Fall In Love With Life this Bealtaine

Happy Bealtaine, happy May Day. That's going to be this Friday with the Full Moon, and I thought I'd do a special episode to celebrate the Celtic festival of love, lust and fertility.

And I really want to focus on ways in which you can help yourself fall in love with yourself, fall in love with your life, fall more in love with your loved ones and fall in love with the world.

We're living through very challenging times, and if we tell ourselves that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, then it's really depressing and it disempowers us and we forget about all the amazing people in the world, under insanely horrific conditions, who are still attempting to do the right thing and caring for others and creating good works and being forces for love and joy and peace.

If you're a trauma survivor and AuDHD-er like me, or simply find self-care more of a “should” than a joy, then the Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD podcast is for you.

I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham, a trauma therapist, AuDHD and self-care coach, senior accredited supervisor and counsellor, senior yoga teacher, columnist and author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-Care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing.

Each Tuesday I share a mix of solo episodes and conversations with other self-care professionals. From other therapists, coaches, yoga teachers and authors to neuroscientists and medical professionals, many of them are neurodivergent themselves and all are honest enough to share the gap between their ideal and ACTUAL daily self-care.

And I hope that it will help you learn to love and care for all of your parts, including trauma and AuDHD, from the soles of your feet to your soul.

You can also sign up for bonus content and polyvagal-informed journal prompts and more for Míle Buíochas Mondays, my free newsletter via the website solestosoul.ie. So that's soles to soul, S-O-L-E-S-T-O-S-O-U-L dot I-E.

Let me know if you've got any questions and thank you for listening.

This Bealtaine, even if it feels especially challenging, I hope you'll recognise that love, as Bad Bunny amplified at the Super Bowl, is stronger than hate.

You can fall more in love with yourself, with your life, with loved ones and with the world, by being honest with yourself, letting it all out. This is not, again, about toxic positivity. So as we move into the Feel part of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework, let it out.

Give yourself time to journal and to rage. I encourage people with my weekly newsletter, Míle Buíochas Mondays. It's a gratitude practice, but it also helps you understand and map your nervous system.

You can sign up for that and hundreds of free mind-body practices at solestosoul.ie/free- downloads. And there'll be a link in the show notes. But we really want to let it all out.

We want to welcome all the feelings. This is not about denying what's going on in the world. This is not about denying struggles you have in your own life.

But once you've let it out, think about what you love about it. Think about, it may feel indulgent. It may feel too privileged.

But you ignoring your privilege, I'm lucky to, at the moment, at time of recording, all is safe here. Many parts of the world very much not. Many parts of Ireland, many homes in Ireland, people are enduring.

Many people don't have homes. Wherever you are, you owning your privilege and you using it to help others is way more helpful and loving and courageous than you just kind of wringing your hands and worrying about everything and suffering. Your suffering helps no one.

Let out all the rage or the pain or the uncertainty. And also think about what you love. Think about what brings you joy.

Think about using joy as a GPS. Remembering we're wired to thrive when we feel safe, welcome and loved. When we are doing what feels good.

Do what you can to outsource, to not do the things that really bring you down and to really amp up what helps you connect with that inherent joy.

Last week, I interviewed the delightful Aakriti Kaushik. And I was talking about the Bhangra dance classes that she's doing in Westport now.

It's a joyful dance from India. Find things, whatever they might be. For me, always on about the underwater handstands.

Elements of my yoga practice bring me enormous joy. Reading, all sorts of things. But it's not indulgent.

It's not self-indulgent to look after yourself. And the things that help us function, the things that help us feel better, the things that help us regulate, when we're better able to handle all the horrors that life can throw at us. Give yourself permission to not only identify what brings you joy, but to feel joy and know that it is helping.

Like all positive emotions, they have research around feelings like joy, like love and pride or hope. They create DHEA, which is a natural performance enhancer. And it's also, while we're producing DHEA, we're making it impossible to produce cortisol for a few hours.

So it reduces stress. So joy, joy, joy, joy, joy. Let yourself this Bealtaine and every day.

Feel as much joy as possible in a welcoming all the feelings kind of way. If you're crying, enjoy it. If you're weeping, if you're angry, just give yourself permission to feel it all.

As we move to the Love part, think about how you might show yourself more love, more acceptance. So the Feel part is the lowercase hyphenated self-care, the regulatory, the things we do that help us feel better. The Love part is that uppercase Love, love archetype.

And it's ways of connecting with the uppercase Self, that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant, miraculous part of yourself. So thinking about this Bealtaine, what you can do to put yourself, as Cheryl Strayed said in Wild, like her mother would have said, put yourself in the way of beauty. Put yourself in the way of the things that help you connect with that highest, wisest part of yourself.

