selflove

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

Thoughts About Things Falling Apart

August 3, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

It’s Friday and it’s been one hell of a week. Maybe you feel the same?

Personal issues that have my heart feeling like a yo-yo? Check. Mercury retrograde getting me feeling a certain shade of yikes? Check. Sleep issues? Check.

I can’t help but feel like things are falling apart.

What do we do when things feel like they’re falling apart? I know what I used to do: Make a home in my pain. I felt the return of that act this morning. I was drafting a response to the awful response from the other party in a lawsuit I’m in the midst of when I felt a familiar sort of uncomfortable radiating from my stomach.

It felt constricting, and immediately took away my desire to eat or drink, and yet, I kinda liked it.

It made me feel shaky and sick like I wanted to throw up, yet still, I kinda liked it.

It was volatile, and wavered with intensity depending on the tone of the words I either typed or erased in the document I felt consumed with populating.

To be blunt, it felt fucking terrible, yet still, I kinda liked it.

So I asked myself the obvious: “Why do you like this? Why are you continuing to do this, even though it is causing you to suffer? What is happening here?”

I didn’t wait for an answer or try to diagnose it. I just stopped typing and the feeling went away. And when the idea came up that I should continue to type, the feeling returned.

“Not like this,” I said to myself, though the words didn’t seem to come from me.

I realized then that I was so very, very tired of trying so hard at things that caused me so much emotional turmoil. I was tired of digging my own emotional grave, and I wanted to continue my commitment to doing things differently.

Different to me means not causing myself harm; it means being unwaveringly kind to myself, no matter how other people might treat me. Choosing to take this path dictates that whatever brings me the opposite of that pit of dread responding to an essay of lies and personal attacks initiated is where I need to go.

So I erased the parts of the letter that were harsh, and replaced them with words that were lighter and more loving. And yes – I sent love to the person who tried to minimize me with misogyny.

This is a moment if there ever was a moment; This is profound; This Oprah “aha” worthy.

I am very, very proud of who I am and the strength I have uncovered through my research and my commitment to doing things differently. Every step I’ve taken has allowed me to witness my pain, instead of allowing pain to run my show.

I make the choices now – Not pain, and not other people who are in pain, either.

I am so very grateful for my capacity to forgive, even in the face of unwavering efforts to minimize me. And yes, this week has had some challenges – the last two weeks, really – but it’s all worth it because of this moment, and my capacity to sift the good from the unsavory.

That said, I truly care about all of you. I don’t need to know you personally to wish you well and remind you with my whole heart how important it is that no matter what you do this weekend, you be loving to yourself.

In the face of confusion or feeling like things are falling apart, self-kindness is the answer.

❤️

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Clarity on Freethinking

May 18, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

There’s something revolutionary I’ve learned over the past couple years, and that is that an emotional reaction is not freethinking.

It’s insanely important for us to understand the need to separate our feelings from our actions. For example, I can say I’m freethinking, while ALSO being racist and void of empathy.

I can speak my mind, and attempt to house my inclination to do so under the umbrella of freethinking while ALSO ignoring the motivations for why I feel the need to speak my mind.

We get angry, annoyed, and frustrated with self-anointed freethinkers.

Case in point, a certain musical artist lighting up the digital sphere with words that appear to be so void of empathy, it’s mind-boggling.

A lot of people are pissed off, but I see his actions as a chance to access clarity. Not in regard to what he’s trying to say (Dude doesn’t need any more microphones right now) but in relation to figuring out what is underneath the disturbing, alt-right support he feels the need to lambaste the world with.

Clarity on freethinking is realizing that every action or word void of empathy is coming from a human being who is in pain.

This brand of self-sanctified freethinker doesn’t want you to think they are in pain. It’s not manly, powerful, popular, or societally accepted to show the vortex of fear that’s running his show. So out comes the justification responses:

“You just aren’t used to freethinkers like me.”

The wild and freeing thing is that People love Truth. They connect with it. It inspires them. So if a person in a public position like this dude is, dared to do the work to figure out where his drive to speak was coming from and then spoke to that, there would be many more open hearts than closed ones.

Hell, he might even be able to open up the seemingly permanently closed ones – that’s how powerful connection is.

To be human is to accept that you are capable of being kind and lovely and compassionate, while also accepting that you are equally capable of being an ego-maniacal asshole in the midst of feelings that are difficult to process.

This means that none of us are immune to being assholes. We’ve ALL got it in us to be jerks.

Now, we can look at the existence of a human being who feels the need to speak from that reactionary locale and call it freethinking as someone to fight against.

Or, we can recognize the little kid within that’s trying to play manager via statements like “I’m a freethinker!” and ask from a place of empathy, (because we all have experience with pain driving us to say and do fucked up things,) “What kind of pain is this kid harboring that is fuelling his need to say these deeply disturbing and damaging things?”

This opens the door to an excellent space of time to put our habit of making assumptions to use.

We can hypothesize about how the circumstances of his life might have steered him to act without concern over consequence, and label it as freethinking.

These assumptions could be used as fuel to establish generosity in the face of a perceived generosity drought. Because we all need a little help in that department when someone is being an asshole. Generosity is tough to access when hate is easily accessible.

