A Taste of My Own Medicine

A reclamation of Fridays.

I’m so grateful to everyone who left their responses to the poll I posted last week. The polls are active until Friday, if you’d like to contribute. You can find it here. I’m excited to compile your shares and to let them inform Sated Soul’s next chapter.

This past weekend, February 1-2, marked “Imbolc,” the ancient Celtic festival that translates to “in the belly”- perhaps still “in the belly of winter” or perhaps, as the festival hoped to mark, “something in the belly growing” - Imbolc marks new life returning, the threshold where we begin to observe and benefit the light coming back. For us here in Colorado, it’s light past 5:00 pm now- not long past, but past nonetheless, and that is decidedly different than the 14-year-long January we have all just endured. The medicine of the light returning encouraged my reflection on what other “medicine” was happening around me.

I sat with a client recently who told me our session had helped “so much” and that it felt like a soothing balm. I left that session too, having felt soothed. And I wondered to myself, why I don’t give that same experience to myself more often?

This was later confirmed when I had a distance reiki session from a classmate in my course, where she wondered aloud to me if I “give validation, trust, and soothing to others” that I should also be extending to myself.

It got me thinking about how I spend my Fridays. I intentionally don’t see clients on Fridays, and had set this schedule early on in private practice to give myself a day to reset and decompress. “Work really hard and do deep work for 4 days, and then take 3 days off to refill!”

It was glorious for a little while. I found myself waking up when I felt like it, having slow breakfasts, hiking, napping, reading, and writing. And then I started scheduling my bi-weekly massages on Fridays. And then sessions with my own therapist found their way to Fridays. Then I started attending a group with other therapists on Friday mornings, and then maybe the dentist, doctor, or dermatologist here and there on a Friday, and then my nail appointment a couple of times a month to keep me from chewing my fingernails, and oil changes, and errands and Amazon returns. And then maybe some podcast recording, or a consultation group. Before I knew it, everything that should feel like self-care had filled a day at the end of an already busy week with more obligations.

If a client were telling me about how they fill their “day off” to the brim, I’d ask how it felt, wait for them to tell me “not great” and then suggest that they re-anchor in the original purpose of taking Fridays off. I’d offer them the “medicine” of reflection and realignment.

Because January has 87 weeks, I had the opportunity to see what a completely open Friday felt like. It turned into an impromptu morning with my mother in the soaking tubs at Sunwater Spa, followed by a delicious breakfast and a lengthy yap session to get caught up on all we’d been up to and who we are each becoming these days.

“Oh, this is actually the reason I blocked Fridays from my schedule.”

This insight paired with some reading about Imbolc being a time to celebrate creativity and new beginnings, reminded me that Fridays were also supposed to be the day the artist, writer, gardener, and chef in me was able to emerge. Fridays are the day where I could be Mary Oliver if I wanted, or John Muir, or Ina Garten. Or, simply, and most importantly, Jesie.

So why don’t I take my own medicine? I’ve written before about how hard it is for therapists (especially this one) to follow our own advice, but this is something a bit different, I think. This is a contamination of time carved out. A stealing of creative space by my more productive self. A lack of boundaries around the most sacred parts of Self-the Self at rest.

So my invitation to myself, and to you too is to reflect on where we may have let the production of life creep into the living of it. Where might we have filled the spaces, the gaps, and the margins with the doing instead of the being.

I’ve started clearing those obligations from my Fridays—not to make room for more doing, but to make space for being. To let the quiet speak. To let my time off actually be time off. To remember that rest isn’t what we earn after the work is done—it’s what makes the work, and the life, worth doing at all.

Know a therapist, teacher, helper, doer, thinker, feeler—or just any human who could use a reminder to reclaim space for themselves? Share this with them. It might be the medicine they need—or at the very least, the spark for a meaningful conversation.