OK, serious question . . .

How often do you celebrate yourself?

I was away recently on a solo retreat and on arrival I planned to put one post on social media and then go offline. In my post I’d been planning to share about the solo retreat and why I’d organised it: for me personally I have learnt that I need solo time after long periods of time with people (even my closest loved ones) to enable me to re-group and reconnect with myself. And the summer holidays were long this year!

I’d packed delicious foods I loved, womb oils for self massage, journaling and drawing pads, smudge and my tarot for some witchy insights and a half bottle of champagne too to kick off the time alone and to celebrate the fuck out of myself.

And yet when I went to write about this on social media, I immediately changed it. I toned it down a bit for fear that folk might think I was vain or too self focused or self indulgent. Admittedly, there were also thoughts of the cost of living crisis and not wanting to appear like I was off galivanting and living a champagne lifestyle.

To be fair, I was in a very eco and basic cabin in the woods with a half bottle of champagne and some nice snacks so I wasn’t going five star or anything…but even so, I felt like I didn’t want to be celebrating myself too much…why is that?

And why is it that WOMEN in particular have a fear of celebrating themselves and what they achieve? Because MEN sure as hell don’t… 

What has created that inner narrative and those deeply rooted feelings of inner guilt that we feel. Am I ‘showing off’, and so what if we are sometimes – it’s right to shine our light and not play small, to take up space and be seen, which is a core desire for all of us to be truly seen for who and what we are. And so why can’t we gift this to ourselves, and celebrate our own achievements.

As adults, it’s really necessary that we do this, not only to celebrate milestones in life like birthdays, new relationships, jobs and babies. But so that we can celebrate milestones in our own lives in lots of different ways.

In offering ourselves moments of celebration, we start to bring some reverence and ceremony into our lives. Recognising and honouring key thresholds and transition spaces can give us space to really feel into the changes we are going through in a full bodied, embodied way, feeling into what is happening for us with open eyes and a full heart.

• Celebrating our menarche (first bleed) for example helps make that transition into womanhood more special and normalises it, celebrates it as a key important transition in our lives.
• The shifts in the different seasons of our lives – maiden to mother to crone – each phase deserves recognition and honouring for the different gifts it offers us (in mother we don’t have to have had children either, we mother in the work we do and the different creations we birth within in our own lives).
• Times when we honour and celebrate change and the journey, the transition from caterpillar to butterfly, we took for us to evolve into our new identities.
• Celebrating our own inner shifts, inner seasons and cycles and those of the earth around us helps us reflect on changes happening within our own inner and outer landscapes. As without so within.

Celebrations can come in all different shapes and sizes – they can be small solo celebrations or big parties and gatherings where we can be celebrated by and with others.

They are all important and these celebrations help us to really embody within our bodies the shift that has taken place, to honour our own journey of becoming at this phase in our own lives. We can track the journey and remember it in our own bodies and feel into what is real and true and new for us as a result of what we’ve been through.

Pausing to embody our own experience and celebrate ourselves along the way is so important – as adults no one else is going to do that for us.

I’d love to know more about the ways in which you celebrate yourselves and what you do when ‘show off’ feelings start to arise. I’m hoping that in sharing this blog, I can take steps to allow myself to celebrate myself more freely without the judgement I had on social media.

Ways you can join me to celebrate yourself are:

• By coming along to one of my Seasonal Workshops
• Join me for our upcoming Emergence Retreat for women in midlife
• Treat yourself to some one to one support to help you with whatever tricky transition you might be facing right now, or to support you with a specific health issue, stress or anxiety, to support you to develop a regular quiet practice of restorative yoga, breathwork of meditation. Or just because it feels right to have some time and space dedicated just for you.