 Ahhh….there’s nothing more enticing than an open span of time and a good book. This past holiday break, I did a lot of reading. For fun mostly. I read what I like to call “brain candy” books, you know...the kind of books that don’t have a lot of substance, but are a fun read, full of silliness, mystery and adventure…?
Right now, I’m reading some sci-fi books that are a nice distraction for the daily grind. I’m having fun! I’ve always been a reader, even as a little kid. It was rare to not find me with my head buried in a book, whenever I wasn’t outside or roaming around the neighborhood. Books have always been a HUGE support for me both as distractions and escapes but also as teachers and guides. There have been so many wonderful books in my life, that I’ve decided to start sharing some of my favorites with you each month. I love learning and am constantly doing so, so from time to time, I might throw in a podcast, movie, piece of art or music with you too. Today though, I want to share a little bit with you about one of my earliest formative books that I read when I was an adolescent; a book that was a powerful impetus of change in my life. The book is Alice Koller’s story, “An Unknown Woman”. This book was so powerful for me that I read it several times in a row because it touched me so deeply at a young and impressionable age. I remember finding this book around the time that I was an adolescent and not only struggling with the impact of all the life changes hitting me, but also the impact of my parents’ impending divorce. Being disillusioned about life and its ability to improve (for a variety of reasons), I came across this book and was initially intrigued because of its cover: a woman walking along the beach with her dog. For me, it’s always the first few sentences that either grab me or do not and as I flipped this book open, I found myself drawn in immediately. I think that what blew my mind the most was that this is a story about Alice’s own grappling with the big life questions of “who am I’, “why am I here”, “how do I live”, “what is motivating me”. It is the story of her courageous journey inward, in which she chooses (chooses!!!!!!) to leave behind everything that she’s ever known, in an attempt to find herself. I had never come across anyone that lived as honestly and passionately towards themselves as Alice described in her story. There is so much that impacted me from this book, but one of the things that I admired the most was her willingness to put it all on the line. She shared about the need to give everything up in order to start over with a life defined by herself and what she really needed to be satisfied, not by the prescriptions and dictates from society and other people. Unbelievable. Much like shelling along the beach, Alice described stopping at every place in her life, turning it over to understand what that experience was about in order to make an honest, authentic and brave decision to hold on to it or clear it out to make room for something new and more fitting. What was so compelling for me was that she was willing to do this all alone too. She chose to rent a cottage by the sea, learn to rely on herself and her own supports, along with a new puppy that she adopted for companionship. As she tore back the layers of her life that had helped her survive until then, she shared about having no “old way” to go back to and how frightening and disorienting this was to her. I understood this process in some deep unconscious place inside of me. This practice deeply resonated. I didn’t know it at the time, but what she was referencing was the process of moving out of role layer and into a place of deeper connection with herself. It’s what growth is all about- being willing to leave behind the comfort of the old and familiar ways in order to deepen one’s experience of being alive. One of my favorite selections in the book is at the beginning of page 200 in which she says, “I haven’t really lived this life that’s lasted thirty-seven years. I’ve only played at living it, pretending I’ve been alive, saying and doing things to let other people believe that I’m alive. But the joke’s on me. Because now that I’ve stopped playing the game, there isn’t anything real to take its place.” Wow. Incredible. At this point in my life as a pre-teen, I had never considered that there could be more layers to life than what I had experienced so far. This blew my experience WIDE open. And was kind of frightening to consider too. If there was someone out there, grappling with how to become more ‘real’, then there was a chance that there was another dimension of me that I hadn’t even begun to tap into. I wanted that for myself. Which is why I read this book over and over and over at that time in my life. It became one of my earliest conscious supports that helped bolster me and move me through life during a tumultuous time. I am forever grateful to Alice Koller for this book and for sharing her story of going inward and deeply searching for the person she was meant to be in this lifetime. I truly believe that this book had a deep impression upon me choosing to become a psychotherapist for my life’s work. I believe that the choice to become a therapist was already within me and that upon discovering this courageous story, this book helped me bring it to light. Definitely one of my top 10 books in this lifetime. I am in a professional training program that requires me to travel out of town once a month for weekend long training workshops. And because of the pandemic, like most events these days, this in-person experience went virtual back in the fall when it resumed after summer break. Initially, like many, I questioned whether or not I wanted to get involved in this again this year, or just take a year-long hiatus until it would be possible to meet again in person. I mulled it over because, like many of you these days, I spend most of my working hours in front of a screen. And then to connect with friends or family in my personal time, it also requires me to be in front of a screen. And I knew that virtual connection with these folks would pale in comparison to the in-person interactions that I had become accustomed to.  