During one of my Vipassana retreats,
I remember the teacher saying something that stopped me in my tracks.

He looked around the meditation hall, smiled gently, and said:
“Look at all these presents—anger, resentment, jealousy, fear…
I don’t want them.
You take them back.”

At the time, I chuckled quietly to myself.
It made perfect sense.
Of course — why carry what isn’t mine to hold?
Quickly, in my mind, I handed everything back.
All the ways others had hurt me, disappointed me, misunderstood me.
“Here. These are yours. Not mine anymore.”

It felt empowering.
Liberating.
A clean, clear boundary.

But then…
As I sat longer in the stillness,
as the hours turned into days,
a deeper question rose from inside me — soft but insistent:

What about the presents inside of me?

The anger I tucked away.
The resentment I clung to like armor.
The fear I coddled and fed in the quiet corners of my heart.
The ones I kept hidden, even from myself.

I realized with a sharp ache:
It wasn’t just other people’s pain I was carrying.
It was my own.

And suddenly, the invitation wasn’t just to hand things back.
It was to look inside.
To see what I was still clutching in the shadows.
And to do something infinitely harder and more beautiful:

To take my own presents back.
To hold them in my hands with tenderness.
And then—
to set them free.

Releasing the Unseen Baggage 🕊️

It’s easy to focus on what others have given us.
The hurts. The betrayals. The heavy energies we never asked for.

But what about what we’ve given ourselves?
The harsh self-judgments.
The buried shame.
The walls we built out of survival that later became cages.

Those need our attention too.
Our love.
Our forgiveness.

This is the real work:

✨ Sitting with the anger until it softens into sadness.
✨ Holding the fear until it dissolves into trust.
✨ Honoring the resentment until it transforms into clarity.

Not rejecting these parts of us — but meeting them.
Loving them.
Letting them teach us what they came to teach.
And then, when the lesson is complete—
setting them down.
Releasing them back into the river of life.

The Gift Inside the Gift 🎁✨

Every emotion, even the heaviest ones, carries a hidden gift.
A message.
A mirror.
A map back to wholeness.

When we stop running, stop numbing, stop pretending —
and choose instead to lean in,
to listen,
to breathe —
we find something extraordinary waiting on the other side:

Freedom.
Compassion.
A love that holds everything, even the messiest parts.

Today, I’m still taking my presents back.
Still unwrapping them, one by one.
Still releasing what isn’t truly mine to carry.

And you?
What are you ready to take back today?
What are you ready to lay gently down, with love?

Come walk this journey with us inside the Slow Secrets Tribe.
This is what we do there —
we sit together in the realness,
we breathe through the heaviness,
we rise lighter, truer, and more alive than ever.

💖 Start your journey here:
🔗 slow-secrets-tribe.kit.com/starthere

You are not alone.
You are not broken.
You are becoming. 🌱

With infinite love,
Julie Spark 🌸