For me, the best way to phrase it is relating to yourself as you would with a friend and romantic partner that you are crazy about. You know, staring at them adoringly, letting mistakes and irritable habits slide, being there, and showing up when they are down, hurt and broken. We tend not to do this for ourselves. It is as if we don’t think we deserve it. I know you also think that sometimes, otherwise, you wouldn’t be here reading this post.

I have avoided myself and my hurts and my needs very many times in the past. When I was scared or hurt or going through something, I tended to turn to others, take care of them, nurture them even more, and love them even harder, when I was the one who needed it. It was as if I thought that I would somehow heal myself by giving love and care to others. I would feel guilty for showing self-love.

I did not know how to receive.

I felt guilty for receiving.

I felt guilty for even asking.

The reasons why we have become conditioned this way are various and vast – mostly stemming from wounds inflicted in childhood. But here we are… Beautiful. Strong. Human… and feeling guilty for asking and accepting love – even from ourselves.

What is guilt?

Guilt is the feeling or emotion we experience when we (or others) think that we have done something wrong. It is slightly less intense than its cousin, Shame – where you believe you are a terrible person for doing something wrong.

You feel guilt when you do something that you perceive as not being acceptable by universal moral standards. You could also feel it when you break your own standards of acceptable behavior. People are social creatures, and we continuously strive for acceptance and approval. Anytime we feel that we have acted in a way that is not accepted or that either ourselves or others do not approve of, we feel guilty.

Because we think that it is not acceptable, we sometimes feel guilty for showing self-love.

So why do we feel guilty for loving ourselves?

The perception of lack.

There is the idea that if you spend any sort of resource, time, money, effort, and energy on yourself, there will be less for other people. We tend to hold on to the view that all of these resources are limited, and that keeps us in a perpetual cycle of lack.

The universe exists in a vibration of abundance – love is an energy of abundance. The more you learn to vibrate at that energy, the more you can encourage it to resonate and spread out, amplified.

The more love you cultivate in yourself, for yourself, the more you are surrounded by that energy and vibration, and the more it will naturally spread out to the world around you.

Feeling loved and cared for will naturally raise your energy as you no longer spend that energy focusing on just being ok. When you are in the space of giving yourself exactly what you need – as only you know how to give it – you spend less energy trying to get that from others.

So what about time? Surely that is a limited resource? Yes, and no. Without getting into a big discussion about whether time is linear or not, there is one thing that I want to focus on here. It is how you use the time that you perceive you have. I get it. There are probably 1000 things pulling at you and demanding your attention, and you need to figure out what to focus on and where to spend your time. The one thing that I learned about my excuse of not having time to spend on myself is that I mistook motion for inspired action.

Motion is all about doing and doing and doing, always staying busy in order to keep ahead and on top of everything that needs to be done. It stems from the idea that anything worthwhile is only obtained through hard work and struggle. We, as a society has glamorised burnout.

Now, let me say this: you can get so much more done when you start taking inspired action. Inspired action is when you slow down, you get quiet, and you start to listen to your soul. Some call it intuition – I know it as that voice that urges me to do something that just doesn’t want to go away. Sometimes it is quite persistent. Sometimes it is a fleeting thought to which I respond: ‘Ok, why not?’.

Through starting to take inspired action, you begin to work with the flow of the universe. Things start to fall into place with ease and grace. As you practice following your intuition, the right situations, people, and things will naturally start to gravitate to you. Opportunities arise, help comes when you need it. You are in the flow.

But self-love is selfish, right?

Wrong!

Sit for a moment and think about someone you love. A friend, family member, your partner or child… Think about what you would do for them and how far you would go to make them feel cared for, nurtured, safe, and loved. Now think about whether you are doing those things for yourself. Would you do those things for yourself? Have you been?

I am suspecting that the answer is ‘No’. That is because we feel selfish for taking care of and looking after ourselves. And by seeing ourselves as being selfish, we feel guilty for showing self-love. Perhaps this is because you have been taught that it is wrong, or maybe you were just never told that it is ok. It could also be that you just never learned how to give yourself the love that you freely give to others.