On top of all of this were my own personal issues around connection and how easily disappointment can be energized inside of me whenever a connection takes place that doesn’t feel meaningful or fulfilling. And whew, talk about virtual connection being a poor substitute for real, meaningful, in-depth, face-to-face connection. The opportunities to get triggered through this kind of interaction were vast. My biggest concern was that by being forced to virtually participate in these experiences that typically have been deeply fulfilling in person, I would stir up the old, deep disappointment and longing inside of me around how much I needed a meaningful and deep connection in childhood and often didn’t get this need met. I knew this because I’ve done quite a bit of deep emotional healing work around this very issue.  It took me quite a long time in my own personal process to even be able to recognize that this unconscious desire to avoid these kinds of situations that had the potential to be disappointing was really about my childhood, not really about what was happening in the present moment. Simply said, my desire to avoid the possibility of being disappointed by a present-day virtual event was not really about the here and now. Crazy, right? Avoiding the possibility of stirring up painful feelings from childhood was the real source of my declining present-day events with meaningful people and experiences. It was one of the unconscious ways my spirit had organized to help me manage the deeply painful experiences of needing real connection (as defined by me and my personality type) and not getting it. Interestingly, even armed with this knowledge, it wasn’t enough to encourage me to sign up for virtual events. Which I found incredibly fascinating, but not surprising. This is the perfect illustration of how a cognitive understanding of your emotional issues is not enough to heal the issues inside and lead to lasting behavioral change in your outside world. The healing of these kinds of emotional issues is a deep internal process that transcends time and consciousness. It’s deeper than words. It’s older than time. Words and affirmations just aren’t going to cut it in terms of changing these ingrained patterns. In fact, they’re likely to keep you stuck. In order to deeply change and heal unconscious emotional issues, you have to get beyond your brain, beyond talk and cognitive understanding, beyond your *story* and back into the experience of what happened. Only in this way can you heal it at the same level it impacted you: in your body, in your energy and in your spirit. And this the only way to resolve something in your life, once and for all.  One of the fascinating outcomes of this pandemic that we are all living in, is that by being forced to socially distance and engage with others virtually, this arrangement is providing everyone with an incredible opportunity to learn about your own unconscious energetic and bodily experiences of attachment and bonding. Everyone has an incredible opportunity right now to learn about your deeper emotional world and how your connection / bonding / attachments affect you at a deeper, energetic and physical level. In case you weren’t aware, connection with others affects us physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, cognitively and so on. Given that most connections, other than those with folks in your household are virtual, it’s the perfect condition in which to explore how the quality of your connections have the ability to affect you physically and emotionally in a variety of deep ways. Bear with me for a moment and I’ll explain. I noticed the other day, after participating in “ZOOM” calls with several different groups of people in my life, a significant difference in how I was feeling physically, emotionally and energetically after each call. (This observation wasn’t necessarily a conscious or intentional effort, it’s part of living mindfully in each moment and just *what I do* most every moment of my life.) What was fascinating for me to recognize (not just in my brain, but more importantly in my body) was how different the experience was in my physical body after each of these virtual calls. In one case, I felt expansive, supported, open, excited, solid, grounded, peaceful, full of life and ready to take on the world. I could feel that experience as the dynamic movement of energy throughout my body. My body felt relaxed and at ease. In the other case, I felt small, closed down, defended, hardened, insecure and ready to give up my most essential internal body organ if it would just make these unpleasant feelings go away. And yes, I could feel this as the experience of tightness in my muscles and body structure and deadness in the energy of my body. It was fascinating. In one case, my body and energy felt alive and bright with high vibration and in the other case, my body and energy felt very dead and blocked, with a very low vibration to it. And that’s when it dawned on me: THIS is the body experience of the difference between how deep and meaningful connection impacts me physically, emotionally, spiritually, energetically, and so on and how dissatisfying connection has the capacity to wipe me out in all these ways too!!!!!! WHOA. It was the perfect real-life example of how the difference in the kinds of connections I bring into my life can either ground and center me or knock me out of my center. So what I had was a powerful experiential physical recognition of the difference (energetically and physically) between satisfying bonding and dissatisfying bonding creates. Powerful. Experience. Indeed. Like many consciousness-building experiences, I didn’t recognize this happening as it was happening. It wasn’t until a few days later when this deep awareness came together inside of me, around how it physically feels different when on the receiving end of satisfying support and connection and not. Here’s another interesting part to all this: this deep attunement to your body/mind/spirit is how you were born and designed to operate in the world. Unfortunately, you live in a world which values logic, objectivity and rationale. In many parts of society, being disconnected from your body is rewarded and seen as a sign of strength and prowess. No pain, no gain, right? I’m telling you though, if you truly want to be happy and satisfied in this lifetime, it requires you to connect back to your body in a deep and energetic kind of way.  Your body never lies. It will always guide you towards more satisfaction and away from dissatisfaction. That is if you know how to listen and decode its wisdom.
