Learn to See Yourself with Compassion

February 10, 2014

Listening to What We Need

Lately, my days have been all about self-care.

In some ways they are similar to the time I often refer to, way back when this whole journey to self-love began. When I was in that ‘rough patch’ I talk about and didn’t know where my life was going. It was then that I started picking up the camera and would go for long photo walks, exploring different parts of town, taking paths or turns I hadn’t taken before.

Slowly, that path led me to a place in my life where I found my way back to myself, to a life that in many ways feels like home.

These days, the way I feel drawn to spend my days is familiar. Thankfully, this time I don’t feel like I’m in a depression, just grieving & some stress and worry that have me feeling like the earth is shaking under my feet a bit.

The familiar overlap in both of these times is that I needed to focus in and relearn how I could cultivate more self-care and refill my well again.

Last year around this time I was focusing on self-care too, and started creating some ‘self-care policies’ for myself of journalling at the beginning and end of each week and going for weekly hikes in the forest. The ideas I was exploring in creating this plan for myself led me to offer the Creating Self-Care Policies Class.

A year later I’m left wondering yet again: What do I need to do to take care of myself right now?

Its not that my Self-Care Policies from last year don’t still apply, but with all of the stuff going on I’m feeling drawn to listen in again and really notice what I most need right now.

The cafe I loved to go to journal at has now closed and every time I think about going for a big hike lately something in me says “softer” “gentler” “just walk”.

So I’m doing my best to listen to what I need and let go of my old self-care policies in order to really do what I need right now rather than guilting myself for not doing my usual self-care tools.

I feel SO drawn to go on really long walks these days. I know for those of you with busy families that wouldn’t be an option (which of course is why we get to figure out what our own self-care plan is). Somedays a short walk is enough to shift energy for me but lately I’ve kind of been going for epic walks around the city.

For me, right now, when the weather allows…my heart is calling for these long walks to refill my own well. Hours and hours of walking, letting emotions or thoughts arise and flow as I move.

On Saturday I walked all the way from my home to a beach on the other side of town along the gorgeous sea wall. Just me, a good pair of walking shoes and my camera.

About an hour into the walk I noticed that I was grinning widely and that I had been for about 5 minutes straight (you know that feeling when you’ve been smiling so wide that your cheeks hurt) and I felt like I was finally filling up my own well of energy & support again, from myself.

I took the photo that I’m sharing at the end of my walk when I reached the beach…and that felt like the truth of the moment…not to be confused with the truth of every moment these days, as it has been quite the opposite. But it felt so worthy to document that moment of feeling really filled up.

All those years ago photography and going on photo adventures taught me a tool that helps me fill up my own well and to a large degree, keep it filled up.

I wanted to share this with you partially because so much of my days right now are filled with work and yes, self-care. As well, I think we can get really focused on one tool of self-care when what we really need to do is just listen in day by day to what we need to do to fill up our own wells again be it taking a short photo walk and turning the camera on ourselves, or taking some time to just read.

selfcarepolicies200

I also wanted to share this as up until Valentines Day, I’m having a little sale on the Creating Self-Care Policies class…if you enter the code SELFLOVE the class is half price!

It is a self-paced class so as soon as you sign up, class will begin the same day! In the class we explore ideas behind self-care and cultivating a plan that works for you right now…that involves listening in to what you really need to fill up your own well and to keep it filled up!

How about you? How do you fill up your own well & what are your go-to self-care tools these days? I’d love to know…

February 4, 2014

Love in our Eyes

grammywithlove

I’ve been a bit quiet over here lately as in the last couple weeks the earth has been shaking under my feet. Almost a week ago now, my Grammy, who I was very close to, passed away. She was a truly amazing woman who taught us so much about savouring the simple beauty of life and was someone with whom I got to experience unconditional love.

For those of you who have been in Be Your Own Beloved, you have heard me mention her in one specific prompt where we are looking into the camera with love. Her health has been very up & down in the last year with many strokes, so in this activity in particular as we are thinking about someone we love when taking the photo…I would think of her and send her love.

Grief and I have met many times in my life and I feel like each time I lose someone it opens up the well of grief as a whole. I loved my Grammy so much & had so much gratitude for her, which made losing her even more intense. I’m still definitely in the grief stage and taking good self-care right now.

I wanted to share this photo with you though, of her and I taken on the day we had a party for her 80th birthday.

There were a number of photos taken on that day, with each of us and she looked so happy and while I don’t think she loved being photographed in general she most definitely let me take so many pictures on this day and I’m so glad she did.

This photo though. I wanted to share it because if I focus on myself in it, old stories have the opportunity to emerge. Yes, this is probably taken at my heaviest. Yes, my eyes are drawn to focus on my arms which are one of the parts of my body I still have some love to cultivate with. Yet those were my inner critics talking. I’ve learned through exploring self-love through self-portraiture that I have another choice, even when looking back at photos from the past.

But when I look at it without those critiques, I am choosing to not let those things be the story that is most important in this photo. I choose love.

So I let those momentary thoughts go rather than make them my reality.

Because I see such love in her eyes in this one and it makes me feel connected to her, to be able to look in her eyes with love even if she isn’t here on earth anymore.