Taking care of yourself is often linked to words like ‘luxury’, ‘spoil’, and ‘guilty pleasure’. These words all link to beliefs that doing things for yourself is selfish. That it isn’t normal and natural. That we do not deserve it.

Perhaps now is the time to start changing that.

Enmeshment and preoccupation with others.

When you have weak boundaries, you tend to want to live up to other people’s expectations. You do things that are expected of you even when you don’t really want to. You feel responsible for others’ emotions, happiness, and wellbeing.

This is a form of enmeshment, where there isn’t a clear distinction between yourself and someone else. In this situation, you consistently place other people’s needs or even wants before your own needs.

By being enmeshed with others, instead of helping them, you are enabling them. You are standing in their way of self-automization, self-realization, and growth. You take away the responsibility that they have for themselves.

You need to set boundaries in order to start taking better care of yourself. This is hard, and other people might not understand it. They might get upset, and they might get angry. And that is ok. It is theirs to carry. Stand in your power and give when you have to give. But also take when you need to take. There is no need to feel guilty for showing self-love.

It’s really just all excuses not to sit with ourselves.

Whoa!

I know – that is a harsh truth. One that I have also had to face. The times when you love yourself the least are the times when you need it the most. But I get it, you are scared. You are scared of what you might find when you enter into an intimate relationship with yourself.

Relationships have a way of bringing all your ugly bits to light. You know, once you get to know someone, maybe move in together there are things about yourself that you can no longer hide – like the way your hair stands up like a cockatoo when you get out of bed, or how you really enjoy having a good fart!

The same thing happens when you start to grow and nurture your relationship with yourself. You encounter the things that you have been hiding from yourself for a very long time.

Carl Jung called this your shadow side or your shadow self. It is all the parts of you that you find unacceptable (and that society finds unacceptable). We hide from them and avoid them because if we look at them, we will realize that we are not perfect, that we are not always right, that sometimes we are the toxic people.

But you know what: there is infinite power that lies in exploring these dark parts of yourself. It helps you to work through old hurts and ways of thinking. It leads you on a path of healing and self-acceptance. It gives you the power to change yourself and your life because you no longer have this massive blind spot for the things, behaviours, and thoughts that have been holding you back.

This, for me, is the root of all the excuses not to love yourself:

You are avoiding being present with yourself.

Think about it. Every single act of self-love stems from the need to be present with yourself.

Give yourself a facial? Presence.

Choosing a treat for yourself that you love? Presence.

Focusing on accepting your body as it is right now? Presence.

Take yourself out on a date? Presence.

How do you become more present with yourself? Well, you start with setting the intention. Every morning when you wake up, choose to be present and to pay attention to yourself (or better yet start a self-love morning ritual). Write it down and make the commitment to yourself with ink on paper.

Affirmations to be present with yourself:

“Today, I am paying attention to myself”.
“Today, I am being present with myself”.

Start with little steps and start bringing your thoughts and attention to yourself throughout the day. Focus on how your body moves while you are doing the dishes. Listen to the sound of your voice when you speak. Bring your five senses into your daily self-love practice.

As with many things, the first steps on your self-love journey are the most difficult. As you get going, you will build momentum, and the lovin’ will start flowing freely and easily. I am here to support you all the way.

Join hundreds of others on a Free 1-week ultimate Self-love challenge. Or commit to doing a 1-month Unashamed Self-love virtual course.

You can join our Sacred Sisterhood of Self-love group on Facebook.

I also elaborate a lot more on guilt, lack, family wounds, boundaries, and loving yourself more in my Remembering Your Worth E-course. Follow the link or click below to find out more.

I would love to hear about how you show up and stay present with yourself, and how you handle moments when you feel guilty for showing self-love in the comments.

The post When We Feel Guilty for Showing Self-love. Recognising it and Healing it. appeared first on .

An easy way to invite more self-love into your life is to connect with yourself through your senses. Traditionally we know of five senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing, and seeing. There is also a sixth sense, called proprioception, which relates to being aware of your body position and how you interact with the physical space around you.