So, to start working towards that, you might try this little experiment next time you have a virtual call with someone or groups of someones: Afterwards, take a moment to check in with your body and your energy levels. Write down as many words, phrases or descriptors that you can come up with to describe how you’re feeling after the call. 5-7 minimum. And then start doing that after these calls or virtual interactions. Begin to notice any patterns or interesting experiences that you have. Take it a step further then and as you get comfortable describing how your body feels, actually close your eyes and let yourself feel these experiences in your body. It’ll be an interesting way to start learning more deeply how you respond physically, emotionally and energetically to the types of connection you’ve cultivated in your life. And wouldn’t that be a nice thing to begin to pay attention to? When meaningful connection of any kind is at a premium right now, wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to more finely-tune your time available to connect with others so that you could be sure to bring in as much support as possible? I sure think so, but then again, that’s *what I do*. https://youtu.be/Akq0xeu-RHE Hi everybody! I wanted to share a little bit with you about some upcoming changes that are happening in my business and in my life. Like many of you, I’m experiencing ZOOM “fatigue” and am continuously finding ways to cope with this. I realized the other day that I spent 75% of my waking hours engaged in some kind of screen activity or another. And it’s taking its toll in many ways. Yet, because virtual contact is the safest way to connect with others these days and because I firmly believe that “some” contact being better than “no” contact, I remain fully committed to finding ways to stay engaged virtually with others.  If my options are “disconnection and isolation” versus “virtual connection and contact”, I’ll stay connected virtually over feeling isolated. What some of you might find interesting is that even though I am an introvert and love my alone time to recharge, I am also a feeler and get energized by deep and meaningful connection with others. So, I am finding that since my reserves run out more quickly due to all the computer and screen time and virtual connecting with others, I don’t have as much left over when my days are done. The one thing that this pandemic and all my “Zoom fatigue” has caused me to do is to reflect more deeply on where I am putting my time and energy so as to be more intentional with my efforts. And what I have remembered about myself is that I want to “do less” while “showing up more”. So, what does this mean?  First of all, I’m going to be sending out less emails. You might get an occasional email here or there from me when something really juicy needs to be shared, but overall, I’m going to roll back the amount of emails to once or twice a month. As far as my social media posts and efforts, I’m going to reduce the number of platforms that I post to and again, follow the “less is more” equation. I’ll still do videos and Facebook lives, but the frequency is going to change. For the meantime though, I’m going to close all my Facebook groups and just focus on my business page and email list until I get more clear on how I want to move forward with a facebook group down the road. My Facebook business page is where I’ll post videos and Facebook “lives” and such, just so you know. Less is more you know?  Two and a half years ago, I dove into the “online” swimming pool and began to build an online presence.
