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3x/month stories for humans seeking depth and meaning.

I'm Janelle Hardy and at some point you signed up for this weekly (ish) newsletter on memoir-writing, somatic (body) healing and stories. If you'd like to leave, just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom.

"He's got that Hardy strength"

or, when we need an antidote to our gifts.

I've been having an aunty summer.

My eldest niece and my eldest nephew are both eight, so I told my sister and my brother to send them to me for a week in the city. We had a grand time.

Cooking together (buttermilk biscuits), walking to my community garden to check out the status of the different berry bushes we could snack from (raspberry, gooseberry, currants, mulberry, sour cherry, thimbleberry, salal berry). A few big city adventures (Science World, the Aquarium, PNE/Playland).

I find kids between the ages of eight to eleven spectacularly sweet, curious and darling.

They've emerged from early childhood with clarity, a solid sense of self and enough common sense to be self-motivated without endangering themselves. They're not yet in the fog of puberty. They're curious about the world.

It's a combination that's so fun to be around.

And, because I'm pretty devoted to my 4x/week weight training classes, I also brought them to my gym during their visits.

My niece packed her art projects with her but mostly swung around on the wooden rings.

I assumed my nephew would do the same, or read his book.

Instead, he joined in on every workout we did, hustling to increase the weights, irked that I was holding him back. He did 25lb plate hold situps, which is what I, and most of the men were doing. And boy, is he powerful. S T R O N G.

I told my sister-in-law, his mom, and she off-handedly said 'oh, he's got that Hardy strength!'

But then, am I surprised? No.

My daughter, at the age of six, anytime the subject of strength came up, would regularly wrap her arms around my knees then lift, hoisting my full weight of 175 lbs up, then hold me there as I shrieked.

Strong is an archetypal energy in my family. Natural strength has always been an unearned gift of my body and my mind.

Hardy strength, yes. My dad, the OG Hardy, only survived his close-to-death cancer diagnosis and high speed medivac to Vancouver, then his next year of treatments, because, as his doctors said, he had powerful organs and a strong body.

But it's the MacKinnon lineage who're the truly sturdy, hardy powerhouses. My aunt Joni held the Sourdough Rendezvous Festival's women's flour packing contest record for decades.

Family members have survived hard living lifestyles well past 60.

But again, am I surprised? Nope.

My ancestral lineages are mostly people who survived doing hard physical labour. Poor, peasant class, farmers and labourers and tradespeople from rugged landscapes.

Strong can be a brittle trap though.

In my family, strength and an ability to endure, has long been praised. It means toughness, loyalty, independence. It precludes vulnerability and expressiveness (except in the service of telling a good story).

Strong hasn't allowed for many other ways of being.

Some of my growth and learning has come from recognizing this and cultivating antidotes to strength.

Antidotes like flexibility. Tenderness. Crying. Expressing need. Orienting to pleasure. Joy. Delight.

And continually catching the ways in which I'm defaulting to being 'strong' when I could choose differently.

Interestingly,weight training is helping me how to properly rest. Contraction needs expansion. Effort needs replenishment. And when I push myself as hard as possible, there's no option in my mind and body but to release and relax.

This is a very, very different dynamic than 'always on'. Always tough. Enduring everything. Pushing through, eternally.

I share this because we all have personal/familial/cultural patterns we get stuck in.

So how do we get unstuck? How do we find our antidotes? This is the personal, transformational work.

And, because my work with you is about healing through the body, story and words...

This is the work that generates great story. Playing with the tension of expansion and contraction. Building up in tension, then releasing.

So, find these patterns. find these stories. Then write them. There's bound to be some fantastic ones just waiting to get down on paper!

xoxo,

Janelle

PS - Save the dates! I am SO EXCITED about the next online summit I'm producing: the Dirty, Messy, Alive: an Embodied Memoir-Writing Workshop Series.

Explore memoir-writing from start to finish and learn from 25+ skilled memoirists and writing teachers - with sessions on outlining, overcoming writer’s block, craft, revision, promotion and more.

September 26-29.

PPS - The dates for the next live round of my transformational memoir-writing course, The Art of Personal Mythmaking, are set. We start October 29th. Seats are limited and I only teach this once a year. Enrolment is now open.​

PPPS - Madison Nees of Ritual Body is offering an online workshop on navigating conflict and anger this weekend. It will be recorded if you can't make it live. Sign up here.