From Fallow Fields to Flower Fields
This letting go business is tough.
When we let go of something, how do we know something better will come? What happens if it’s gone forever?
Whenever I start to doubt, I turn to Nature for assurance. Nature seems to be a wonderful reflection for us humans.
In Carlsbad, California there is a place called The Flower Fields where they grow acres and acres of ranunculus. From March through May, the fields are full with every color of flower: red, orange, yellow, white, pink, even purple, as far as you can see.
But after the season, the farm workers harvest the seeds from the remaining crop and plow the fields down. They fumigate all the beds to be sure to kill everything. And they let the soil rest.
Through the winter the fields are empty, colorless, waiting.
In early spring, new seeds are planted by hand, row after row, the workers trusting that the coming year’s crop will bloom as colorful and beautiful as the year before.
While previous harvests strongly support the possibility, there is no guarantee.
But the flowers certainly wouldn’t grow if the farmers didn’t first clear the fields.
It’s the same with us.
We have to let go of the old to make space for the new. We need to sit in that space of fallow fields, allowing our own ground to rest before something new can grow.
A woman in my Living Room Ladies coaching circle is redefining what it means to be an artist. While she has let go of her youthful visions and expectations of an artist’s life, she has no idea what that life could look like now. And she is very uncomfortable with this blank slate.
Because if it’s not what she always thought it was, what is it?
She is in the fallow fields. She has plowed the fields and fumigated the beds and now she must sit and lean into that quiet empty space. Maybe it isn’t yet time to plant the new seeds.
So what can she do? (We all want to be DOING something to move our progress along.)
Well, sometimes the best doing is just Be-ing.
Being able to sit with the thoughts that come up, to calm ourselves when we butt up against our own impatience, to dig deeper into our own soil to reconnect with the reason we want to do this thing in the first place.
She will know when it’s time for planting. She will know what seeds to scatter. She will know how she wants to bloom.
I’d love to hear your comments. Please share them by clicking the comments below.
My Mother Never Wore Makeup
In honor of Mother’s Day last Sunday, and what would have been my mom’s 84rd birthday on May 17, I’m re-sharing this post I wrote about my mom shortly after she died in 2010.
It inspired so many people to think of their own mothers and what they knew and didn’t know about them. Several friends wondered how much their own kids knew about them.
Maybe it will inspire you to spend some time today thinking of your own mom.
My Mother Never Wore Makeup
My mother never wore makeup. No eye shadow or mascara, no foundation or blush. A tube of pink coral lipstick could last a whole year in the bottom of her pocketbook, only rolled up out of its gold tube on special occasions, like weddings and PTA meetings.
In her wedding picture, my mother looks like Elinor Donahue, the daughter in Father Knows Best. Her short black hair has a slight wave below the ears, framing her twenty-nine year old face.
My mother never rode a bike, could barely swim. She said she didn’t know how to breathe like a swimmer so, for her swimming test in high school, she held her breath for the entire lap across and back.
My mother didn’t like octopus or squid. She did not like to sit in the sun. She was good at crossword puzzles and Scrabble and those logic games where you have to figure out, if Jane likes cats and Matthew is allergic to dogs, who sits next to Bob in the office.
We’d watch Jeopardy together way back when Art Fleming was the host, and my mom got so many answers right I thought she should be on the show.
She didn’t drink except maybe a single whiskey sour at someone’s bar mitzvah. She didn’t smoke, either, but she sometimes held a friend’s cigarette because she liked the way it felt between her fingers.
My mother had scars from a hysterectomy, a lumpectomy, and the death of her seven year old son from neuroblastoma.
Her favorite ice cream was Baskin Robbins Rocky Road and Burgundy Cherry. She liked the eggrolls with the bumpy wonton wrappers. When she was on the original Weight Watchers with Jean Nidetch, she ordered beef with bean sprouts with no cornstarch at the Chinese restaurant.
My mother could recite entire poems, like Trees and The Wasteland and Casey at the Bat. She played the piano by ear and sang the harmony on Happy Birthday.
She swore by Ivory soap, Prell shampoo, Scott toilet paper and Kleenex tissues. She preferred S&W over Libby’s, Macy’s over Penney’s. She always drove an American car.
My mother didn’t garden or sew or read Ladies Home Journal. She drank Chock Full of Nuts coffee and SweeTouchNee tea. Her standard home cooked meals were hamburgers, salmon latkes and spaghetti and meatballs served with canned LeSeur peas.
