When you ignore yourself

March 23, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Acknowledge your needs.

So many of us are used to placing other people’s needs and desires before our own. We’ve been conditioned that way through our family culture and our cultural norms.

To allow ourselves to consider different ways of being, we first need to become aware of what we are doing automatically, without thinking about it. When we become aware of our automatic responses, we can then slow down and choose on purpose.

And first, we have to know what the other options and choices are for us. We can start by asking some questions:

What is my automatic response to this type of situation?
Why do I respond this way?
What do I think will happen if I don’t respond the way I always do?
Am I willing to feel uncomfortable and do something different?

Then we can decide what we want to explore doing instead. Some options could be:

“I want to think about it and get back to you tomorrow by noon.”
“I had plans for that time already, but I know this is important to you. Let’s see what can work for both of us.”
“This is urgent and I’m willing to focus my time on this instead of what I had planned.”
“This isn’t urgent, even though I used to make it urgent, and I want to focus on what I had planned instead.”

One thing that really made a difference for me, even though it may seem small: I used to put off going to the bathroom at work until it became urgent. Our bodies let us know when it’s urgent! But I wasn’t being very nice to my body or myself when I waited until I urgently needed to pee. It’s like I was my body’s warden and not allowing it to pee until it became an emergency. Now, when I need to pee, I go to the bathroom as soon as I feel it; or I plan ahead of time to pee before a meeting so it doesn’t become urgent. This lets my body know it can trust me to take care of its needs.

It may seem small, but it started to change things for me. I started to become aware of my own needs and asked myself, “Where else in my life am I ignoring myself by not taking care of my needs until they become urgent?”

Your turn: How do you want to respond on purpose? What might you need to change in order to recognize and acknowledge your needs more? Where in your life are you ignoring yourself by not taking care of your needs until they become urgent?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Life coaching for you

March 16, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Curious?

What do you think about life coaching? Have you considered it for yourself? How can coaching help you?

Life coaching can add value to your life when you think you have a problem—and thinking about it takes up a lot of your time and mental energy. You’d likely rather do something else with that time and energy.

Life coaching can help you make it a non-problem in your mind so you can focus on the things you want to think about and do instead. Things that move your life forward in the direction you want to go. Things you want to create for yourself.

At the very least, it can provide a committed time for mental self-care. It’s making time rather than finding time to keep mentally healthy.

As it relates to self-care, we look at your life holistically to see where the gaps are. What is your relationship to self-care? What is your relationship to your Self?

Sometimes your thoughts and beliefs do not align with who you want to be and who you think you are, which is a big obstacle to making healthy choices for yourself.

When we coach together, we’ll look at your thoughts about self-care and strengthen your beliefs about yourself—that you are a person who deserves care, especially from yourself.

When your thoughts and beliefs start to align even more, that’s when you begin making healthier choices for yourself. You align with who you want to be and who you are becoming.

If that sounds good to you, I’d like to personally invite you to join Self-Care Sundays, my weekly drop-in coaching sessions, or to book an exploratory session to find out how coaching can work for you!

Register for Self-Care Sundays

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When you self-sabotage

March 9, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

“Have” it instead.

Sometimes there is something we say we want—and we really do want it. We go after it and expend a lot of effort in getting it. Then we may actually get it. Now what?

Some of us are in the space of not knowing what to do once we have something. It might even feel uncomfortable to have something we’ve wanted for so long.

So what do we do? We might sabotage our efforts instead of continuing to take actions that maintain our efforts, actions that sustain our having gotten what we wanted.

This may be because the “capacity to have” hasn’t been cultivated in us yet. When we have something, it means that thing is here with us. Whether it’s an ideal weight, sobriety, an amount in the back account, a partner, a job title, etc.

Sometimes when we finally get something that we’ve been wanting, unhelpful thoughts creep in, like, “I don’t deserve this” or “I’m unworthy of having this” or even just “This feels so uncomfortable.”

We become familiar and comfortable with a certain level of weight, income, connection, responsibility at work, how much we drink/eat. When we move beyond our “comfort threshold” even if we’ve gotten what we want, it can feel uncomfortable because it’s unfamiliar.

