Family Life Balance

my brain and
heart divorced

a decade ago

over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become

eventually,
they couldn't be
in the same room
with each other

now my head and heart
share custody of me

I stay with my brain
during the week

and my heart
gets me on weekends

they never speak to one another

- instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week

and their notes they
send to one another always
says the same thing:

"This is all your fault"

on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past

and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future

they blame each
other for the
state of my life

there's been a lot
of yelling - and crying

so,

lately, I've been
spending a lot of
time with my gut

who serves as my
unofficial therapist

most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage

and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut's plush leather chair
that's always open for me

~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up

last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head

I nodded

I said I didn't know
if I could live with
either of them anymore

"my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,"
I lamented

my gut squeezed my hand

"I just can't live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,"
I sighed

my gut smiled and said:

"in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,"

I was confused
- the look on my face gave it away

"if you are exhausted about
your heart's obsession with
the fixed past and your mind's focus
on the uncertain future

your lungs are the perfect place for you

there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either

there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment

there is only breath

and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out."

this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves

and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs

I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs

before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said

"what took you so long?"

~ john roedel

Pain is a given but suffering is optional:

“There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.”

― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

The poem I wish I'd read when I was a teenager or in my 20s. 💛

THE MYTH OF GROWING UP

I used to think growing up
was like filling up.
An invisible line inside my brain
climbing higher and higher
as I poured knowledge in,
and eventually it would hit the top,
marking the summit of my youth.

I would then be able
to tackle all problems
with the contents inside me,
like a well-stocked shed.

How lucky that I met with
the generous whispers
of those few adults who dared
to explain that there is no finish line.

Only a few important gates along the way,
like the moment you realize
you have the courage
to admit what you don't know
and the discernment
to know where to look.

~ Samantha Reynolds





For more poems like this one, visit bentlily.com

page 106 from ‘home body’ ♥️

a while ago i had a conversation with my dad about happiness. about how we in the modern world have become so obsessed with happiness, that we’ve begun to perceive it as a state we’re supposed to be in most of the time. otherwise, something must be wrong with us. we treat happiness like it’s a lifestyle. a thing to grab, hold, and keep, when in reality happiness is just an emotion.

“we’ve given a single emotion far too much credit” he said. because like any other emotion, happiness is meant to come and go. he said “emotions are just temporary states of being, nothing more than passing visitors. they do not define our lives.” this teaching has kept me grounded in tough times. especially while i was trying to figure out why i couldn’t “stay happy”. the teaching said: you are not entitled to stay in any emotion. the sooner you learn to stop avoiding the difficult ones, the sooner they’ll pass. the sooner you stop trying to keep the good ones, the less devastated you’ll be when they go. the wheels keep turning. and within that motion we must find our peace.

"We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it."

All it takes is 10 mindful minutes When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present mome...

No. Nope. NAWL.

A reminder to all of us (aka ME). Say NO. Yes, you wanna help. No, you don’t have the capacity. Yes, maybe you will in 2 months but not now. Cuz if you say YES, then do that thing begrudgingly, nobody wins.

Happy Monday.