To Receive—Graciously.
On the sacred discomfort of needing help plus few offers for you.
My mom paid my rent this week for the first time in probably my entire adult life.
What I'm feeling is a tender mix of profound gratitude and something else… Something that I call “cringe”—but that is probably just my hyper independence kicking up.
Yeah… that.
“I can do it myself!”
I moved out when I was 16.
My rent came straight out of my paycheck and in between checks I could charge meals at the restaurant, but not too many or it would eat up my check. With what was left over we would usually buy beer, smokes, and camping food. The beer and smokes someone else would have to get because I was only 16 for most of that summer. After I finished cleaning hotel rooms around 3pm we would drive up in the mountains to 4x in our friend’s Bronco, or head to the Green Bridge to leap, lounge, and drink.
That was my first “real” job. Prior to Bucks T-4, I had worked for my dad during the summer behind his front desk at his chiropractic office in Livingston, Montana. His house shared the building, so home was just on the the other side of the hallway door. He paid me in cash. I spent it on kid stuff. But by Buck’s I was on my own, living with a boyfriend, paying my own measly bills and drinking half my meals. I was an adult. Not hardly, but I had complete independence and with it a lot of fun.
They say you can't go home, but lots of us do at some point or another. I tried when I was pregnant with my daughter to move back in with Mom, but I wound up at my mother-in-law's instead. At 23, nearly 24, I wound up at my dad's so I could escape my meth habit; that worked out pretty well because I dropped meth entirely nearly 22 years ago come this summer.
And it's been 20 years that I've been doing my work in the professional capacity through thick and thin years, through abundance and some scarcity, through having extra jobs and barely being able to find time to work at all… my work holds me.
My mom let me move into her little tin house—the house she'd lived in for 20 years, and now me for the last 8—but I've paid the bills and made improvements and more than pulled my weight to make up for being handed a house in a place and economy where nothing is affordable. I've installed windows, dug out flower beds, moved hundreds of pounds of rocks from out of the house and around the little property as well as gone through things that she had hoarded for years.
My living situation courtesy of my mother's generosity has been of mutual benefit to both of us.
Still…
I don't like the feeling of needing help from her or really anyone else. I imagine a lot of us don't.
Somehow it feels like needing help is indicative of failure—although relying on others is actually the most natural thing in the world.
Modern society conditions us into hyper independence, something I take up like a fish takes to water, but not only is not needing anyone an actual impossibility, it's not healthy either.
We need each other and we all need help at some point.
Needing help and getting sick is awkward, vulnerable, and unavoidable, but for a lot of us, myself included, navigating those tender waters can feel like swimming with piranha. It eats our flesh, Precious! It stings!
As someone who supports people for my profession, I empathize with the courage and vulnerability that it takes to open yourself up to a stranger, to put your inner world on someone's plate and ask them to digest with you, gently. I'm scrupulous about who I do any kind of inner work with. I'm also exceedingly discerning about who I will let know that I'm struggling when I do, specifically when it comes to my finances.
Money feels tender. Or, more accurately, needing money feels tender. But not only that—it feels like a failure.
When I have money I'm good with it. I'm good at saving, good with spending, I feel harmonious with the exchange of value for goods, services, bills, trinkets, and necessities. When I don't have money, I can stretch it. When I have to ask for it, for anything outside of charging for my services, I feel a “cringe”.
When I have to ask for help in general, I feel a “cringe”. My body restricts. There is notable tension in my jaw, shoulder, a loss of appetite. Maybe even a little dissociation. These feelings show me where I'm not free. They show me where something about receiving is not in alignment with what I need because what I need is help, but what I feel is resistance.
The body shows us where our blind spots are.
Circumstances being what they are—me being a full time caregiver to a toddler and a kindergartener who is about to get out of school—my focus and my resources, time wise and financially are stretched. There is only so much of me, so much of the day, and only so much that little dependent bodies understand about an adult who is there, but is also working while sitting in the same room: writing, creating content, answering emails, and talking with clients (in the other room) the latest of which is the easiest for them to grok.
But it's not just the mundane requirements of parenthood, my entire spiritual investment in this situation has been next level.
If we drift back about a year you may recall me doing a ritual to commend my daughter to the Mother. I did it on Mother’s Day and I do believe it was released only for my paid subscribers.
It was titled Claiming What is Mine, and here is the conclusion of it for a refresher.
Ritual is for when we refuse to feel helpless.
“We ask the Unseen, the Mother, the Saints, the gods, and powers of psyche and nature to stand beside us. We ask for help, for a boost to our power, not as someone who does not have any power of their own, but as someone who is alignment with that power.
What can I say about the outcome of this endeavor? I do not know longterm what will happen. I do know that the release and relief I felt was almost immediate and that within 48 hours noticeable shifts in behavior and communication were occurring. I take this as an omen.
And I continue to commend those who I care about into the arms of the Mother.”
