Redefining Strength: Embracing All Emotions

(mouse clicking) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (soft upbeat music) (birds chirping) Hi, I'm Dora, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday. Before we get started with today's episode, allow me to introduce myself. I'm a meditation and mindfulness teacher here at Headspace, of course, and I'm a registered psychiatric nurse and a birth doula. So as you can imagine, I have a lot of stories from my career and passions, but as a dedicated student of life, I also have a lot of personal experiences that I'm really excited to share with you all. So thank you for joining me today. As I mentioned, I'm a meditation teacher and I often have one-on-one sessions with people in my community wanting to deepen their meditation practice or learn a few techniques. One of the reasons I became a meditation teacher was to offer my guidance to my community, the Black community. So many of my clients just happened to be Black women. Anyways, there was one particular day I was in a client session with someone I had never met before, and the client I was working with, let's call her Ruby, was explaining to me that in the past year, she'd experienced the loss of 10 family members, which would be devastating for anyone. When I asked Ruby what she was hoping to achieve in our time together, she softly said, "I just want to learn how to breathe again." And to be honest, I was slightly taken aback by her answer. And as we continued to talk and connect, she explained that she was the only person in her family that always had to be strong and stay positive for everyone else. And she felt like she never had the chance to truly share and express how she was feeling with her loved ones. And from what it sounded like, this was truly suffocating. And when she tried to seek support from her family, she was told to stay positive and be strong. But even the strongest amongst us still needs support sometimes. And our conversation got me thinking about how we define strength. Even for a moment now, just think about what strength means to you and where did you learn this idea of strength or what does it mean to be strong? I know growing up, staying positive, being strong, keeping it in the house was constantly affirmed by my parents and older relatives. So being strong meant not showing any emotions, not expressing how I'm feeling, and most definitely not crying. And I was thinking that maybe some of us need to redefine how we think about strength. For me, I grew up around strong women, women that had to be fearless, independent, and tough. I've only seen my mother cry once or maybe two times in my life. The one time that I can distinctly remember was at my grandmother's funeral. It was a gloomy gray day in London, and my mom and her three sisters...