december: work
monthly theme: [celebration]
Celebration as work, as a laborious task… I mean, if you couldn’t guess from my other essays this month, opening myself to joy is a work in progress for me. Celebrating my wins takes effort, it’s almost a chore to figure out what works best for me, what makes me actually feel good. Legitimately good.
Relaxing/celebrating often does feel like work. And now entering this “official” week of work, an even more daunting light is shed onto the idea of celebration. It’s now time to put all this noticing and intentionality to the test…
For this month, maybe “experiment” or “play” would be better suggestions than “work,” since the formal ideas of labor and celebration seem to be perfect antonyms in our culture. But then again, why shy away from the reality of the feelings we’re facing during this time? Afterall, the whole point of this Year of Healing project is to welcome in the truths coming up for us.
And yet here we are–at least you and me–exploring the work of celebrating. Which means there’s at least two of us in the world who need to put some effort into relaxing and enjoying ourselves.
As a matter of fact, I’m just now noticing that I’ve been linking celebration to a time of year or some milestone of accomplishment this whole time when every breath can be a celebration of life…if you’ve taken enough yoga classes and listened to enough mindfulness podcasts, of course. Where is the line between things that are worthy of celebrating and those that are not? And why didn’t I ask that question last week?
Shit, I really need to celebrate just getting through this week…I’ve been non-stop recently with End-of-Life Doula Training and work and preparing for the holidays… Celebration is a pause. A deep breath in. Even an exhale. Dare I say that it’s stopping to smell the roses as if you were the rose itself. Celebration as a self-reflexive action of love. Celebration is self-love. Moving beyond self-care.
This week, I did wrap up my End-of-Life Doula training with INELDA where the main (or at least every-day) takeaways were deep-active listening and self-care. Deep-active listening is a form of presence where we don’t interject our own agendas or beliefs, we simply help others discover the thread running through their own–so long as this person is open to going there with us.
In fact, deep-active listening is less about opening doors for others and more like walking through a hallway with someone and witnessing them stop, enter, or pass-by their own doors. The main aspects of this practice are asking clarifying questions and reflecting back things that someone just said to make sure that we’re hearing them correctly and not projecting our perspective onto their reality.
It’s really quite a powerful practice. The training went into so much depth about it that I really can’t do it justice since I myself am just getting my feet wet with deep-active listening. But through my studies, explorations, and experimentations of it, I’ve noticed that self-care is simply deeply and actively listening to yourself. Self-care is sitting with our own realities and reactions; asking clarifying questions; and making sure we see what it is that we’re truly thinking/needing.
Self-care is a loving and illuminating walk through your own hallways. It is accompanying all parts of yourself through the doors that might be hard to enter but beckon you anyway.
I bring up all of this because I keep coming back to the idea that celebration is presence, embracing reality and marking it with a ritual of joy. Deep-active listening is a celebration of life, of our needs and of our stories. And vice-versa, celebrating anything must mean being truly present with all that it is.
It seems like my work this week will be opening up myself and my heart enough to be touched by the presence of joy. To truly see and listen to the beauty of it. Reveling in the reality that exists in front of me will require a lot of effort because I am always so afraid of rejection, being let down, or getting thrown off by the next possible tragedy on the horizon (I’m anxious).
But the times where I have been able to open myself up to joy, to deeply and actively listen to the softness of my own heart have been where life begins to celebrate itself. It is no longer work after the labor of opening up and remaining soft. Once that energy has been exerted, it pays off ten-fold. And coming to this realization is reason enough to celebrate.
May this week bring rest and ease to you and yours. I love you very much. Happy celebrating!