What “toast, boast, and oath” might you offer this January?

Spirit and Breath, create an openness that violence has constricted.

May you be tender and gentle with yourself

My dreams matter, as they are connected to the dreams of my ancestors.

Taking what we need and leaving the rest behind isn’t only a one time thing. We can do it anytime.

Love calls me to rest when I feel disconnected

My God lives in the margins and witnesses to the broken-hearted.

My inner compass reminds me of the power we’ve been given to create a new future.

Since I was a kid, I have had a penchant and passion for my touch on my body. This was sometimes shameful, sometimes wonderful, and deeply private from fairly early on, as I received messages from family and neighbors that it wasn’t “right.” It has only been as an adult, as i have witnessed...

Learning to love all of me—including the parts I used to be scared of—made the fear go away.

I take care of myself first, because I am deserving of exquisite care. I take care of myself to maintain the capacity to help others. I move and stretch my body every day. I spend time in nature, attuning my senses to the earth's wisdom. I ration my daily exposure to the news....

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”...

We all have our foibles; pieces of ourselves that we both admire and occasionally revile. These gifts and struggles exist in tandem.

Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive and on purpose... Pleasure—embodied, connected pleasure—is one of the way we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and...

The crisis was an opportunity to learn to be fully me and love it, inner turmoil and all. I learned that strength comes from authenticity, never from perfection.

I was made this way, in this body and this skin. Like all beings, I have an inherent good that cannot be eclipsed.

We can be cheerleaders for simple joys (even when we don't share them) and compassionate about the fact that we’re all just trying to survive.

In her 1975 theological treatise Suffering, German liberation theologian Dorothee Söelle* examines the ways that suffering can knit humans beings closer together, and can draw us more fully into the process of loving. She uses the term apatheia, “the inability to suffer,” to describe the...

You matter. There is no one like you; never will be again, from the birth of the earth to its outermost end. You — an eager shout, a sacred “Yes!” that moves your flesh, your bone, your breath. You— she, he, ze, they, you are whole and okay, gracefully teaching your truth and your way. You...

Sometimes people show up fully and be with me. And sometimes they cannot, even if they really care about me and want to help.