She had small hands and AAA narrow feet and her pinky toes curled behind the others, just like mine. She could add three digit numbers in her head and type seventy five words per minute. She edited spreadsheets and newsletters and balanced her checkbook with Quicken, even when she could barely read the numbers in the register.
My mother looked pretty in pink and gray and periwinkle. She preferred elastic waisted pants and skirts and didn’t wear a bra around the house. She usually wore a turtleneck under her blouse – partly because she was cold – but mostly to hide the folds of her neck.
We buried her in the navy velour pants and matching jacket, hood up, with a pink turtleneck underneath. No bra, no makeup, just a hint of lipstick, just like she asked.
What do you remember about your mom? Please share by clicking on the Comments below.
The Gifts of a Setback
You may be tired of hearing about my sciatica, but I’m learning so much about myself through this experience. And folks have written, thanking me for verbalizing what they’ve experienced with their own chronic pain.
I was so happy to return to work last week, driving to a client’s house, sitting for two hours and then driving home. I iced between activities and continued my regular stretching on my yoga mat. I was even able to sit comfortably through the entire dinner my Dad made on Saturday night. I still had the neuropathy that felt like a hard waterfall down my thigh for the first few moments after standing up, but I felt good. Strong. Stable. I was even going on short walks with Mabel.
On Thursday I went to my favorite gentle yoga class at Desert Song Yoga. My teacher focused the practice on hip and heart openers. It was like she was talking directly to me, “If you have back issues, pay attention, don’t over do it.” She reminded us to engage the tops of the thighs, to reach from the waist, to exhale, then go a little deeper.
And she guided us into a deep hip opener and said, “Use your breath to release any residual stuff that might be stuck.” I was lying on my back, with my knees hugged deep into my chest. I breathed into my right hip and started to cry. “Breathe in and release,” she said, as tears dripped down my face. “It’s OK to let go.”
I was cautious and attentive with each pose and several times I came out of the pose before everyone else, and rested. And most of all, it was so wonderful to be practicing with my community.
After yoga I had a light lunch, then drove an easy three miles to a client’s house. I sat for two and a half hours in a wooden chair and my butt was talking to me on the way home. When I got home I got in bed and laid on my ice, praying.
On Friday, I woke up in tears. It hurt to stand. It hurt to sit. I had that throbbing aching in my butt again.
But I had a client and I had already rescheduled her twice. I cried on the drive to her house and was so grateful that she had forgotten the appointment. I drove home in tears, shifting and lifting myself off the seat, trying to find the least painful position. I spent the day on heat and ice, getting up to walk every fifteen minutes in between. And I cried.
That night I couldn’t find a comfortable position to sleep. I tried lying flat on my back in bed but my legs hurt. I stretched out on the couch but my back hurt. I ended up sleeping in my office on my yoga mat, on my belly with a pillow under me to take the strain off of my back.
Mabel came in around six in the morning. I got back in bed and told Marika how frustrated I was. And I started crying. I cried about everything – the returning pain, the frustration, missing my Mom, how I didn’t want to have to cancel any more clients. And then I was just wailing, with no thoughts attached, just crying out everything, moving the energy, releasing it, letting it go. I was bawling so loudly that Marika had to leave the room. And I cried about that too. But I understood and I let that go, too.
Healing is not linear. Few things are, really. But we think and imagine and expect things to be.
What this sciatica journey is teaching me is that really, everything passes and nothing stays the same and that being able to live THAT is the key to everything.
That this present moment is here for us to enjoy or not, it’s our choice. So yes, even though in the last eight weeks Marika and I haven’t been able to go anywhere fun, we’ve made our own fun. We sing, we play rhyming word games, we play name that tune with the oldies station. And on the days when it is hard to be together, we get grumpy and cranky and we take our own space.
There’s so much to learn in that, too. That we need to be able to be alone with ourselves even when we are together, so that it’s not as hard when we are apart. And that there are some things I can’t do it for her and she can’t do it for me. But that we can still be there for each other, supporting each other as we do our own work.
Now, instead of asking, what can I do for you, I ask, How can I support you? Sometimes it is by making her a tuna melt sandwich, other times by looking up addresses or calculating numbers. And sometimes it is just me being in the same room while she files her weekly unemployment claim.
And when I am feeling hopeless and frustrated, I just need a squeeze of her hand and for her to remind me that it’s not always going to be like this.
And then I can get up from my ice, walk and move in my body and lift my heart, and say Thank You for all that I am learning, even though it hurts.