The promise that I made to myself two and a half years ago was that I would dive whole heartedly in these efforts, learn what I could, experience what opportunities came my way and experiment with building an online presence to see what I could learn in order to help me get more clear about how to move forward. Go all in. 150%. And then when my time was up, I’d pull back, re-evaluate and reflect on these experiences and use them to guide me in my next steps. And that time is now. I’m excited to change some things up and refocus on what feels really important and essential right now: supporting myself and others through my work that I do in my therapy practice and business. In order to provide the level of care and fidelity that I want to bring to my work, I’m going to do less so that I can show up more. That said, I’m not disappearing entirely from the online scene. I’ll be around, just in a more refined, substantial and clear way. In the meantime, in order to not miss out on any of the really “good stuff”, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve “liked” and follow my Facebook business page. I also encourage you to sign up for my email newsletter if you haven’t yet. This will ensure that you stay informed about any upcoming events, programs, offerings or free supports that I continue to create and share. To sign up, you’ll have to go to my website, scroll to the bottom of the page and enter your email to sign up if you haven’t yet. Bottom line is, what I really hope that you take away from this today is how much I really appreciate each and every one of you. YOU are what makes this community great. I appreciate all the participation in my Facebook groups and my virtual summits, reading my newsletter and responding. I just love all the personal comments I get back from you all in my email. A big thanks to those of you who read and share my, blog posts, emails and so on. I plan to continue to do these things, just in a much more scaled back and focused approach. Less is more. I’m focused on scaling back what I do so I can be more present in what I choose to do. So, stay tuned. There's lots more to come. Stay safe and be well. I don’t know about you, but these days, it’s easy to feel stretched thin. There are just so many things going on in the world, responsibilities, tasks, it sometimes feels like it’s impossible to keep up. And that makes me want to just unplug and take some time for myself. Many people feel guilty for focusing on themselves and not taking care of everyone else’s responsibilities/needs. Ever wonder why this happens? You tend to feel guilty for taking breaks if you’re burned out. And most people get burned out because there is something about being busy, too busy in fact, that actually serves an important, albeit unconscious, purpose in their lives. The constant feeling of stress and feeling like you can’t catch up can make you feel like there’s something you should be doing, instead of taking a break. And guess what this does…? It distracts you from having to feel something more uncomfortable that is requiring your attention deep down inside of you. It’s true. Keeping busy, especially when the busy-ness is having a deleterious effect on you is always about staying away from having to deal with some underlying issues demanding your attention. The work will always be there. It’s not going anywhere. Not balancing rest with work absolutely hurts you in the long run. So take breaks!!  And how do you avoid that feeling of guilt for taking a break or taking some time off? Deal with your underlying issues causing you to stay so busy all the time. And since these underlying issues reside in a place where there are no words, you’re going to need some help accessing them. Talking about your problems is radically different than actually accessing them, dealing with them and clearing them out. Oh, and while I have you, taking care of your mind and body is so incredibly important during these stressful times. So here are some free resources I’ve created just for you!  Get ahead of the upcoming flu season and download my free guided imagery, Boosting Your Immune System! It’s a powerful tool to help create safety and protection on a cellular and molecular level from any viruses, illness, or toxins. And it’s incredibly relaxing.
Or if visual journaling is your thing, check out my free resource, Scribble Your Way to Sanity, an interactive and experiential livestream designed to help you make sense of all the emotional and mental mayhem currently going on in the world. Either way, take care of yourself during this time, and DO NOT feel bad about doing so. So…I'm not usually the kind of person that sends out emails to promote programs or services from others. It's not that there aren't some incredible resources out there, it's just that I'm not interested in selling anything to anyone. That said, I couldn't resist sending this email out about a program that I personally have participated in multiple times and can get 100% behind to support. Especially these days. It is incredibly important, now more than ever, to take care of your mental and physical health. Did you know that these things are not mutually exclusive?!?!?!? (They’re not.) These days it may seem like it’s difficult to manage keeping both in check, but boosting your physical immunity is essential step in taking care of your mental and emotional health. Whether you approach wellness from a physical standpoint or from a mental or emotional perspective, both avenues are portals to deeper emotional healing. One of the easiest ways to support your physical immunity is putting some time and attention towards how you fuel your body. (Yea, I’ve been doing the *pandemic eating* too…) To that end, my friends Tess Masters (The Blender Girl) and Karen Kipp (The Juice Goddess) have the most amazing 14-day cleanse that they lead four times a year, and the next live group starts soon on November 6th.  Forget what you’ve heard about “cleanses”. You will not be doing anything extreme, like starving yourself with wilted lettuce leaves and food that tastes like wet cardboard, and being hungry all the time. And you also don’t need to purchase any expensive supplements! The Decadent Detox is very different. This cleanse is gentle and super effective to help improve digestion, get better sleep, gain more energy, and lose weight. And here's the best part: this 14-day cleanse is a LIVE-guided program. So, Tess and Karen participate in the cleanse with you (and the other participants) around the world in real time. So, essentially, you have two personal health coaches available to you for two weeks! For those of you who don’t know this about me, my background before mental health, was in physical education and nutrition. I’ve seen a lot of health and nutrition programs, and let me say that the quality of this program is unparalleled: the quality of the recipes, the health information, and the support. They pour time, energy and attention into every single person with such a high level of knowledge, care, and enthusiasm. That is the secret sauce, and why people get such amazing results.  I LOVED doing this program. In fact I love it so much I’ve done it six times now over the past couple of years!!! You can check out exactly what is included in the 14-Day Cleanse here! Take a peek, you won’t regret it. When you take care of your body, you are taking care of our emotional well-being as well. Your body is our truest source of information about your feelings and if your body is trying to tell you something, listen and take action to address it. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get healthy and end this crazy year on a strong note. I want to see each and every one of you living your best, healthy, strong life!  Being a business owner and working for yourself seems to be a hot topic in 2020. In the age of social media, most of what you see is a highlight reel, not the whole picture. People don’t share their lows or their worst days on social media, and it creates a false perception that their lives are perfect. As a business owner myself, I can tell you that’s just not the reality. It’s not the reality for any regular person, but as a business owner, there is a lot that is left off of social media. Now, I am in no way discouraging you from becoming a business owner or working for yourself - it’s talked up so much for a reason! But it’s better to be aware of some of the struggles you may face ahead of time, so you can be prepared and have an easier time overcoming them. I mean, that’s really what my Facebook community - The Rite Type Coaching Group is all about, business owners helping each other out. We’d love it if you joined!  You may go on Instagram and see tons of people working for themselves, living their best life, at least that is how it’s portrayed on social media. But that didn’t exactly happen overnight.
