self-compassion

Why I Let Go Of My Fear Of The Comments Section

April 2, 2019 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

I’m taking a course right now which is requiring me to do something I usually avoid like the plague.

No, it’s not dairy or gluten, or high fructose corn syrup. 😂

It’s reading the comments section!

I’m being prompted every day to read and interact with other students in the comments.

At first, I flat-out dismissed the idea, and with good reason.

I’m not into keeping tabs on what other people have to say when I’m taking a course. I’m trying to learn, not find out what Sara from Idaho thinks about what we’re learning.

I don’t want other people’s opinions in the mix while I’m taking in information from the experts. Right now I’m learning from a world-renowned psychologist and meditation teacher, and I don’t want anyone or anything getting in the way of me absorbing every last ounce of what she has to share.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the fact that the comment section scares the shit out of me.

I’ve had a small yet effective-at-freaking-me-out sampling of shitty comments over the years.

Misogyny from both men and women? Check! Ego driven passive aggressive grossness? Check! People who don’t even realize they’re being assholes? Check!

Mix mucho passive aggressive responses with a bevy of volatile life experiences, and you’re going to get the blinks whenever you perusing the wall of potential ignorance that is the comment section.

So those are some legit reasons why I feel compelled to avoid the comments. It’s can be volatile territory; a gathering place for ignorance and aggression.

I feel this duty to myself, in the name of love and kindness, to not entertain that kind of stuff. I don’t want to give it my energy any more than I already have in this lifetime.

But this course is really poking at me and pushing me to dig into that discomfort. I mean, it’s a course about facing your fears. If ever there was a time to face them, it’s now, right? 😂

Yet still, I began the program by wanting to avoid the comments in the course.

Except its part of the program to look at them and contribute to them, so I HAD to stop avoiding them. AHHHHHHH!!!!

An initial “hard pass” on perusing what other people have to say has recently turned into engaging a bit, which has turned into me possibly changing my mind about reading comments altogether.

The catalyst for my shift? The responses my classmates offered to the question, What are your fears?

The answer everyone gave, in both direct and indirect ways, was the Fear of not being good enough.

In this case, comment sections like the ones in this course help us realize that our fear experience is not an anomaly.

They help us realize that fear is not solely our own experience, it’s a shared experience.

When we are free of the belief that our fear is an anomaly, we are unburdened by a great degree of heaviness.

Case in point, consider the degree of fear you’re carrying when you believe the lie that you are alone in feeling afraid.

To believe you’re alone in your experience, you’d need to believe that you’ve got a serious abnormality – an inherent deficit going on. So you’d end up with the initial fear, plus the fear that you’re alone, and then the fear that you’re intrinsically flawed.

That’s a lot of heaviness to carry with you! No wonder you’re tired and anxious all the time, right?

After reading the comment section in my course, it’s clear to me that a lot of our fears can easily be proven wrong.

My mind wanders to imagining the degree of transformation that would come if we all dug into working towards becoming conscious of the fact that EVERYONE is afraid of not being good enough.

In this case, reading the comments can help us disentangle from the lies we tell ourselves about our fear experience.

It’s not “Our” fear, but “The” fear – A fear felt by the collective.

If we became deeply aware of this truth, we wouldn’t feel the need to be so harsh to ourselves and others when we felt afraid.

We could let go of some of the judgment we carry. Wouldn’t that be amazing? 😍

Becoming deeply aware takes work, of course.

Meditation is required. Our brains are wired to focus on judgement first and foremost.

It takes a commitment to keep coming back to noticing fear through meditation in order to change the default setting within us.

But it is absolutely possible to experience a great amount of peace through this work. I am proof of that!

Some days will be smoother sailing than others. If you’re not sleeping well, or have the flu, or someone’s behaviour is triggering fear within you, it can be hard to stay the course, and tough to remember how to be kind to yourself.

But there’s an instantaneous self-compassion catalyst I’ve shared with you today, that you can reference whenever you’re feeling lost in fear:

The memory of all those comments, posted by people from all different backgrounds and ages, courageously admitting to their deepest and darkest fear:

That 9 times out of 10, they are afraid of not being good enough, too.