Here are some ideas to harness your senses to cultivate more self-love throughout your day.

Smell.

The sense of smell is one of the strongest senses that links to memories and emotions. You can practice more self-love by surrounding yourself with smells that you adore. Smells that bring back good memories, and that encourages specific emotions. Integrate different smells into your daily life, and especially into those times where you consciously practicing self-love. Combine the smells that you surround yourself with the memories, the feelings on the emotions that you want to experience.

Taste.

Invite self-love into your life through taste. This is an excellent opportunity to engage in conscious and mindful eating. Indulge in your favorite food and give not one thought to any conditioning that you’ve experienced around it. For example, chocolate is often referred to as a guilty pleasure, but cacao has been part of sacred rituals at least since the Mayan times. Take your time to prepare and eat the food that you enjoy and refuse to feel guilty or accept judgment. Open up yourself to new experiences and try things that are novel to you. You can find as much pleasure in the texture and taste of a crunchy salad as you could from a creamy and luscious dessert. The question is: what do you like? Consciously pay attention to the tastes that you experience. Show yourself more love by guilt-free eating the things that you enjoy and exploring self-love through your senses.

Touch.

Give yourself some lovin’ by touching your body. No, I don’t necessarily mean sexually… But I do mean sensually. There is a lot of power and, in fact, empowerment in engaging with your body sensually and exploring self-love through your senses. Touch the bits that you don’t often give attention to, like your elbows or the backs of your knees, the spaces between your finger and the small spot behind your ears. Get to know your body and show it some love through the sense of touch.

Hear.

Surround yourself with sounds that you like. Play your favorite music or listen to healing sound vibrations. Harness the healing power of sound to help you change your inner vibrations. Pay attention to the sounds around you, sounds that you usually block out or ignore. Find the joy in the voices of those that you love, your family, your friends, your children, your partner. Pay attention to the sounds of their voices, the vibrations they create, and allow yourself to be surrounded by those vibrations. Lean into them as if they were a physical embrace and soak up all the good feelings that come up.

See.

Celebrate your self-love by looking for the beauty in ordinary things. Practicing mindfulness meditation is a wonderful way to enhance this skill. Start to look at mundane things through new eyes, really pay attention to them. Notice how the light changes how something looks. See the reflections in a glass. Notice all the different colors of the hair that covers your dog or the flecks of color in your lover’s eyes. Surround yourself with things that you like to look at. Things that make you feel happy and inspired. Things that motivate you and raises your vibration.

Proprioception.

Practice self-love through becoming aware of your body. Take a few minutes throughout the day to check in to see how your body feels, pay attention to any spaces of stress or tension, and release them. Become aware of your physical body in the physical space around you. Notice how you are able to create changes in the space around you in an instant. All you need to do is have a thought, and you can reach out and pick up that apple or push in that chair. Pay attention to how you are the creator of your own life and your own space. It might not seem like much, but can you see how you are the vessel through which change happens?

Small steps. Small steps to a very big, unconditional and unwavering love. That is what we are doing here. We are consciously looking at and changing how we interact with ourselves. We are consciously starting to pay attention and to take better care of ourselves. This self-love affair is the most important relationship that you will ever have. Let’s work on nurturing and growing it together.

Here is a self-love infographic that can help to remind you…

Find out how you can increase your self-love through Remembering Your Worth.

The post Exploring Self-love Through Your Senses – Every Moment of Every Day. appeared first on .

Here are a few things that you can add to your morning self-love ritual:

Wake up gentle and slow.

Set your alarm clock to go off a few minutes before your usual wake up time. Choose a ringtone that is gentle and calm with some soothing sounds, but that would still be loud enough to wake you up. There’s nothing as shocking and unsettling as waking up to the sound of an alarm or even a digital rooster crowing. Yes, yes, real roosters out in nature are not the same.

Take some time as you wake up to slowly take in your surroundings, become aware of your body in the physical space, look at how the sunlight plays through the leaves against the curtains or the window. Take some time to experience this new morning. Connect with yourself or your partner, your cats, or your dog. Soak up some self-love as part of your morning self-love ritual.

