Tag Archives: Relief

That Is So Bogus!

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Your thoughts are often your worst enemies. They are probably keeping you from loving everything about your body—and your life.

You may be accepting the negative messages offered by your inner critic as true. And you feel bad.

Struggling with losing and regaining the same 30 pounds over and over again is often a sign that your Gremlin has been given reign over your inner Queendom.

Symptoms of this include:

  • Feeling body shame when you look in the mirror
  • Being overly critical of specific body parts
  • Wanting to hide under the covers when you have sex with your partner
  • Feeling impatient when the weight doesn’t drop off instantly

Stop right there!

Chances are those flimsy arguments offered up by your Gremlin are totally bogus. Search your thoughts with the bright light of Truth—those Universal Truths that are true no matter who, no matter what.

Now you probably won’t be able to jump in an instant from feeling body shame to the Truth that your body is beautiful. But a feeling of relief lets you know you are headed in the right direction.

Choose a different—better feeling—thought that creates an entirely new path.

This might look like:

  • Recognizing that your body is working hard to help you meet your goals. You didn’t get where you are overnight and it will take a little time to get where you want to go.
  • Focusing on a body part you can praise.
  • Focusing on the love you are expressing with your body.
  • Having faith that your body is responding to your eating healthy and exercising. Changes are coming!

When you catch yourself feeling a negative emotion, use that as a cue to look at your thinking. If you think it’s your Gremlin talking, reason your way through its messages looking for Truth.

What better feeling thought can you choose that moves you towards your goals?

Together we can do it!

Woo Hoo! You Aren’t Perfect!

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Many women I work with are squeezed between feeling the need to be perfect and judging themselves harshly for not being perfect.

Wow it’s a painful place to be.

And so not necessary.

I love the Dan Millman quote:

“You began life with a natural, complete sense of worth. (Have you ever met an infant with self-worth issues?) But as you grow, you serve as your own judge, deducting points when you misunderstand the nature of living, and learning—when you forget you are a human-in-training and that making mistakes and having slips of integrity and mediocre moments are a part of life, not unforgivable sins.”

I would go further. Not only is being imperfect not an unforgivable sin, it’s vital to living a full, happy, and authentic life.

Often when I ask clients to list their gifts or positive attributes, they struggle or can’t do it. But ask them for self-criticism or the perceived judgments of others and they can give you a page.

From the time you were born, you begin trying to please many masters—parents, teachers, friends, society, God, etc., etc. This would be OK if they were asking the same thing from you, but the message is inconsistent. To please your parents you have to say and be one way. To please your teachers, you have to say and be another. Your friends yet another.

And people still don’t like you and criticize you. You begin to think, “Maybe if I contort myself this way or that way they will love me.” You begin striving to meet this ever-changing target of perfection that will make everyone else happy.

Is it any wonder that you can’t be perfect?

In the process of contorting yourself, you lose Who you are—what you actually enjoy, what you’re good at, what you love.

By trying to be perfect, you may stop at the first hint of criticism. If you do push forward, your self-imposed rigidity my suck all the fun out. Life becomes hard. More often then not, you give up on achieving your goals and do what’s easier–what you know you can do perfectly.

I’m pulling your mask away. I see you and you aren’t perfect. You aren’t hiding the fact that you aren’t perfect from anyone. And you are so loved and worthy just as you are. You don’t need to please anyone else. You don’t need to be anyone else. In fact, the world is hungry for the true you.

I see you for Who you truly are—absolutely and totally perfect in your imperfection.

How do you expect to expand, change, and evolve if you are already perfect? And you can’t help but expand, change, and evolve. It is boxing yourself in and trying to limit yourself to playing in the narrow lines of perfection that is at the heart of your pain and unhappiness.

Growth comes from playing, learning, trying, and being. So relax. Ease up on yourself—and others. Play more. Be willing to learn more. Be willing to try and have the results be less than perfect. Let go of doing more and focus on being more.

Can you feel the relief in that? Can you feel the path to joy in that? Can you see the way to being Who you truly are?

Together we can do it!

Feel the Relief

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Every feeling you have is either a derivative of love or fear. Like opposite ends of a magnet, the feelings that you have are moving you closer to one pole or the other. Where you spend most of your time is reflected in how you experience life.

Is what you are feeling most of the time closer to joyful, appreciative, content, hopeful or frustrated, angry, overwhelmed, depressed? As a result, do you see the world as a happy or scary place?

While many people think their feelings are out of their control, this isn’t actually the case. What you are feeling is tied directly to what you are thinking.

You may believe that what you are thinking about a situation is etched in stone. The situation is the situation after all. It’s either good or bad, right? How could you possibly think something different about it?

We begin to take control of our thoughts and emotions when we recognize that what we think and feel is a choice.

For instance, I can focus on the rain that is falling right now, the thunder that has my dog anxious, and the gloomy sky, or I can focus on the mild temperatures we are having in the middle of January, how our drought-lowered water table is being refilled, how animals in the wild have plenty of water to drink, and come spring, the wild flowers that will be abundant.

And if a situation is truly so bad that you can’t shift your thoughts about it, then as often as possible, figure out how you can take your mind off that topic. You will not be giving it freedom to get worse if you give your mind a rest to think about something that you do feel good about.

Letting go of your grip on worry and stress—even for a minute here and there throughout your day—can actually help you see solutions that you otherwise would have missed.

This is where it’s helpful to tap into your spiritual beliefs. You can feel a sense of relief when you put your mental burden in the hands of a power bigger than yourself, that understands the story behind you and to come, that has such a broad perspective that the solution is clear, and that has the capacity to create the Universe and that will use all of its resources working on your behalf.

However you can get there, a feeling of relief is all you need to strive for. Trying to jump from depression to joy will just bring you crashing painfully to the ground. The small step of a feeling of relief is all that you need to move you closer to the love-side of the magnet.

The more you step your thoughts towards love, the more you love your life.

What can you do today to alter your thoughts to create a feeling of relief? Do that, and repeat.

Together we can do it!

Photo by dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net