Working for yourself often means starting from scratch, and building from the ground up, which can sometimes take a long time before it becomes profitable. One of the greatest things about working for yourself means unlimited vacation and flexible working hours! But sometimes, that means that the balance of work and life becomes very blurred and hard to gauge. Sure, you can take a week off whenever you like, but if you’re running the entire business by yourself that means you may need to work double hours the week before or after, just to keep things running. Flexible working hours are great for if you’re the kind of person who likes to work in blocks of time, take a break, and continue working. Keep in mind though, that the “working hours” definition gets kind of messy, and you may find yourself working at odd hours that you normally wouldn’t. Again, I don’t want to discourage you from starting a business or working for yourself; it absolutely comes with many benefits. However, like anything else, it also comes with challenges, and it’s always helpful to start something knowing those challenges upfront. And even if you have faced some of these challenges already, just know that success is not possible without some sort of growth opportunity. Trust me though, it will all be worth it in the end! These days it seems like the week days and weekends are just blurring together. Remember way back when, we used to be able to take a spontaneous trip if we wanted to...? Remember? For me, one of the hardest parts of the pandemic situation is that you can’t really plan very far into the future because well, we don’t know what the future will be like. So, it’s sometimes hard to find things to look forward to in the same way that it used to be. I mean, geez...the past 7 months have kind of blended together.  I have a few tips to make your weeks exciting again and feel a tiny bit of “normal”.
Hopefully these tips will help make the days seem more “normal” and not blend into each other so easily. And you don’t have to make big life changes all at once! Even introducing just one good habit, and slowly introducing more, will make a world of a difference. Seven months into the pandemic and with no end in sight, many people have been feeling a sense of unease and upset that goes beyond anxiety or distress. For many, it's a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the enjoyable things you regularly do. And seems to be there constantly these days, no matter what you do or how you support yourself. There’s a deep sense of feeling lost and disoriented that is plaguing many people these days. What you are experiencing right now is ancient. It’s called “acedia” and is linked back to Medieval monks who were plagued with this listlessness too.  Acedia is the sense of no longer caring about caring, not because one has become apathetic, but because somehow the whole process of caring becomes blocked and all jammed up. On the face of it, you quite likely care very much about the health risks to those you know and even those you don't know. Alongside this, though, is a sense of dislocation, an anchorless-ness that somehow interferes with how you care. Think about it this way... If you’re like the rest of humanity, everyone assumes that there will be a future world that survives your particular lifetime, a world inhabited by people similar to you, including some who are related to you or perhaps even known to you. We probably even have envisioned it somewhere deep inside, even though we’re not conscious this has happened. Though you rarely pay attention to this deep assumption or even acknowledge it, this presumed future world is the horizon, or the anchor, towards which everything you do in the present is oriented. Philosophers have studied how losing one’s horizon (the future how we thought would exist) impacts one’s day to day activities. And what they found was that the things that you value start to lose their value. Your sense of why things matter today is built on the presumption that they will continue to matter in the future, even when you, yourself, is no longer around to value them. Your present relations to people and things are, in this deep way, future-oriented. So, given that most of us have lost our sense of what the future will look like, this sense of dislocation, melancholy and listlessness makes sense then in this current Covid-19 reality. The origins, then of our current, dislocation and listlessness is not the literal loss of a future but a more subtle and unconscious disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which just going on in the present relies.  “Moving around” is what we do as humans and for that we need horizons. Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don't notice them consciously very often.