Start your morning by slowly, quietly, and calmly being present.

Wait about an hour before you engage with digital devices.

We are constantly attached to our phones and digital devices. It’s almost as if they have become an extension of ourselves, and we feel a little bit lost without them. It’s natural to have the impulse to want to check your phone, your messages, or your emails as you wake up. Give yourself some space and some time where you don’t need to engage with the rush, or the stress, or with work.

Take about an hour if possible to focus on what you’re doing whether you’re making coffee or breakfast or having a chat with your child or your husband or wife do you serve free from distractions of your phone or any other digital device. Self-love comes through spending conscious time with yourself and your surroundings.

Nourish your body.

Loving yourself means loving your body and taking care of it. Here I can throw in a cliche like ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ or something like that. The truth is your body has fasted for around 8 hours. Take some time to break the fast, drink some water to hydrate and give your body a nutritious meal so that it can have the energy to power you through the day.

Avoid being distracted by devices or thoughts of what needs to be done that day try and engage in conscious eating and paying attention and being present. Practice self-love through nourishing your body as part of your morning self-love ritual.

Nourish your mind.

Your mind is mighty. Your thoughts literally create the world around you – ask the quantum physicists even. That is why it’s so essential that you need to take care of your mind. That you need to nourish it. That you need to put all kinds of good things into it. By taking the time out to feed your mind every morning, you can become empowered. You can start to gain control over your mind, your thoughts, and your life.

You can become a powerful Co-creator of your life. Now, don’t let me hear you coming up with an excuse like you don’t have time. This is how you create your life, and five or 10 minutes every morning is absolutely worth it to bring in the changes that you’ve wanted for so long.

Good ways to nourish or expand your mind is to do some yoga or meditate you can write a gratitude list you can spend time focusing on affirmations or intentions. Get in touch with that powerful tool that you have at your disposal.

Stay present.

You might have noticed by now that all four previous points have one thing in common – and that is to cultivate presence. How do you start your day is often an indication of how the rest of your day will go. If you started off rushed and hurried and disconnected, the chances are that’s what you’re going to experience for the entire day.

You’ll probably not pay as close attention to things. It will likely feel like everything is going wrong and that you just cannot catch up to the present moment. So start your day off with being present. With being connected with your mind, your soul, your body, and your surroundings. Take the time out to be quiet. To start your day with consciousness and awareness. Make it a part of your morning self-love ritual and watch it gather momentum throughout your day.

Self-love is a difficult practice to do regularly. It’s easier to make excuses, to avoid it because we feel guilty for taking time for ourselves. The thing is, without taking time for yourself, you engage in the world in a disconnected way, in a way that is not always authentically you. And the world deserves the authentic you. They deserve to experience the uniqueness of your soul, the valuable gifts you bring to every day… to every interaction… to every moment.

Take some time out to cultivate the love relationship you have with yourself in order to grow that love and to expand that love. Because the more love you have in yourself, the more you will have to give and to share with others.

Find out how you can increase your self-love through Remembering Your Worth.

The post Morning Self-love Ritual – the Ultimate Start of Your Day. appeared first on .

I have dabbled in mindful living for about a decade, ever since I first read Eckhart Tolle’s ‘New Earth’. While it all made sense to me intellectually, and I spent many hours striving to capture that ever-elusive ‘present moment’, I only ever got glimpses of it. My moments of mindfulness were like glimmers on the surface of a pond, a bright reflection of light there for an instant and gone the next. I travelled to Thailand and Nepal, took yoga classes and eventually became a yoga teacher all in the pursuit of the Now.

I consider myself to be quite in touch with my spiritual side and meditate often. I have spent many hours researching and practicing being present, and still I often found myself in stretches of unconscious thoughts and behaviours.

The statement that made me stop and my tracks.

One evening I was watching a magic show on TV. The program revolved around faith healing and whether it is fact of fiction. Darren Brown, the presenter (or is it performer – I will let you decide) said something that completely startled me.

His sentiment was this:

You become the story you tell yourself about yourself.

