Navigating the Portal: How to build a relationship with yourself
Happy Sunday, Soothers, a very happy new year to you, I’m very glad to be back with you after a bit of a break, and excited to welcome to you to my new teaching essay series, Navigating the Portal.
I wrote about the concept for this series in this earlier post, Tips for surviving The Portal.
Let’s revisit the concept of the Portal, shall we?
The Portal can happen at anytime, but I find is particularly strong between the periods of 37ish-43ish, and for me, at least, it contained the following characteristics:
Realizing I was not fulfilled in my career or what I was doing in my life and that it lacked meaning
Yearning for knowing a deeper purpose
Physical changes that looking back I can associate with peri-menopause beginning, which, spoiler alert, can definitely start for women in their 30s (for me it was hair loss, weight gain, intense mood swings)
A dawning awareness of the systems set up to keep women in subservience and people pleasing (aka the patriarchy). Like I’d sort of been beforehand like chirping “Yeah, fuck the patriarchy!” But now I was like, scream-stopping, sweating, angry shouting, “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY!” You really, really start to see its tentacles everywhere.
A growing rage at those systems
A deeper search for meaning and an opening to spirituality. It’s no mistake this time is when I had my spiritual awakening; I got into Tarot and reiki around 37/38. And look at me now!
Crumbling of existing systems or support structures that were holding me back (jobs or relationships may disappear)
I see a lot of divorces and breakups happen during this portal period and age range
General radical personal transformation over the 5-7 years of the period (peep me, starting out at 37 as a senior corporate employee, not at all spiritual, totally agnostic, not really connected to nature, in series of disastrous relationships, trying to socialize in a big city, now, ending 43 [I’ll be 44 in January] as a spiritual mentor and coach, living in a 300-year-old house in nature with my partner, not drinking, only mind-altering drugs I’m taking being psychedelic plant medicine. Ha. Actually when I write this all out damn, that WAS a transformation.).
So, if you find yourself in The Portal, you must go through it, and you won’t remain untouched, but I hope I can help you navigate it just a bit. As I wrote….
You can’t escape the portal unscathed. There’s likely to be fear, anger, loss, resistance, conflict, grief. There will one-hundo be things that fall away like relationships, jobs, or living situations. You can bet on it. And let's not even talk about the ego death(s) that happen. But it’s all for your highest growth and evolution, promise. And with some adroitness, some tools in your rucksack, some general awareness of what you might expect and how to navigate it, you may also take incredibly rich lessons from the time, and it may be less painful than it has to be. Just think of me like the wise camp counselor who’s walked this scary forest path before, and knows how to help get you through it. That's what I hope to do with this series.
So. How do we best navigate, survive, move through the invitations that The Portal will be asking us to step into? That’s what I’ll be writing about in this series, on the following topics the next 8 weeks.
Building a relationship with yourself, once again
Stepping into understanding the astrological placement of your north node as a guide for portal navigation — (this is one of my favorite tools, and one that’s had the most impact on me)
Regulating your nervous system through the portal and how to do it
Learning how to actually feel your emotions and express them (a skill we are literally never taught)
Feng Shui and decluttering. If you can’t accept the shedding in your external life, a powerful way to begin to accept the invite of The Portal is to at least declutter your living space. Plus many tenets of Feng Shui and energy and space clearing are super supportive during this time.
Diet/health changes (annoying, but I find because of the associations of peri menopause or menopause or other hormonal shifts for women that take place during this time, you do often have to change how you’ve been nourishing yourself)
Tips for beginning a spiritual opening/awakening/relationship — how to step more into the spiritually curious side of you that may be awakening during this time
How to accept the transformation, surrender, and let what needs to crumble, crumble.
And so, let us begin! With what I think is the most essential invitation of the Portal:
1. Rebuilding a relationship with yourself, and reconnecting to who you authentically are at your core.
(Know somebody who could use this series, or is going through The Portal? Please feel free to share and forward this with them!)
By the time a woman-identifying person gets to their mid or late 30s in our society, it’s likely they’ve given every scrap of themselves away to other people. It’s likely they’ve monitored the emotions, needs, desires of partners, children, coworkers, bosses, employees society, animals, and everyone else above themselves. It’s likely they feel that they’ve absolutely lost every single sense of who they are, what they like, what they want in life.