We may overeat to gain weight and be back at our “familiar” weight where we need to keep thinking about how to lose it. We might create arguments in a relationship to push someone away because we’re not used to having close connection. We might do something at work to set us back or sabotage our reputation.

What does “having” something feel like? We may need to allow ourselves to get familiar with “having” so that we don’t self-sabotage. We can allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable at our new ideal weight. We can allow discomfort with a new job title and responsibilities. We can allow discomfort with the increased income we’re earning. All while still “having” it.

When we allow ourselves to have something, it will become familiar and comfortable to have it. That’s when we’ve acclimated to our new level of being.

As this relates to self-care, we can open ourselves up to feeling deserving of care, especially care from ourselves.

What else do we want to create for ourselves and practice having?

Your turn: Is there something that you’ve been wanting but maybe feel undeserving of having? Tell yourself the truth about it. What do you really want? Are you willing to get it and then have it and possibly feel uncomfortable with it while you acclimate to it?

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Check your attention

March 2, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Where is it?

Do you know where your attention is focused in your life? Does it seem like you’re all over the place? Like you’re not focused because there are too many things vying for your attention?

While this is a normal experience, it doesn’t have to be yours if you don’t want it to be.

Like willpower, we have a limited amount of attention to spend during a day or a week. When we’re not intentional about where we spend our attention, we may be wasting it.

We may think we’re focusing on certain things, but “other” things are really getting our attention instead. We want to be aware of this so we can refocus on what’s really important to us.

Let’s say we have 100 units of attention for one day. Where do we want to spend those units on purpose during our day?

To find out where we’re currently spending our attention, we can make a list of things that we’re giving our attention to. Think about the things that are getting your attention, that demand your attention, or things that you want to be giving attention to but aren’t.

You’ll see things that are getting your attention and you may notice areas where you’re neglecting to give the attention that you want to.

You may also notice areas where you’re giving so much of your attention to but you don’t actually want to be paying that much attention to—because you’re sacrificing other areas that you actually want to pay attention to.

For example, in the past, I used to think about relationships a lot and focus on what wasn’t going right in them and how I could make things better or control things in a way where I could feel good and be happy. But I wasn’t paying enough attention to other parts of my life where I actually had more control. And everything just spiraled downward because I was focusing my attention on things that I didn’t have control over and couldn’t actually change.

What if I had used all that mental energy and attention on taking better care of myself, or creating opportunities and experiences, or finding other options in my life instead?

This is not to say that our attention should never waver. It does and it will because we have human brains. We just get to decide what we want to focus more or less of our attention on during our days. As it relates to self-care, this can serve us well.

Now I practice focusing my attention on purpose on what’s valuable to me and where I want to create shifts or changes in my life that can move me forward. I focus attention on taking care of myself in the myriad ways that self-care encompasses. I ruminate less on what I think isn’t going well and focus more on what IS going well—and also on expanding what I think is possible in my life and what thoughts I want to have instead, on purpose.

Your turn: What are the things that you give your attention to that energize you? What are the things that drag your attention away and de-energize you? What do you SAY that you value in your life? Does where you spend your attention reflect this? How can you be more intentional about where you focus your attention on things that move you and your life forward?

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Dopamine on purpose

February 23, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Choose intentionally.

Let’s talk about dopamine. Dopamine is our motivation neurotransmitter and it seeks reward and pleasure.

We get hits of dopamine from eating sugar, social media likes, checking social media, checking email, thinking about pleasurable things/people, or finishing tasks, just to name a few things.

Because our actions can be driven almost unconsciously by our desire for dopamine hits, we want to start being more aware of where we get our dopamine on purpose. OR decide that we need less dopamine overall.

So here’s how we can think about this. Our human brains can be rewarded in many ways. Mostly, the way our brains were designed was to be rewarded initially by things that would keep us alive, which is a very good idea.

So we are rewarded by things like accomplishment, by comfort, by food, by sex, by conserving energy. When we were just starting to develop as humans, those were some of the things that drove us to stay alive, versus just staying in the cave, being afraid, and not going anywhere. We had dopamine driving our reward system, so we would go and seek things out.