You are not an anomaly, you are part of the collective. Therefore, you are not alone.

Also: You are loved. It’s non-negotiable.

Struggling With Guilt Over How You Reacted? This Might Help.

January 7, 2019 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

You want to be loving. You really, really do. Especially with that one person who reliably displaces their fear and frustrations onto others.

You affirm your patience. You ask for guidance. You seek solace in your beautiful, heart-led intentions to be a generous and loving human being.

But you miss your mark in their presence, and quickly hone in on hopin’, and wishin’, and thinkin’, that you woulda’, coulda’, shoulda’ done better.

Good news: Guilt is a sign that you need to prioritize self-kindness.

After a less than stellar interaction with someone whose very presence is an emotional trigger, you need love. Because if you can’t be around someone without pain attempting to do the thinking and speaking for you, you’re still reeling from the past.

To heal from the past you need high-frequency feelings pulsing through your body, mind, and spirit, like love.

Love is…self-compassion when you miss the kindness mark in the company of certain people.

You know the ones I’m talking about…

We don’t need to try to eradicate our guilt. Nope. Nadda. Not productive.

We just need to notice guilt’s priceless message: “Psst! We need some self-compassion in here, Stat!”

Love up on yourself when guilt makes itself known. Notice it and breathe into it. Acknowledge your humanness and the timeline of trauma that has a tendency to interfere with your intentions to be kind on every occasion.

And vow to try again next time. 🙏🏻

This one’s tweetable:

Being kind to others might be your goal, but unless you make self-compassion a priority you'll always miss your mark. Click To Tweet

And this one’s Instagram ready. Right click & Save to share:

It’s never up for debate: You are loved.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger from Pexels

Advice For Difficult Seasonal Transitions (From A Chronically Seasonally Depressed Human)

September 3, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

Seasonal transitions have always proven to be tough for me.

I love the sun. I thrive when it’s warm outside. When the temperature drops, and it’s no longer weather appropriate to be bare-legged in a lounge chair with my computer, notebook, or latest non-fiction obsession, I enter into a period of mourning.

I don’t anticipate quite the difficulty as I’ve had over the past few years, but I’m still a bit weary. I’m not sure what will come about when the skies get grayer, and Vancouver Island starts to live up to its reputation as a rainforest.

I’ve recently upped my belief in the fact that everything is going to be OK, and that I will be OK, no matter what happens in my life. So that’s comforting when I start to feel uncomfortable with all the changes weather wise.

But that doesn’t mean the transition to fall isn’t capable of rocking me to the emotional core.

Something inside has a tendency to fight what is this time of year. It’s prone to clenching and refusing the universal need for the leaves to fall, the temperatures to cool, and the diminishing amounts of sun to be available to baste my body.

Something within doesn’t want to accept the changes.

I experience a lot of uncomfortable physical symptoms in the fall, too. Digestive issues (Will spare the details and you’re welcome for that); super dry skin; heavy depression; intense anxiety: all of them come on strong and are hesitant to let up on demand.

Remembering that everything is temporary when experiencing all the discomfort is, well, comforting. Sitting with how I feel isn’t. Letting things get emotionally messy is messy, and I don’t like messes.

But the alternative, of looking to the not so recent past and feeling bummed out over how fast the summer went, and wishing and hoping for more time in the sun, always proves to be a tempting, albeit terrible, idea.

Until I’m ready to see what was with lightness and look at summer with gratitude instead of fear over its passing, I need to leave it where it lay. I need to get to acceptance of what is first; Acceptance of right now. And I always get there, but not until I go through what feels like a spiritually led mourning period.

I believe this: That there is more to the struggle I feel during the seasonal change into Fall than just the passing of summer; That the feelings are too heavy and deep to be from missing my favorite river or lakeside spot alone.

Regardless of the origin of my feelings, my goal this year is to get outside the realm of discomfort over what is with greater speed. I don’t want to set up shop with depression and anxiety. My plan to make sure that doesn’t happen?