That was my a-ha moment. Although I understood it intellectually, I never managed to integrate it into ‘knowing’ before. So I started deliberately practicing mindfulness. I started paying attention to every now that I could anchor in. I would sit and breathe or fully engage with whatever I was doing. Whether it was writing articles or putting on my computer, taking a shower or tying my shoes. I started paying attention more and more, especially to ordinary and boring things in my life. Things that I did as part of a routine that required no attention.

 As I started practicing mindfulness during those moments when I could have easily switched to auto pilot, I started to become aware of my thoughts and self-talk. I heard some interesting things – and some very mean things from myself… about myself.

The awful things you say to yourself.

‘You will never make it’, ‘you don’t deserve it’, ‘you are not worth it’… These have been thoughts that I have been working on changing. Each time I would stop the thought and change it into something positive. I would re-frame it to ‘look how far you have come’, or something similar. You become the story you tell yourself about yourself.

Then there were other stories that I would tell myself, stories relating to my abilities and the fact that I am living with depression and (sometimes nearly debilitating) anxiety. I would hear things like ‘this is too overwhelming’ and ‘it is too much, too big, someone with depression cannot possibly get this done’. You become the story you tell yourself about yourself. And every time, every mindful moment when I managed to catch that I simply reminded myself ‘all you need to do is one thing… just one thing… just this one thing’.

And once that one thing was done, I would take a moment to breathe consciously and sit with the heaviness inside of me that has become a rather permanent companion. I would sit in the darkness of me and breathe. And be mindful of my breath. And then I would pull myself together and do the next ‘one thing’. It would start non-committal, and then, as I practice being mindful I would quickly become absorbed in what I was doing and forget all about the heaviness… if only for a few moments of ‘now’.

Seeing the change.

I had changed my story from thinking that if I attempt one thing, I would have to take on everything… and be perfect at everything. But what practicing mindfulness has taught me is that there is always just one thing… because there is always just that one moment. And that one thing in that one moment is all that matters. Because all of those ‘one things’ eventually sting together to create a life filled with purposeful and conscious living.

You become the story you tell yourself about yourself.

Find out how you can increase your self-love and change the story that you tell yourself about yourself through Remembering Your Worth.

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Burnout is defined by the ICD-11 as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
• reduced professional efficacy.”

With this definition comes the caveat that burn-out is a phenomenon specifically related to one’s occupation and does not apply to other aspects of life.

Other mental health factors that influence employee productivity are anxiety and depression. The WHO estimate 264 million people life with depression globally, with many of these individuals also experiencing anxiety. A study led by WHO found that the global economy loses nearly US$ 1 trillion each year due to lost productivity as a result of these mental health conditions.

A different WHO-led study estimated that for every US$ 1 that was dedicated to the treatment of common mental health disorders, US$ 4 was returned in the form of improved health and increased productivity.

In 1979, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre, Jon Kabat-Zinn introduced the west to The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme.

In a study published in Creating Healthy Work Environments  in 2019, the authors found that integration of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) techniques in the workplace led to lower cases of worker burnout. The researchers also found that MBSR led to lower depression, anxiety and distress amongst employees.

Hilton and colleagues published a summary of recent Mindfullness-based research in Work in 2019, while this article published by Forbes (and this article here) indicate that large companies like Google, Intel, Aetna and General Mills have all incorporated mindfulness training as employee wellness offerings.

While a person’s mind tends to wander about half of his or her waking hours, mindfulness training helps to bring focus back to the task at hand. Mindfulness has been shown to improve stability, control and efficiency. Employees tend to be less scattered and complete tasks more thoroughly and quicker.

Practicing mindfullness has a positive impact on a variety of areas. It improves attention, cognition, emotions, behaviour and physiology. It reduces stress enabling employees to feel calm and focussed on the task at hand. It also has physical benefits such as lower blood pressure and stress-induced health concerns. This means lower cost of health benefits and less employee absenteeism due to poor health caused by stress.

Individuals who practice mindfulness show greater empathy, emotional resilience and compassion which leads to better interpersonal behaviour and workgroup relationships.