And as I walk through the discomfort, I feel the new range of motion in my hips and legs and realize that this is also about learning how I support myself. How, for years, my right hip has been tight and unsteady, forcing my left hip to bear more weight. In the same way that my Mac training is so left brained, and my writing and coaching work is so right brained, now, as my right hip gets stronger, there can be ease and flow in my hips and in my work and in my life.
This setback has given me another opportunity to stop and go deeper, to learn even more about how I move and don’t move through my life. And to realize the blessings that have come from this painful experience. And for that, I am vey grateful.
How do you deal with setbacks? Please share by clicking the Comments below!
Take Time to Dream
Imagine how your life might change if you did just ONE of these things every day!
The other night I asked Marika if she wanted to plan a vacation with me that we didn’t have to go on. Where do you want to go? Philadelphia, she said, to visit her aunt. And Longwood Gardens, I added. And we’ll invite all of my relatives to meet us at the diner on Roosevelt Blvd, and we can go to that art museum that your mother was talking about. The Barnes Foundation? Yes. And we can get real PRETZELS. And maybe we can go to Baltimore. How far is Baltimore? I’d love to go back to Visionary Museum and they have a great aquarium, too. We could take the train. And a bus to the harbor. It would be an adventure!
It was fun to let our imaginations go wild, to stretch and envision without considering logistics, money, time….to just play.
That afternoon, after spending over an hour helping Marika look for jobs online, she was flipping through an RV supply catalog. She pointed to all kinds of silly things that we could buy for when we are on the road, traveling in the RV. We were both smiling, laughing, lifted from the heaviness of the job hunting. And it was fun!
The next day I was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair and she was telling me how tired she was from all the cleaning and painting she’s been doing at her house.
I asked her, if you could go anywhere on a vacation, where would you go? Paris, she said, and her whole face lifted. What would you do there? Drink wine. and sightsee. Would you go alone or? Oh no, I’d go with a girlfriend. Not my boyfriend. She stayed with the dreaming for a few quiet minutes then said So you remember that when you win the lottery, OK?
Our minds need to dream without limitations. Like kids do. They’re able to imagine all kinds of magical inventions because they never consider if it’s possible. When we explore the edges of our own possibilities, who knows what we will discover.
So, imagine, where would you go on a vacation? What would you do there? Who would you go with? Tell us! Share by clicking on the Comments below!
How to Wake Up
This summer my friends Maya Stein and Amy Tingle are bicycling 1,400 miles on a tandem bicycle through America’s heartland, writing free poems & building Little Free Libraries.
They made tiny little books for people to complete and add to the free library. This book was sent to me with blank pages and just the title. It was up to me to write the contents. I am thrilled to share my first published book.
Click on the picture to see the whole book.
And click here for more information of Maya and Amy’s Tandem Poetry Tour
What’s Next?
Like with any behavior, thought or pattern we’re trying to release, if we focus on it, it continues to manifest.
But if we shift our thought and attention to what is NEXT, even AND ESPECIALLY if we don’t know what that is, then that first thing loses energy, lessens its hold on us and it eventually releases.
For the last four weeks I’ve been in pain and for the last two, I’ve been writing about it. Because that’s how I needed to move through it. To get to know it, describe it, feel it with words. I needed to engage with it, be with it, learn from it.
And then, at some point, even though pain was still with me, I didn’t want to give it my full and undivided attention anymore. I was ready to release it.
I stopped using the word pain and now I simply notice the different “sensations” when I sit or stand or bend my legs. Sometimes it’s tingly, then more like thumbtacks poking, with fire. But just a small fire, and it goes out quickly, and it doesn’t spread.
When I sit for too long I feel a hard aching on my butt, but it no longer feels like someone’s drilling a hole back there. But the longer I sit, the wider and deeper the ache spreads and then it reverberates like electricity down my leg. But the intensity is much less and it doesn’t last long, especially if I can get on my back, on an ice pack and relieve the pressure on my spine.
On Monday I saw a “real” doctor at a spine and sports medicine practice. She confirmed that I probably have a herniated disk and that yes, 80% of patients get relief in 6-8 weeks without much intervention.
She prescribed neurontin for the nerve pain. We’ll see if it gives me more pain-free sitting time. I’m taking the rest of the week off of work to remove the stress of cancelling, rescheduling and feeling bad about it, and I’m devoting the time to healing.
