Permission and Surrender

I've spent the past few days in what I would call a "funk". Which is a state of mind I've found myself in more often than I'd like to admit over the past few months (okay, maybe year). But this one was extra funky.

Despite having amazing friends, loving family, a career that is growing daily, etc. I've found myself in these moods where the only thoughts and emotions I feel are negative. I feel stress, anxiety, sadness. My self talk is hurtful, negative, and deprecating. And with no clear cause or trigger. All I know is that I don't feel happy, I'm not excited, I don't feel passionate, I don't feel love.

And this drives me crazy. I beat myself up. I compare myself to others. I think about the people who are going through much harder times in their lives than I am - and I feel immense guilt for feeling shitty. I feel like a fraud ("If only the people who look up to me for inspiration saw me now. They'd think I was a fake."). I feel fear that it won't get better.

And these thoughts only serve to make the funk funkier. Shocker, I know. Instead of being able to overcome it, I find myself in a state of paralysis - I don't know how to fix it.

So, I skipped lululemon's run club last night and I went for a walk by myself. I put on a podcast and I walked around my neighborhood. It started by giving myself permission to not think about how I was feeling. To not analyze it, criticize it, or try to solve it. Just to walk, to listen, to look at my surroundings (which were unsurprisingly beautiful).

Fast forward an hour and a half or so later and something changed. I came to the realization that I needed to give myself permission to embrace the funk. That it was 100% okay to feel stress, to feel anxiety, to feel sad, to feel inadequate, to feel unsure of myself - even though I didn't know why I was feeling that way. I gave myself permission to embrace those feelings instead of trying to fix them. Because nothing needed to be fixed - I'm not broken. I'm human. This was/is a revelation for me.

Something began to shift. I came home a little clearer. I went to bed early, slept through the night, and woke up excited for today.

I went to a yoga class this morning and the teacher (shout out to Julia Sparkman, who somehow always gets me) had sequenced the class around the idea of "surrender." That when we find ourselves in a bind, whether mental or physical, real or imagined, in life or in yoga - that sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is surrender to it. The universe works in mysterious ways to support you when you are open to receiving that support. This yoga class was a clear reminder of that and a reaffirmation of the revelation I had come to last night.

So, self - you have permission to feel the funk, to love yourself during the funk, and to know that you are not the funk - you are human, and the funk isn't real, isn't permanent, and sure as hell won't stop you from moving forward.

LP