June - is all about the strength

Strength

Is to own
who I am,
what I like,
what I did,
what I do and
what I don't want to.

Strength
is to own
both the
truth and the
dreams and
sit quietly
with these
without apology
or need
for validation.

I am mixing it up a little this month and would like to give a warm welcome to my guest blogger Dalyce from December Studio who I asked to share her thoughts on what it is to nurture strength.

“You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.” —Pena Chodron

Growing up, the world taught me that emotions are a sign of weakness and inherently shameful. In adulthood I’ve grown to understand that emotions are the language of the human trifecta—mind.body.spirit. Emotions are energetic guides, the messengers of navigating life, and they must be acknowledged, looked at, cared for and then let go of. If we ignore, repress or judge our feelings we hold the energy in limbo and it becomes poison for our whole selves. Strength and resilience comes from working with your emotions instead of against them.

Self care is a hot topic these days and is promoted as treating yourself to that sweet coffee drink or glass of wine or new outfit. I think this is definitely ok sometimes, but true, sustainable self-care is not about contriving a temporary sense of ease + feel good vibes. It’s about digging deep into what feels tricky in order to sustain a core of ease and live in the flow of high vibrations regularly.

In my art practice, my internal self doubt gremlins surface on the regular. At the beginning of my journey these little fiends were nasty. They caused me to want to give up every day. My love for creativity, however, drove me forward and through that dedication I began to look my nasty gremlins in the eye and ask what they were trying to show me. They were just the relics of past conditioning wanting to be brought to light. When they’d show up I would counterbalance them with words of encouragement and love until eventually they weakened and shrunk. I began a system of emotional self care.

Very recently I started a focused meditation practice whereby I talk kindly to my body, my heart, by mind and my soul. I thank each of them for what they’ve given me to get through this life. I also visualize my family and envision sending them clear blue light energy to surround and support them. I send them gratitude for the love and support they show to me and others in life. It’s my form of prayer and has proven to be a very helpful way to soften my emotional responses toward myself and my loved ones during the hard times of life. By starting everyday in gratitude for these gifts, my well for grace grows deeper and fuller and my ability to navigate through difficult emotions gets stronger.

By embracing our emotions, owning our quirks, accepting what we love for what it is, allowing mistakes and creating healthy boundaries—we build emotional strength and resilience. Gratitude for what life brings forward guides us into courage, confidence, and personal power. It also allows us to accept others more easily which diminishes judgement and fear-based thinking—and, side benefit, helps us accept ourselves more fully too.
Emotions are not the enemy, but the key to understanding who we are, what we want and how we intend to live our lives. They are like the weather: changing, growing,building, diminishing. They come, they go and they help us to grow.

What ways do you build emotional strength and resilience?

May - is all about the acceptance

Acceptance

Neither
reaching
for the moon,
nor bound to
the ground.
Happy is
when I
can float
amongst
the stars.


This picture popped into my head one day as a speedy moment of clarity.
You know those!
When everything makes sense for a brief second and then everything feels clumsy and confusing again.
I made the picture to remind myself of that clear moment as it held the key to my experience of happiness.
One of the things I struggle with is change and expectations.
I can ruin an experience because it isn’t what I thought it would be or what I had originally planned.
That can make for an interesting time because life is completely haphazard and entirely built on change.
My teacher in this has been my noisy boy, who also struggles with these.
We talk a lot about transitions (that is the moment between one thing and another thing – yep it’s a thing)
and we talk a lot about expectations and how something might be going sideways because of unknown territory and / or differences in what we thought would happen. My son and I seem to feel more comfortable with a perceived feeling of control in situations, but we are learning how to negotiate our way through this by giving up the reins sometimes. Just as my little girl is teaching me piano, my boy is my lesson in feelings.

When I think back on moments that I haven’t ruined with my sulky face. Times when I have in fact let loose, chilled out, or even (dare I say it), “gone with the flow” – it feels AMAZING! I know I have it in me – I just forget to switch it on and that is my homework for May.

If this sounds in anyway familiar to you I have been playing a game with myself for the last couple of weeks called the Acceptance game. Before I explain I should note that this is not a lesson for passivity. IT isn’t about accepting status quo when status quo is truly affecting you negatively. This is more about times when you are getting in your own way of enjoyment, contentment and just plain chilling to make for a happier day. Ok back to the game. SO here are some prime examples of me.

1. I am getting completely wound up by some random person in life for some perceived thing they have done. Game on. I accept I am getting wound up right now, but I choose not to let this ruin this day.

2. The kids are hyper, I have to cook dinner and there are 6 things spinning through my head about stuff I have to do and I am going to loose my mind. Game on. I accept that all I have to do right now is cook dinner. I choose to not think of these other things I need to do right now.