I’ve been doing gentle hip opening and core building yoga stretches and have added heart openers and balancing poses to my practice.
Yes, I need to be aware of what hurts so I don’t overdo it, but I am ready to begin moving with this new freedom in my hip, to stretch deeper, to stay open to what’s next, even though I don’t know exactly what that is.
I do know what skills and gifts I want to share and with who. I know what I love to do most, and that I really do help people see themselves with eyes of love.
And so, during this week of healing, I’m focusing on what I love, what I’m grateful for, and how I want to feel in my life.
I’m asking myself questions like:
What do I really want?
Why?
What do I already have?
What’s in the way?
What’s the next first step I can take?
And I’m looking forward, eyes and hips and heart wide open.
Share your thought, your own What’s Next! by clicking the comments below!
Making Friends with Pain
It is Sunday, day 23 of this sciatica journey and it is still too uncomfortable to sit in a chair for any length of time. So I am lying on my back in bed with the ice pack under my right butt cheek. My computer is propped between my belly and my bent knees and I have two pillows tucked under my neck and shoulders so that I can see the screen.
Yes, everything hurts a LOT less than it did a week ago. I am able to stretch my arms above my head without feeling the clenching in my hip. I can bend at the waist and get up and down from a chair with no pain. I can even lie on my back with both knees tucked into my chest and rock.
But I still can’t sit or stand long enough to drive or enjoy a meal, much less work with a client.
I remind myself how big a shift this has all been, emotionally, physically, even spiritually. And that healing takes time. My muscles and tendons, ligaments and nerves were all so bound up, and my femur actually shifted in the hip socket. So it should be no surprise that it’s going to take a while for everything to calm back down.
And that all I can do is what I can do.
I get up to walk and move every 10 to 15 minutes. I can now get on the floor to stretch at least once an hour, doing leg lifts and hip rotators and gentle twists. I am drinking lots of water, taking the homeopathic anti-inflammatory pills and rubbing arnica cream on my butt and thigh several times a day. And I am breathing.
And I practice sitting. Getting into the chair is painless and easy. I remember to relax and breathe and all is fine. And then I feel the pressure on my butt, like I’m sitting on a fresh black and blue mark. I shift to my weight onto my other side but I still can’t find a comfortable position.
Then I think I am being a baby, that I should be able to sit down even if it hurts, and so I stay. And then I have sat too long and my butt is cramping and the fire is racing down my leg and balling up behind my knee and I can’t get into bed on my back fast enough to relieve the pressure.
I lie there, breathing to relax, until finally I can feel my butt loosen and release, even though it still hurts. I breathe deep into the pain to discern if the edges of the pain circle are any smaller than the last time I checked.
I have asked the pain what it wants, what it needs, how it would like to leave my body. I have invited it to tell me more stories, and I have thanked it for all that it has brought me and taught me. But all it says is, Be patient. Be present. And breathe.
Meanwhile, Marika, who is an RN and skeptical of alternative treatments, would like me to go to a “real doctor” to get an epidural for the pain and to find out if something else is going on.
I assume I’ll need an MRI before anyone will give me the epidural, but
I’m thinking, by the time I get an appointment, get an MRI, etc., I’ll probably be sitting and standing with minimal discomfort. (Which needs to be by Friday, because I’m doing another live presentation.) And that the MRI won’t show anything abnormal.
But what if I’m wrong? Should I go for the MRI just to be sure?
This is the same dilemma I had when Laddy was suddenly so sick and they suggested doing an ultrasound to be sure. I chose NOT to have the ultrasound. I didn’t need the confirmation. I knew it was cancer and that it was time.
And I realize that this is another opportunity to trust myself. My gut knows that it is just going to be a longer than usual healing time. That EVERYTHING has been inflamed and moved and stretched and torqued, and it’s going to take some gentle patience for everything to settle back down. I know this. I trust this. Today’s massage is part of that gentle, patient healing.
I think about people who live with chronic pain, and people whose pain is a direct link to serious disease and big big life questions. And I wonder how they do it. And then I think about how we all live with some form of pain, and that we each get to choose how we deal with it.
We can fight it. We can deny it. We can try to tame it. We can run from it or dance with it. We can meet it like a wary stranger or invite it in as a welcomed guest with stories to tell and gifts to share.
Or we can just breathe. And breathe again. And become one with it.
Tuesday update: Yesterday’s massage worked wonders. This morning I was able to sit outside for breakfast with minimal discomfort for 30 minutes before returning to bed to rest. I can walk with no pain and later today, I will get in the car to see if I can drive. Clients are waiting and I am ready!
