Creating Sanctuary Guided Meditation
May this meditation help you to find a moment of freedom and safety in your day.
“How do we balance the need to go home with our daily lives? We pre-plan home into our lives. It is always amazing how easily women can ‘take time away’ if there is illness, if a child needs them, if the car breaks down... Going home has to be given the same value, even stated in crisis proportions if necessary. For it is unequivocally true, if a woman doesn’t go when it’s her time to go, the hairline crack in her soul/psyche becomes a ravine and the ravine becomes a roaring abyss.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I’ve been diving into some old journals from my early days of motherhood. I came across some sermon notes I took during one week of the moms group at my church. The speaker was talking about marriage and I wrote down gems such as, “Our husbands weren’t designed to make us happy,” and “Our husbands shouldn’t be the ones to carry our burdens–God wants to take those.”
Cool, cool. I was 5 months post traumatic birth, struggling with postpartum depression that I was unwilling to treat with medication, and in the middle of a faith crisis. I’ve been joking that looking back, maybe it’s that moms group that pushed me off the precipice into deconstruction.
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in their book Burnout, describe the concept of Human Giver Syndrome. Women are often seen as Human Givers instead of Human Beings. The Nagoski sisters explain on their podcast, “Givers are not allowed to impose anything so inconvenient as their own needs, including their difficult emotions, including their stress, on anyone else... No emotional need for connection or care. No intellectual need to pursue your own sense of purpose or curiosity. And remember, this is our moral duty. If we fall short of our moral duty, we'll get punished. And if no one's around to punish us, we will just go ahead and beat the s*** out of ourselves.”
If you have a little voice inside of you begging you to drop everything and run away, listen to it (you know what I mean...in a safe, responsible way). You deserve to prioritize your needs and passions and to take time to process your difficult emotions. I hope this meditation gives you a tiny bit of space to flex the muscle of prioritizing yourself.
LINK TO INSIGHT TIMER
Click here to listen to the meditation.