This Ask Polly Comment..

2025 Forecast: - please care deeply for you spleen & liver, taking care of these two will take care of all the other parts of you, mental & physical. drink hot water only & drink ginger tea when you can. - Beware of regression & reverting, our systems, money's & governments are embodying these words boldly but we must not. - do new things, do lots of new things, in the biggest ways & in very small ways. ask your friends & family to hold you accountable, ask them to join you in these new things. - look at the stars more often y'all. we need to be reminded often how small we are, what vastness lives outside of humanity, here in these moments lives humbleness, gratitude & wonder. we need more of these feelings right now. learning constellation is a great hobby to take on, to learn constellations is to learn yourself <3 - never forget your tears are a form of offering, so cry y'all. cry. calling in a calm 2025 ... bless y'all 🌸💕

what are you waiting for? someone to grant you permission? the perfect and permanent emotion? a shooting star to magic away every problem you have or ever have had? alright, wait away then. but no one is going to live your life for you while you wait to become someone else

Safety means safety to experience whatever arises. When we feel secure enough, our natural capacity for love and connection begins to unfold naturally. Our defenses - whether spiritual materialism, perfectionism, or withdrawal - gradually soften. We begin to trust the raw process of life itself.

This understanding transforms our approach to spiritual practice. Rather than chasing particular states or insights, we focus on building a secure relationship with reality - learning to trust its fundamental nature.

Having a secure attachment to reality doesn't mean all our experiences are pleasant or desirable. But it means reality itself is, at its core, trustworthy. Even our deepest insecurities and fears aren't evidence that we are fundamentally unloved or unlovable. We are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God.

This is what spiritual traditions have been pointing to all along. When mystics speak of "being held by God" or "resting in awareness," they're describing this fundamental security. When they talk about surrender, they're pointing to a trust in reality so deep that we can finally let go of our protective strategies and simply be.

Perhaps most crucially, this understanding helps us grasp why genuine transformation often appears as breakdown. When our system finally feels safe enough to release its protective strategies, everything we've built can crumble. What we once saw as our strength - our self-reliance, our spiritual attainments, our carefully constructed identity - reveals itself as an intricate defense against our true vulnerability.

This is why spiritual development cannot be forced or hurried. Just as you cannot command a child to feel secure, you cannot will yourself into secure attachment with reality. It unfolds gradually, through repeated experiences of safety and attunement. Sometimes this happens through meditation or prayer, sometimes through therapy or deep relationships, sometimes through forms of grace we may never fully understand.

The process holds an inherent paradox: we need to feel safe enough to face how profoundly unsafe we feel. We need secure attachment to heal our insecure attachment. This is where spiritual communities, teachers, and practices become our "transitional objects" - temporary secure bases from which we can gradually develop a more fundamental security with reality itself.

The implications of this understanding ripple outward: our spiritual struggles mirror our attachment patterns, healing emerges through relationship rather than force, safety precedes genuine transformation, apparent regression often signals progress, and true spirituality cannot be separated from our deepest emotional needs.

This brings us back to our beginning - the recognition that spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience.

When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity - just as a child learning to walk must first release their familiar supports.

This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself.

Consider how spiritual traditions so often speak of "the dark night of the soul" - periods of profound doubt and disconnection. Through the lens of attachment theory, these experiences reveal themselves in a new light. They aren't failures of faith but opportunities to develop a more secure attachment with reality - one spacious enough to hold both light and dark, connection and disconnection, certainty and doubt.

Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality, Daniel Thorson

Colman Domingo in conversation with Jacob Elordi for Variety's Actors on Actors

2024 1. Desire is information from the future 2. Anxiety is not a product of fear alone, but is employed to defend against any negative feeling 3. Feeling is the only resolution 4. Anger is surprisingly enjoyable 5. All truthful communication is inappropriate by some standard 6. Voice notes are speech therapy 7. Instagram is embarrassing because the medium is the message 8. Love must not be conflated with attachment 9. True power is antithetical to control 10. Conflict is a gift 11. Eye contact is singular and sacred 12. Fantasies of love are just mechanisms through which I am taught to love myself enough to try

🎬 Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

from Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch

Oubaitori (n.) — the idea that people, like flowers, bloom in their own time and follow their own individual journeys; the acceptance of not comparing oneself to others, and focusing on one's own uniqueness.

Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma