what are you willing to release in order to renew your own life?
affirmations for change
originally published on substack 03 june 2025
Attilio Codognato. Skull Earrings in Memento Mori: Jewels by Attilio Codognato at The Serge Sorokko Gallery.
i know i’m not alone when i say life has been ripe with change lately. so much of it has been delightful and so much has been deeply stretching, intensely challenging, and has asked me to reflect on some of my deepest held beliefs to be clear on what truly feels like mine these days.
the moon went new last week shortly after the entrance of saturn into aries, which will be its new home (minus a brief return to pisces) until mid 2028. as chani said, “we beg[a]n a two-and-a-half-year boot camp for achieving our goals. But the path to the finish line won’t be straightforward.” “it’s training season,”1 have you been feeling it already, too?
there’s been an enhanced mix of beginnings and endings since then. but such is life.
there is no fresh start without the ending of the old.
there is no new life without the dying of what was.
even in the birth of a child,
the new parent/s must sacrifice the world they knew on the altar of the life that’s been made.
so, too, do the seasons live and die in succession, like the snake devouring its own tail. there is always a dying that is inherent to truly living. releasing one season of your life and letting it become the next.
sometimes it asks for mourning, for rejoicing, for tenderness, for strength. sometimes it asks for all this and more.
to sit in the quiet and learn yourself anew.
to allow all the sensations of new life, changing life, overtake you.
to make room and time to compost the old so that it can feed what now is true.
it is not always (or usually) ‘easy’ to go through the many deaths and rebirths that living asks of us. and in this time where we have been so ripped from the natural rhythms and cycles of nature, it has become easier to believe the falsehood that it’s safer for one to avoid the endings that give way to greater living.
please know i understand.
i, too, have run from this metaphorical death more than once.
just like the swallowed sadness that sometimes comes when we feel the heat leaving the summer sun, we’re often taught to ignore and deny rather than make the space to say goodbye. encouraged to press that pain down somewhere in the tepid dark where it slowly festers and morphs, yet can’t quite return to the soil as we’ve plasticized it before burying it in our earth.
if you know anything about composting (which our beloved planet does on every scale), you know it’s only that which is made of earth that returns to the soil. once you swath it in plastics, wrap it in the concrete box of fear, or in the thick metal capsule of holding time, then no matter how deep you entomb it those feelings/beliefs/sensations still have a way of carrying on.
that’s why when change calls upon us, we must do the work.
we must dig and notice, uncover and listen.
we must ask ourselves what is the life that’s truly mine and how do i offer forth the remnants of what was to nourish that which is becoming?
because it is in the brave tending to the tenuous moments of dying and birthing, changing and releasing, that we most uncover ourselves.
in boldly facing what has been—what we’ve done or allowed or participated in— we can beat the final boss and realize the great wizard of oz is just a man with a machine.
the real power of unifying ourselves with who we truly are is in remembering that real life has always been in our hands.
that we are far more powerful than we learned to believe.
that we carry all the potency of this earth within us and so we can build and grow and release and renew just as our dear home has always shown us to do.
✨affirmations✨
- everything i need is within me
- i trust myself
- life is on my side
- i am strong enough to change
- i am brave enough to grow
- i am always becoming new
- the pain will not destroy me
- this pain will transform me
- i release my old wounds
- i continue growing even when i’m scared
- i believe in myself
- i believe in myself
- i believe in myself
- i can do anything
instagram post, june 2, 2025