Becoming Your Own Rock: Love, Loss, and the Radical Art of Holding Ourselves

"I feel like I'm everyone else's rock but not my own."

This was something that a client shared with me on our call today, and it hit me square in the heart. So much of what we're taught about how to be human could be wrapped up in that single sentence.

We learn often at home, in school, in friendships, and in relationships that we are not safe to have our feelings - much less express them. As children, so many of us were told that our reactions were inappropriate, our big feelings too much. Anger is "bad", sadness is unwelcome, and jealousy makes you unlovable.

Our society has largely failed us in this way. The education system does not train teachers to hold themselves much less how to hold our children. This is not any ONE's fault, and our incredible teachers are doing the best they can within impossible systems. As parents, with the number of hours jobs often require of us and the demands and added pressure we put on ourselves to succeed, we expect and hope that it will be the school system that teaches our kids how to be good humans, but the truth is our little humans are learning it from everyone, everywhere, all at once, and where does that leave us when most of us were never taught that to love ourselves comes first?

As my wise and hurting client shared today, it’s a rare thing to meet an adult whose parents modeled what it means to be your own rock. That it's even possible to hold yourself the way you hold the people you love most in the world. That you should treat yourself with the same kindness, compassion, and forgiveness that you show to others...if not more.

This lesson took me 35 years and the most excruciating grief I could have ever imagined to learn. It took 10 years of a meditation and mindfulness practice to plant the seeds that blossomed into self-love and the radical art of self-holding, and it took all that time to finally understand that all those teachers who said "loving yourself is the greatest thing in the world" weren't being placating - they actually knew and felt something my heart hadn’t yet grown wise enough to feel.

I never feel as blessed and humbled as when I am on a call with a client, invited into their most human, raw, and often painful (and yes, beautiful) moments. It is a gift that doesn't have words: to feel my own heart in theirs, to see my life's stories in their pain, to feel the dance of life moving through both of our chests.

If there is one thing I feel like I have learned in all these years of practice and teaching, it is what this woman knows so instinctively in her own moment of greatest pain: We MUST learn to be our own rocks the way we are for others.

This, this is the fertile ground where true love and freedom grow. When you learn to love and hold and be tender and present with yourself the way you would with a child you pick up off the floor after they have fallen down, with your partner or best friend when something has just broken their heart, or with your puppy as they tremble through a thunderstorm - then there is never anything in life to be afraid of anymore.

Though you can play out all sorts of scenarios: the millions of things that can and sometimes WILL go wrong in your life, the one and only thing you actually fear is the pain that comes with each of them.

So when you learn, that no matter what...no matter what you might feel, no matter if you lose the greatest love you have ever known, your home, your identity, your body, your mind - no matter what pain might come - when you can hold yourself with unyielding tenderness, you become the safe place you’ve always longed for. Love, peace, and presence become your home.

Though this journey is not easy, it is the most important and most human thing we can do.

We will all lose the people we love. We will all meet experiences we did not and would not choose. Life is not about arranging circumstances to avoid heartbreak. Life is about learning to LOVE and embrace every single breath, every moment, every ache, and every joy - about becoming the rock for ourselves that we are so freely for others.

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Today, I was not only struck by my client’s wisdom but broken open by grief and gratitude upon learning that this morning the world lost Andrea Gibson to their battle with cancer. 13 years ago sitting in a bunk bed at a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York, a soon-to-be monk gifted me with Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns by Andrea, and I fell in love with every word:

"I wanted to hold your heart to my ear like a seashell
til I could hear the tides of every tear you’ve ever cried
then build islands in the seas of your eyes
so you’d see there’s land to swim to
hold your hand and say,
‘storms are born from the same sky we write hymns to when the sun shines.
’Sometimes it takes tempests to wake rainbows
that will wind our pain into halos."

Watching Andrea navigate their battle with cancer was like watching a spirit that was already so awake: so bright, so unabashedly connected to every fucking feeling with so much depth and unwavering intensity come alive not only more deeply to their humanity but to the whole fucking point of all of this. The deeper they went, the more their life and words bloomed with love, peace, and gratitude for all of it. To read that some of their final words on this Earth were "I fucking loved my life!" has chills pulsating through my heart and the entirety of my body. It has tears streaming (again as I type this) down my cheeks.

It is so easy to get wrapped up in the doing. It's so easy to get caught in the stories we tell about ourselves and each other and to forget that the point is love.

Here we are, a tiny, invisible speck of stardust hurtling through space on a tiny speck of a planet in the entirety of our unfathomably enormous universe, and so often we are caught up in controlling and striving, in perfectionism, in wanting life to be MY way.

But today, for this moment at least, my ribcage feels cracked open. Like Andrea, I want to welcome the stretch marks of loving too hard, too fast, and too much.

I feel broken open by my incredible client who doesn't yet see how strong and powerful she is, but she's already learning and becoming. And broken open by Andrea's grace, their unflinching invitation to feel more deeply even when it fucking hurts, and by their last words on this Earth: LOVE. It's all about love, and we must, MUST start with ourselves...with this tenderly beating heart that knows more than your head ever will.

So today I say, "Thank you."

Thank you to this feeling of being so deeply blessed to be touched and brought alive in so many ways today.

Thank you to my client for teaching me too and for the tender privilege of being trusted with someone’s deepest pain.

Thank you to my grandmother, Bunny, for carrying us both onto this path.

Thank you to Andrea for their courageous heart, their words that stitched me together and blew me apart, and for their choice to keep showing up to it all.

And thank you to every person reading this. You, YOU matter. Through this moment, we are forever connected: strings in the tapestry of loving and living that have now crossed. We are all connected in this way to everything that has come before us and everything that has yet to come. This journey is yours and it is mine. It is my clients and it is Andrea's. My heart is your heart. And every choice we make to love more radically - starting with ourselves - changes not only our own life, but the whole world.

May you learn to become your own rock. And may you know, with every breath, that you are never alone in this journey.

Namaste.