cvanelewoud

Self Love Letter

How would you define love?

Does that definition apply to the way you feel about yourself?

Last night in the yoga class I taught I read When I began to love myself by Charlie Chaplin in savasana. If you’ve never read it before do yourself a favour and click on the link. As I read through the lines, I was reminded of just how powerful self love is. I truly believe that it can change the lenses that you see life through. With that in mind I wanted to write myself a love letter to remind myself just how wonderful I am in my own eyes. It’s pretty nerve racking and kind of uncomfortable to praise yourself in a big way but I’ve committed myself to no half baked love letters so here goes nothing.

To my darling beautiful Clare,

I want you to know how insanely proud of you I am. I have seen you grow and flourish so much over the past few years. What I admire about you most is your ability to forgive yourself with kindness for the mistakes and blunders of the past and from that place of kindness you have been able to take in and learn so vey much.

It hasn’t always been easy and I know that you have faced some very dark times but watching you emerge from each period of darkness has been specular. The light and ease with which you move through life is testament to the battles you have fought and the darkness you have known.

I often marvel at the way you dream so big. You’ve never been one to timidly step through life, you’ve always bounded in to ideas with a full open heart. I love your ability to see everything as an adventure. That sense of adventure had allowed you to do so many big things in your life without ever thinking twice; trekking mountains, volunteering in foreign countries, running marathons, jumping out of planes, floating in hot air balloons and completely changing your career in your late 20’s. You are an inspiration and your love of life in infectious.

I know that sometimes you don’t see the beauty in your face, the kindness in your eyes, the magic in your smile or the brilliance of your body but please know that you are more wonderful than you could ever imagine.

While there’s still so much to be learnt in your amazing journey know that where you are right here and now is phenomenal. You have come such a long way and made so many brave constructive changes in your life so again please know just how proud you I am.

Keep smiling, keep laughing, keep lighting up the world with your beautiful soul.

I love you forever and always.

Clare

xx

August 14, 2015

30 Days of Kindness

Last night I went to an amazing workshop on authenticity run by the simply brilliant Emeli Paulo from Collective Potential. If you’ve never heard of Collective Potential do yourself a favour and check them out. At the start of the workshop we were asked to turn to a stranger and tell them what brought us to the workshop. For me I had started to feel like the authenticity that I had once lived my life with was beginning to fade and I wanted to turn that around.

I have to admit I was kind of expecting to be lectured about what authenticity is and given steps to living an authentic life. I was so glad that it was nothing like that. It was super interactive and required everyone to talk about their truth; to share their values, their fears, their dreams, their story. It was simply stunning to see how contagious bravery can be. One person gets up and says or does something inspiring and next thing you know some on the other side of the room has something to contribute too.

The most magical part of the night for me came near the end when I found my truth in someone else’s story. A lady was sharing with the group that she felt like she needed to let go of grief for the loss of her mother. As she spoke I realised how much I had not let myself grieve for the loss of my father. It had been a month since I’d lost my father unexpectedly and I could count on one hand the amount of times I’ve let myself really cry. For decades to me strong has meant putting on a brave face and getting on with things. It has only been in the last year or so that I’ve begun to see the strength in vulnerability. Not giving myself the time and space to sit with my pain and feel what I need to feel was a big part of why I felt like I wasn’t living a very authentic life.

An idea that really resonated with me about authenticity is that it is about being real not perfect. So how do I get myself to be more real…I knew the answer before I even asked the question. I knew I needed to be kinder to myself, I knew needed to stop expecting so much from myself and I knew I needed to nurture the most important relationship I have, the one I have with myself.

At the end of the workshop we were asked to set ourselves a challenge for the next 30 days. It was to be something that we could do each day that would allow us to become more authentic. Straight away I knew that I wanted to set myself a 30 day kindness challenge. To each day do one kind thing for myself.

I’m starting today by putting an affirmation on the mirror that I stand in front of each day when I brush my teeth.

You can follow my 30 days of kindness on my instagram @ckve and use the hash tag #30daysofkindness to share your own little bits of kindness that you give yourself. At the end of my 30 days I’ll post a list of the things that I do for myself.

Love and Blessings

xx

August 4, 2015

Bone Broth Magic

Bone broth is my go to drink whenever I feel like a need a warm hug from my food and a little extra nourishment. It’s a delicious nutrient dense drink that’s also easy to make. Before I run you through just how easy it is to make your own brew of goodness here’s a few of the benefits of this amazing prehistoric drink.

Helps promote good gut health. Lets talk about your gut for a second, because gut health is something that I’m super passionate about. The lining of your intestine is selectively permeable to allow nutrients to pass through and be absorbed into the body. This lining can become too permeable due to lifestyle factors such as consumption of highly processed foods, stress, some medications and pesticides ingested from fruit and veg. When the lining becomes too permeable undigested food particles can pass through the gut lining and directly into the bloodstream. This situation really puts a lot of unnecessary stress on the body, just think of your poor liver having to deal with all this foreign matter. The glutamine in bone broth can help repair a hyperpermeable intestinal wall.
Reduces joint pain and inflammation. Bone broth is loaded with glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). These GAGs include glucosamine, chondroitin and hyaluronic acid. They have the ability to stimulate the growth of new collagen aiding in the repair of damaged joints and leading to a possible reduction in pain and inflammation. Bone broth is very high in the anti-inflammatory amino acids glycine and proline
Give your hair, skin and nails some loving from the inside. The collagen and gelatin in bone broth helps build healthy hair, skin and nails.
Magic minerals a plenty. The minerals in bone broths include calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, zinc and selenium. They are critical for many bodily functions and impact everything from our bones to our mood and our joint health.

