Tracey Lee Wallace is a life coach, spiritual teacher, intuitive guide, and founder of The Ministry of Self-Love, The Self-Love Movement, and The Foundation of Love. For nearly 20 years, she has helped individuals break free from limiting beliefs, unhealthy patterns, and emotional barriers so they can build a stronger, more authentic relationship with themselves and others.
Once the conductor of a fantastic epic, planning birthdays and holidays, making lunches, planning family vacations, attending thousands of baseball practices and games, attending plays, PTA meetings, helping with homework, bandaging cuts and bruises, administering medicine when they are sick, tending to broken hearts, and on and on and on. Then one day it is just sort of over.
Shame is a m*%^$#f*$&@# no matter your gender, age, or level of success. I do believe there is a particularly insidious kind of shame the ‘successful man’ who has ‘made it’ feels. The man who thinks he has no right to feel sad, angry, confused, depressed even, or deeply unsatisfied, let alone lonely or afraid. This shame seems to lock him in a room without doors or windows, a voice shouting on repeat “DO NOT ASK FOR HELP LOOSER!!!”
I now see life less in terms of black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, and more like the proverbial tapestry. A veritable watercolor of all things high and low. This is the stuff of a rich life. And while a rich life lived with a wide-open heart does allow for pain and tears do fall, it also allows me to Love many deeply and be so Loved in return.
How was it possible for that voice to sound and feel so familiar after so much time had passed? How was it possible for me to feel so unconditionally Loved and accepted in my darkness by her instantaneously? She had zero judgement and was at my side within days. In the darkness that was my 2024, few moments shine as bright as the return of Haley and this sweet friendship into my life. The Benevolent forces of the Universe must have whispered into Haley’s heart encouraging her to reach out to me, knowing how much I needed her in that very moment.
I am grateful to be on the beginning side of things once again. Deeply breathing in the clear cool mountain air with gratitude, delicious anticipation, and an expertly made latte in my hand.
Endings and beginnings, forever hand in hand.
I Love myself and so...
Today I will feel all the feels that are left to feel.
Today I will not resist anything, even my own resistance.
Today I will nurture the littles inside of me who are frightened of moving and change and loss.
This week, for the first time in a very long time – close to a year, I heard myself laugh again, a full out bellowing laugh that came and went for the better part of an hour. This big throaty, head back, mouth open wide, full-body kind of laugh was, and is, a glorious restorative precious thing. It felt so easy, like finding something that was just hiding in the back of my closet I wasn’t even looking for, a long-lost favorite treasure. I didn’t analyze it as it was happening. I rolled with it fully and with abandon. The next morning, I began to marvel at the ease with which this particular kind of joy returned. Eight months or more joy had been missing, dormant, absent. And just like that, just as spring is exploding all around me, so too am I emerging from a long dark cold miserable season, hand in hand with joy apparently.
I take a seat next to her and take her hand. She immediately leans in to hug me. She knows that I know what is really happening for her in that moment even more than she does. This is comforting to this younger me who felt chronically misunderstood. I tell her how beautiful she is. She brushes it off like yeah-yeah. I take a beat and look in her eyes and say it again, “You are so beautiful, more beautiful than you know. I promise.” She takes it in this time, understanding and not brushing it aside.
Prioritize self-care. Set an intention. Know your limits.
And so I grieve. I woke up with the grief all over me this morning. It filtered into my dreams last night and hangs on me still like a heavy wet black cloak of confusion, unanswered questions, sorrow, anger, and despair.
Most of us want to turn away from grief. Most do. We live in a time and an “antiaging” culture that does everything it can to try to convince us that we, and our loved ones, can avoid aging and death.
We can’t.
Grief is a lost art.
Grief can be so beautiful.
Grief can be cathartic.
Grief is necessary for healing.
Grief is Love in action.
So, how do we grieve?
I can tell you for certain that avoidance and distraction are not the way. Pretending not to be sad is not the way. Trying not to think about it is not the way.Denying your feelings or the feelings of others is not the way.
Letting him see my messy, my sadness, my tears…
letting him Love me in this moment, is the most supremely self-Loving thing I can do.
Sometimes, when the moon is in just the right phase, and the stars are in just the right alignment, and the house is too quiet, and I feel too alone, and someone says or does something that reminds me of that trauma, or that song plays…I find myself awash with the grief and pain and sadness and come face to face with my trauma all over again.
Until this morning, in those moments, I have tried an infinite number of healthy and not so healthy ways to, well honestly, not feel what I am feeling. This morning I want to apologize to my sweet traumatized self for trying relentlessly to erase her. Instead I open my arms and heart to her and say, “Oh honey, of course you feel this way. How could you not?”
Autumn, the time of year when leaves fall to the earth away from the trees that have been their home.
What are you ready to intentionally and consciously let fall away?
What do you no longer wish to carry?
What have you realized is too heavy, and are now ready to lay down?
As the leaves fall to the earth they decompose and become nutrients and nourishment for seeds to be planted in the future.
What can you release now to become food for the future?
Here are some prompts to consider, perhaps journal about, or share in your sacred circles:
Resistance causes suffering. Acceptance, non-resistance, allows me to freely move through the feelings as they arise. Judgement and criticism are the actions of resistance. Compassion and curiosity are the actions of acceptance. Awareness is the magical tool that assists me in knowing when I am in resistance or acceptance. Gentleness with myself and others has been most important, and I have kept it close at hand this week.
"I sometimes go a whole day not even thinking about love.
Thank you for the reminder."
Oh! I am not supposed to know everything! I am not supposed to never need help! In fact, not knowing and asking for help is precisely where and how I invite the Benevolent Forces of the Universe enter my life and assist me.
Love acts as a vacuum drawing forth anything unlike Love to be healed. This is what we are experiencing. We have to see it to heal it, we have to feel it to heal it. There is no escaping it. So we may as well turn and face it, look it straight in the eyes and ask, ‘What is Love trying to show me and teach me. What does Love want me to know and do?’
This might be a wildly unpopular notion, and it might not even sound nice; still, we have got to stop this positivity trend. Because here's the thing: Love is never going to ask you to lie. Love doesn't want you to be dishonest. All of these messages about staying positive are not messages of Love. The truth is if you feel sad, feel sad, and if you are grieving, grieve. If you are tired and weary and worn out from all of this, then feel that. Feel whatever you are feeling, stay in the flow. Don't resist your own disappointment, outrage, anger, frustration, overwhelm, because when you do that, it's like you're trying to shove a bunch of beach balls under water all at one time, and it doesn't work.