I wanted to also share this with you to share a bit about what has been going on behind the scenes here and to share this photo that I’m choosing to see with love with you. I wanted to share this with you in case you have photos of loved ones who have passed away that could be healing to see without self-critique of ourselves in it. I wanted to share this with you in hopes that next time you are with family, you’ll take more photos (even if you and your family aren’t all that fond of having your photo taken).

Again I’m reminded at how valuable photographs feel in my life, not just self-portraits, as a way to be able to look back on our lives & people we love.

January 31, 2014

Be Your Own Beloved starts tomorrow!

In celebration of Be Your Own Beloved starting tomorrow I made a little video about some of the misconceptions about self-portraiture!

January 30, 2014

Finding Moments of Respite

Unencumbered.

Freedom.

Relief & Respite from my Inner Critics.

For a long time, that all seemed very far off.

I felt encumbered, weighed down, marked for a path of self-hate or at least a lifetime spent trying to figure out my way out of it.

Healing our self-hate doesn’t happen in one instant.

It isn’t sudden, but we can cultivate a path that leads us there, creating more and more moments of respite from it along the way.

Thats the way it has been for me…starting with moments that felt unencumbered and free.

When do you feel free from self-hate? Its worth noting those places…will you take a moment and ponder them with me?

Maybe it when we are in the water at a very quiet lake, swimming and feel free & weightless.

On a camping adventure where we haven’t seen a mirror in days but just feel like ourselves in the woods?

Dancing at an outdoor concert surrounded by thousands of people but feeling like you’re dancing like no one is watching?

Or perhaps it is around some dear friends who are really supportive that you just feel like you have the weight of those feelings lifted by their support?

Where did you notice you felt unencumbered & free?

One of the places that I discovered that feeling really shocked me, it was yes….you guessed it…when I would put down my camera in a quiet spot and step into the frame but it wasn’t just standing there that made me feel free. It was inviting playfulness into the mix.

It might be dancing or skipping, or just moving in whatever awkward way felt right for me on that day. That playfulness has always been the key for me stepping out of the cage of self-hate.

I like to say that “Playfulness is the antidote to Fear” and I think the same could be said for self-hate. It truly does physically do something to help me shift then endorphins from being low to feeling energized and back in my body.

Want to try it? Maybe get a little playful in front of the camera today and see if it feels like freedom (try it…it might not seem like it will, but it just may surprise you)!

To be honest, it only started to feel like I was really ‘free’ from my inner critic on an every day basis about a year ago. It had been a really long haul getting to this point. I do feel like self-portraiture has been pivotal in that, but it didn’t shift immediately. It wasn’t just one photo. It was all those little moments of finding a place where I felt free, unencumbered. Those little moments might be a short respite at first, but I found that the more I created those pockets of respite, the closer and closer I came to having it be not just an occasional respite, but the way I could live my life as a whole.

I don’t have it all figured out though. Some days I still need those pockets of respite, those moments of freedom that feel like a deep breath and remind me that self-love is available….for all of us.

This post is part of the Unencumbered Sharing Circle, a gathering of honest first-hand stories about self-loathing, self-love, and the journey between the two. Read more stories, and share your own, right here.

January 28, 2014

Letting Go

I feel like the last decade of my life has been a study in letting go.

Letting go of the life that I thought was ahead of me, one I thought would be mediocre, in order to step into the unknown and see what I could make of myself that would feel like I had purpose.

In order to do that it was a long road of more letting go and one of the things that struck me most along the way was about identity. How even if it was a part of myself that I wanted to let go of, it was deeply tied to a place in me that identified as that.

Be it Unlovable. Unbeautiful. Invisible. Lost.

These didn’t just feel like stories that I told myself, ones that came from my negative self-image but in fact they were things that felt tied to my identity (and some of them are things I’m presently still working through). I tend to still think of them as the negative stories that I told myself, but sometimes it didn’t feel quite as simple as the word ‘story’ might invite us to think. Sometimes it felt like I needed to let go of a piece of me and sit in the unknown for a while before I knew how to put it back together again without that piece of my identity.

So letting them go left me feeling like if I wasn’t unlovable? Who was I?

If I wasn’t unbeautiful…What was my kind of beautiful?

If I wasn’t invisible…What did my visibility look like and how was that a new part of my identity?

If I wasn’t a lost soul…What felt like being found?

It wasn’t as easy as just letting go of those pieces of my identity and having a new one to replace it with. It felt like unknown.

I know when I was going through this (and in many ways still am), I was in need of a map and for me, taking self-portraits and learning to Be My Own Beloved ended up being that map. One in which I didn’t need to know where I was going. Yet it gave me a place to chart my course back to myself and to start to answer those questions. To look at the woman in the photo, even if at first I didn’t recognize myself in her, knowing that if I kept on taking those self-portraits, some day I would.

It reminds me of the poem:

Barn’s burnt down —
now
I can see the moon.

-Mizuta Masahide

Letting go is big, its vulnerable and I wanted to share this with you in case you’re feeling like letting go will shake at the core of your identity, not just one story that you’d like to let go of.

Even if you feel like you won’t be you without it though you know you want to let it go.

And it will shake at your identity. But it might just mean that there is more of you ahead of you…that you are going to have the blessing to get to meet….

This post is part of the Let it Go Project: a collection of stories leading up to a beautiful releasing ritual, hosted by Sas Petherick on the 30th of January. All the details for this free event are here. And you can take part! Be inspired by other posts in this project, and share what you are ready to let of of on the Let it Go Project Community Page!