For a lot of us, especially when we have experienced trauma, been through difficult times, or, like, ever made a mistake, trusting ourselves can feel more complicated. I mean, trust myself to what, exactly?

I used to think trusting myself meant being able to feel into my gut or intuitions and just “know” something. Like whether or not a certain person was good to date. Whether I should follow a particular career path. Should I buy a yoga studio? What I should have for lunch??

Despite my best intentions, I had what’s known as “gender disappointment.” This is the first moment where we realize we’re not in control of who our children are going to be. When I imagined myself with a baby, I always imagined a girl. I had thought a lot about what I would tell a girl about what it meant to be a woman in this society. I imagined teaching her things about how to navigate a misogynistic world without losing her power. But a boy? What the heck was I supposed to do with a boy? 

The problem with self-care is that it implies that your care is 100 percent in your control. It isn’t. We also need other-care and community-care. We need infrastructure care like health services and school for our kids. Yes, Zoom happy hours do help. But they aren’t the same thing as a hug from a friend you love or soaking up the music at a concert with your favorite band. We can’t access all the things we need to take care of ourselves right now.

Inevitably we dip into the darkness with each new moon, and that is to help us shed our outer layers and reveal what’s on the inside, what’s new and possible within us. This new moon aligns with Imbolc (Feb 1st to 2nd), an ancient holiday celebrating the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It’s also Groundhog Day, Candlemas, and Chinese New Year: all over the world, we celebrate the the shifting of the light, the moment where we start to stir from our winter darkness.

I first learned about the term process-focused or process-oriented Tarot reading from Jessica Dore, a Tarot reader and teacher whose first book, Tarot for Change, just hit the shelves. Her approach is so much more intuitive than I had often seen when I was trying to leaf through guidebooks and memorize the meaning of each card. She offers Tarot the way I had already been reading it: by observing the images of each card and noticing what comes up.

Our bodies have a way of expressing what we haven’t been willing or able to. When we listen to our symptoms, we can sometimes learn something about our lives, how we feel, and what we need as we move into the next phase of our lives. What are our symptoms telling us?

The psoas muscles are often to blame when dealing with lower back pain, sciatica, and even constipation and other gut issues. They have a relationship with our organs, nestled up next to the guts and the reproductive system, and they are strongly governed by the nervous system.

We must be gentle when we approach and try to soften the psoas, as they are deeply connected to our spirits and our experience of stress. Stretch all you want—these muscles won’t release until you feel safe enough to let them.

The holiday season is wonderful in so many ways. We get to see family, take a break from work, eat lots of delicious food, and end the year in style. But precisely because the holidays are about family and tradition, this is also a common time for grief to cycle back up. We think of the people who aren’t present, the people we aren’t going to see. We think of the traditions we wish we could share. As another year comes to an end, as much as we are thinking of New Year’s resolutions, we might also be thinking back to what the last year meant to us and what we lost.

And then, if we become parents, the adrenaline doubles down. Now, we have a small being to protect, so our vigilance notches up, even (especially?) when someone else is watching the kid. We have constant pressure coming from pretty much everywhere to be impossibly perfect parents, especially if we have been raised as/present as women, because women are held to a certain punishing standard of motherhood in our society.

Part of the reason there are so many different religious holidays in December is because of the magic of the winter solstice. All over the world, people light candles and bonfires at this time of year, gathering, feasting, and staying up late. The winter solstice is a powerful time of darkness, and darkness is often the place where magic happens.

Everyone wants pleasure—it feels good, gives us energy, helps us manage stress, and keeps us hopeful. Pleasure is the food of desire. But pleasure has a dirty little secret: sometimes it is unavoidably linked with pain. Opening to pleasure means opening to the truth of our bodies, and suddenly all the crap we’ve been repressing rises up to the surface.

In the event of non-consensual penetration of any kind, the vagina might be expressing its displeasure by being “out of balance.” Sometimes the issue is about a spiritual or energetic penetration: someone pressing toxic energy into you or making you do things you don’t want to do (whether sexually or not).

When my little one was a few weeks old, I remember feeling like I’d been hired for a job for which I had no experience. The hours were 24/7, there were infinite manuals, and zero agreement on the rules. Everyone has an opinion on parenting and there is no real gold standard to show you the “right” thing to do. My baby just turned one, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what I have learned in the last year.

Hunger is a form of physical desire. It is something that we feel in our bodies and, when we’re healthy, it’s unambiguous. We can feel it right there in our stomachs. Fullness is a physically felt aversion, an internally felt “no” or “stop” signal. Feeling and following our hunger and fullness signals is a powerful way to practice consent within our own bodies, to teach our nervous systems that our desires and our limits matter.

Trauma doesn’t respond to conventional ways of healing, so we need our unconventional grimoires. We cannot plan out and micromanage our healing, but we can cast a spell.

When working on supportive practices for the adrenals, we are also working on supportive practices for the nervous system and emotional balance. Chronic stress isn’t just about, for example, trying to get to work on time. It’s about consistently feeling unsafe and never having a chance to come down to a place where you feel totally relaxed and able to be yourself. There are so many reasons that stress can get stuck in the body, but working on loving those adrenal glands might be a really helpful place to start.

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Feed on demand, the internet said, but don’t go longer than three hours. Feed the moment he seems hungry. Don’t miss a feed or your supply will never go up. Breast is best. Don’t give him formula. Don’t give him a pacifier. If you can’t feed him exclusively, you are a failure as a mother and as a human being. Oh—and relax. If you don’t relax your milk won’t come in at all.

I had drunk the Kool Aid on “natural” birth, even though I’d been actively trying not to. I knew, cognitively, that a good birth was one where the baby and I survived. I knew that having a birth plan was pretty much a waste of effort, and I certainly did not expect to have an orgasmic birth. But the misogyny of our culture is so deeply embedded in my body that I still found myself believing that if I couldn’t do it “on my own” I would be failing in some fundamental way.

You get the message. It’s this: If you feel guilty enough about every detail of your child’s health and wellbeing, you’ll stay home to micromanage your children’s care instead of going to work. That means the government does not have to pay for quality, affordable childcare.