We want to become aware of where we’re focusing our dopamine seeking. If we’re focused on getting dopamine from food, for example, we’ll be thinking about the next snack, our next meal, going to the grocery store, going to Starbucks, going to dinner, etc. However, this likely leads to a negative result of being overweight or having disordered eating.

Recently, I’ve been getting dopamine from learning through online courses, reading self-help books, and creating more in my business. I get dopamine from doing hard things—things that I “don’t feel like” doing, but I do them anyway because it serves me to do them.

We can get dopamine from taking a walk, from completing a task (even just a small one), from seeing a clean floor after vacuuming, from singing, from creating, from anything that rewards us with some pleasure.

When we become more aware of where our dopamine is focused, we can take better care of ourselves.

We get to decide, “I’m now going to spend more time doing these things that contribute to the life that I want and the results I want in my life.” Instead of unconsciously choosing other things that may produce negative results.

Your turn: Where are you directing your dopamine? Where are you directing your desire? Where are you currently getting the most rewards? Where do you want to be getting rewards from on purpose? What pleasurable things would you like to create for yourself to experience and enjoy consciously?

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It’s not “over there”

February 16, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

It’s right here.

When we set goals for ourselves, it’s easy to start thinking that when we finally achieve those goals, our lives will be better.

Our lives will be different, not necessarily better. We may not have some of the problems we had before achieving our goal. But then we may have new problems after achieving our goal.

Life will still be 50/50, positive/negative.

But it’s tempting to think that “there” is better than where we are right now. We might start thinking:

“Once I get that promotion, I’ll be satisfied.”

“When I find my perfect partner, I’ll feel worthy.”

“Once I’ve lost the extra weight, I’ll love myself more.”

“When I buy a house, I’ll feel complete.”

“Once we have kids, our marriage will be more fulfilling.”

We can get focused on the “there” and forget about being here in the present moment. And when we place a lot of weight on getting “there,” we may be disappointed once we are “there” and we still don’t feel satisfied, worthy, loving, or complete.

This is not to say that our goals aren’t important or that we shouldn’t have a vision of what we want for ourselves. But when we place so much responsibility on the future for the way we want to feel, we forget that we’re responsible for the way we’re feeling right now.

“Being aware of the present moment simply means you never believe the illusion that the future is going to be better than what is going on right now.” – Mateo Tabatabai, The Mind-Made Prison

We can feel satisfied, worthy, loving, and complete right now by what we’re thinking about our life circumstances and ourselves. Our thoughts generate our feelings. We can fuel ourselves with the feelings we want to feel, take aligned actions, and create the future we want from here.

Being “here” and creating our future from “here” is just as valuable and important as being “there” can be.

“Plan, dream, and organize all you want, just don’t start believing that what you have planned for the future is going to be any better than your current moment. You are going to be in the present moment your entire life. If you are focusing on how good the future is going to be, you are just running on the hamster wheel hoping to get somewhere. Life is right now in this glorious moment right in front of you. I believe that if you’re not allowing yourself to be happy right now, nothing external in the future is going to change that permanently.” – Mateo Tabatabai, The Mind-Made Prison

Your turn: What feelings do you think achieving your goals will generate for you? Do you believe you have the capacity to feel those feelings right now? What would happen if you didn’t need to wait for future circumstances to provide the feelings you want and that you can feel that way now? What would it look like for you to move towards your goals feeling now the way you think achieving those goals would feel?

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“I should feel happy all the time”

February 9, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Life is 50/50.

I want to offer that life and our human experience is 50/50 – 50% “good/positive” and 50% “bad/negative.”

I think we’ve been taught incorrectly that our lives should be good most, if not all, of the time. So when something happens that’s in the “bad” 50%, we think something has gone terribly wrong. But if that 50% is supposed to be there, has anything really gone wrong?

If you felt happy all the time, you would have to feel happy even through things like the death of a loved one, an accident, an illness, someone betraying you. And all of these things, my friends, are part of the human experience. Things we basically sign up for when we’re born.