So, if you’re one of those people feeling listless and having a hard time accomplishing anything much, you make sense. There’s a very good reason why this is happening. Naming this malaise may seem more trouble than it's worth, but actually, the opposite is true. When we name something we replace ambiguity with form and structure. We suddenly make the invisible, visible. This is powerful. What these religious philosophers also discovered about the ancient acedia experience by the Medieval monks was that struggling through it in isolation aggravated the experience ten-fold. Isolation makes everything worse. It still does today. I get it: connection is changed too. It’s not possible to be in person with others in the same ways that we took for granted pre-pandemic. I, too, am exhausted and getting burnt out from the day to day ongoing connection through a computer screen, over a telephone line or through texting or chat messaging. And yet folks, this is reality now. If connection via a screen is all we have right now, then we have to begin having “real” connection, real conversations about the things that are truly happening all around us. This is what’s going to reduce your sense of feeling lost and anchorless. Once you’ve done that, you’ll begin to recognize our current experience of acedia is a problem we need to tackle together -- across political and cultural lines -- as families, communities, nations and a global humanity. Which means doing so in acceptance of our shared vulnerability, finding ways to connect with each other and weather this storm in real and authentic connection, rather than suffering each on our own. I’m going to let you in on my #1 trick for managing stress during these highly stressful times… Ready for it? Turn off your phone. Get outside. Stop doing anything except for what you want to be doing. I know, crazy right? I don’t just lock my phone and put it in another room or put it on “Do Not Disturb”, I literally turn it off for 1 hour. (Or more sometimes!)  Let me explain why. Technology has advanced exponentially in such a short amount of time, which has been wonderful, and given us so many avenues of communication, 24/7. However, this can get distracting and even intrusive at times. Turning off my phone even for just 1 hour per day allows me to have a true separation from notifications, social media, emails, etc. rather than trying to take a break, and seeing the notifications pile up. Now, I know what you may be thinking: Are you crazy!? You may think that by literally turning your phone off, people won’t be able to reach you, you may miss something important, etc. But let me just remind you: it’s just for 1 hour. Especially when you are feeling stressed, that 1 hour can make such a difference. If there is a true emergency, there are still other ways of reaching me, but for the most part - most things can wait 1 hour. And I can’t tell you the relief I felt when I went to habitually check my phone, and it was a black screen. I could even feel the relief as a physical experience in my body: my shoulders and stomach relaxed and I could breathe more easily. The dilemma with our phones is that, especially if you work from home, even when you try to take a break by taking a walk, you may be using your phone to listen to music or a podcast.  Sound familiar?
But that means that your phone has to be on, and even if you have some notifications on “Do Not Disturb”, the little red number on the app still adds up. This is soooooooo anxiety inducing, knowing that while you’re on your break, the work is still piling up. Kinda undermines the whole intention of a break if you think about it. Turning off your phone - completely off - for just 1 hour per day can help you get the relaxation that you truly need. Give it a try and let me know how it goes for you. I just love experimenting like this! Right now, self-compassion is more important than ever. The truth is, even if you don’t know anyone personally who has been affected by COVID-19 or many of the other global issues going on right now, you’ve had to adapt to a completely new lifestyle. I really dislike the notion of, “Well, I don’t have it as bad as ____”. Just because the worst possible thing is not happening to you doesn’t mean you aren’t experiencing a difficult time. It might even be that your difficulty is completely unrelated to the pandemic, and that is okay. If one of your closest friends was feeling down on themselves, and feeling guilty for not being as productive as they could have been, how would you react? You’d probably say something like... “It’s okay, we are all facing something completely unprecedented right now, no one is expecting you to be operating at 100%, that’s just unrealistic.” Sooooooo….. Why wouldn’t you extend yourself the same kindness?  Self-care doesn’t always have to be bubble baths, music, and candles.
Sometimes self-care is as simple as treating yourself like you would a friend. It can be very difficult to make this mindset shift, however, it is one of the most useful techniques in self-compassion. Next time you’re feeling disappointed in yourself for not finishing something, or just feeling exhausted from everything, imagine a close friend is in the exact situation. What would you say to them? It’s really not fair to yourself if you treat everyone in your life - friends, family, strangers even - with kindness and compassion and don’t treat yourself the same way. Even if it may seem obvious, sometimes you can get a little lost or stray from this habit, (I know I’ve been there!). And sometimes all you need is a little reminder to be as kind to yourself as you are to everyone else. |
AuthorKate is an INFJ-3 on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Enneagram. Archives
May 2021
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