What other people think of you is none of your business

FYI, You will never please everyone, so don't even try.

What others think and have to say about you has nothing to do with you. It's about them and what they dislike about themselves.

Here's the key though: if you have a problem liking, accepting, and being content with yourself, there's no way you can give up worrying about others.

As women we are trained from birth to be likable, content, happy, never angry or sad, to stay thin, never age, always be sexy but mysterious, smart but not too smart, funny but not too funny, serious but not too serious, so many things our male counterparts never have to worry about.

We have to relearn that it's not our responsibility to be liked, understood, approved of, or accepted by everyone. If you constantly try to get everyone to like you, there is no way you can act from an authentic place. You will lose yourself in the pursuit of other's approval.

Take the time to work on you. Figure out what you don't like about yourself, and change it. If you can't change it, learn to accept it.

I'm learning to unlearn. To live from an authentic place. This means being sad when you're sad, raging when you're angry, laughing uncontrollably when you're happy.

Repressed trauma turns into sadness. Repressed sadness turns to rage. Repressed rage turns to depression. Repressed depression turns to mental illness. Repressed Mental illness turns into disease. Disease alters your DNA, which then passes on to the next generation.

Life is not all sexy, perfect, happy, and joyful. It's messy, sad, despicable, confusing, and tragic. But it's also beautiful, transformative, and adventurous. Learn to love it and in turn, love yourself. That's the true act of rebellion.

Going through a tough time? Read this

The fastest way out is always through

Full disclosure: I've had a pretty shitty week. A couple things happened in my personal life that left me way more affected than I initially thought. 😒😒

Thankfully, I know enough about trauma and the importance of grief to know it's not only ok but essential that I allow myself to be sad, go through all the emotions and process this loss.

At first I tried to shrug the situation off and pretend like it didn't affect me, but it did. For a moment I stepped into old familiar patterns of thinking "what did I do wrong, how did I not see this coming, etc," until I realized I didn't do anything wrong and nothing was my fault. I could not have changed a single thing. This is life, and life has its ups and downs.

So, I've been hanging at the house, eating all the chocolate and watching all the shows, because I know that the sooner I go through this grief, the sooner I'll be out of it.

It sucks that we always think we need to keep a brave face, stay strong and walk with our head held high. We don't. We need to give ourselves permission to be sad, be angry, cry, hold our head down and do all the things people tell us not to do. This is the only way for us to heal.

Suppressing emotions and not allowing ourselves to feel sad & vulnerable only sets us up for failure, depression and more permanent health and mental issues down the road.

We've got to change the perception of grief in society. Grief is not just about death, but for any loss or unwelcome change in our life. We have to honor it all, and that's what I'm doing.

Remember that the fastest way out is always through.

What are your core values? And are you living from them?

What happens when you stray from integrity, and how to get back to it.

I listened to Marie Forleo’s latest Marie TV with Martha Beck and wow, it was a good one.

This interview aligned exactly with things I’ve been working on myself, specifically regarding integrity and authenticity. 

Integrity happens to be one of my words for 2021. The more I talk about my life, experiences, and how it’s made me the person I am today, the more it’s crucial for me to live in my integrity, authenticity, & to follow my heart regardless of what’s happening around me, what others think or what the majority is doing. 

For someone that was groomed from childhood to be a people pleaser, forced to act a certain way because of my status in the cult & constantly told “everyone is watching me", each time I acted out or tried to be my own person, I was shamed and told I was bad & wrong. Needless to say, undoing all the brainwashing was hard for me.

Listening to this interview helped me connect things I’ve talked about here recently regarding fear, shame, and depression. Martha Beck says the cure for unhappiness staying within your integrity. That’s it. Separating from that not only affects you emotionally, but physically as well. "Once you leave your truth, your immune system function goes down, your heart rate goes up, adrenaline spikes, and stress hormones increase.

I started asking myself how closely am I adhering to my truth on the deepest level? If I’m staying true to my integrity, I’m happier. If I'm fearful or sad, most likely I’m not in line with my integrity and internal guidance system. 

That is SO SIMPLE. When we're living in integrity, we have peace, joy, love, & freedom. It's what we are & what we all yearn for. When we split from one or all 4 of those things, we stay rooted in fear and depression until we return to joy. 

Freedom and integrity are my two core values, my guidance systems. If I’m not getting those things, I’m not within my integrity. I’ve veered off course and strayed from my truth. 

If you’ve been feeling sad, off kilter or unbalanced, check in with yourself. Ask if you’re walking in the path of your integrity. It’s a hard question, because many of us THINK we’re living in our integrity, when really we’re just doing what we think we should be doing. That’s not our truth. It’s everyone else’s.

It may take awhile to figure this out. But think of two words that represent your deepest core values. Just two. Courage, integrity, faith, family, money, adventure, love, career, whatever. Once you’ve found those two, figure out if you’re living within those values. If not, then you’ve veered off course, and that’s probably what’s making you sad, angry, confrontational, unbalanced. That’s that’s fine. Now you know, and you can change it. 