Do things differently than I’ve always done them during the seasonal transition.

If you’ve read much of what I write about on the blog, or in the twice-a-month-ish emails I send out, you’ll know that doing things differently is what I’m all about these days. Because doing things differently is the key to emotional growth.

Which is why recently I’ve been scanning through the last couple years, to the times when seasonal depression and anxiety started taking up square footage in my body like a great dane in a studio apartment. Not with a critical, self-shaming eye, but a clinical one. And I’ve asked myself:

What did you do when you struggled with difficult seasonal transitions in years past?

Here’s what I came up with:

I stopped posting and connecting with people on social media. I couldn’t think of anything positive to write about or share, ’cause I felt so down, so I just stopped posting altogether. I was gone long enough that friends started messaging me, asking if I was OK. So I isolated myself from my community and it definitely didn’t help me out.

I ate shitty food. Gluten much? How about Gluten too much. Plus dairy, pork, canola oil, corn, refined sugar, and salt: You name it, I ate it when I was feeling depressed. I’m a huge follower of the medical medium and have seen incredible results from following his suggested eating plans via his books, which you can read about in this post. So I know from repeated food-related emotional and physical upheaval throughout the year that September is not a good month to be trifling (Damn, I love a good trifle) with all the stuff on my “Don’t Eat This Stuff” list.

I was less active. Recovering from drug and alcohol addiction and the depression and trauma that fueled them taught me that when I’m experiencing heavy doses of depression I need to move my body. Which is tough because when I feel depressed I don’t want to be active. Case in point the last few years, when I dialed back my work out routine substantially in the fall, ’cause I had zero motivation. Needless to say, not doing anything made me feel worse.

I ran from my feelings by buying stuff. The last few years I’ve done a fair bit of running. Not around the block – I’m talking running from how I felt via emotional purchases. Tons of cash spent at the vitamin store for supplements in order to fix how I felt; make-up counter visits in hopes a new product would make me feel (and look) better; a surplus of books, some of which haven’t even been cracked yet: none of it helped. It just kept me busy while siphoning my savings account. Yuck.

I didn’t take time to be grateful. I was so consumed with fear over how uncomfortable I felt that I couldn’t see how it could ever get better. I stopped practicing being grateful and it made things way worse.

After all that investigating, it became clear that I needed a plan this year. Even though I feel like a different person – stronger, more empowered, and grateful than in years past – I still need to be ready, in case the same symptoms come about again.

So I made a plan for the transition to Fall and it goes like this:

Remain open to my community. I’m going to share what the transition teaches me on social media and on the blog. I’ll be mindful of the delivery, ie, keep my heart open, and ensure I share empowering yet honest content. And I’m going to make plans with friends, for the near and faraway future, instead of hanging solo all the time. Adding fun stuff to the calendar always feels good, no matter how far away it is (TGFJ = Thank God For Jen, who likes to plan ahead like I do.)

Write it out. I’m going to use how I feel as content inspiration for my blog, my book, and my workbook. This is a good chance to get introspective about what I’m feeling.

Not let depression make choices for me. Depression isn’t something I need to be listening to for health advice, so I’m not going to listen when it makes the super shitty suggestion that I numb my brain with entertainment shows, lay in bed all day, shop away my feelings, or eat bags of cheddar popcorn. Nuh-uh. Nuhhhh-uhhhhh.

Up my healthy eating game. The proof is in the dairy-free pudding (I’ve never tried making that but it feels like it’s google worthy): Shitty food equals a shitty frame of mind, body, and soul. I’m going to cut out the crap when I feel like crap and keep my house stocked with healthy foods so it’s easier to dismiss depression’s suggestion that I start eating cake at every meal.

Move my body. This is one of those cases where I have to get tough love-ish with myself: Even if I don’t feel like doing anything when I’m feeling down and out, I need to do it anyway. I’m not saying I need to sign up for CrossFit (though if that’s your thing, go get ’em, babe.) I’m saying move my body a bit, ie, walk around the block, or do one beginner yoga class per week – something that gets the blood flowing. Nothing good comes of stagnation, mentally or physically. I know this VERY well. Lighter equals, well, lighter. And I’m not talking about my waistline. Everything feels a little less heavy when you make time to move your bod.