3. Malaise of mood about weight, work, messiness or my general crappiness at something. I accept I feel crappy right now about (put in issue of the moment) but I choose to do something that makes me uncrappy (like make a picture, drink a tea, take a breath, take a walk, get that washing up finished).

4. Decisions. I am terrible at making decisions especially about things that I don’t really want to think about, but have to in grown up land. Once I make a decision about how I might handle a tricky situation, a business choice or a personal matter, whatever it is I will still churn it over in my mind. If it was a situation I was feeling particularly prickly about then on and on in my head it will go even though I have decided what I am going to do and already taken action. Game on. I accept that I have made my decision and I stand by that decision. I chose now to lay this situation to rest and move on.

It sounds very basic I know, but little, by little something started to shift in me. That heavy weight that joins my ears to my shoulders did actually start to lift. All I was really doing was being a kind person to myself to stop the spiraling, but because I wasn’t spending so much of my day in a spiral I was less tired, less hurt and less burdened. I wasn’t striving to change things, to “fix” these perceived problems, nor was I letting myself be dragged down by them, all I was doing was saying “oh yeah there you are and moving on”.

This is early days of course. Last week the sun was shining, a warm spring had arrived and my mood was lighter. Today a rainy day seems to have taken its toll on me and I can feel the stress rise again bit, by bit. If I can keep up my awareness though, keep up the training of these acceptance muscles of mine, I can still build a resiliency and learn not to freak out so much at change and sudden circumstance. Learn to hang back a bit rather than kick into reactive mode. Become a little more wait and see, rather than fluster and fear of fate. For my noisy boy I can do this so that more and more we will both be just chilling in the stars.

Good luck my friends with your trials of acceptance this month of May. What are the triggers that make you get the board out for your acceptance game?

April - is all about the support

Photo Credit: Devon Gillott Sessions

I close
my eyes
and there
I see,
a patchwork
of the
people who
blanket
me.


One of the things that can happen when we take to our beds is an overwhelming feeling of loneliness. Whether we have isolated ourselves too much or even if we are surrounded by people all the time, we can still feel alone in this. This is the month, when we turn our thoughts to the positive people who are in our life, have been in our lives and those passing miracle, people who pop up out of the blue at just the right time. This is our time to focus on the people who are there for us and have been there for us, to help us see that net of support that is still there; we have just forgotten how to feel it.

I would like us to try a little exercise together. We are going to make a paper quilt. First take a piece of paper and divide it up into squares – just like the cloth pieces of a quilt. The first thing we are going to do is to draw ourselves in one of the squares near the centre. This can have your name, a stick figure, a shape, a swirl – anything that helps you make the mental note of "there I am". Next I want you to start filling the squares around you with anyone that is close to you right now who is a bright spark in your week – a partner, a family member, a friend. Think outside the box too; a kind mum during drop off, a co-worker who makes you laugh, a friendly coffee server or a helpful neighbor. Just keep filling those squares with anyone who comes to mind who has brightened your every day, or your week or your recent months.

Once you have exhausted those squares you are going to move outward and add all those people who you no longer live close to, but who would support you in a heartbeat. Family who live far away, childhood friends, college friends, old work colleagues. Who have you collected in your experiences along the way that have helped to shape your today? Who could you connect with immediately and with ease if you lived closer? Keep on filling those squares.

The next squares are for those people in your life who have been your guardian angels at random stages. I really enjoy remembering these people and once you start you will be amazed at how many angels you have met along the way. They deserve a square in your support network for what they did for you, but they also serve as a reminder that people will pop up in your life over and over to help you at times of need. It has happened before and it will happen again. I have special teachers, a manager of one of my first jobs, people when I travelled who all went above and beyond to help me at different times of my life. Who took a kind interest in me when I needed the guidance and support. These are people who I won’t ever see again, but who made their own special mark on and in me.

This next one is hard, but important. I would like us to fill up more squares that honour and remember the people in our lives we have loved and lost. These people still live inside us and their support when they were here is strongly imbedded, even though it hurts to be reminded. These are the special people in our lives who still play a very important part in this amazing paper fabric that is unfolding.

So lastly, as you look at all these people who have made you, held you by the hand, made you laugh, made you tea and done all the great things that they have done, I want you to also look at some empty squares. These squares are there to symbolise our faith that people do always come to help, support, befriend and love us. We need to make room for our special people of the future.

I hope after this little paper exercise you are feeling a little amazed at who is really in your life!
We may feel by ourselves, but we are far from alone.
We are in fact part of a much bigger picture, that is sewn together with strong threads of support and comfort.
This is our network, these are our people and stitched together they are always there to keep us warm when we need.
Wrap up this month.

Happy April.