All Vibes Are Welcome Here

People tell me that they feel the “good vibes” that I put into my jewelry. I hear this all the time. I feel grateful to connect with people through my art, but to be honest, this used to completely perplex me.

I’ve experienced many things in my life…especially in the past decade. It’s been a roller coaster of emotions and experiences as I’ve navigated recovery, divorce and learning to be on my own and self-sufficient. Through this period of intense growth and learning, my life has become a perpetual practice of looking within and peeling the proverbial onion.

I came into adulthood with my only coping skill being to try anything and everything to change my outer circumstances in an attempt to address what could only be dealt with by looking within. That didn’t work out so well and it backed me into a corner where I could choose to either really look within or lose everything.

Faced with that choice, one tends to get serious about their growth. Fast forward nine years and, I now live life completely differently. I used to have absolutely no clue what was going on inside of me. I was so numb that I didn’t even know when I was feeling something, let alone WHAT I was feeling.

Today, I have a few tools and I try my best to use every encounter, circumstance and thought I have as a sacred reflection of my inner world. A world that was once completely outside of my awareness. It is still pretty beyond me much of the time, but now I feel like I have a flashlight to show me at least part of my inner landscape.

Living this way has led to some intense pain. There have been times when I’ve had emotional and spiritual crises that have coincided with very important projects and events. Crises that in the past would have been handled by fleeing in any way, shape or form that I could. But, this always happened with the "big stuff". The commitments that I knew I both wanted and needed to follow through on. During these crises, I had to find a way to feel what was showing up and not run. 

So, back to the good vibes…It used to confuse me when people would tell me they felt such good vibes from my work. I mean...I got it, but at the same time some of the work that they were getting the feels from were ones that my tears were literally falling on as I crafted them in the previous weeks. There have been many times that I was an absolute wreck in the days and weeks leading up to markets. Times when I could barely get out of bed because I was so gripped with terror or paralyzed from processing my earliest experiences that had been buried for decades.

I always thanked people for their kind words and felt deep gratitude but I would be perplexed. Until one day it finally occurred to me that what they were feeling as “good vibes” or “love” was actually the honesty and presence that I was bringing to my life. At some point in my growth process, I had made a shift to actually sitting with whatever came up in me and doing my best to just let it be without telling it that it needed to be different. I learned to trust that it would pass when it was time, but that it was vitally important to just sit with some things. THIS was what was being felt by people when they encountered my work. People are touched by honesty and presence deep inside in a way that they most easily know how to interpret as “good vibes” in our modern day jargon.

I love to feel good. I love good vibes. I think it’s amazing that more and more people are living in an intentional and conscious way in order to foster more love and positivity in their lives. At times, though, with so much focus on feeling good and the plethora of beautiful spiritual memes out there (yes, I've created my share), it can risk feeling a bit overdone and surface-y.

For me, good vibes can NEVER be at the expense of allowing  and being with what is showing up right here, right now. Sometimes that’s an amazing connection I make with someone through my jewelry, sometimes it’s sitting with and feeling the terror of past trauma that has been coaxed from its familiar hiding spot in my body, and sometimes it’s simply cleaning up spilled food that one of my kids has neglected to notice they left all over the kitchen counter.  This honesty and willingness, this opening to the allowing of “all vibes”…feeling what I’m feeling in each and every moment…THIS is what people feel in my jewelry. THIS is what leads to “good vibes”.

The willingness to just be with “what is” right here, right now is what I ultimately hope people are inspired to experience in their own lives and in their own ways. If my art allows me to fully share this most sacred of moments with a fellow human being, then I am truly sharing my “good vibes” with the world in a way that feels very good to me, too.