LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Nate Postlethwait!

A return to love (and cereal)

Dear Lovelets,

Someone asked me in the last few weeks — as I’ve been traveling about Australia and giving talks — what I believe my biggest accomplishment is in life. My first instinct was to joke the question away, to push the discomfort of that question out of my body with some sort of sarcastic quip.

But the question had been asked sincerely, and so I decided to answer it sincerely. And what I came up with was this: “Befriending my own mind.”

When I think about how I thought about myself and spoke to myself 25 years ago, compared to how I think about myself and speak to myself now, it is, truly, an entirely different existence. The terrorist who used to live inside my head has been disarmed, to a large degree — has been lovingly rehabilitated, actually, and taught to be a good neighbor. And the general tone and volume of my demeanor toward myself has been, of late, “Hi, friend. How can I help you today?”

Being friendly toward myself doesn’t mean that I always handle my emotions perfectly (as my letter this week demonstrates). It only means that when I am being tossed about in a sea storm of overwhelming, terrifying, angry, or obsessive feelings, I try to throw myself a lifeline, instead of shouting at the drowning person within my mind “WHY ARE YOU DROWNING AGAIN?! YOU SHOULD BE SWIMMING BETTER! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF FOR CHOKING ON ALL THAT SEAWATER AND MAKING SO MUCH COMMOTION!”

(S.H.A.M.E. = Should Have Already Mastered Everything.)

Friends, I have not already mastered everything. And I try really hard not to punish myself for that, because that doesn’t feel very friendly. I can’t always get it right, but I can always be kind to someone who is suffering — even if that someone is me.

This week our special guest is a remarkable fellow traveler who has also learned, from hard experience, to befriend himself. He has learned to befriend all the different, younger versions of himself, and he teaches others to do the same: Nate Postlethwait leads an online community of survivors, many of whom suffer from complex trauma, and he does it with an awe-inspiring level of humanity, clarity, kindness, and safety.

Let’s head into the week remembering that wherever you go, there you are — and since we are our own constant companions, it makes good sense to try to make peace with ourselves.

Onward, my friends. I can’t wait to read your letters!

Dear Love, how do I return to you?

Little beech tree, thank you for returning to me right now, with this question. Take a moment and settle. Here we are again.

And that will be the way it is, for as long as you hold form in this body — you will drift into the demands of human life, and sometimes you will feel like you are drifting away from me, to the point that you might even panic . . . but sweetheart, the process will never be any simpler or more complex with this. Open up the notebook. Ask me to help you. And here I will be. Because here I always am.

I want to commend you for something that you are wrongly thinking you should be carrying a little bit of shame about. Two nights ago, you got triggered — and at the worst possible hour, right before you were about to try to fall asleep.

A flurry of professional emails came across the screen of your phone (and please don’t be angry at yourself for looking at your emails right before you went to bed — everyone does it; this is the age in which you live) and all of a sudden, for reasons that would take you days to sort out, your brain read the words of those emails on the screen and your mind was filled with these two equally terrifying ideas:

I did something bad and wrong.

I’m going to get in so much trouble.

Sweetheart, here in the bright light of day, more than 48 hours later, it’s easy to laugh at how terrified you became in that moment. It’s easy to see the nonsense of it. You, a grown woman in her mid-fifties, terrified that you had made a mistake that was going to get you in “so much trouble” — forgetting even the position of privilege, power, and accomplishment that you hold in the world; forgetting that you could easily explain or correct whatever perceived error of judgment might have been made — if it even WAS an error of judgment made; forgetting most of all that when you are anchored in me it doesn’t MATTER if you did something wrong or even if you get in trouble, because nothing you could ever do, right or wrong, could cause me to not love you.

No, darling, you forgot all of that.

Because in that moment, reading those business emails, you were not a 55-year-old successful author on an international speaking tour, who just that weekend had very confidently and easefully held space for over 1,000 people at a very intense and emotional creativity workshop. You were, in that moment, a seven-year-old child, so absolutely terrified of being disciplined and scolded that you could not even breathe, that your hands shook with panic, that your stomach was a clenched fist of traumatic, existential angst.

