Hello, my friend!
Happy Mother’s Day. Before anything else: if you’re a mother, today is a day of recognition, and I hope someone is cooking you breakfast and letting you sleep in. But I’m well aware this day is not without its challenges. If your mother is no longer alive or your relationship with her is fractured, today can be hard. For those who couldn’t become mothers because of circumstance or biology, this day is fraught. And for those who never wanted children to begin with, today can feel like being left out of someone else’s party. But we are all mothers, in one way or another, engendering life or dreams or missions with our passion and dedication. Most importantly, we are mothers to ourselves.
↓ In today’s email:
- This week’s inspiration: The gift of being drugged at the farmer’s market
- Latest blog post: Facial acupuncture for the skin
- What I’m listening to: Reparenting the Inner Child
This Week’s Inspiration: The Gift of Being Drugged at the Farmer’s Market
The craziest gift was given to me for Mother’s Day. Unsuspectingly, I was drugged at the farmer’s market yesterday.
My husband suggested we go to a plant sale on the other side of Rhode Island, and I went to keep him company. There was a cannabis farmer there with CBD gummies as samples. I took two, thought nothing of it (CBD doesn’t usually do much to me), and lo and behold, I was incredibly high for the rest of the day. It’s one thing if one decides to get high. Being drugged when you’re unsuspecting is a bit of a roller coaster.
Just a quick primer: CBD is not a psychoactive substance. THC, another compound in the hemp plant, is what makes people high. CBD mostly makes people slightly relaxed, and people apply the cream topically on tight muscles. So I didn’t think much at all about taking these gummies. They were samples after all, and who doesn’t love a sample?
I will never know to my dying day if this was the universe teaching me lessons I needed for Mother’s Day, or if this hemp farmer had taken too many of his own gummies and put out the wrong form of cannabis. Maybe everyone was high from that farmer’s market. I’ll never know.
But the day unfurled like a carpet beneath my feet, with huge amounts of laughing and incredulity. I had booked the private sauna on the beach with a huge picture window of the waves crashing right in front of me, seagulls gliding over the white caps, and my dear friend Kayla, who owns the sauna, was there. We conducted what must have been a therapy-guided trip as we spoke and meditated together. (Shout-out to Kayla. I told her she definitely should have charged me extra for all of this.)
The lessons came in waves:
1. Being viscerally full of gratitude for all the things in my life, even those that have been incredibly painful.
2. Letting go of control, fear, and anxiety, because it does not alter my destiny in any way. It just makes life painful.
3. Finding a deep, abiding love of myself through meditation, and realizing that I am love.
By 6:30pm the trip was over. I went to a dinner party and regaled friends upon entering about the insane day I’d had. One suggested it sounded like an LSD trip. When I told my son about it, he demanded to know where the plant sale was, hoping to score more samples. I told him it was a pop-up. :)
Mother’s Day gifts come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Usually material things, like flowers, a new pair of earrings, or even time to be left alone for a long nap. Sometimes Mother’s Day gifts come in psychotropic waves of understanding of my own being, and a little more peace for my heart. So, for that, thank you.
Latest Blog Post
Facial Acupuncture: The Ultimate Guide to Skin Benefits
The blog post this week is about acupuncture and taking care of your skin. But truly, I just selected it because my daughter was kind enough to model for the picture, and as her adoring mother, I couldn’t resist using it.
If you’ve been curious about how facial acupuncture actually works on fine lines, tone, and collagen, and how it’s different from the more invasive cosmetic options, the post walks you through what to expect.
What I’m Listening To This Week
Reparenting the Inner Child by Dr. Nicole LePera
To say I’m reading it is not exactly right. I downloaded it from Audible and have begun only the first couple of minutes. Dr. LePera’s last book was a favorite of mine, and this new one has been a recent favorite of many of my clients.
It’s about exactly what it sounds like: how to mother yourself, how to attend to your inner child and what she needs. So often the hurt child in us seems to be running the show of our adult lives. I’m hoping to spend more time with this one, and given how my Mother’s Day went, the thematic alignment feels almost too on the nose.
One more thing. My father-in-law, Leslie Kenneth Price, is having an art opening at my Newport studio on June 18th. He’s one of Northern California’s best and longest-creating African-American artists, and his work is a complete joy to me. I’m blessed to be surrounded by it at the office and at home. Come meet him and see his unbelievable work. His website gives you a sense of the kind of beautiful things he brings into this world.
Wishing you peace today, however this day finds you.
Dr. Catherine