In our effort to feel happy all the time, we stay away from discomfort that could help us evolve and motivate us to make our dreams come true. If we can accept that emotional balance means that 50% of the time, we’ll be on the other side of happy, we might be willing to fail epically and try courageously. That is the normal human experience.

Our emotions are an indicator of what’s going on for us. To be authentic, to have a true relationship with our life, is also to be willing to experience negative emotion 50% of the time. If we’re willing to do that without trying to escape it, we’ll remove all the buffers in our life, and at the same time, we’ll remove all the negative consequences that come with them.

What are buffers? When we buffer, we use something to distract ourselves from feeling an uncomfortable emotion. A buffer could be over-eating, over-drinking, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, over-spending, over-cleaning. We do these actions instead of allowing and processing an uncomfortable emotion like boredom, loneliness, shame, fear, jealousy.

We avoid doing the harder things (like processing our feelings), and instead, we gain weight, we get hangovers, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals, we throw away time consuming other people’s content when we could be creating our own, or doing something to take care of ourselves, like going for a walk, run, doing yoga, meditating, or cooking a healthy meal.

When we allow ourselves to feel discomfort, we will decrease our buffers and the negative consequences they produce. In fact, when we allow ourselves to really feel our emotions, we get to know ourselves in a much deeper way.

What happens when we get to know ourselves in a much deeper way? We start finding the causes of our unhappiness, and then we can start to change them, if we want to.

This is sustainable, unlike engaging in the false pleasures we’ve been using to buffer before and bearing the consequences that come along with them.

For example, when you limit your drinking, you don’t experience hangovers and get to feel good in your body. When you watch your eating, you get the pleasure of not worrying about your weight. These results are real, ongoing pleasures.

Your turn: How would you think about your life differently if you accepted that life is 50/50? What if nothing has gone wrong when you’re in the other 50% that’s not “good”? What would you be more willing to do for yourself if you embraced the 50/50 of life?

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Your morning revamped

February 2, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Step into your day.

Do you look at your phone and check emails, the news, social media, or text messages the minute you wake up?

This used to be my morning routine: the alarm on my phone would go off. I’d turn it off and since my phone was in my hand, I would immediately check my work emails. I wanted to see what my day might look like.

It seems like a productive thing to do, right? To “prepare for your day.”

I want to offer that when you do this, your day might appear to “come at” you.

All the requests from other people and all the time you need to spend on emailing others for info, looking for info, and creating responses once you have the info. Along with the other meetings and projects you had planned to do that day–or last minute meetings and projects that have popped up overnight.

Not to mention what fills our minds after looking at the news, social media, or text messages as well.

It might feel overwhelming. Starting your day immediately feeling overwhelmed likely doesn’t contribute to productivity in a way that serves you.

What would happen if you didn’t look at your phone and start having information come at you the minute you wake up?

I’ve talked to clients who said they feel anxious just thinking about not checking their phones/emails first thing.

What if instead, you have an alarm that’s separate from your phone? And what if you took five minutes after waking up to start your day in a way that YOU WANT?

This could look like intentional breathing, a short meditation, or some gentle movement and stretches for your body. For five minutes.

It could look like lying in bed and recalling a dream you had or just savoring those five minutes for yourself in whatever way you want.

It could look like writing down your thoughts or drinking a glass of water to rehydrate your body and feeling it flow through your system. Five minutes for yourself.

It could look any way you want it to look. This creates space for you to step into your day the way you want to. Instead of having your day come at you.
Your turn: How would your days change if you stepped into them the way you want to? What would happen if you start by exploring with five minutes to yourself at the start of your day, without your phone? And what if you could stretch that to 10 minutes? What about 20 or 30 minutes? What would you do to empower your morning with time away from your phone?

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Compassionate or Judgy

January 26, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Which will you choose?

How does our self-compassion motivate us differently than our self-judgment?

Most of us are used to judging or punishing ourselves into action. This might sound like:

“I’m so gross, I need to workout extra hard today.”

“I’m such a loser, I have to figure out how to make more money.”

“I’m so inadequate, I need to find a partner.”

“I’m a mess, I have to get this right.”