Mindfulness is the practice of being fully present without judgement. Often referred to as ‘in the now’ or ‘in the moment’, it is the practice of fully engaging with an activity or situation that is occurring at that particular moment, without judging anything that comes up. Besides paying attention to the activity, practitioners of mindfulness are also aware of themselves in that situation, of their physical and emotional responses in that space, again in a non-judgemental way.

There are many was to cultivate mindfulness, with meditation being one of the most powerful tools to do so. With practice one can enter a deeply meditative state where the focus is completely directed at the quiet space with, linked to the breath and the sensations in the body.

Other practices like yoga and mindful eating or walking can also assist in cultivating mindfulness. Mindfulness practice is exactly that – a practice. Some days it might come easier than others. The key to releasing the benefits is to engage in it consistently.

As per the summary published by Hilton and her colleagues, there are a number of different mindfulness practices aimed at improving employee wellness, and through that efficiency and productivity. With the growing popularity and the pool of research on the benefits of mindfulness in the workplace more and more employers are introducing these programs.

Specialised employee wellness and mindfulness programs provide employees with the skills to perform better under stress and to be more productive while at work. These skills can be, and often are, transferred into the employees’ lives outside work, leading to overall improvements of health, psychological wellness and general contentment. Employees who find contentment in and outside of their workplace tend to be more motivated and stay with their employer for longer.

Mindfulness programs in the workplace not only hold benefits for the employees, but also for the employer in the form of lower absenteeism rates and more productive employees. This, in the long run, lead to lower costs per employee, and higher income due to a more efficient workforce.

Take a look at our employee wellness and mindfulness offer here.

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I also had the opportunity to guide my students through some of the most difficult times of their lives. Scuba diving takes you waaaay out of your comfort zone. It places you in a very unique and unfamiliar environment. And you need to deal with all of the emotions that come up. The uncertainty, the trepidation, the fear…

I have been next to so many students working through their fear, fighting with their own minds in order to get control and surface more confident and empowered.

I want to do that for you. I want to help you on your journey, walk next to you through those dark and scary times when your mind might be telling you that it is all just too much. Let me sit with you and support you in order to gain your own empowerment.

Find out more about my Intuitive Shadow Work sessions here.

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What is your shadow?

According to psychologist Carl Jung we tend to project our shadow onto other people. Ever heard the saying that whatever bothers you the most of other people are your own unrecognised flaws? Our subconscious tries to bring these shadows to our attention through showing them in someone else. This can be friends or family or even fictional characters. It can even be in the form of people in your dreams. The shadow can also just be something that you repress, something that you hide from others and yourself.

It is natural for us to want to just see the good in ourselves, and it is difficult to admit to experiencing things like guilt and shame, anger, insecurity and lust, depression and anxiety. All of these things are seen by society as bad and we tend to distance ourselves from feeling and experiencing these things.

The more we try to silence our shadow side, the more it presses to be heard. It will consistently show up in other people and in your dreams. It wants to be acknowledged and integrated so that it can heal, and you can live a more authentic life.

                        “To become conscious of [the shadow] involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real”- Carl Jung.

Once you start to do some introspection and chasing your shadow, or self-analysis as Jung calls it, your shadow will become more apparent. Honest investigation will show you parts of yourself that might be difficult to see, never mind accept. It is the parts that you have always been taught to reject, that aren’t good enough, that are not acceptable and worthy. From this stem self-rejection, and in extreme cases even self-hate.

Chasing your shadow.

To know yourself and fully accept yourself you need to dig deep into who you are, all the wonderful parts of you, but also all the nasty bits. Facing your shadow side, chasing your shadow, even just accepting that you have these qualities is difficult. You need to acknowledge parts of yourself that you have always tried to hide. The work is hard and long, one does not merely integrate one’s shadow in a day. It is a continuous cycle of growth, of facing bits, acknowledging and accepting them, healing and moving forward. Only to start the cycle again, digging more, digging deeper, healing more fully.

The goal of all of this is to be able to see yourself as a whole, but more than that, to be able to love and accept yourself as a whole, with all your good and bad parts.