Sit with my feelings. I’m going to notice when I feel like running by eating or shopping and sit with my how I feel instead. I’m going to go all Buddha on that “Hey – you should do this thing that will make you feel worse!” suggestion that I KNOW will be coming my way on the regular. Will it feel great to sit with how I feel? Not likely. But it’s temporary, and the sooner I am courageous enough to do so, the sooner my discomfort will pass. (I wrote more about this idea, of sitting with your discomfort, in this post.

Meditate more often. One of my Instagram friends, @remindmeditation, recently said: “Meditation isn’t hard. Learning organic chemistry is hard. Winning an Ironman is hard. Giving birth is tough AF. Meditation is easy. You can meditate.”

And Jaylee is right: You can meditate. We can all meditate. And while I don’t think meditating for long periods of time is easy, I DO think we sabotage ourselves by saying it’s too hard to even attempt. I do it to myself sometimes, particularly when I’m feeling depressed, and that’s an everyday meditator admitting that.

A way around the “I don’t want to, even though I know it’ll help me” is by lowering the bar. Making 1-5 minutes of meditation the goal is much less daunting than trying to force 20 minutes when you’re just not that into it. And it makes it more likely that you’ll actually do it. So less self-sabotage + more doing what feels doable = self-care, self-love, self-empowerment. The math checks out. I checked it.

Seasonal transitions can be tough. What makes them even tougher?

When you don’t have a plan to deal with the issues that might come with the changing of seasons.

Experience has taught me that waiting until things get hard is not a good plan. Having a plan is a good plan.

You might need to look at what didn’t work for you in the past, like I did, to sort out what helps provide relief, empowerment, and motivation when times get difficult.

One thing you can do right now? Share something you plan to do this year, to help you mentally transition into fall in the comments below.

You never know who you could be helping by doing so, so please take a moment to share your thoughts. And after that grab a copy of my One Minute Meditation Guide, which is a great tool to add to your Fall Wellness toolkit.

Now, I’m going to give Fall, cause it’s truly here on Vancouver Island, a warm welcome, even though it’s not exactly warm, and offer a reminder to you:

Be kind to yourself during seasonal transitions. It’s so very human, to struggle during times of change.

The Business of Being Kind To Yourself When You Feel Terrible

May 1, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

When you feel crappy, you might instantly get worried and wonder, “Is this terrible feeling mine to own? Is it here to stay, forever?”

I used to go that way about any and every feeling that was tough to sit with. Insta-crap (you know what I’m talking about, the “my life is perfect, #blessed” only accounts) has given feeling anything other than happy and grateful a shitty label, serving up the dysfunctional belief that if we are not happy and grateful all the time, then there’s something innately wrong with us.

In reality, having a bad day is part of the human experience.

When we take ourselves on a jaunt down “I’m a bad person for feeling bad” lane, we suffer more, and so do the people around us.

Everyone has bad days. So enough with the “no bad days” bumper stickers already, Mmm-kay?

We have to have hope. That is, we need to put our hope eggs in the “this too shall pass” basket, instead of the “the fact that I feel shitty means there is something really wrong with me” bin.

I want us to get in the business of being kind to ourselves, and being kind looks like us acknowledging that bullying ourselves for feeling terrible is unproductive.

Take some logic to the self-bullying, and ask:

“Am I human?”

“Is it normal to have days where not happy when you’re human?”

In case it isn’t clear, the answer to both questions is yes. Now, if you’re feeling unhappy every single day of your life, that’s a different story – one that I’ll be discussing in my upcoming book (yes I’m writing a book – sign up for my newsletter for updates.)

But overall, being kind to yourself means not discriminating when it comes to your feelings. It looks like you, allowing yourself to feel the full spectrum of emotions, not just the ones you prefer.

Being kind to yourself means allowing yourself to be human.

I talk more about this subject in my One Minute Meditation guide. Sign up for my newsletter below and I’ll send you access.

