Feed Yourself First: Unmasking, Ending Self-Abandonment, and Loving Without Losing Yourself Through Yoga and Solo Polyamory

Hit play above to listen to the raw voice memo dispatch, or read the transcript below.

Well, well, well. We are back. And as you can see, I have changed the name... of... my substec again.

I want to talk about... burnout and giving yourself permission to feed yourself first. In October of this year, I hit a wall. I have been going, going, going, nonstops since last year around this time, and after my diagnosis in August, September came in, hot, heavy, fast, yoga teacher training started, was chaotic.

And by October, I was so burnt out, so frustrated, so confused, and honestly, just completely unbalanced. I started my yoga teacher training program back in 2023. And it was a vision.

He started small. We had a small cohort where we held space for each other, created community. It was beautiful.

And I wanted to recreate that with Break a Binary, the 2.0 version of my yoga teacher training. And the truth is, even though I’ve got big dreams and big ones somewhere between my autism and my ADHD, I take on too many things. And I mean it, like, too many things.

Somewhere between juggling, being a parent, being a caregiver, uh, being a teacher, being a coach, being a yoga therapist, I was managing the studio up until August hit. And I realized I had to slow down. I realized that I had truly been pouring from an empty cup, and we talk about this pouring from an empty cup.

It was a regular thing. But what does it really mean? My definition, my view of this pouring from an empty cup is putting yourself as the last thing on the list.

Like, literally taking your needs, your wants, your desires, your time that you need to recuperate and reconnect with yourself and slide it to the back burner. And I am good for this. I am the type that comes in, and I make sure every other nervous system in the room is better before I check in with myself.

And I realized this year, the toll that it was taking on me. And so I started going through some old journals, realizing that when I left my marriage at the end of 2023, I made a decision to learn how to love without abandoning myself. And this has held true for so long.

Now, what does solo polyamory have to do with this? Well, I adopted the title of solo polyamy back in 2020 when I was in yoga teacher training and realized that I had, number one, never said that I was non-monogamous out loud. And I also realized that outside of, like, my friends and people close to me, no one knew that I was queer.

Not that I was hiding it, but I was in a straight presenting relationship. I guess I didn’t feel the need to, quote unquote, calm out, right? And so in 2020, when I did my yoga teacher training, at the end of that training, I realized that I said for the first time, in our closing circle, that I was queer and polyamorous, and I loved who I was.

I was embracing who I was. I was remembering who I was before conditioning took over. And that sat with me, as I left my marriage at the end of 2023, went into 2024 in my 40th year, and I decided, You know what?

I’ve been putting all you funky motherfuckers ahead of me, and it’s time for me to put me at the top of the list. And with that choice came some losses. I’ve lost best friends.

I’ve lost partners. I’ve lost people who I thought would be here with me. forever. Only to realize, I really and truly, the only person that’s gonna be with me forever is me, and being okay with that.

In yoga, we talk about ahimsa. A himsa is non harming, or this kind of ethical code that keeps us considering how we could be causing harm. And usually talks about others, but I like to think of that as beginning with the self.

See, back in 2022, 2021, 2022, I wanted to write a book. And I wanted this book to be called “Ahimsa begins with the self”. I had a cover for it.

I asked a lovely yoga teacher to do the introduction for me and I was ready to rock and roll. And then one day, I looked up and realized I was not happy where I was. I wasn’t abundant.

I wasn’t living the life that I wanted to live. And I said, I can’t write this fucking book. It’s a lie.

Ahimsa begins with self, and I couldn’t fucking stand myself. Yep, I said it. I said it out loud.

That was a part of my practice, realizing, I couldn’t fucking stand myself. See, I was so used to self abandonment that the version that I knew of me was one that constantly put me on the back burner. And I was angry with myself for it.