You can, of course live your life without exploring your shadow side. This, however, will keep you in a state of unconsciousness as that is where the shadow resides. While ignoring your shadow you will also be ignoring your unconscious mind end everything in it that needs to heal.

We tend to avoid it because it is difficult and because it is painful. Few things are as soul shaking as taking a deep, hard look at yourself and realising that you are and have done things that are not ok. That sometimes, you are the toxic person in someone’s life. It takes strength and courage to stand, unwavering and face those truths about yourself.

Many people choose not to do it. They prefer to live in an unconscious space. For some people that path works, it is familiar, and it is comfortable. Facing your shadow is not. It is quite the opposite in fact. At least at first. It is sore and uncomfortable and daunting. But in the process, you will grow, and you will heal and the promise at the end is a self that is whole and complete. A person who know who they are and have seen the best and the worst in themselves and fully love and accepts the entirety of who they are.

How to face and heal your shadow.

How does one start to integrate your shadow? First you need to start by paying attention. Practice mindfulness and start to pay attention to the little things that might usually go unnoticed. You want to start making the unconscious conscious.

Through paying attention, you will start to learn what triggers you, what situations or which people elicits a certain, undesired, response from you. You will start to notice aspects of other people that you dislike. In these situations (or during a quite time afterwards) you can sit and explore the feelings that arose in you. Ask what triggered you and why you feel so strongly about it. Think back to other times in your life when you felt the same, is there a common thread that you can explore?

Our unconscious mind often speaks to us through messages in our dreams. My keeping a dream journal you will start to recognise whether there are patters that need to be explored.

The aim of shadow work is not to sit in a miserable heap, lamenting on what an awful person you are, although there might be moments of doing that. It is about self-discovery and self-acceptance.

It is thus important that shadow work should be done in a gentle and caring setting with focus and intention. A good practice is to keep affirming to yourself “I love myself when… (insert shadow aspect here)”. By becoming aware of your shadow side, it no longer holds any power over you. Rather, you become more empowered as a human being capable of experiencing the full spectrum of being alive, the good and the bad. And that is the way you lead an authentic life.

Find out how you can increase your self-love and chase your shadow side, and heal it through Remembering Your Worth.

The post Chasing Your Shadow – Working Through Your Shadow Side for a More Authentic and Happy Life. appeared first on .

The awake Empath out there is quite aware of the word ENERGY.

** A version of this article first appeared at www.empathevolution.com

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Our emotions have been subjected to suppression; in the education system, work environments, community gatherings and even in family and celebratory events.   Basically society seems as if they don’t want us aware of ourselves or are surroundings.   As if we are here for everyone else but ourselves.  That is simply not true no matter how indoctrinated society as a whole has become.

Medication has numbed an entire (mostly American and Asian) population of people.   The mass accepted modern medicine inclination that “care” and “numbing” equate to “healing” is VERY dangerous and obviously wrong in the eyes of any holistician, nutritionist, chiropractor, or physical therapist.  Pain, is a feeling, an emotion, of the physical body which is warning you of how to respond not ignore the area.  Without pain we would never know what is wrong with the body, where it is coming from, or what it takes to lessen the pain.

If you think very literally of your emotions as “internal feelings” it is very clear to understand why it is so important to be able to listen to these and not have them obstructed by modern pill medications or emotional disassociation (a result of emotional and physical abuse).  Emotions are our bodies’ internal dialogue system; a result of our aura field picking up on the surroundings and therefore communicating with us of what is around us energetically.  Hard to spell out or label but easy to feel.   That is why they are so important.   I have been observing my emotions for a long time now, and have come to an amazing conclusion recently about anxiety specifically.  Here is a little story of how my anxiety was reading my surroundings and protecting me.

