It’s been a heck of a year.

Be kind to yourself.

Healing is a process.

We’ve circled around the sun to where it all began a year ago here, the official pronouncement of the global pandemic. Today is a year since Melt Massage stopped seeing clients in-person. It’s a sort of anniversary (a Corona-versary?), but not the kind with champagne and flowers. But, maybe it should be.

Although it was painful in many ways for me to stop seeing clients in person, my primary goal shifted to surviving this year. And I did, knock on wood.* I am reminded by friends and colleagues to celebrate small wins, too. So this, too, may be cause for celebration.

Yet this celebration is not without sadness, for all that was lost this year and, as painful as those losses may be, I know I will not be whole, I will not be fully healed, until I fully grieve and integrate those losses into me; the loss of my massage practice as I have known it for 20 years, the loss of lives in my community and around the globe from Covid, the relentless loss of Black lives to police brutality and unrecognized racism.

Healing is a process.

How are you healing through the trauma of this pandemic?

I have been baking, gardening, exercising, researching how to live with the impacts of the evolving pandemic, taking new classes in anatomy, making massage videos, journaling, reading to illuminate my blindspots around racism and learning more about processing trauma through My Grandmothers Hands.

Just when we’re recovering from something – an injury, an illness, a trauma, is the time when we’re most vulnerable.

I don’t say this to make things seem worse, just to acknowledge this delicate time in our recovery. We as a people, as a global community, we the human race have endured this global pandemic for a year now, some even longer. And some have not been so lucky. Some have lost their lives to this virus.

This strange unifier, putting us all in the same schoolhouse, in a global intensive workshop on navigating a new world with a novel virus where teachers are learning as they teach, like building the plane while it’s flying.

This has been a stressful time for the human race, and so stressful for some as to be traumatic.

Recognizing this anniversary of the beginning of this stress, this trauma, can be re-traumatizing. It can also trigger other traumas we have experienced, rekindle old pain, remind us of unprocessed emotional experiences, dredge up the past that may have been so neatly buried, or so we thought.

On one level, this is a delicate, sensitive, vulnerable time for the global community and hits us all differently as individuals.

So, during this time, be kind to yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Love yourself. If you notice yourself acting out, engaging in micro-aggressions toward yourself or others, step back for a minute. Consider how you would respond if this were a small child who were under your care. How would you love it? How would you care for it? Be kind and trust, with time and gentle attention, we are integrating this challenging period into the fabric of who we are as a human race. Let us do so with patience and compassion and with love for ourselves and others. And let us celebrate what progress we have made.

*Knock on wood. If we’ve been in conversation when the moment presented itself for us to acknowledge our good luck by saying “Knock on wood” you may recall at my studio I emphasized the importance of knocking on raw wood, nothing varnished, painted or stained over. This, I’m told, is the real deal. My husband gave me a piece of raw wood to have handy just for these very occasions. Seek it out if needed, or lmk if you need one. I have a special collection I’d love to share with you.