This is one of the deeper, crueler effects of the patriarchy, which chews up women’s identities, needs, individualities, forces them to subsume themselves to caring for others, being “nice”, abandoning themselves, and causes women to lose something so precious:
Our relationship with ourselves.
When I came into my 30s and to my own portal, I had to acknowledge a few things:
I had no idea who I was any longer.
I didn’t know what I really liked.
I didn’t know what I wanted out of life.
When I did vision boards or goal-setting classes, and the hosts asked me to get super clear on what I actually wanted out of life, that was the hardest part. I would stare at my cursor on the computer or cut out some random images out of a magazine that seemed like I should want them, but I had no idea if I really did.
I’d lost all sense of who I was, and I was a grown woman.
For me this loss of self and identity really presented as strong codependency. Codependency and people-pleasing stem from, at their core, a lack of identity. One of the primary ways a codependent struggles is because we never had the chance to develop a sense of identity that is independent of what others think of us (or, perhaps we had this in childhood, adolescent, maybe even into our 20s, but we might lose it with motherhood, career, marriage, or more).
For whatever reasons, be it the patriarchy, the way women are conditioned, childhood trauma, many of us become skilled at observing and sensing what others needed from us, desired, expected of us, thought of us, or the general emotional states of others.
And us?
What do we think, want, desire, value?
We may ask ourselves that and be answered with blankness.
And that’s where the first invitation of the Portal comes in:
Rebuilding your relationship with yourself.
You have to understand that there are two of you:
The person who is experiencing and going through life, and the person who is stewarding and observing that person going through life — your higher self, perhaps.
The two of you need to start talking, in order to rebuild a relationship with yourself.
Having a relationship with yourself is literally like having any other relationship, friendship, partnership in your life.
It requires time. Patience. Curiosity. Love. Compassion. An honest desire to want to get to know this person, and a willingness to share back of yourself, too.
So HOW do we actually do that? If we’ve come to the Portal with the realization that we’ve absolutely lost our sense of who we are, how do we begin to reclaim a relationship with ourselves?
Here are some of my concrete tips:
Journaling. In particular, morning pages journaling as taught by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. The Artist’s Way is of course a seminal book on recovering your creativity, but for me, it was more of a book on recovering from codependency and shame. If the Portal had a map, a guide, a bible all wrapped into one, it should be The Artist’s Way. Now, you can definitely do the whole book, if you like, though it’s a commitment. If you do, I recommend finding a community or class that leads you through it and keeps accountability for you. However, I really think you can simply start with just the morning pages and you’ll get enormous value out of that.
Morning pages is just what you’ve heard: You pick up a pen, more or less first thing upon waking, (yes you can pee and get coffee first), and you write whatever comes out. At first, maybe for days or weeks or even longer, your journaling will be mundane drivel. You will write to-do lists. You will write “I don’t know what to write” approximately 274 times. Your pen will hover hesitantly over the page. You’ll wonder, “Am I doing this right?”
Keep going. By doing morning pages, you are excavating your sense of self, little by little. The drivel that starts out, the boring observations, the “I don’t know what to say,” are the first steps back to being in conversation with yourself.
And that’s ultimately what morning pages is. A conversation between your conscious self, and your soul.
And that’s what it means to rebuild a relationship with yourself. You are writing letters to your soul, and your soul is writing back, every morning.
It may start out as tentative first, but it will deepen, and you will learn the most astounding and tender insights about yourself.
If there is only one thing you do to survive the Portal, if you stop reading this series right now, if all you take away is this: Morning pages is, in my opinion, the #1 tool for navigating the portal.
It is the thing that led me to start this newsletter, to build my second career, to have courage, to understand what I wanted, to find love again, to make my way towards the nature witch cottage.
It’s everything.