You were so afraid that you were going to be thrown away, out of the family.

You were so afraid — not that you had DONE something bad and wrong, but that you ARE something bad and wrong.

Sweetheart, I know what you WISH you could have done in that moment of panic. I know that you wish you could have used all the spiritual and emotional tools that you have gathered over your decades of life and utilized them to restabilize your nervous system. You wish you could have calmed yourself with breathwork and meditation, with affirmations, or even with reaching for a notebook and writing to me.

But that’s not what you did. What you did was the only thing your panicked mind could imagine might help in that moment.

You rose up out of your hotel bed, got dressed, and wandered around the streets (ran, actually, through the streets) of Melbourne at 11pm searching for food, any kind of food — no, not any kind of food, carbohydrates, sugar — the only thing that would settle the terrified child within. And thankfully you found a 7-Eleven. You bought a big box of sugar cereal, a pint of milk, and an empty bowl, and you brought it back to eat at full speed like a desperate animal alone in your hotel room.

Sweetie, this is what I want to tell you: if you think that that midnight carbo-sugar binge was NOT you returning to me, returning to love, then you are wrong, and you don’t know what love is.

Because there was nothing you could have done in that moment to soothe that child that would have worked, except the box of sugar cereal.

Because it worked, didn’t it? Full of carbs, buzzing with the pleasure of drinking the sugary milk out of the bottom of the plastic bowl, you were able to lure that child back to sleep. Because you were able, by feeding her what a seven-year old needs in a moment of panic — you were able to make her feel safe.

Don’t you dare think that was not a return to me. Don’t you dare think you could have handled that better. That is beautiful mothering, sweetheart. That was love. That’s why the child was able to settle. Because you took her, literally, from empty to full — from “I am bad and wrong in a wasteland of nothingness, and I’m going to be abandoned” to “I’ve got you, I will take care of you, I love you.”

And in the morning, when the scary night shadows had passed, you were able to see that those emails were nothing. They were nothing! They were just imagined monsters under the bed. But you could not have seen that the night before. And that is not your fault.

Darling, listen to me — you handled that perfectly.

Honey, I really don’t care what you have to do in order to return to a feeling of love. In your scariest moments, you have my permission to find me however you need to find me. And if “finding love” means scarfing down a box of cereal on a scary night alone in a hotel room in a foreign country, then you better believe that I was inside that box of cereal. I was the bowl, I was the plastic spoon, I was the sugary milk, I was the guy working the late shift at the 7-Eleven who smiled at you sympathetically, I was with you, wandering the streets, looking for something to eat, to bring a sense of physical safety. I was with you, we were with you, when you finally put that panicked child to sleep.

And I was with you the next morning when you woke as an adult again — ready to calmly answer business emails and eat healthy salads.

And I am with you now, saying: don’t you dare ever be ashamed of what you sometimes have to do to survive the wild horse of your mind.

This message, this moment, this infinite love that I have for you — this is our heart’s return.

Earth school is difficult, dear heart. I never said it wasn’t. I never expect you to behave perfectly at every single moment, by your distorted notion of perfection. And I am never, never, never not with you.

You’re doing great, kiddo. I’m so proud of you.

Let’s keep going — no exceptions.

Prompt

As always, once you quiet your mind and body, you can write out the answer to this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know today? I’m a big fan, having started thousands upon thousands of letters this way — but if you are feeling particularly disconnected from a sense of self-friendliness, you can pose this question along with me: Dear Love, how do I return to you?

I absolutely love it when I meet Lovelets in my travels! This is Tara Hegerty, and she’s part of our beautiful family. I met her in Brisbane, Australia — she told me that she has introduced our Letters From Love practice to her two children, ages five and seven. And that nothing makes her happier than when she hears them asking each other, “But what would Love have you know?” My heart!