Why Sleeping In Separate Beds Saved My Marriage

April 19, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

If you’d told me a few years ago that I wouldn’t be sleeping in the same bed as my husband anymore, I’d have panicked and assumed my marriage had fallen apart.

But today I celebrate it because I know it saved our marriage.

My hubby and I shared a bed for years and it proved to be an excellent contempt builder. He’d do flips in lieu of rolling over onto his side. It was the worst. Let me tell you, it’s VERY hard to look at someone with love in the morning when they woke you up/scared the shit out of you for 8 hours straight.

I was no angel myself. I was constantly on the move, trying to find a comfortable position, lambasting my guy with sleep-induced martial arts in the process. I was also notorious for yelling obscenities in my sleep. 😬 Suffice to say I probably deserved a restraining order, but instead received regular “Good Mornings” through gritted teeth.

I’m happy to report that these days things are way more copacetic between us, and I’m less sleep ragey thanks to therapy. I’m also happy to be finally sleeping in separate rooms because our sleeping arrangements were taking a major toll on our mental and physical health.

Once I got realistic about the factors that were contributing to our problems (see below), it became clear that there was no way around it: we had to sleep in separate beds.

The hubster is 6 foot 3, and + or – 200 lbs (depending on the season) and takes up a lot of space and blankets.
I have always found it very hard to sleep next to someone. This has been going on since childhood, and being married wasn’t going to make it go away all of a sudden.
We have an intense emotional connection. When one of us is struggling to sleep the other one picks up on it. We notice this even when we sleep in different rooms.
I experience chronic body pain and move a lot throughout the night. It’s better for me to sleep solo, so as to not disturb others, or be disturbed myself when I finally am getting some Zs.

A solid inventory of excuses, yet still, it took me a really long time to warm up to the idea of separate bedrooms.

I was white-knuckled to the idea that it meant our marriage might be doomed. When my girlfriend told me about all the looks of pity she received from her co-workers when they found out that’s the way her and her hubby roll, I made immediate assumptions, “Maybe it does mean there is something wrong with her marriage, and she’s just hiding it,” I thought.

But there was no denying the fact that I was totally fucking miserable and she seemed content with her choice – happy, even.

I also found it extremely fascinating how I, and so many other people I knew, appeared to take such issue with where a married person chose to sleep, in their own house.

Why did it have to be synonymous with marriage problems, I wondered, after perusing my 4 legit-as-hell reasons for the hubby and I parting ways at bedtime.

So I started to chip away at my beliefs about what a healthy marriage entailed. I started to question my dust-laden, less-than-ideal ideas and their ability to support my relationship and wellness goals.

And when I started to entertain the truth – that I get to define what is healthy for me and my relationship – it made changing my slumber locale that much easier.

Disengaging with the need to uphold dysfunctional societal norms, and realizing the importance of separating my physical self from my hubby when it comes down to the holy grail of health and wellness – a good nights sleep – is what made our marriage work.

We were less annoyed with each other, and we were happy to see each other in the mornings. Totally foreign concepts until we decided to pull the plug on co-sleeping.

This situation further reiterated what I know without a shadow of a doubt: Self-care is about setting your own rules.

People might have opinions about what you’re doing and make aged assumptions, but the truth remains: Life get’s really exciting when you realize you get to decide what works and what doesn’t work – for you!

If you’ve labeled something “bad” that could actually bring you a lot of happiness, you can choose to take another look at it and put it in the “good” category.

You will likely need to do just that because there are so many old school beliefs that are totally useless. The only thing they contribute to is us being miserable, yet we keep believing them because it’s what everyone else is doing, and we are afraid to step outside the norm.

But guess what exists outside the norm? Exceptional stuff. I’m talking about self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-love: the stuff we all dream about, yet will never tap into if we keep doing things the way “they” say we should do ’em.

You might be worried about what other people might think like I was for a spell. And you might be worried about what might happen if you don’t follow the norm. But here’s the deal on all that noise:

You need to get comfortable with other people being uncomfortable with your choices, and you need to get used to challenging the beliefs you hold that are causing you to suffer.

