How would our lives transform if we remembered to honor the people in our daily lives? The people we get so used to, we stop seeing them. My son drones on…am I even hearing his words?
Fatigue. Relationship fatigue. Everyone is tired. No one has a reserve of internal resources. That’s the time to let everyone off the hook and accept that we just aren’t at our best. Let’s get ice cream. Let’s watch a movie. Let’s go outside.
Last week, I put together a dinner for someone I met in my field. I began by honoring the engagement. I drew on women’s work - making home and feeding people. This can be so powerful when mixed with business. It is primal. We feel loved. We feel warm. We want to be close to the furnace. Mothers know this.
This morning, as my husband and I were shuffling the kids out the door for school in a kitchen littered with crumbs and sticky stuff, I thought, maybe we could honor each other with tea together. Recently, busyness has taken this important ritual. So I cleaned the kitchen, readied the tea, and invited him home again for tea together. He is not just someone in the space we share.
Yesterday looking back at a decade of photos on my phone, I see our lives together. I see the kids. In the images, you don’t see the exhaustion and all the minor stresses that cloud our experience of these precious moments. What if I didn’t let them?
I honor the children each morning as I make their beds and use the time to reflect on what they each need. Is it a theater camp or help with phonics? My job is to notice these things and I can’t notice them if I stop honoring them with my focus.
All the relationships in my life are more gratifying when I can honor them. If I can’t, I should shed them. If I am unsuccessful at transforming them, I should let those relationships go. Of course, there are some relationships for which you need to do that extra work!
When your construct melts in the psychedelic journey, it can feel like you’ve lost everything. And in a way, you have. For that period of 4-5 hours, you may not know who you are, how you got there, where you are, or that you have children.
But when you come back to yourself, it is as if you get it all again for the first time and the level of gratitude people can feel is immense - for the people and relationships they may have forgotten to notice even the day before.