When your leggings are tight.

I bought a pair of leggings in the next size up. Just to have something that felt normal on my skin. It was a moment for me when I wasn't admitting I had failed my body, my insides, but I was opening to the truth that I needed to feel comfortable while I figured out what was going on.

Gaining weight, not fitting my clothes has sent me into a hermit state for the last few months. (OK, well, more of a hermit than I already am!) I was avoiding getting my hair done, not wanting to be social. I wasn't recognizing the person looking back at me in the mirror.

I've got this man who loves me. Who fell in love with me when I was at one of my favorite states of my body.  I felt embarrassed in front of him for the first time in two years when I was naked, trying to hide myself from his eyes. He continued to use his words of love, telling me I was sexy and beautiful and how lucky he was.

But I couldn't feel it. None of it. I felt shame.

Shame is what happens to me when my body gets bigger, bloated, unlike what I am used to.

In that shame I become ungrounded. My moods are inconsistent. My thoughts become consumed with how this happened, why this happened. Leggings stretch, mine were stretching out.

|| Rooting In. Lifting Up. ||  It grew from this place of not fitting my leggings. Of knowing that I was not planted, rooted in what I know brings my body freedom, my insides joy. I didn't want to talk about this part of it. I sketched out ideas for a new circle, a devotional circle. Something that would feel like a Lift Up born from the connection that women make when they are inside of a common intention. 

I wanted to feel the ground, in circle. I was craving the practices that healed me, that started it all, that allow my freedom of spirit.

I was struggling to talk about the program, to write about it, to share it. Not my normal state of being inside this work.

I circled back to shame. The hiding. The hermit. 

And of course, the whole reason that I needed to give words to something new. Because I am new. In a new body. Making a beautiful plan to feel rooted in again. To feel my beauty again. To stop hiding.

The circles that come together inside each new offering change me. The women change me. They teach me. They take the work and they grow it, blossom it, make magic within it.

Two weeks ago I started the work of rooting myself back in to the devotion I feel for my body, my spirit, my home, my love, my kids, my dreams. I cut my hair. I welcomed back the way of eating that adores my body and mood. I drank extra tea when I was mad at water. I'm often mad at water.

I pulled my leggings on and they feel right again. I am standing in the mirror and not using the words that were hurting my soul, those words I would never say to another.

This morning I stood in the rays of sun streaming onto the wood floor and I could feel the earth rising up into my skin. I felt the opening of self back into the world. 

My devotional practice letting the shame melt into my past self. So I may lift into the woman who takes up her space on this beautiful earth. 

The leggings that helped me find my words around the magic that is inside of this circle that called me to find it, to grow it, to know it; those leggings on my body, ready for these days together. 

When shame melts and rooting begins. When shifts are daily space makers. When the sacred infuses into the everyday and becomes walking prayer.

I am ready. In this repetition of time, of change, of acceptance, of speaking a truth that allows for this devotional to unwrap.