relationships Archives - Janine Bertolo

Welcome to Leo season dear friends!

The full moon arrives on August 11 at 9:36 p.m. in the Eastern time zone.

I always look forward to Sarah Kemp’s Moonlight and Manifesting full moon guided practices (via Patreon.com – you can follow without subscribing to read public posts). If you’re interested, you can find all of Sara’s offerings here.

It’s also Perseid season…. have you seen streaks of light in the night sky? You’re not imagining things! The meteor shower will reach its peak in the early morning August 13, but if you have clear skies, the brightness of the full moon might make viewing difficult.

Either way, there’s magical light falling on us this week.

I have such fond memories of discovering quite accidentally that meteor showers are a thing, one hot summer night in 1987 while on community retreat. After most were in bed, a few friends gathered on the lake shore to wind down and enjoy the summer evening. We counted over 200 shooting stars that night and I was forever hooked.

I love to think about the cyclical timing of the universe that carries us on our annual trip around the sun, through belts of cosmic debris that burn up on hitting the Earth’s atmosphere.

Scientific and magical all at the same time.

This month’s newsletter follows the format set by the 3 Questions with Kat & Val podcast, a weekly delight that asks, “What’s bringing you joy?” “What’s moving around for you?” and “What are you learning?”

I look forward to Tuesdays when Kat and Val release new episodes.

What’s bringing me joy?
– Breakfast Bowls (lunch and dinner bowls – aka salads – too):
I love vegetables. I love fresh. I love the abundance of fresh local and delicious produce available to us during the summer. And I love being able to* toss a random combination of things into a bowl for a healthy, nutritious and delicious meal. This morning’s breakfast bowl consisted of tomatoes grown by my partner in our yard (you can taste the sunshine in them!), sprouts, arugula, lettuce, green onion, avocado, fried eggs and cooked ham. So.fucking.delicious.

*Okay, more accurately, my lovely partner does the tossing, the shopping, the cooking, and the bowl assembly, not me. And this too brings me joy.

Being able to listen to your body’s needs and honour them; to be able to ask someone to source the ingredients and prepare them, is a sign of a healthy nervous system. I haven’t always been there, and having regained the capacity for this also brings me joy.

– Ms. Marvel is delight. It brings me joy, and if it doesn’t bring you joy, I don’t want to hear about it.

– Learning and creating new things – I created a guided practice for orienting to your space and cultivating safety. Learning to use the audio conversion and mixing software, searching for background music and integrating it was… well it was fun!

You can listen and download the new thing I made here.

What’s moving around for me?
The non-binary nature of consent: and by this I mean recognizing that all-or-nothing perfectionist thinking has infiltrated my brain so that I deem any level of discomfort around something new as non-consensual.

This is simply not true and, more importantly, this internalized messaging keeps me in a state of freeze or stasis, unable to move or grow or expand, even when I desire it.

Without curious inquiry, this dynamic plays out in my life around chronic pain and mobility, around relationships, community-building and justice work. The discomfort of stretching into new places of learning and growing is not self-harm.

I am finding the work of Betty Martin and the Wheel of Consent very helpful in unpacking this. You can learn more about it here.

The concept of dirty pain versus clean pain described by Resmaa Menakem in this article also speaks to this idea, and is something that I am digesting and integrating:

“When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent or run away, we experience dirty pain” (Menakem, R., 2017, pg. 20). When we avoid pain and discomfort, we also create more of it for ourselves and for others. To heal collectively, we must be willing to engage and feel clean pain.”

***
I have joined the Institute for Radical Permission facilitated by adrienne marie brown and Sonya Renee Taylor.

The most recent teachings explore self-worship as an act of radical permission, including developing decadence practices for ourselves.

There are some sticky bits around this for me.

In answer to a question about how to cultivate self-worship, adrienne marie brown suggested taking time to look at the moon the next time it’s full.

Notice that the surface of the moon is not smooth; it’s pockmarked by asteroids that have collided with it. The moon has a face because of those shadows; the moon has acne scars.

The moon never apologizes for its shadows because they are the story of its shaping, of its being.

The shadows tell the story of what’s shaped us, what we’ve overcome, what we have survived. Each of us is a miraculous being. The shadows shape us. They don’t have to be in charge.

Each of us is a luminous full moon, comprised of shadow and light, unique and precious and invaluable to the whole.

Taking this one to heart.

What am I learning?
See above; it’s all in there.

