Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers and wellness disciples. I am celebrating ten years of blogging this week. My, how things have changed since 2006. In the early days I blogged on an old Yahoo platform before it croaked. The content back then was almost exclusively limited to running, racing, travel, and my struggles to recover from domestic abuse and old emotional baggage. From there I bounced to another blog platform that died out as well but it contained lots of creative writing, poetry and daily narrative essays. From there I bought my own domain, built my own website, imported every sentence I ever wrote, and wrote happily about whatever was on my mind on any given day in daily diary style. Before long my website’s service provider decided to phase out the blog feature so I had to go shopping for a yet a third platform. But on and on I wrote.

When I had purged myself of poignant memoirs a whole bunch of the remaining content was about yoga teacher training, opening my own yoga business, teaching public classes, battling the yoga business establishment, defiantly opening my own school, getting disenchanted with the elitism, money-grubbing, and fear-mongering, and then quitting the business. By I was already here on WordPress but I had three different blogs going (or not going) and no fulfilling objective for any of them.  I floundered around for a while, making messes, cleaning them up, and wallowing in the process of writing things just because I couldn’t stand not to write. One day I reached a saturation point with it all and pulled the plug. Wiped the slate clean. Full stop. Not a reset; more like a realignment. A blogger born-again, if you will.

That’s when I decided to start over and write with a defined purpose. I opened this blog and dedicated it to the practice of wellness:

• personal
• professional
• physical
• emotional
• spiritual
• financial
• social
• intellectual

The discipline and structure has been good for me and it has allowed me to funnel my creative energies into writing a novel. The wide scope of wellness has kept the focus from feeling too restrictive. I have far fewer readers than I used to have but I write less to perform for an audience than I used to, so it’s all good. I write to inspire people to practice. Not to achieve—to practice, and to respect the practice as a practice, not just another goal or program or outcome-based strategy.

The 366 Days of Self-Portraits project was a year-long practice in the therapeutic process I began with Vivienne McMaster’s Be Your Own Beloved course. I had no idea that it would be the catalyst which prompted me to break up with social media, but in hindsight, of course it was. When we cultivate self-love we also end up cultivating self-truth (truth-telling to and about ourselves), self-regard and self-study. Cultivate one and you cultivate the others, intentionally or not. I wasn’t just going to grow. I was going to grow up.

As this project winds down I’m finding less that I need to say about it because the benefits of the practice are leading me to conversations about other things. There is also a clock ticking. When I no longer have a weekly submission of Tinas to keep the blog from languishing between posts, I’ll have to produce other content. Other wellness-related content. It’s good to reconcile with that pending change now and start making peace the uncertainty of it.

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For now, these are the images from my practice this week.

As you are gobbling turkey and giving thanks, receive some from me (thanks, not turkey) for the time you spend here with my offerings. I used to characterize serendipitous finds of wisdom from the Universe as kicking over rocks and discovering something remarkable beneath. Thank you for kicking me. I hope what you find here supports your practice.

— Geyser Shagbolts