Coming 2 Consciousness

Respect - It’s not for authority, it’s for humanity.

As a wife and mother, I sometimes find myself being a super-mum/super-wife martyr.
It’s not good.
It’s a negative way I discovered to try and get the attention and affection I crave from my loved ones. Often going further afield to friends or extended family if my strategy wasn’t working in the home.
Laura Doyle’s book: ‘The Empowered Wife’ taught me the power of vulnerability - How expressing my pure desire for comfort (asking for a hug or a longer snuggle in bed or on couch) allows me to receive what I need without damaging my relationships. Very empowering indeed!

Mindful Self-awareness: ‘How do I feel? What do I want?’ (Another Tool from Laura Doyle’s book) Allows me to dig deeper than impulsive/reactive thinking and behaviour, and discover my very human needs that I may not be attending to.

Think I’ve just cracked the code on ‘Find a penny, pick it up. All the day you’ll have good luck.’
When you notice something of value and act on it, you’re putting your gratitude goggles on and shifting from half empty to half full. It’s the switch on a better view point throughout your day. The luck is just the noticing of all the gifts already at your feet. 👌🙏

As ignorant
my feminist ideals had me competing with my husband for career success and social status, ruining our marriage with rivalry and resentment rather than supporting and appreciating his loving service and provision for his family.
Motherhood became a burden and obligation through this lens, and my children missed the loving attention they needed in favour of my ego.

Honoring your own healing is a big deal 💗

Wisdom 🙃

Mindful Summer Week 2: Compassion and Mindfulness in Activism - Mindful Schools It can be difficult to work on big, systemic issues like climate change and oppression. This talk is about compassion and mindfulness in activism.

The evolution of consciousness through the commitment of marriage. An intriguing article.

Beauty and the Beast: The Higher Purpose of Marriage THE BLOG 01/16/2017 02:45 pm ET Updated Jan 15, 2018 Beauty and the Beast: The Higher Purpose of Marriage By Kamlesh D. Patel T he other day, I was lucky enough to observe an elderly couple taking a stroll along the river in Princeton, their steps totally in sync. You could see they had been togethe...

I can relate to this. 😊

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.

~ Brianna Wiest

[Image: Olivier Valsecchi]

Love it. 👍

A great explanation for how Mindfulness facilitates positive change.

Headspace | Meditation | The Hole in the Road It's hard to change something that you can't see. This story demonstrates that awareness is the first step toward positive change, in our minds, and in our l...