What can I say about this endeavor a year later? It worked. The ritual worked—and it required tremendous sacrifice on my part. Sacrifice that is fair exchange when it comes to securing the well being of my lineage, but sacrifice nonetheless. Time, energy, resources, free time, and even my health in some circumstances. My body has bucked at the extra responsibility, at what at times felt like little to no external support. My body struggled to hold the weight of life blooming even as it gripped with the weight of life dying—my father’s death, specifically.
Grief stayed with me as inflammation, as inflexibility in my body where previously I had felt limber. Grief surfaced occasionally through tears, abrupt moments of missing my dad and then the immediate turning to tending to little bodies.
Profound growth came in the form of holding the firmest boundaries I think I ever have had to hold and the effects was the rising of the consciousness of the whole family system. Yet… it took its toll on me. The energy required to master our own desire to escape, check out, or do the “easy” thing is where we truly wind up enforcing boundaries. And boundaries are also what actually allow for us to receive.
Without a container, there is no structure to hold the energy that we are requesting, the energy that is needed for us to grow. This is why children need structure! This is why adults who did not get that structure can struggle for years to get momentum going in our lives, to maintain healthy relational dynamics, and to hold ourselves in times of turmoil or to even know how to truly rest.
Structure is the magical and practical formula that is being built beneath the surface in the moments when I seem to no be doing anything, in the moments where rest becomes necessity, in the moments where responsibility surpasses desire and desire becomes the hidden glow that feeds the hearth.
And along comes my mother—and emissary of the Mother—and offers to help pay some bills, tosses a log on the embers that feed my cooking pot, stokes my dwindling fire and gently blows life onto the kindling that I have been carrying…
Gawd-blessed right I am going to accept Mom’s help!
And I am going to do something that is out of bounds for me as well: I am going to invite you, my writing community to help me, too.
My PayPal is https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/justicebartlett
My Venmo is Justice-Bartlett https://venmo.com/code?user_id=2759562415308800355&created=1780593656
Buy me a drink. Send the girls and me to the hot springs. Or help me buy some plants for my rather delayed spring planting. The kids love gardening as well. Send us a few bucks to brighten our day!
Or…
Up your subscription to paid.
It’s a few bucks a month or a discounted one time commitment. I haven’t been offering a lot paid content to my subscribers, but Summer Solstice approaches and we will have a ritual. I have also been toying with the idea of doing a book club. I think we would need to start with Women Who Run With The Wolves.
Or….
Engage is Senses & Symbols session work 1:1, in a container, mentorship, sign up for an upcoming class, or grab a recording of a previous one.
As an intuitive, cognitive sculptor I offer clients and students a method of working with their consciousness, for both healing and creative purposes, which incorporates mind, body, and stories or mythology (personal and collective). Though anyone can benefit from the compassion and skillfulness which unfolds through the Senses and Symbols process, my specific niche is working with other healers, psychotherapists, and licensed counselors.
My eclectic education and keen intuition combine in a way that allows people to delve safely into areas where they have not been seen or met, yet, and my ability to offer insights outside of their own scope of practice provides perspectives that traditional therapy does not often cover.
I am also offering Containment again.
And I’m super excite to do so…. This was a course I taught last year that was incredibly potent. I was just delving into this process of holding energy for my family in a new way at the time and I have learned so much and deepened my own capacity since then. The processes we shared then have taken root and become stable. From this more integrated place, I am now offering this course again.
I am offering my paid subscribers as well as returning participants a 20% off discount. Just select the 2nd option at check out or send $220 instead of $275 when paying through other preferred means like Venmo or PayPal.
Register: https://www.sensesandsymbols.com/store
Seeking to feel more secure in yourself, your body, your relationships, and how you move through life? This course may be of benefit to you. Help heal relational wounding. Define and refine your own energetic and emotional structures and how they relate to others. This is about safety, sanctity, and protection as it applies to every area of your life.
And finally…
I am offering men a free mini soul attunement session for the month of June.
Dear men, this is for you: For the Love of Men.
Men are just as likely to struggle with mental health as women are and less likely to talk about it. Men are just as prone to shame and internalized self-loathing as women are, maybe even more so. Men are “allowed” far less emotional bandwidth and are more often than not raised on stoicism, or at least have been in previous generations.
Let me listen to you. Let me hold you for a few minutes.
This month I am offering men a free mini soul attunement session. This is a chance for you to speak to a compassionate witness what is on your mind and heart, and be received in active listening, but also to feel your energy align differently when you are heard and held.
If this appealing to you, as a man, or for the ladies for a man you know: please DM me. I will be holding this space all month.
So, as you can see, the moment anyone offers me anything I simply want to pour this beneficence back into the world, into my work, into you my subscribers, students, and clients. And women, I have something in mind to offer just for you, but we will save that for another time.
We are given what we can hold, though it may stretch us at times exceedingly, but we are also given the capacity to grow with and through our challenges and to discover even more of ourselves, each other, and what we can become together in the process.
Love
~Justice