Welcome to Wellness Weekly coming to you every Wednesday. This will be a weekly series, sort of like a Letter from the Editors that will rotate between Morgan, Lara and Luigi with the occasional guest. We’ll hold space on the Dirt to check-in on our Sixth Sense: the term we use to refer to our spirit, our intuition, our inner power. And because while we exist in the world alongside our other Five Senses, we’ll do a check-in of those, too.
March’s Theme is Cleanse here at Smudge. As we enter the last month of the first quarter of 2021 (like seriously how is it March again?!?) and as we approach a year since Covid changed our world, I am taking a moment to reflect on everything that has happened in the past year. I’m not going to take us back through it all but I will say, congratulations because if you are reading this, you are still here!! You made it through 2020!! You survived the Oregon trail!!
On this day last year, I was on a flight to the Cayman Islands for the By Grace Retreat. The news reporting was just starting to talk more about Covid 19, enough that we talked about if we should still go but not enough that we cancelled our trip. We spent 7 days and 6 nights in paradise, filling our cups and soaking up the sun. About halfway through our trip, SXSW got cancelled, an event many of us attend. That’s when the seriousness of the virus and what was happening in the world really began to hit us. We had such a beautiful experience but I also had this nagging feeling that everything was about to change and I had no idea how long it was going to last. The flight back was different from the flight there but we still had a lot to learn, there were no masks and lots of people were still traveling and moving freely. When we came back I chose to go into lockdown. Most of my work could be done remotely, I declined social invitations and just stayed in my house trying to figure out what was happening and what to believe. It was hard to know what the right thing to do was. So I decided to do the safest thing that would protect the most people. So I stayed inside. I stopped going to events, I stopped traveling, I stopped eating in restaurants, I basically stopped doing all the things I loved that existed outside of my house. And boy was it HARD and confusing and it seemed never ending. And for a minute there, things got really dark. And folks were struggling, myself included. Then some light started to peek through, and with every bit of good news, I got a little back to myself. I got back on my mat, I started drinking more water, I got this awesome job, I picked up the books I’d been putting off reading. Then came the cleansing. It was time to shed that old skin and re-emerge again. And I’m still inside but now it’s time to make my inside a little cleaner, a little brighter, a little more the new me. I realized it’s time for me to be a goddamn cheetah.
So now that we’ve talked about my 6th Sense, what’s going on with the other 5 you ask??
Sight: I am currently finishing Untamed by Glennon Doyle which has been so amazing (if you’ve read it that line above at the end probably makes a lot more sense). I’ve actually had it on my shelf for a little bit and finally started it last week and realized so much about the importance of timing because this is the exactly right moment for me to be reading this. I cannot stress enough how incredible this book is. Which is how I selected last night as my night to attend a book launch with Glennon Doyle for a new book titled Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. Since it just came out yesterday, my copy has not arrived yet but based on her amazing chat with Glennon, Luvvie’s book is the perfect next read.
Sound: I was recently catching up on the Black Girl in Om podcast by Lauren Ash. It was titled “Integrating Sensuality, Spirituality, and Sexuality with Lyvonne “Pastor Bae” Briggs” and even though I’ve basically cancelled dating right now, it was still a great conversation that I learned a lot from and another reason to look forward to us getting out of this Covid phase of life.
Smell: While I was doing my cleansing, I actually found a gift card to Blue Mercury and decided to treat myself to the Vitruvi Stone Diffuser. Which I will say is quite nice to look at. She’s a little pricey but as I work on leveling up my abundance, I’m going to focus on the abundance of finding these gift cards and treating myself with this little pick me up!
Taste: Since we are cleansing and I’m coming out of my hibernation period, it was time to get back to center. Was talking to my mom who suggested we try a juice cleanse. We decided to go with Raw Generation to give ourselves a 7 day reset cleanse and a break from cooking! It was pretty nice to take a break and just open a bottle of juice every few hours to fuel up.
Touch: I’ve been trying to increase my mat time and am super excited to take a virtual class with my bawses Lara and Luigi. We’ll keep you posted on our mat time and who's gonna be teaching us!
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