So then the question or dare becomes: when someone is being an asshole, are you willing to take the hard road? Are you willing to accept that we are all capable of being assholes, given the right emotional parameters?

And are you willing to see how connection and compassion, even for the ones we are driven to hate, provides the power to heal?

Letter To A New York Times Best Selling Wellness Writer

May 3, 2018 by Must Love Crows 2 Comments

This morning I saw a post on Instagram by a very well-known author – I’m talking New York Times bestselling wellness writer.

The post pissed me off (more deets on why below) and though I thought about working towards letting it go, I passed on that pretty quick, ’cause my frustration was 40 proof.

I’m not in the business of shunning my feelings. If they are coming up there is a legit reason for them.

I love myself, therefore I value the whole package, even the not-so-societally-celebrated strong feelings.

Most of the time. Wrinkles are hard to embrace at the moment.

I quickly realized my frustration did not warrant trolling, as nothing ever warrants that. But it was something I was willing to write about.

And write about it I did. I formulated a post, and was close to publishing it, when I realized, “Hmm, this isn’t helpful at all.” Writing a post she will never read doesn’t serve anyone, other than my fired up ego (it was blazin.)

If I want any chance of inciting change over an issue I feel strongly about, then I gotta lady-up and write this chick personally.

I have to constructively communicate what I see as being a red flag issue, ie, advice she’s offered that could be potentially detrimental to someone’s mental health.

Never mind that she may never read my message or respond to me or even give a shit about what I have to say. That’s not for me to decide.

I gotta try. And I need to get in the business of being courageous enough to speak on things that aren’t supportive of self-care and mental health advocacy in the wellness industry.

Even the stuff coming from the mouths of the most popular wellness writers in the world.

I need to live up to what my Instagram profile says and BE a mental health and self-care advocate. So I did just that: I wrote her a long form note via Instagram, and this is what it said

Hello <name redacted>. I just read your latest post re: the fan asking what to do about feeling like everyone hates her. I felt the strong pull to communicate my concern over your response, so here goes.

Someone who believes everyone hates them needs therapy. This is distorted thinking as a result of damaging beliefs. “Just be you” is a recipe for a person to feel ashamed of how they feel. “What’s wrong with me, if trying to just be me doesn’t work? I must be a loser. There must be something innately wrong with me…” Enter more shame, more pain, and more distorted thinking.

I appreciate your beautiful intentions to help others while affirming that “just be you” has the ability to minimize a person’s struggle. Healing is not that simple. It takes work. And I get that we are all attached to our pain and we could do with focusing on it less and being more grateful. But we still need to look at our pain. We need to process it.

People need to be validated. The complexity of their pain needs to be heard and understood, particularly for people with mental health disorders like PTSD. BTW, I wonder if this person has PTSD, particularly abandonment-related PTSD. (There is a great book by psychologist Susan Anderson about it.)

And finally, IMHO, “Just Be You” isn’t realistic. It’s the goal, yes, but a sense of self to house new beliefs that help he or she understand and process the feelings that are leading them to believe that everyone hates them is a required precursor to someone being able to follow through on “Just Be You” advice.

That’s it, that’s all. I thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate you. And I hope you have a wonderful day. Andrea

Boom. Speaking up when I feel the need to, 1. Complaining via blog post, 0.

It might have taken me a lot of therapy and many complaint pieces through my blog to get me here, but the air feels cleaner in Courage-To-Speak-To-Someone-Directly town. So I’m going to stay here. For good.

PS: Guess what? I’m working on personal development material (ugh that sounds so dry – think workbooks that speak to rewriting beliefs that are hurting you) right now.

If you want first grab at them and a freebie in the next week or so, sign up for my weekly, curated with love and unfiltered truth, newsletter. ❤

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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 I’m So Damn Tired

April 30, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

I’m tired, Y’all.

I’m tired of seeing and hearing women embrace the patriarchy, and shit on and minimize other women.

I’m tired of witnessing women refuse to do the work required to see the truth below their lack of empathy: that they don’t like or trust themselves.

If you’re a woman, and you feel the need to slap hurtful generalizations onto other women, you’ve got some work to do.

And I feel for you, babe. It’s not easy work. But being awful to your fellow females is gonna make things even harder for you in the long haul.

‘Cause, it feels so shitty to be mean – just awful.

To be clear, when someone acts shitty, it’s not the human being that’s awful, it’s their behavior.

It’s much more humane to separate the human being from their actions – This opens the door to forgiveness, which opens the door to connection.

I’m tired of doing the empath/narcissist dance, too – Lord grant me the strength in that department.

I don’t want to be better than anyone else. I just wanna get clear on how to not enable behavior that attempts to minimize other people’s feelings, without having my soul sucked dry in the process.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to fight for what’s right, but hyper-aware that it’s what I need to do at times.

I’m tired of feeling uncomfortable, but cognizant of how prevalent discomfort is in the growth equation.

What I really want is for things to be easier for everyone. And I want things to be easy because I occasionally subscribe to the greatest indoctrinated falsity: that life can somehow be easy.

Now, to my dearest full moon, the biggest and most powerful one of the year:

You are making me tired. I love you girl, but I just can’t wait until you leave town.

Seriously. The last week or so has been madness. Absolute emotional madness.

See you all in a few days, on the other side of all of this very human frustration/confusion.