Last month I took our girls to see the Pixar movie Inside Out 2. We’re all huge fans of the first movie, so were excited to see the sequel. If you’re not familiar with the storyline, Inside Out follows an 11-year old little girl named Riley who moves with her family from a small midwestern town to San Francisco. Leaving the comforts of her friends and beloved hockey team brings forth difficult emotions she’s never felt for lengthy periods of time – fear, anger, sadness and anxiety. As Riley, a Type A perfectionist, tries to tamper down these feelings and put on a brave face and smile for her family, they begin to spiral and take over her senses of joy and excitement – until she learns to open up.

The beauty of this movie is that it teaches kids the importance of tapping into emotions rather than ignoring them, and to know that positive and negative emotions are part of life’s journey. And it’s ok. The brilliance of this movie is that each emotion is represented as a funny, animated character in Riley’s “Mental Headquarters” – her mind. It’s a lesson about opening up, about finding your way back to joy after a fall, and about taking care of yourself.

Just before this movie, I was listening to my favorite podcast, “We Can Do Hard Things,” with author Glennon Doyle, her wife Abby Wombach and sister Abigail Doyle. In the podcast they were discussing what they’re currently watching, reading and listening to. Glennon, who normally writes beautiful non-fiction books on life experiences and observations and reads self-help novels said the coolest thing. She said she was enjoying an era of fiction “because I’m trying to move towards a life of juiciness, of joy and comfort and luxuriating and indulging and cozy and soft and deliciousness.” And I just loved that because we don’t spend enough time in these spaces. In fact, we often feel guilty when we step away from self-induced pressures to do things that make us happy. And this is when we, like Riley, experience unwanted feelings like anxiety and sadness.

So remember it’s important to work on the inside in order to to enjoy the good stuff on the outside. To feel all the feels without judgement and give ourselves the time and space to rest, to heal, to cry, to be upset and find our way back to the light. We are here to live and live well. So give yourself permission to do more of what feels indulgent – it’s called self-preservation. To enjoy the comfort and cozy and the joy in little things that make you smile.

XOXO, Heather