And make a list, draw whatever it is, like connect with these things that help keep you grounded and expansive, that help you connect with your knowing that you have access to all the time. And also think about the people you love most on the planet, the people you love most in the world.

As we move into the Heal part of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework, it's the collective care, it's the co-regulation, it's the connecting with others and remembering, again, community is so important at this especially challenging time for so many people.

It's so easy to watch the news or scroll and feel completely isolated, feel like there's so much cruelty, so much sadism, horror, horror, horror, suffering, suffering, suffering. That's just going to bring you into what I call Freeze! (in Purr! Hiss! Freeze!) that kind of dorsal vagal, the overwhelm, the collapse, the dissociation, the numbing, the giving up. We don't want that.

That doesn't help anyone, least of all yourself. So thinking of ways in which you can connect, not just with yourself and that highest part of yourself, but with others. Help each other, love each other, nourish each other.

Two of the practices I want to introduce this week, one comes from the Buddhist tradition, Mudita, and it's the idea of taking joy in other people's good fortune. And it's so important to cheer others on and to encourage them and to help them feel safe as they make themselves more visible and to help them celebrate their successes as well as buoy them after challenges. And I'm not going to say failure. No such thing as failure, only feedback.

But think about how you can embrace the concept of Mudita this week, this Bealtaine. And it might be emailing or messaging some of your favourite people that you follow, some of your favourite authors, some of your favourite musicians, artists, whatever they might be. But just connecting in a way that celebrates them, that allows you to feel the joy and amplify it for yourself, for them, for the world.

The world needs more joy. And also here in the West of Ireland, this is one of the most joyful traditions since moving here. I didn't know what was happening my first year and I try to remember each year.

And because this is going out a few days before Bealtaine, I can share it. And wherever you are, if you're listening on or before the 31st of April, it's a tradition to put flowers on your doorstep for May Day, for Bealtaine. And it's just like a blessing on the house.

It's to bring good luck and fortune and joy and love and fertility and all good things. And I think what's really lovely where I live, I'm really, really rural and I really enjoy walking up the lane. There are like, I don't know, five to ten houses within a mile.

And just delivering a few little, they might be daisies, they might be dandelions, they might be bluebells, buttercups, little flowers just on the doorstep.

Just sending my delightful, gorgeous neighbours who've been so welcoming, so much love, so much well-wishing for Bealtaine, for May Day and for the season ahead. In town, a lot of the doorstops are covered in flowers.

I do it for my own doorstep as well. And I look forward to seeing, in town, all the flowers. And you just like, they wither away over the coming weeks or like months or days, depending on the wild Atlantic weather.

Wherever you are, you might want to adopt it. You might want to just, if you're in flats, if you're in a farmhouse, if you're anywhere in between, maybe just for one or two neighbours, as well as for yourself, just put some flowers on your doorstep the night before Bealtaine, April 30th. And welcoming the love, the lust, the fertility, all good things, abundance.

Let yourself be happy. The world needs more happiness. The world needs more joy.

The world needs more love, more celebration. And it's an antidote to the inevitable heartache and horrors and all of it. So let me know how you get on.

Send a picture if you're doing the flowers. Tag me on Insta and wherever else you are. And there are links to everything in the show notes.

Next week, I look forward to welcoming the delightful Allan Frater. He's an author talking about dreams and imagination. And he was one of my lecturers when I did my psychosynthesis training.

He was just starting out and I was just finishing the training in London. And it's a delight to catch up with him after all these years. So happy Bealtaine.

And it was basically, if you knew how cold it is today in April, it's like, yeah, we still need the fire in May. But it's that metaphorical warmth, that metaphorical love and heat and letting yourself feel, feel all of it, the rage, the pain, the sadness. It makes way for the joy, the plans, the love, the hope.

Let yourself enjoy life. It's here to be enjoyed. And you can do way more to help others when you are functioning and when you are joyful, rather than when you're collapsed in a heap in the corner, losing any hope at all.

So on that joyful note, have a brilliant week. And I look forward to sharing more next week.

As you think about this episode, I want you to imagine scanning your whole body, your whole energy field from the soles of your feet to your soul and notice what has come up for you as you've listened, as you think about it now.

How might you show yourself some extra love, some extra care today, this week?

Make some notes, doodle, whatever feels good. And if it feels comfortable and you want to email eve at solestosoul.ie or comment in any of the comment areas. Do feel free to subscribe, rate, review, all the things. But thank you for listening.

I'm your host and producer, Eve Menezes Cunningham. Find full links in the show notes and full transcripts and let me know if you have any questions.

Really looking forward to joining you again next time and have a brilliant week.