often, people can’t find an outlet for their ideas and their ideas get stuck and start yelling to be free.
So many people don’t understand that it’s their ideas yelling to be free. They think instead there must be something wrong with their life.
It doesn’t occur to people that it’s their ideas that feel stuck and miserable.
Our ideas are always pushing and begging us to share them because they recognize their own beauty and truth and usefulness.
And when we don’t let them out, it’s really painful for us and for our ideas.
Sometimes I think our real job in life is to find and create outlets for our ideas.
I used to wait and wait and wait for the perfect outlet or invitation to share my best ideas. And when I couldn’t find one, things got pretty crowded inside my body because new ideas are always being born.
It became difficult to move and breathe and carry them all around. Eventually I had to get them out. I just couldn’t take the discomfort anymore.
It wasn’t the outlet I had hoped for, but the thing I learned is that when ideas are allowed to get out, the outlet doesn’t really matter – so long as the ideas can be seen and heard by another.
And after one idea is let out, the rest of the ideas usually get excited and follow, if we let them go. And when we can see our ideas on the other side, they always thank us and take on a life of their own.
When I remember to treat my ideas the way I’d treat someone I love, I remember to give them the space, any space, to be free.
-JLK
To me, the Christmas Spirit is all about giving to others the parts of yourself that you think are the most brilliant, the most beautiful.
Many people will give you what they believe are these parts of themselves, and yet sadly, they will not be the gifts you’ve been waiting for.
So please remember, you need not accept these gifts from others. Whether it’s their opinion or advice all wrapped up in holiday cheer or their criticism with sugar on top. You only need to accept that which gives you peace and joy and health.
That doesn’t mean you need to say, “Hey buddy, I’ve got an idea. How ‘bout you send this ‘gift’ straight up the ass it came from?”
Instead you can choose to give something in return that comes from the part of your own self that’s aligned with what’s true and beautiful for you, given in a way that might inspire more understanding. Maybe this is the spirit of giving that could stop pain from spreading like a virus throughout the world.
-JLK
This illustration was inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ audiobook, The Dangerous Old Woman.
Some people think Baba Yaga is an evil witch, but I feel inspired to think of her as the preserved wisdom of women from the beginning of our time here.
And because each of us comes from the beginning of our time here, this wise woman must exist inside us all.
The part of the self with a heart as bright as the moon, like heartwood that’s been weathered by storms, not to harden and die, but hardened just enough to stay preserved and protected from the turbulence of life.
My whole life, I was the little leaf that was blown and then left alone. My stability was determined by outside forces.
And yet these outside forces in my life were also lost in the turbulence, because they had never been taught about this light within, that offers wisdom and stability, and so they weren’t able to share with their children what they didn’t have themselves.
It’s an invisible trauma when a child says to their grown-ups, “Look at me glow! I have magic inside! Would you like to celebrate with me?” And watching the adults smile and say they’d love to, but sadly they can’t, because turbulence needs their attention.
After enough time, the child may stop believing that the magic they experienced inside themselves was real.
Maybe they exchange the light of their wisdom and magic for compliance, or hollow, commodified rituals, because they’re the only times people seem available to celebrate.
Or maybe they’re fueled by their defiance of such things.
Either way, they must muscle through the turbulence every day — constantly blown off course by a mere look or comment or tone that reminds us of our original betrayal, of someone not seeing that sacred part of ourself when we were so sure it was there.
And this becomes our life, this cycle continuing…
Feeling so privately stressed and betrayed, looking for a way out instead of in.
And when our own children come to us asking for a witness to their magic, or for guidance through their turbulence, we teach them what we were taught—proper behavior and compliance—just so we can have a little peace from their turbulence, before it adds to our own.
And yet, the truth is, after all this time, our light is still here, inside us. Inside us all.
We don’t need to travel to find her to receive her teachings. She has never left—her light is as bright as it’s always been.
When I listened to Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ The Dangerous Old Woman, her light was so bright, it traveled right through the recording and ignited my own.
And this is when I felt it—the importance of waking up each other’s awareness to this light, that is all of ours, instead of letting the hardness of the world convince us that it isn’t real, or worse, doesn’t matter anyhow.
We need only to step into our bodies and listen. Until the light inside us becomes our own, guiding us as we travel through our days in our mobile houses.
And when we cross paths with someone who may look as though she’s doubting what she most definitely has deep inside her, we can share our light until it ignites her own.
This is the sisterhood that we have lost.
Baba Yaga is not an old evil witch, except to those who don’t understand. Except to those who have lost the magical language of light.
We women need to make sure we never quiet our spirit or save it for a rainy day. Or to waste our time wondering if it’s real.
We need to trust that in our light is our unique expression of the most profound humor and wisdom and creativity that’s been flowing from one heart to the next since the beginning of our time here.
—JLK
Thoughts about what love is...
If you grew up in a toxic household (even if the people who were toxic to you aren’t able to agree that they were) you may not understand what love looks or sounds like.
You know what it’s not: It’s not being controlled or criticized, demeaned or dismissed, punished or shamed.
You know it’s not tough love or getting gold stars for your elbow grease that you may have suffered greatly to produce.
And you know it’s not even being fed or clothed or roofed over your head.
You might think that maybe love is a tone of niceness instead of a tone that yells.
Or a word called love instead of a word that stings.
But to me, love is time spent making an effort to understand someone.
Love is making the effort to make sure another person knows that their perspective is not a waste of time, but that it matters and is valuable, even when it’s different than mine.
And love is also making the effort to share my own perspective, to also be understood, to also matter, so that we can have a meaningful connection based on what’s real for us both.
The flow of communicating-to-be-understood and listening-to-understand between two people, to me, is love. No matter if the flow is free and easy, or if takes a bit longer for two filters to unclog from all the times we felt so stuck inside ourselves, and so hurt by all the people who never seemed to care.
-JLK
Even when you're feeling invisible in the algorithm of life, remember that's because you're still hoping for others to see you and acknowledge all that you have to offer, when in fact, you already know who you are and all you have to offer.
Your job is now to look around and see where you’re needed, what spaces are waiting for you to decorate them with the most beautiful parts of yourself.
-JLK