And because I know people will ask: I use a pen, I do recommend doing this by hand, I use 3 pages of a Mead spiral bound notebook, and I do it probably 20-30 minutes after I wake up (I make some tea and do some meditation first). I don’t do it every single day now, but I think when you are starting it is good to try to do it daily or every weekday.Going on solo travel, or if that is not feasible or too much, going on solo dates, and overall spending time alone, without podcast or music playing. I wrote ages ago (actually six years, when I was 37) about the first solo vacation I ever took at this link and it has a lot of takeaways and thoughts I would still recommend. Traveling alone (even if it’s just for something overnight, just an hour away from where you live) requires you to do some serious self-inquiry. Where do you want to go? What preferences do you and you alone want? What’s it like to spend time with just yourself? If travel isn’t on the radar, what about an evening alone, dining alone, going to a museum or movie by yourself? Again, the same self-inquiry will come up, which is important to be with.
Practice self-centering questions throughout a day. As we recover from people-pleasing and codependency and having lost our identity, our relationship with ourselves, one small but effective shift is to start a daily practice of noticing when you're asking externally motivated questions about others ("What do they want, what do they need, what are they thinking about me?") and shift them to questions that are centered on the self. "What do they want?" becomes "What do I want?" "Do they desire me?" becomes "What do I find desirable?" "Do they like me?" becomes "What do I like? Do I like THEM?" "Am I good enough?" becomes "What feels good to me?" Try this shift out and make this question reframe a small daily practice. It will have powerful results as you begin to rediscover who you are, what you need, and what you like. And in that lies the path to recovery from people-pleasing and lack of relationship with self.
To do this, you can just put a post-it on your monitor or mirror to remind yourself to center yourself back a few times a day.Do emotional self-observation, asking, “What am I feeling?” regularly. We’re rarely taught to feel into our bodies, let alone our emotions. (And honestly, asking, Am I thirsty, am I hungry, do I need to pee can be really great starter steps, too, to building a relationship with yourself, because you’re checking in on your physical needs, which many of us have lost track of, too.) For 7 days one week, set an alarm for 2x a day, and simply stop and check in on what emotional state you suspect you are in. This is simply to gain self-knowledge and begin to become more fluent in our emotions, not to rush to change it.
Name the emotion, how you know, and what you’ve been doing the past 12 hours (situations, people you’ve been interacting with, consider including other things like sleep, diet, environment, etc).
You don't have to overcomplicate, as explained earlier: If you can't name your emotion off the top of your head, pick between five options: mad, sad, glad, afraid, or ashamed. This list is easy to memorize. It’s a multiple-choice question and “none of the above” is not an option. (However, you might pick more than one, as you often have multiple feelings at the same time). If you don't know what you're feeling, follow up by asking yourself, If I had to pick between mad, sad, glad, afraid, and ashamed, what would it be? and use that.
You can also pin up this emotion wheel somewhere you can see it and check in with it regularly when attempting to name a feeling.Ask yourself every day for 21 days, “What do I actually want?” And “What do I actually like?” (If 21 is too much, just even start with one day, or a few days, or a week.) If you’re eating eggs, do you like them? Do you like the coat you’re wearing? The song on the radio? The podcast you’re listening to? The couch you own? Do you want seltzer water or plain? Think of it as a big experiment. I’m willing to bet for a long time you’ve gone along with other people’s preferences on everything from TV shows to food to clothing. Examining your own wants, needs, desires, likes, preferences, is mandatory education in The Portal.
Write a letter from your Higher Self to you right now. Spoiler alert, your Higher Self is just a part of you that already lives within you. She has wisdom, guidance, insights on challenges you’re currently facing, because she’s already moved through them. Write as you, right now, about a challenge you are facing. Then ask on the page, “Higher Self, can you advise me here?” And then begin writing as her. This is a sort of channeled writing; don’t overthink it, just see what comes out on the page. When you get to know this part of yourself it’s deeply reassuring; she always has wise counsel and it’s never more than a page away.
And those are just some starter suggestions. Ultimately, rebuilding a relationship with yourself is about knowing yourself intimately; supporting yourself and having your own back; having deep self-trust; and supporting your own choices and preferences.
Think of it like getting to know an awesome, new best friend who's going to be around forever:
You.
Which of these 6 steps would you like to commit to and try? I recommend picking one and only one; don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to do all of them or a few. And I’ll see you next time for our next lesson on Navigating the Portal!