Hello dear one,

Most of us have quiet ways of holding our days together. The order we do things in. The route we always take. The little rituals we don't even register as rituals until something interrupts them.

And then the day shifts. A holiday. A trip. A guest in the house. The kids home from school. Suddenly the smooth thing isn't smooth, and we find ourselves snagging on a moment that any other week we'd move right through.

I want to offer you something to consider about those moments to uncouple the judgment just a little bit. The places where a changed routine undoes us are not random. They tend to be the same places, again and again. Walking out the door. Getting something started. How waiting feels to you. The transition from one thing to the next. And all those places have a story underneath them, often older than we can consciously remember. The body remembers even when we don't have an explicit memory of what happened or the pattern that we're repeating.

When everything runs the way it always does, many times our patterns remain hidden. Some of us have built our days around them so smoothly that we never have to feel them. It's the disruption that brings them up to the surface. The unfamiliar morning. The trip that doesn't go to plan. The person beside us who does it all completely differently or gets stuck in a place we don't normally get stuck, which is often the thing that gets under our skin. (Thinking of my children here with love.)

This is why I love a week like this one, even with all its mess. A break in routine is not only an inconvenience. It's an opening. The pattern that's may normally be invisible becomes, for a moment, something you can actually see. And you can't tend what you can't see.

So here's the invitation, if you'd like one. This week, when something snags when you're in a transition from one task to the next, see if you can get curious instead of frustrated. Notice where it happens. Notice what part of the change is hard, and what part, maybe, you secretly love. None of it is a problem to fix. All of it is information. It's your own story, asking to be understood.

You don't have to do anything with it yet. Noticing is enough. Noticing is where it all begins.

If this is stirring something, and you'd like to look more closely at the patterns that show themselves when life moves you out of your routine, I'm opening Back to Birth workshops again this summer. It's a gentle space to meet these imprints, your own or your child's. Just reply with the word imprints and I'll add you to the wait list. The door is open if you feel called.

Be curious. Be kind. Start with yourself.

Rebecca