LiveWork Blog
If you’re like me, you sometimes feel like you’re living in a fog, seeing the world with fuzzy edges and hearing conversations in muffled tones. When in this place of confusion, I rely on my journal to create direction out of the darkness.
Here are some basic tips to start of journaling from confusion to clarity.
Meditation doesn’t have to be something formal, with rules and rights and wrongs. Give yourself the gift of the present, but just taking time to reside fully in the present. Giving yourself an opportunity to bring your attention to Now, helps energize and ground you. This is a great place to start a Journaling session. Ground yourself with these few deep breaths and this body awareness and answer the following,
Life is hard enough, why do we have to be so hard on ourselves? If we’re generally pretty good at being kind to, and having compassionate for, others, what’s the deal with that mean inner monologue?
Scientists believe that one reason is due to our “negativity bias”, wherein we evolved to be constantly scanning our environment for danger, training us to orient to what is, or potentially will, go wrong. Retraining something at integral as evolutionary hardwiring is not easy.
To that end, it’s helpful to have a bunch of self-healing tools at the ready. Here are three tools that may come in handy.
You can’t necessarily judge your mental health by your emotional ups and downs. Feelings are important and definitely have a lot to tell us, but they are always colored by "the stories we tell" about our experiences. Mental health is about experiencing a full range of our emotions without denying, shaming, or becoming overwhelmed. Emotions are innocent, it’s what we do with them (i.e. "act-out") that can get us in trouble.
I’ve always learned by failing, like getting lost in a new neighborhood, in order to find my way around (pre-Google maps!). But, this can come at a cost to my self-esteem, as I’m constantly in what Brene Brown calls “Fu*king First Times”.
To get me through the feelings of being a stranger in a foreign land, I’ve had to focus as much as possible of my WHY. Why did I want to make this course/book? How do I wish to change the world/give back to my community? Focusing on my why (mostly) gets me through the rusty machinations of the unknown.
My WHY : Creating and delivering inexpensive and accessible mental health tools to as many people as possible so they can take charge of their own healing.
There are a lot of advantages to having extended family close at hand (it takes a village!), but it would be helpful to understand that it will also bring some challenges. Here are some tips for mindfully navigating a smooth transition.
1. Self-Compassion…
2. Nuclear Family Meeting…
3. Establish Ground Rules…
One myth, stubbornly persistent in our culture, is that needing therapy means one’s mentally ill. In reality, most people seek out therapy for what I like to call emotional coaching. A holistic therapist serves as a translator between heart & mind, helping create a pause, between stimulus & response. Therapy does not have to be about what’s wrong, but about uncovering all that’s right.
