My Blog
Tools and strategies for owning, valuing,
and celebrating your life.
Self-care gets tossed around as a hot-button topic in the world of personal development, yet many people are confused about what it really means. If self-care looks like bubble baths, yoga classes, or treat-yo-self spa days, how on earth do you realistically add these practices into your life, let alone afford them?
Here are my top ten strategies for stopping anxiety in its tracks, reducing the power it has in your life, and for taking charge when everything feels out of control.
Have you ever procrastinated? Like really, really procrastinated? The kind of procrastination that seduces you into thinking that cleaning your toilet, organizing your garage, or doing your taxes sounds... um... fun?
It’s difficult to know when you’re lying to yourself. Here are five common lies that keep you stuck and questions to help set you free.
“Survival mode” happens when you have a dysfunctional relationship to the self-preservation instinct. Rather than truly providing food, shelter, safety—you catastrophize and generalize about possible futures. In this state, you’re a hamster on a wheel, always hustling to outrun the bad-guy, never gaining ground.
The questions you ask yourself hold power. They shape your thoughts, your moods, your behavior.
Here are five questions that you need to stop asking yourself right now.
It’s like I closed my eyes for two minutes. Maybe it was just a blink. I swear, it couldn’t have been that long. Fall came and went. My daughter now too old to be taken door to door by her mother, made plans to trick-or-treat with friends. Did we even buy a pumpkin this year? I don’t think so.
I needed to speak to you: lost one. You know who you are, the one who wrote to me for help. You're the one who reached out in those last hours of your life. You are the one who told me your story. You're the one who doesn't go a day without crying. You're the one at rock bottom. The one whose been too far lost now for far too long.
In an effort to find quiet space in my house, somewhere that I could find solace -- a place to be able to write in peace, I decided to move outside. Our back deck looks over a canopy of oaks stretching from our home down the canyon toward the beach. I created a luxurious outdoor room with a super comfy sectional sofa and overstuffed pillows. I stocked it with cozy blankets (heated ones for cold and foggy mornings) and music (Sonos: I love you). My outdoor living room gets nuclear amounts of sunshine at certain parts of the day, so we hung some extra long outdoor drapes that can pull across part of the deck to shade the patio area.
Acceptance has never been one of my strong suits. I, honestly, don't have a laid-back bone in my body. I've always found pride in being driven, being a hard worker, being creative and in my ability to get shit done. For years, I shushed away the idea of acceptance, seeing it more akin to apathy, weakness or powerlessness. Don't get me wrong, I knew acceptance was important; many great teachers have spoken about it. It's one of those Big Topics that seems to be required for spiritual maturity, personal transformation, and for being a decent human being. But secretly, I didn't want to accept that I had to accept. (I told you: stubborn.)
The Universe, knowing me and my tenacious ways, had other plans for me and over time relentlessly upped the ante (divorce, losing all my money, single parenthood, blind dates) until I either had to spontaneously self-combust or surrender into acceptance. Under duress, I chose the latter. And I'm so glad I did. I'm a few years into my acceptance practice, and I now see that I resisted acceptance because I didn't understand what it really meant, and how profoundly it would change my life (in a good way)...