Offered with love,

Janine

I am a post-traumatic growth and somatic coach who helps people heal & find ease from trauma that gets stuck in the body so they can live more fulfilled & authentic lives.

I create a safe, consensual, nurturing space for exploring, excavating, and healing, allowing what’s been stuck to move through and out.

I love to work with humans to transform individual and collective trauma that disconnects us from the wisdom of our bodies, and keeps us from living joyful, connected lives.

You can find more about my offerings here.

Remember that Bee Eye Are Dee my mom and dad were thinking about getting for me for my fifth birthday?

Well, it turns out bee eye are dee spells ‘bird’ and that’s what I got for a present. He was a green and white parakeet and I named him Charlie. He lived in a cage in the corner of our dining room, next to dad’s chair by the window. The cage had a pull out tray lined with newspaper to catch Charlie poop and seeds he scattered.

For breakfast most mornings, I’d fill my bowl with dry cereal in the kitchen and carry it to the dining room table to add milk and sugar and eat.

One morning, when I was feeling a little sleepy and not quite coordinated, I tripped, knocking the bird cage and my cereal bowl onto the floor.

I guess mom wasn’t in a very good mood. Maybe on second thought, she was in a mischievous sort of mood. Parents are humans too after all.

Whatever, she took the broom and dustpan and swiped everything up, cheerios, bird seed, bird poop, feathers. She dumped it all back into my cereal bowl, slapped the bowl on the table in front of me with a bang and said “eat it.”

Time stood still.

I remember staring at that cereal bowl, a tiny parakeet down feather stuck to one of the Cheerios, wafting gracefully in slow motion in the breeze from my breath. And the smells of bird poop, bird seed and Cheerios.

I don’t know how long I sat there. It felt like forever. I remember thinking, she’s not really serious is she? Was this some kind of joke?

I like to think that this was followed by a second edible breakfast, but I really have no recollection.

My mom lived with cyclical depression and mental health issues. I didn’t really understand that as a child. I just felt that something was not right and, as children often do, I blamed myself. I learned to silence myself, my needs, in order not to upset someone else’s equilibrium. Most of the time that someone else was my mom.

I learned to put others’ needs before my own, and I used this strategy for most of my adult life.

All I knew back then was that my mom wasn’t always there for me in the ways that I needed her to be. I got the silent message that my job was to be there for her, to take care of her, and I took on that role with fervour and skill.

I was reluctant to shed the role of parent and go back to being a daughter in the times when she was feeling stable and well. As you might imagine, that in itself was a source of conflict.

I have the greatest compassion for my mom and the life she lived without adequate mental health resources to support her. She was a brave, incredibly strong survivor who did the best with the circumstances she faced. She experienced discrimination and isolation and judgement and shame because of her mental health issues.

My mom brought a lot of joy and music and laughter into my life. She shared a fierce and loyal love with my father that I held as my standard, unwilling to settle for anything less.

I know how much my mom loved me. I cherish my memories of the smile that brightened her face every time I showed up to visit unexpected. She thought I was the most beautiful daughter in the world. I know this because she told me often, and I believe she believed it.

Whenever I’d complain about the behaviour of a male colleague or co-worker, she’d reply “Well it’s obvious isn’t it? He’s in love with you.” Every single time, and there were many. I suffer no delusions about her accuracy of assessment, but it says a lot about the way she loved me, and I cherish that.

I am proud of myself for entering into a personal journey that allowed some healing of our relationship over the years leading up to my mom’s death in 2019. A couple of years before, on her 80^th birthday, I thanked her for teaching me the meaning of unconditional love. I wrote it in a card and watched her read it across the room. I know from the light in her eyes and the smile on her face that she heard me.

I have learned to forgive my mom. I’m learning to forgive myself as well. It’s a layered process. I get the sense that mom learned to forgive me too.

I am resourcing that incredible strength of character and unconditional love I’ve inherited from my mom, and I am grateful.

I’m learning that putting my own needs first allows me to have something to offer the world. I’m learning to reparent my inner child and to walk more gently in the world. I’m learning to redraw personal boundaries. It helps to feel less alone. I’m learning to love myself and love life.

I can tell you, though, that at the age of almost 60 years, I’ve never eaten another bowl of cheerios, and most likely never will.

One day a while after the Cheerios incident, Charlie caught a cold and got all puffy and didn’t live much longer. I’ve never really felt the urge to have another bee eye are dee either.

Just sayin’