My Blog
Tools and strategies for owning, valuing,
and celebrating your life.
Self-care gets tossed around as a hot-button topic in the world of personal development, yet many people are confused about what it really means. If self-care looks like bubble baths, yoga classes, or treat-yo-self spa days, how on earth do you realistically add these practices into your life, let alone afford them?
Here are my top ten strategies for stopping anxiety in its tracks, reducing the power it has in your life, and for taking charge when everything feels out of control.
It’s difficult to know when you’re lying to yourself. Here are five common lies that keep you stuck and questions to help set you free.
“Survival mode” happens when you have a dysfunctional relationship to the self-preservation instinct. Rather than truly providing food, shelter, safety—you catastrophize and generalize about possible futures. In this state, you’re a hamster on a wheel, always hustling to outrun the bad-guy, never gaining ground.
Valuing yourself is a brutally courageous act. It's raw and vulnerable and sometimes it takes the strength of eighteen hundred elephants to speak it out loud.
Most of us have a natural compassion towards others. We see someone struggling or suffering and it's our human nature to want to extend a hand, to offer loving kindness and to want to help. Yet, when we look inward, many of us struggle to offer ourselves the same kindness.
Self-compassion means to extend love, friendliness and acceptance to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. To some extent, self-compassion also has the meaning of trusting oneself - trusting that we have what it takes to know ourselves thoroughly and completely without feeling hopeless, without turning against ourselves because of what we see. Self-compassion is a form of faith: a faith in the way we hold our conversation with life.
The Dalai Lama says that having compassion for oneself is the basis for developing compassion for others. When we have learned to have compassion for ourselves, this leads us naturally to unlimited friendliness toward others.
An emotional trigger is an emotional response that is out of character from your typical behavior. A trigger is something that sets off a memory or flashback, subconsciously transporting you back in time. When you're triggered, you're no longer responding to the present situation. Instead, you're running old software, unwittingly trying to repair your past.