Whatever it is, we think mean things about ourselves in order to “motivate” us to do what we think we need to do in order to feel better about ourselves. “If I stop beating myself up, if I accept myself the way I am, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and never change.”

We think we need to beat ourselves up in order to take helpful actions. We might be in a rush to get “over there” because we think that’s when we’ll feel better about ourselves. Beating ourselves up may have gotten us results in the past, but at what cost to the relationship with ourselves?

When we have a self-judging narrative, everything we do can feel punishing:

Instead of seeing a healthy plate of food that will nourish our body, we see a restrictive, limited diet
Instead of doing a workout and celebrating what our body can do, we see it as a way to burn calories and whip ourselves into shape–sometimes even as a penalty for “not eating right”
Instead of staying happy in a new relationship, we find ways to prove that we’re not worthy of happiness
Instead of becoming aware of how we talk to ourselves, we beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up!

Kindness, love, and respect for ourselves doesn’t start when we hit a certain goal of ours.

In fact, when we do hit that goal without doing the work of self-compassion and acceptance, the reward will likely be temporary and we might still not like ourselves the way we thought we would when we finally get “over there” by hitting that goal. It’s because achieving goals doesn’t create our feelings. Our thoughts create our feelings.

Kindness, love, and respect for ourselves can start right now, exactly as we are.

Decide that that’s possible.

When we have compassion and acceptance for ourselves exactly as we are at this time, we can start making the changes we want to see in our lives from a place of care, love, and patience. It’s about our relationship with ourselves. So that in the long-run, we are where we want to be with ourselves and in our lives, loving and accepting ourselves along the way. No matter what.

Your turn: Are you open to feeling accepting of yourself as you are? If not, what’s getting in the way? What are some of the self-judging thoughts you’re aware of? What are some self-compassionate thoughts you can have about yourself instead? What would happen today if you found some self-compassion for yourself in a situation where you usually beat yourself up?

Feeling challenged by finding more self-compassionate thoughts? Let’s talk about it. Book an exploratory session here to build your self-compassion practice.

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When it’s not easy

January 19, 2023January 19, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

We get to do the work.

When we’ve been doing the work of growing and expanding ourselves by learning concepts and tools to help us evolve into who we want to become, sometimes we may think, “I should know this already. I should be better at this. Why am I still reacting this way? Why is this still hard for me?”

Why, friends? Because we are human beings with human brains.

Just because we know the work, the tools involved, and the ways of thinking that can benefit us, doesn’t mean we no longer have human emotions and human experiences. That we no longer have to do the work.

We learn the tools and beneficial ways of thinking in order to help us navigate our human experience on purpose, consciously and deliberately, with compassion and grace for ourselves and others.

There isn’t a point where we get to stop doing the work—unless we choose to be stagnant and stay exactly where we are. It’s possible to do that, but also as human beings, it’s unlikely that we’ll want to choose that for ourselves.

We will always get to do the work. And that’s not a “bad” thing. It means that we’re continuing to expand ourselves and grow beyond where we currently are. That we want to be even more of who we are becoming.

Our primitive brains evolved to want to be efficient (to do “easy” things), to avoid pain, and to seek pleasure to help us survive.

When we’re wanting to live a fulfilled life where we’re not just surviving but thriving, we can’t always choose the easy things, we will likely be uncomfortable facing new situations and experiences, and we will delay immediate pleasure/gratification in order to attain our long-term well-being.

So we do the work in order to overcome our primitive brains and utilize our sophisticated brains (our prefrontal cortex) to their fullest potential.

Some thoughts for helping us continue doing the work:

I’m getting better at this, even if it’s not easy yet.
This is still hard for me, and that’s okay.
I’m learning something from this and that’s why I don’t already know better.
I’m reacting this way and catching myself instead of being unaware.
My awareness is helping me through this.

The work is always here. No matter how much we know, we don’t get to escape the work. And it’s worth it to see who we become.

Your turn: Are you willing to keep doing the work to become the best version of you possible? Instead of thinking “I should know this by now,” what is a more compassionate and empowering thought? Are you open to remembering that you always have a choice to do the work or to not do it, and to confront the consequences depending on what you choose?

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