What did I learn today? Lessons on the Journey to Unconditional Self Love

  "The quiet, powerful work of unclenching." November arrives as an invitation. it invites us into the sacred practice of letting go. For a long time, I misunderstood what letting go meant. I thought it was giving up. I thought it signaled defeat, weakness, or a lack of commitment. As though releasing my grip somehow cancelled out all the effort, energy, love, and determination I had invested. What I have come to learn is something very different. Letting go is not giving up. Letting go is a conscious choice to trust. To trust the God of your understanding. To trust the work you have already done. To trust the seeds you have already planted. To trust that after doing all that you can humanly do, there comes a moment when holding on harder no longer serves the journey. There is courage in that moment. There is wisdom in recognizing the difference between persistence and attachment. Sometimes we hold on because we care deeply. Sometimes we hold on because we are afraid. Afraid ...

  "When was the last time you allowed yourself to rest in the unknown around you and to befriend it?" These questions from author Lalah Delia  pulled me into a reflective state. The truth is, feeling safe is important to me. And if I am honest, befriending the unknown has been a process. A real process. When I think about my relationship with the unknown, I realize that in some areas of my life I have not been walking alongside it. I have been running from it. Nowhere has that been more apparent than in intimate relationships. Many of us have been programmed to react to the unknown rather than respond to it. We meet uncertainty with fear, urgency, overthinking, controlling, predicting, fixing. We convince ourselves that if we can just gather enough information, anticipate every outcome, or protect ourselves from disappointment, we will finally be safe. But safety does not always come from certainty. Sometimes safety comes from trusting ourselves in uncertainty. That has been ...

Just over a year ago, I started boxing. Five days a week, I lace up my shoes and walk two kilometres one way to the gym.  I am not  training for a fight.  I have no dreams of becoming a champion. I go because somewhere along the way I realized that commitment to self is built in the ordinary things we do repeatedly. The walk. The training. The sweat. The showing up. Boxing became a place where I could push myself. A place where I could channel frustration productively. A place where I could learn healthy anger management. A place where I could have fun. Over time, I started to notice changes. Not just in my stamina or technique. In me. I was becoming more comfortable with discomfort. More disciplined. More willing to keep going when things felt hard. More confident in my ability to learn something new. And then last week, I injured my wrist. Let me tell you, the disappointment was real. I was just getting into it. I was improving. Growing. Finding a rhythm. Feeling strong...

  Ten years ago today, I gave a TED Talk. I did not wake up remembering it. There were no plans to celebrate, no nostalgic revisit of old photos, no mental countdown to a decade since stepping onto that stage. In fact, if a dear sistren had not sent me the memory and asked, "Are you celebrating? How do you feel?" I might have allowed the anniversary to pass unnoticed. Her question stayed with me. Not because I had an immediate answer, but because I did not. The truth is, I left that moment in the past. Not out of dismissal or ingratitude. Simply because life kept moving. There was work to do, girls to support, programmes to build, crises to navigate, lessons to learn, and a vision to pursue. The TED Talk became one of many milestones folded neatly into a larger journey. Or so I thought. When I paused long enough to reflect, I began to see something I had missed. The talk itself was not the most significant thing that happened that day. The significance was in what it informed...

  Lately, I have been asking myself a difficult question: Do I need a level of obsession to achieve the goals I have set for myself? When I look at people who have mastered their craft, built meaningful organizations, or achieved remarkable things, the language used to describe them is often the same. "They were obsessed." The word is almost worn as a badge of honor. We admire it. We aspire to it. We sometimes convince ourselves that if we are not obsessed, we are not serious enough. So I began to wonder if obsession was something I needed more of. In my quest to understand this, I did a little research and discovered that I had misunderstood obsession completely. What I had been calling obsession was not obsession at all. It was focus. It was consistency. It was presence. It was the willingness to return to a goal repeatedly because it mattered. The distinction is subtle, but it is life-changing. The difference is structural. Intense devotion says: "I am going to pour m...

  "We have become disconnected from our bodies, our feelings and our inner wisdom, and the way back to ourselves is through embodiment rather than more thinking."  – Master Mingtong Wu There were moments while reading Master Mingtong Wu's book when literal tears filled my eyes. The simplicity of it all, the way it read me and my current actions, the profoundity of it all. One description shared by people who had worked with the Master stayed with me. They spoke about treating their bodies like rental cars. Something to use, push, criticize, neglect and return without much thought. I thought about all the ways I have treated my own body over the years. Eating poorly. Ignoring rest. Pushing through exhaustion. Speaking unkindly about it. Wanting it to be different. Constantly focusing on what it lacked instead of appreciating all that it has faithfully carried. And then a sobering realization arrived. This body is the only one I have. The only one. The only body that will c...