Balancing Shadow Work with Light Work

Hello Beautiful Souls,

I hope you’ve enjoyed the sweet song of summer and are welcoming the fragrant winds of fall.

As we cross the threshold from one season to the next, I’ve relearned the utility of balance, that while digging down into the depths it is also important to nourish the seeds of what I want to harvest. Balancing the dark with the light, the pain with the pleasure, the challenge with the gift. One without the other is either too dark and depressing or too shallow and ungrounded.

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Assertiveness Tips for Building Beautiful Boundaries

Hello Beautiful Souls,

Ok, it’s happening.
Someone is doing or saying something you don’t like or asking for something you don’t want to give and alarm bells are going off in your head and heart.
You feel really uncomfortable, maybe even angry, and you want to address it.
A boundary needs to be set…

Here we go with Assertiveness 101.
I’ve just created this new crib sheet for us to play with.
You’re welcome to test it out with me. Below is a video for those who prefer to watch, and a more comprehensive text for those who prefer to read. They’re a bit different, so if you really resonate with this topic, consider both.

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Leaning In: Using Difficult Emotions & Judgements for Healing & Growth

Hello Beautiful Souls,

I’m sharing some of my most hard won lessons with you today. They’re about facing vs avoiding painful emotions. Hard won because as biological beings wired to avoid pain, toxicity, etc. and if we’re admitting our pain it’s generally because we’re in so much of it that we can’t seem to do anything else – we’re drowning in it and taking everyone and everything down with us. It’s not pretty, and we generally avoid it like the plague. Quite literally.  

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How to Stop Absorbing Emotions

Hello Beautiful Souls,

Welcome to the relaunch of my blog, where I answer your questions and offer my best insights into healing, self-development and awareness.

Before we begin: fair warning… in my personal and professional work, I dive in, and go deep. I generally believe that the best way to deal with anything is to lean in, to use whatever is here for growth and evolution, be it joy, sorrow or somewhere in between. This isn’t for everyone, and isn’t even for me all the time. I need to be ready to ask myself hard questions – and be honest about the answers.

So, if you’re not of the “I use my challenges to learn from” persuasion or you just don’t have the bandwidth to go deep today, stop now and either find something softer to work with or come back when you’re feeling up for some serious work.

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Insomnia Melting into Sleep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKOexGhiEdc&t

Frustrated with your attempts to cure your insomnia with meditation? I realized that the frustration itself was keeping me awake! I also realized that if I could relax into being just 10% calmer (versus frustrated the I still wasn’t asleep!), that I’d sink 10% deeper, then 10% more… Eventually, I was 30% closer… Melting slowly. Melting slowly to sleep. If nothing else, melting, relaxing is a restful practice.

Group Practice Helps Personal Practice

Things feel pretty chaotic to me, and practicing meditation would help. But I’m having a hard time motivating myself to sit for more than a few minutes. (Sit, stand, walk, move, whatever.) I just knocked off balance, and if I’d been practicing regularly, even for 10 minutes a day, I would have been able to stay more centered. Lesson re-learned: when things are getting hairy, pay attention to that inner voice that says, “You need to start meditating a bit everyday!” I didn’t, and now I’m regretting it. No time like the present to heed my own advice!

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