As I was driving down the road, with beautiful mountain scenery, on cruise control in a very peaceful state; this being a 2 hour drive that I am very familiar with the route,  I noticed at two different occasions my anxiety kick in full force, for no reason, no one behind me, no thought on my mind creating the anxiety.  I wondered why?  What followed within 10 minutes (not instantly) of these anxiety spikes where police cars, radar detecting the drivers on the highway.  Wow I thought! That’s what my anxiety was! It was warning me! As someone with PTSD I have never viewed my anxiety or depression as anything but a horrible result of my upbringing, until this moment.  This has completely changed my understanding of my emotions, my intuition, and what they have been trying to tell me. These feelings were not a result of abuse or being weak, they are a warning, a guide, and our greatest protection for self preservation.   I now am viewing my depression as speaking – “you are Not in the right place”, my anxiety – “watch out, proceed with caution”, my joy obviously confirming “I am in the right place”, and my fear as standing for “false evidence appearing real”.  Giddy anxious feelings are saying “something good is to come”.

So if your overwhelmed, please take time to listen to your emotions, they change with your state of mind, the entertainment you watch, the surroundings, and the people you spend time with.  Choose the positive over the negative; though it might be lonely at times, you don’t need t exclude the world completely to feel better.  Personal boundaries allow you to feel better what is all around you.   Spend time feeling and listening to your emotions to learn how to navigate your life in a direction that takes you to happiness, instead of misery or a pill bottle. Namaste

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That’s me… The woman in the picture. She looks happy, doesn’t she? She looks like she’s got her shit together, doesn’t she? Look at that smile… look at the pretty hair and dress…

This is what depression looks like.

It is getting up and showing up when it feels like you are living underwater and every movement you make is met by resistance. It is the inability to even attempt to help yourself with positive thinking and meditation because even just lying there with your eyes closed and with your mind focused is still too much effort.

It is just sitting there breathing into the nothingness in your chest hoping the breath will somehow fill the void, fill the emptiness, lighten the heaviness. It is a fluttering heart and inconsolable anxiety over absolutely nothing.

It is trying to claw yourself out of a hole because the world is carrying on and you need to show up, you need to contribute, you need to convince yourself and everyone around you that you matter, even when your entire being resonates with thoughts about how you don’t.

It is knowing that you have so much to do, so much that you want to do but your body feels impossibly heavy and your mind feels like it is filled with cotton wool.

And you know it is not normal. But you cannot remember when you started to feel this way… you don’t even know what normal feels like.

It is sitting on the couch so full of nothing that you start to wonder what the point is of you even being on this earth… that you contemplate cutting yourself just to feel something… and the only thing stopping you from grasping that knife is the fact that there is no space on your body to inflict this ‘feel’ where your partner wouldn’t see… that wouldn’t make him ask questions.

I am a yoga teacher… I am a hippy… I am supposed to be balanced and grounded and whole and healed. I am supposed to not take pharmaceuticals and aspire to living a natural life. But what is the point of living a natural life if you have no desire to LIVE?

So, finally I caved and asked my doctor to prescribe me antidepressants. We started off with a low dose and the changes are nearly tangible. I have days, or perhaps moments, where I can feel what normal feels like. When the heaviness lifts and I feel like I am taking my first breath of fresh air after years in a stale, musty cave. And I was. My cave was called depression.

I felt like a failure. Because I am supposed to have control over my body, my mind and my emotions. I have all the tools, all the knowledge, and know just how powerful my mind can be. Because light and love, everybody- I am supposed to be able to heal myself… it is all in the mind, right?

It’s not. My depression is a symptom of an autoimmune disease. And even if it wasn’t, I am now learning that it is nothing to be ashamed of. I am starting to speak out about depression. To tell people that I have depression and how it has affected my life – something that I didn’t want to admit for a very long time.

Sometimes people are supportive. Sometimes people joke about it, asking if I’m a bit mad in the head… I say ‘yes’. Because no more running, no more hiding.

Often people say to me: ‘I would never have thought, you seem so happy and amazing and do such great work with your website, you help people’. I guess we just never know.

I guess we just never know just exactly what depression looks like.

There are so many resources available for people experiencing depression. There is no shame in speaking out about it – it is actually very empowering… starting to focus on  your healing. I have found an interesting article about the benefits of turmeric and how it could help depression and anxiety. Read more about that here.

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