You can change it by finding the pieces of yourself that are stuck in false beliefs. The things we think we should be doing, but really it’s what we think others think we should be doing. Recognize it, let it go, and change directions. Start living closer to your truth, your core values and your integrity. It’s a huge shift, but it’s worth it.

Everything that happens to us is happening for us. Every ache, pain, and depression is a gift, a sign post that is telling you to go a different way. Obstacles are always detours in the right direction, usually telling us that we’ve strayed from our values, and it’s time to get back to who we really are. If something isn’t working for you, don’t try harder, try a different way completely.

No matter how far we’ve strayed, we can always come back to wholeness, to yourself. The moment we decide to trust ourselves and follow our truth, that’s when immediate healing begins. It’s that simple.

Spiritual Identity Crisis...do I be who I am, or who I think people think I should be?

Throughout my journey in life I struggle with a huge identity crisis: being healed, a healer & leading a more spiritual life, all while staying true to myself and who I really am.

After life-changing experiences and healing moments, I thought I needed to appear different. More "healed", "spiritual", "wise", like I’ve got everything together & life is wonderful.

I tried to show how different I was and I'm never going back to my old ways. I projected a newly-constructed image of myself based on how I thought I should behave.

This resulted in a huge identity crisis. While trying to fit a mold of what others believed spirituality should be, I repressed my who I really am. I felt conflicted following the path of others, my true self screaming to be let out.

I knew I needed to make a change, step away from other's opinions & forge my own path. I needed to stop taking myself so seriously & acknowledge things in me that will never change.

The truth about me is that I’m goofy, really spacy, I don't have it all together, I'm a bit clumsy & make poor decisions when rushed. I love to have fun, go out and dance in clubs. I'm wild & do things for shock value to rattle people's cages. Many times I’m a walking contradiction.

I thought being spiritual meant I couldn’t drink, go out, or do what I used to do in the past for fun. I thought I needed to meditate every day, follow a strict diet and face every event as something I had resistance towards that I needed to surrender. While yes, some of these things are good, there is a balance. Not everything you dislike means you have resistance & must surrender. Not everything must have a profound meaning that I have to ponder for hours or I’ll never learn the lesson. Life does not need to be so serious.

This journey has taught me about balance of being who I really am, not just portraying some image on social media. It's about joy and fun, being able to laugh at absurdities and finding pleasure in life.

The times I get the most comments about being at peace and happy in my life is never when trying, but just being myself.

When you're happy, successful, and at peace, you don't need to show or tell anyone, people know. The same for healing. People see the change in you. They see you’re different. They may not like it, but it’s there. It may bother them at first, they may tell you that you’re not spiritual, they may tell you they’re disappointed or disillusioned in you, but these people are put on your path to mirror to you what your greatest insecurities are.

Healing for me is personal, it’s private, but it’s also a never ending shift. It’s the ability for me to say and be who I want, to not sit back and take criticism, and to share my story with others because that’s how we all heal, by learning from everyone else. When you're healed, you’re not healed alone.

Learning about love

Understanding what Love is releasing my hatred of the word.

Recently I learned more about what love is. I always thought Love was a tangible thing and something to be measured, like love for your friends, your family, etc.

I cringe when people say "love is all you need." This belief was forced on me in the cult, followed by beatings and abuse of all kinds. I was told this abuse was happening because that person loved me. I equated love with pain and ran from any love that didn't seem painful.

I thought I didn't know what love meant as I'm not married, I don't have kids, so I felt my love was stunted. I resigned myself to the fact that I may never know real love, based on the above assessment. But these are all conditional things like desire, passion, allure, infatuation, all of which fades.

But love is so much more than that.

Love is in everything around us. The air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the stick on the ground, the leaf on the tree. Love is in you, me, and everyone, because we are all love and love is all of us. It's unconditional and unchanging. The painful and the joyful, there is love in everything, we just have to choose it.

If we all chose love, there would be no more suffering, only peace. But you have to always choose to return to love, and that's hard part. Choosing love is so much harder than choosing hate and wanting others to suffer like you do. But in the end, everyone wants love, and everyone wants peace. So why not choose that path?

These days I'm choosing to see things differently. I'm choosing to return to love, again and again.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
--Jimi Hendrix

Survival of the Fittest vs. Survival of the Nurtured

“We are not the survival of the fittest, we are the survival of the nurtured. Those who are nurtured best, survive best.” ~Louis Cozolino

Louis Cozolino is an attachment scientist and professor of psychology at Pepperdine University. He says that nurturing is the key to survival, and without it we carry a lack of trust, empathy and compassion into future relationships.

Many of us didn’t grow up in a nurturing environment, and because of that, we have to learn to nurture ourselves. No one is coming to save us, but the good news is that it’s never too late to learn how to nurture and create secure attachments for ourselves.

We can learn to self mother and self soothe by practicing mindfulness and self-compassion, and by doing things that made us feel safe, happy and secure as a child. For me, that’s going out in nature daily. 👍👍

Practicing what makes us feel safe helps change our nervous system from anxious and vigilant (fight or flight) to a calmer, connected state of homeostasis.

You’re never too old to nurture yourself!