Feel free to share your story by clicking on the comments below.
Anatomy of a Shift
I have been lying on my back for the last two and a half weeks with the most intense episode of sciatica.
I’ve had lower back pain before that has left me on my heating pad for several days. But this sharp, lightening bolt pain that shoots down my leg is like nothing I’ve experienced before.
But then, this place in my life is like nothing I’ve experienced before either.
Yes, it started with some irritated disks, but, with my back already tender, I didn’t slow down. Instead, I must have moved just enough to tweak something in my piriformis, the muscle that stretches across the lower back between the pelvis and the head of the femur. The muscle tightened and shifted my hip in the socket and somewhere in the midst of all of the shifting, my sciatic nerve got caught in the middle.
It was as if all of the things I was dealing with in my life – a shift in my work, the grief that was triggered with the loss of my first best friend, helping Marika find a new job, transitioning to being in Phoenix- all came to a head like a five car pileup on my right butt cheek.
My whole body tightened up against the pain. I couldn’t sit on the toilet without screaming. I had no appetite. I couldn’t even reach across the bed to pet Mabel. And I was barely breathing. As soon as I noticed how shallow my breath was, I was able to breathe a little space into my back and heart.
My yoga teacher says that women hold a lot of emotion in their hips. My hips have been tight since I began practicing in 2004. Since then, my left hip has opened more but my right hip has continued to be resistant to most stretches. Even in the simple pose with my right ankle resting on my left thigh, my hip has always screamed like it would break if I attempted the slightest stretch.
I looked up Louise Hay’s interpretation of sciatica and she believes that it is related to financial fear, which made me laugh, because there I was, lying on my back, cancelling clients, NOT making money, and being advised not to worry about it. But it made sense on a bigger scale as I am redefining my work in the world and feeling unsure that it will support me. I began repeating her suggested affirmation, “I move into my greater good and I am secure and safe.”
And I started talking to the pain, asking what I could learn from it.
The first message came loud and clear-to love the pain. To not resist it or deny it, but to befriend it, to move with it.
And so, when I shifted from sitting to standing, instead of stopping because the pain was going to take me beyond the top of the pain scale, I willed myself to move with it, through it. I figured it was going to hurt either way, so I might as well move faster.
I screamed, I cried, I sang, I prayed, I cursed, any expression to release the pain, all while telling myself that it would be over once I stood up.
And it usually was. But standing for more than a few minutes brought severe cramping down the back of my leg and I had to get back into bed to relieve the pressure.
Lying there, I could feel how bound up every single muscle was in my butt. I breathed in calm and love and release as I laid on my belly with a pillow under me for support, making microscopic flexing movements with my butt cheeks, imagining they were butterfly wings.
I began moving my pelvis, ever so slightly, to see if I could loosen things up. After a day of these gentle movements, I had a little more range of motion in my hips and I began slow, regular stretches to continue the healing.
And what I noticed was that my hip was now moving without that feeling of breaking. I could feel the stretches in the actual muscles for the first time. My butt still ached like hell, but my hip felt free.
I had been seeing my chiropractor since the episode began and he had mentioned that, in addition to the swelling in my disks and the issues in the piriformis, my femur was turned out. It is no wonder I experienced such excruciating pain while it re-situated itself in the socket.
Life is a spiral, and this has been an opportunity to go deeper into the grief I’ve been holding in my hips all of these years. I’m sure it was triggered by the sudden death of my first ever best friend, even though we were only friends online. I had lost the last connection to someone who knew me before my brother died. While I have done years of work making peace with his death, this time I realized I needed to reconnect with my own six year old self who got lost the day he died.
In the midst of all of this personal work, I am also doing a lot of shifting in my businesses. 2014 is the year that I step higher and deeper into Spark the Heart. This is the year I am writing my book and leading retreats and workshops for ready women. This is also the year that I am doing less Mac training.
I am so grateful for the friends who called and emailed and engaged with me on Facebook. And for my Dad who called and checked up on me daily, offering to bring bagels and lox and anything else I might need. And for my friend Geri who came and worked her massage magic on my buttocks. And for Marika, who kept me on heat and ice and fluffed my pillows and made chicken soup, and took over my football duties and put my socks on for me and sang with me and screamed with me and held my hand when I cried.
