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My just-poured tea is still too hot to sip. My legs are dotted with mosquito bites in various stages of itch and scratch. And the smoked Maldon salt in the green glass bowl on my coffee table is sweating.

It’s hot and humid here! (I may be a girl with simple tastes, but I do keep a bowl of bougie salt within reach pretty much anywhere I might eat! 😂)

Sometimes, when my husband heads to bed earlier than me, he says, over his shoulder, “Gonna watch your cheffies?”

He knows I love MasterChef Australia. It’s my safety show. It’s comfort. There’s something equally entertaining and inspiring—and yes, so co-regulating—about that Aussie show for me (free on Tubi, at least in upstate New York).

When I start a season and don’t know the contestants—sometimes not even the judges—I’m full of opinions: who I like, who I don’t, who seems too entitled, who’s too self-effacing (what are they trying to hide?), who’s whiny, who tickles me in a heart-throbby way (hello Australian chef and multiple-time guest judge, Shannon Bennett!).

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But as the season progresses—and especially as I watch contestants face challenges and pressure tests—my opinions soften (though never the pitter-patter of my heart for Shannon). Invariably, I end up loving pretty much every contestant.

I want them all to succeed: the underdogs, the dark horses, the smart-asses, and the returning favorites…

If I had to boil down what I love most about MCAU, it’s this: friendliness. The show feels so real and human. And on my hardest days—when I feel dysregulated and battered by the news, especially when the latest notification intersects too closely with my own history of growing up in a strict, fundamentalist religion (now Christian nationalist)—I lose myself in MCAU.

I’m a foodie. Though it’s not lost on me that food is both my joy and my struggle. It makes sense. Food, as far back as I can remember, was reliable comfort. Now, as someone in ongoing recovery from an eating disorder and diet mentality, I continue to practice friendliness with it all.

There’s that word again: friendliness.

Practicing friendliness—even in moments when I don’t feel particularly friendly—has changed everything. Friendliness implies relationship, whether with qualities I don’t like, or with old survival patterns that still, on hard days, rise up to try to keep me safe, even if their data points are outdated.

Last week I received a text from a family member—a short message filled with concern for the state of my soul. As a missionary kid raised to believe that the fate of anyone’s soul is the only thing that really matters, I should be used to it.

But as the day went on—and then the following night—I found myself quite upset, with anger definitely in the feeling-mix:

Anger at my family member who sent me the message, and anger at the orange man driving our country into the ground—the very man that people I love and share DNA with voted for and, I’m sure, still defend.

How do I reconcile so many triggers and tangled feelings?

• Noticing, with friendliness, just how irreconcilable it all seems right now.
• Noticing, with tenderness, how heartbroken I feel.
• And then—after watching one too many episodes of my cheffies—getting up after a sleepless couple of hours to give my heart a pen.

Hello, I’m here. And it feels so good to write to you.

More than anything today, I wish you friendliness. Because at the end of the day—and at the too-early start of some days—friendliness is a giant cue of safety.

In nervous system healing terms:

Friendliness helps your body soften. It signals: It’s okay. You're safe (or safe enough) right now.

We don’t have to look far in our world to see how people act and react when they don’t feel safe. So thank you for bringing even a moment of friendliness to yourself, and in that way, to our world.

If you want to drop a line and tell me where you are and how it is for you—whatever your “it” is—I’m here. And I read every note.

With love,

xoHeidi

PS Did you grow up pushing down anger because “good girls” don’t get angry? Were you taught that saying no was rude or disrespectful?

I made you a friendly freebie:

👉🏼👉🏼👉🏼 Click HERE for “10 Ways to Say NO (without guilt, ghosting, or over-explaining)”

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