We ALL need to get used to defining our own wellness standards and reworking the stuff that ain’t cutting it anymore.

Redefining our personal standards for wellness is what self-care is all about.

That being said, I challenge you to take a look at something you’re doing that’s not making you happy but you’re continuing to do out of fear of how it might be perceived by others.

Something you think you might get some pushback on via assumptions or looks of pity (barf right?) but YOU KNOW it could bring some serious peace and joy into your life if you did it anyway.

Right now, I want you to forget about what the neighbors, your parents, your co-workers or your friends might think, and just do it.

Right now. Or, at bedtime. 😳

Heads up: if you were a subscriber to my newsletter this content would look familiar because I jacked it from a recent email I sent out. And you’d have a book recommendation from me.

PLUS: you’d be on the list to get a free copy of my One Minute Meditation Guide when it’s ready to go.

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In Defense of Taking Things Personally

April 9, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

I’ve had two health care professionals tell me I should read The Four Agreements over the past few years. Must have been something about what I shared with them that had them thinking the book would help me.

When someone tells me I should read a self-help book, it kinda makes me want to tell them to fuck off, depending on the day. No one likes a stranger coming to an assumption about what their issues are. In my humble opinion, I prefer my unsolicited advice from people I know and trust, if at all.

But I ended up reading it because one of the suggesters lent me a copy. hah!

I didn’t love it enough to buy it, at least not yet. I did, however, find the principles to be solid, and now that I think about it, I would consider throwing it in the basket next time I’m at a bookstore (I haven’t ordered from Amazon since I found out the dude that owns it was a Trump supporter. Plus I would way rather touch a book before I buy it. That’s right: I wanna get touchy-feely with a hardcopy more often ‘cuz it feels good.)

So I read part of the book, and this line stuck in my head because it irked me:

“Taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness. It makes the assumption everything is about me.

I get that we cause ourselves pain when we take things personally but I also know the value of the feelings associated with taking things personally.

They act as a catalyst to investigating why we feel upset. And we need to understand why we feel how we feel.

We enter tricky and potentially damaging territory when we shame ourselves for feeling upset about how someone treated us. Especially if we’ve spent our entire lives believing that how we feel isn’t OK.

Self-help books are great. I am a full-time seeker of wellness, which means I’ve always got a new one on the go.

But these kinds of books can get dangerous, particularly if they motivate us to jump ship on feeling our feelings.

We need to make sure that anytime we attempt to better ourselves, whether it be through a book or a course, we don’t abandon our right and need to feel how we feel.

There’s a lot buried within our feelings. For example, maybe you take things personally because you’ve spent your whole life feeling like who you are, as is, is never enough. If that’s the case, validating your feelings is not a luxury, it’s a necessity if you’re to establish the self-love you weren’t taught to feel for yourself as a kid.

And Self-Love is the basis for all healing and emotional evolvement.

Getting defensive is just you trying to protect yourself. The fact that you want to protect yourself is a good thing. We don’t want to bury or dismiss it because a popular book suggested it’s an undesirable way to feel.

We want to unwrap it and give it some light and air, so it can be acknowledged and processed.

It’s one thing to admire a piece of writing or a popular wellness concept. It’s an entirely different thing to throw self-compassion out the window by denying how you feel.

Your feelings tell a story. They give voice to trauma, both known and unknown, that you experienced throughout your life.

Your feelings are born of your life’s experiences, which started at birth, and, some would argue, from the day of conception (Check out the documentary In Utero. It’s rad.)

Is it selfish to take things personally? Maybe. But the hurt still exists and needs to be investigated.

Think of getting upset by other people’s action or choices as a chance to get better: “I need to figure out why this is hurting me so much.”

And work on accepting the truth that feeling angry, sad, betrayed, annoyed, disrespected, or devalued by the way someone treated you doesn’t mean you are a sub-par human being.

It means you’ve got some hurt you need to process, just like everyone else.

These worksheets on my resource page are a great way to start figuring out how to process that hurt.

♥