I am still far from 100%, but walking and standing are much less painful. It is still uncomfortable to sit for very long, with the pressure on my butt, but I’m hoping that tomorrow’s acupuncture will alleviate whatever is still bound up.
Still, it would be so easy to just stay in bed, on my back, no pressures, minimal discomfort. Just like continuing on my life path as it is would be easier, no pressure, just show up and do the work I’ve been doing for the last 28 years. But I know what my body needs most is to move, to stretch, to realign. And that I need to shift into bigger work.
Life is about challenging ourselves to move past what we know and what is comfortable, to find how we can really make a difference and feel that our work matters. Old stories can’t get us there. Old wounds can’t keep us there. We have to unbind ourselves from our old beliefs and hurts, and release them so that we can move forward with grace and ease to whatever is next.
I will continue to move through this journey with faith and an open heart, trusting that I will be financially supported because this is where my real work is.
That Attitude of Gratitude
It is springtime in the Arizona desert and, as I drive the streets that line the bases of the mountains, it is as if the whole earth is lit up with the yellows of poppies and brittle bush and marigolds. Bursts of orange African daisies and purple lupine and verbena appear on the roadsides between stretches of sidewalk and graveled hiking trails.
I tell you this because the last time I spent the spring in Phoenix, I couldn’t tell you what was in bloom, or dormant, or what colors appeared anywhere. I wasn’t really present. I was merely here counting the days until I’d be back at the beach.
This time is different. Completely. I am present. Open to what happens each day. And I haven’t even thought about when I’m heading back to the beach.
Because life happens where we are, in the present moment.
It is in the NOW that we hug our friends and feel the love. It’s being here in the moment where we notice the colors popping and feel the intensity of the sun on our skin.
It’s in the present moment that we feel the sadness too. Being here, I notice how much more I miss Laddy. I’ve been crying a lot, feeling his absence. But I lean in and feel the loss, and that’s living in the now, too.
I’m sure I’m experiencing this big shift because, the day before I left the beach, I set the intention to be grateful for my time in Arizona, fully and completely, with no regrets, and with full presence.
I set things up with my time here differently, too. Yes, I came to town primarily to work with clients. But this time I didn’t jam every single day with work. And I have reserved every Thursday morning for my cherished yoga class. I even gave myself an extra half hour between yoga and my afternoon client so that I can languish in the way my body feels after my practice, and enjoy lunch without rushing.
And I haven’t planned a dinner out with a friend every single evening. Instead, I’m staying home some nights enjoying Marika’s home cooking, and stretching out on the couch watching TV.
Even the warm weather hasn’t really get to me, because I was expecting it.
And I find myself saying thank you a lot. Because when we are present we are more able to be grateful for what is.
I am still in awe of this life I have created that allows me to come back to Phoenix where clients greet me with hugging arms, where friends remember my birthday and treat me to delicious meals, where my home away from home is comfortable, familiar and full of love.
Having an attitude of gratitude may seem like just a silly rhyme. But I invite you to try it. Because it really works!
Cause For Applause: Replace But’s With YAYS!
I was listening to one of my coaching clients share some of her weekly successes. She had cleaned out an entire closet, paid her bills early and had scheduled a long-overdue manicure for herself.
She was moving so quickly through the list that there was no pause for honoring her accomplishments. And when she did pause, it was to counter the success with a “but I didn’t….”
I had to stop her.
I gave her a big shout out for each of the successes. And I asked her to join me in a big WOOHOO! YAY! I DID THAT! celebration.
And then she said, “Wow, I didn’t even realize how much I’d done.”
Often we are so focused on plowing through our to-do lists that we don’t honor the work we’re doing.
We don’t take the time to celebrate our successes.
We don’t breathe in how good it feels to accomplish something.
No wonder we still feel overwhelmed with what ELSE we have to do.
And when we counter what we HAVE done with a BUT, (yes, I did that BUT I didn’t do the other thing) we are negating ourselves, dishonoring our success, sabotaging our own power.
I asked my client to pay attention to this pattern and, whenever she hears herself say BUT, to stop and take the opportunity to CELEBRATE what she DID do with a big YAY!
She liked the idea.
Later, in our conversation, she started to go down that BUT road and immediately stopped herself mid-sentence. She didn’t YAY, but I could hear her smile.
How often to you celebrate your accomplishments?
How often do you honor what you’ve taken care of, what you’ve done for yourself?
How often do you give yourself a big high-five YEAH???
Click below on Comments to share your successes, your accomplishments, your YAYS!
