To Love Ourselves in Action
Or, A Day as an Affirmation
If you’re in New York City, this week’s in person classes include Suminagashi: Meditative Paper Marbling on Wednesday, October 9 in Fort Greene, and Thursday, October 10 in Greenpoint. Odette Press is popping up at Margot in Fort Greene on Saturday, October 12, where you can shop our full collection. Curious to connect to the nature of your life? Sign up for Park Practice: Nature Journaling and Meditation on Sunday, October 13 in Prospect Park. If you’re looking for focused support on your creative path, I’m here for you. Learn more about 1:1 sessions — let’s connect.
I love you. I’m proud of you.
These are the last things I whisper to myself at night before bed, face slicked with oil, hair like night and cloud, dark and swirled in a half knot somewhere across my head’s horizon, day winding down, and dinner digesting. They are the first words I remember to reach for in the dawn hours of a quiet morning, the same songs whispered into the atmosphere toward migrating birds as they flit across the sky, inspiring a momentary wonder and pause of breath. I love you.
In the solitude of days and evenings, and in the months and years moments like these repeat, I learn to look within for bliss. A day contains twenty-four hours for our actions to accumulate, for our attention to be guided, for our intentions to coalesce and take form, to take action that affirms that all we are creating. How many hours in those days, I began to wonder, spent in the pursuit of embodying love and self acceptance? Then, practice begins.
Hazel, summer lake, and deep brown green, I learn to look into my own eyes, how to strengthen my own gaze. Mirror practice, affirmation practice, meditation. Look — at the day, your life, this living, my practices remind me. I coax myself into awareness, into wonder in the act of noticing, affirming life in appreciation for the daylight and solitude, in the minutes of standing, breathing, brushing my teeth.
My reflection was slow to respond at first; now, we laugh and dance and glance back. I have a great time with myself I tell a friend, and I mean it, grateful for this process of turning inward, of learning to love my own company, in the acts of taking care and becoming my own friend. I learn to laugh at my own jokes, I take myself out into the vibrant nights, and hum joy into the early morning, leaving myself notes around the apartment, affirming for myself what it's like to befriend, tend, and connect with the solitude of my own living. In the not-too-distant past I’d worry these actions were selfish; now, I celebrate. Each day is an affirmation: something made solid and given form, formed by the actions we take in the direction of our ideas and intention Affirming, remembering, celebrating, I write in black pen across the smooth, blank page. I write and breathe, and write and breathe again.
Autumn arrives and reminds me of the need for cleansing and turning inward. Leaves slough off and fall in copper greens toward the ground. I want to affirm the daylight; I return to the ground of living; I turn to running, yoga, meditation, painting, cooking, walking, connecting, emailing, writing, watching, making, as the cold breeze comes and shifts the landscape of the days. I turn a street corner as an affirmation of curiosity, cook a plate of food as to affirm nutrients for the landing place of this body, follow my best yes when she leads me around corners or into and through and out of conversations, learning to be guided through dark night, hands out and trusting into the unknown. I look, notice, listen, learning to say no to what I’m not willing to accept, and five out of seven days a week, lace up my running shoes, and weave footsteps along the morning streets. I breathe delight into daylight. I send emails. Every part of life becomes an affirmation.
When I’m running, I'm clear not to run from something, but rather to use the spark of the run — the sprint and the joy and the quickness — as a momentum-building, of moving toward. Not an escape, but a source of fulfillment. Life is ecstatic, strong, and beautiful on the days when I listen to my mind, heart, body, and affirm for myself, slow or fast, how to run and run and run. Keep going, I choose, whispering into the East River as my feet dot lines across the pavement, a reminder of my own endurance. Let it out, I say, sprinting, releasing anger into ground of morning, legs moving, the expression of which is an affirmation in the direction of balance and equilibrium, and being healthy. Remembering and affirming that not all runs or days need to be hard or fast, I run some days with as much softness as possible — whispering slower into my actions, steadying my breath, affirming with each mile the strength of slowness, celebrating the effort of even pacing and the grace with which I am running, choosing to infuse stay steady into my feet against the pavement. Gentle, my life-as-practice says.
Our embodied actions are affirmations of our creativity, consciousness, and choice. On the days when I want to remember my own center, I roll out my worn, green rubber yoga mat, turn on my breath, and move. I tune into the moment, turning my palms into cups and wrapping them, gentle and strong, around my slopes of my kneecaps, heels, and shoulders. A breath is an affirmation of the present moment, and then I exhale, folding forward as an invitation to myself into a future of my own making through this practice of embodiment. A grip, a release, an exhale, I bring my shins to the ground in collaboration with the planes of gravity, pressing into existing across the slop of hardwood floors. Knees wide, forehead rests on the ground in reverence to the day and breathing, affirming a moment of stillness and solidity along with the Earth, remembering the places in body and Earth both where I remember I fit, and fit well — an affirmation of the places and ways that I belong to myself. Miracle: the ways our cells coalesce to become muscle, bone, particles of strength and softness taking form, becoming firm. Breath and body in concert with the symphony of living.
“We shape our life by deciding to pay attention to it,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, and an affirmation is taking life and making Earth from it, crafting form from the formless. Affirmation — a ground, “a solid assurance” or “an assurance that something is true” formed from ferm, which is to say something becomes "strong, steady,” "permanent, enduring,” "sound, well-founded" or "steadfast, steady". Take an idea and root it down into being through action. Make life firm through the act of your tending. When we embody intention, we are affirming our lives.
Take four words you’re drawn to feeling, and write them on slips of paper. Place them places around your life and your home where you can feel them, sense them, and see them. Use your actions to breathe life into these words, so that they form into being. A poem is an affirmation. A breath, a glance, a sound, a song, a meal or a sentence or an action we take can be an affirmation, a story we tell, something we declare to be true, bringing solidity to the form of our lives in the act of repeating. If I ever feel I don’t belong, I come back to this feeling, like an affirmation scrawled across a page: I take two hands, gentle and firm, and wrap them around my own shoulders, as if these shoulders were the gentle sloping landscapes of a person, partner, or friend.
“Affirmations work for anyone striving for self-acceptance,” writes bell hooks in All About Love. “Although I had for years been interested in therapeutic modes of healing and self-help, affirmations always seemed to me a bit corny…I wrote affirmations relevant to my daily life and began to repeat them in the morning as part of my daily meditations. At the top of my list was the declaration: ‘I'm breaking with old patterns and moving forward with my life.’ I not only found them to be a tremendous energy boost — a way to kick off the day by my accentuating the positive — I also found it useful to repeat them during the day if I felt particularly stressed or was falling into the abyss of negative thinking. Affirmations helped restore my emotional equilibrium.”
This week, what's helping you balance? What are you repeating?
PS. For more on guiding yourself with intention, embodied action, and care in life through meditation and the act of writing, try out my Journaling Library with recorded experiences, or sign up for a 1:1 session. All pair well with a cup of coffee, a warm view, and journal from Odette Press.
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