In the end, I started to take accountability for the things that I allowed. allowing people in my space who didn’t really care about me, overperforming for love or some idea of love, giving more in my connections than I was getting. I gotten to a point where I wouldn’t say what was uncomfortable and what didn’t feel good, because I just wanted to keep the peace. And in realizing all of this, I wasn’t feeding myself first.

I was abandoning myself. I had taken my plate off the table and put the plate of everyone else ahead of me. So I had to admit out loud, I’m doing too much.

I’m caring too much. I am performing capacity that I don’t currently have. And that he got into this old trap, this, this habit, this some scara that I had of pushing through, fatigue, trying to be the strong anchor for everyone else but me, and I’m ignoring my own body signals until exhaustion forces me into shut down where I’m angry at the world.

Well, that’s not even me. Now, this platform... is changing. I am changing the title to Feed Yourself first, because I am writing the book that I wanted to write years ago.

But we’re changing it. And this isn’t meant to be a cute self care catchphrase. It is meant to be an urgent survival mandate.

I wanna end self abandonment, and I want you guys to do it with me. And what it actually looks like is to stop relational and professional survival bullshit. We’re refusing to let these external demands dictate the internal baseline.

And this is so close to my heart because this is something I’ve had to relearn again and again. This lesson continues to fucking come up for me. And I love how people say, We heal from it and we never do it again.

Yeah, for me, no, there are certain things that I am on the edge of dealing with and self abandonment is one of those. And so I have to remind myself regularly. And I’m acknowledging that even with all the training, all the yoga therapy tools, all the somatic practices, all of this to pull over, to function, and disappear into the needs of others is a chronic pattern.

Requires my intervention. I am reclaiming Himsa. I don’t want to spend time trying not to harm others, walking on eggshells, softening my boundaries, over explaining, and smoothing out friction.

That’s me actively committing violence to myself. And I didn’t even realize it. Now if my compassion can include me, it’s incomplete.

Forcing my body past this capacity to keep the peace or maintain some sort of commitment is an actual form of internal harm. I’m not practicing it himself at all, or I wasn’t practicing it himself at all. Now, how has this evolved?

I moved through these experiences that have brought me from this broad, generalized, sort of commercial view and concepts of yoga into this really deep, visceral reality of my practice of solo polyamory, unmasking, and a radical somatic sovereignty. Now, a couple of years ago I started a practice every December. I do a reset.

I don’t hold classes. I don’t study, I don’t train. I just take some time to lean into the slower, quieter practices, like meditation.

You’re gonna yin and resortive. And it’s a way I kind of take myself off the treadmill for the year. I’ve put in so much work this year.

I allow myself a full month of rest, to spend time with family. In addition to this, I also allow my school, a full month arrest, so holistic whole yoga school actually ended yesterday for the season, and we’re taking the rest of the season off. The remainder of November to integrate what we’ve been learning all year, and the month of December to rest and reset as a community.

I want to invite you guys to join us on that. It is a free community. You don’t have to pay a cent to join, no upgrades or anything.

You can join the community free and it’s no, you don’t even have to do the task. It’s invitations. I will be sharing my 21 days of practice from December 1st to December 21st.

The quiet practices that help me feed myself first. So I want you to think about if this is something for you, and this might be a transparent home for this evolution. But from here on out, this substack is gonna be audio notes, some real-time book excerpts, and my honest processing, as I write, feed yourself first.

So if you are interested in joining community and doing this December reset challenge with us, this is a quiet, low pressure invite for you to join the slowdown. You can go to the link, bio.hwyogalife.com, and choose the December reset challenge. Now before I sign off for you today, I want you to do a quick practice with me.

Let’s do one shared breath today. I want you to take a moment, unclench your jaw. Soften in the face, soften in the throat.

Take a full breath in and drop your shoulders. away from the ears. Notice anywhere in your body where you’re holding on right now. And I want you to give yourself permission to set it down.

Inhale, in through the nose. Exhale, open mouth, sigh it out. Welcome to the new era.

With your crazy guide. And I hope that this is a season where you choose to feed yourself first.

Love you, bye.

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