As the name suggests bone broth is made from bones. I trend to always use chicken, but you can certainly change that up. Try and find an organic chook who’s had a happy life. I’m not much of a recipe follower myself but below are some guidelines on what you might like to put into your broth.

All you really need to know is that you are combining bones with some meat still attached, vegetables spices and herbs to add flavour, apple cider vinegar (helps to leach more minerals out of the bones) and enough water to cover your bones and some then simmer for 24 and 48 hours easy peasy.

If you’ve like a bit more elaboration around vegies, spices and herbs I tend to use the following:

Celery
Carrots
Onions
Bay Leaves
Rosemary
Thyme
Whole Peppercorns

But you can really just go with whatever your heart desires.

Happy Brewing!

June 16, 2015

Are you living a life that you are proud of?

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
How often do you take the time to check in with yourself and the path you’re on? When your time comes how will you look back on your life? Will you have many regrets?

In 2009 Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware wrote a blog post called regrets of the dying. In this post she listed the top 5 regrets people under her care had voiced in their last weeks of life.

I’d like to share these reasons with you now because I think we can all take something away from them.

Take a moment now to read through them slowly. Let each one sit with you.

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I didn’t work so hard
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
I wish that I had let myself be happier

If you read any of these points and know that you would feel the same way then today is a great day for you my friend!

If you can acknowledge that you are currently spending your time in a way that you will later regret you now have a choice. Now that you know there is the possibility that you can make a change.

You may say to me that yes I work hard but I have to , I can’t change that I need to work this hard to survive. Firstly know that your immediate response to get defensive about any of these points is your ego saying this is who I am and I will not be changed or challenged. The things we do everyday, our behaviours and our way of being make up our identity and it can be crazy hard to challenge that. But if your first response was a defensive stance from your mind I invite you to challenge that view point ask yourself if that is really true and explore what your life could like if you did change. When something is unknown, there exists infinite possibly. Get excited about who you could be without the story you’re telling yourself.

Changing your life and setting new priorities for yourself is not a walk in the park. It can become battle ground in your own head with your ego fighting to keep things the same not liking that you may perhaps be moving closer to connecting with your true self. It can also become a battle ground with the people closest to you who have formed an idea of who you are and do not like the change that ripples into their lives when you change. Change takes courage and commitment but as things begin to settle and fall into place other people begin to appreciate your choices.

Give yourself permission to live a life that you are proud of because you deserve the best life has to offer!

June 3, 2015

How much love do you have for yourself

How fiercely have you loved in your life? What would you do for love? Would you move heaven and earth to look after your beloved? Does that same love apply to how you feel about yourself? What happens when you love your partner more than you love yourself?

I can’t speak for every situation but I can certainly speak for myself. Those who knew me many moons ago may say that they actually couldn’t imagine me loving anyone else more than I love myself. I used to walk around with a certain self confidence and arrogance that I’m sure left some people thinking that I was pretty damn happy with myself, or at least that’s what I wanted people to think. I had no real concept of how little love I had for myself. At that stage in life self love was something I didn’t understand….sure I had heard the saying you need to learn to love yourself before you can love anyone else but I never stopped to consider that my behaviour and emotions had little to do with actual circumstances and a lot to do with how I felt about myself.

We all remember the line for Jerry Mcguire “you complete me”. When I wasn’t good with myself and found myself in that happy honey moon phase I did start to think that all these gaps in my life are getting filled by this amazing human. I remember feeling better about myself from being with him. I was a nicer person to be around and my life made more sense to me. And all of that would have been fine if I was coming from a good place but the problem with thinking like that when you’re not good with yourself is that it creates dependence and attachment. When you start needing you partner to be for you what you should be for yourself it can get very ugly.

I started to look to him for my happiness all the time and over time I needed him to be more and more for me. My identity became his girlfriend there wasn’t much that I ever did for me. I completely willingly lost my sense of self. All the things I do for myself now; running, yoga, meditation, massages and other pampering just slowly stopped happening. And it wasn’t that he didn’t want me to do these things, he even bought me a yoga mat and dvd to help encourge me back into yoga (funny how the universe has this way of throwing you little clues about where you should be). But the more dependant I got the more I lost my confidence, I wouldn’t even go to a yoga class, I’d think about it all the time and then get to so stressed and anxious about going on my own that I’d just drop the whole idea.

Feeling stressed and anxious by the smallest things was nothing new for me at that time, it was something that I had struggled with for years and had often managed to hide from people by avoiding situations or getting defensive and picking fights with people to mask my discomfort. As time went on and my neediness got worse I probably hit my all time worst random anxiety moment, we were going to hire bikes to go for ride and it started happening I couldn’t even tell you exactly what set me off but part of my brain just started to say no don’t do this and rather than being honest (people who don’t love themselves aren’t very big on honesty or vulnerability) and explaining what was going on in my head I decided to start a fight at the bike hire place and declared that I didn’t want to go riding anymore like a small child would, initially he was calm asking what do you mean….this is going to be fun…you were looking forward to this. That was until he realised that he was talking to a little brick wall that had made up her mind and would not listen to sense and he simply told me to stop it and turn away from me and then it was water works. Crying in the middle of this shop and not even knowing why I was so upset was scary, I could see how much I was frustrating him but I still couldn’t bring myself to be honest. Being honest with him meant being honest with myself and admitting that it was a problem that I needed to deal with.

I think back to one conversation we had a few months out from us going our separate ways a lot. I think about it a lot because my response and in action baffles me. We were both in tears, things were just not working and he said to me I just can’t make you happy, everything I do is not enough and my response was I can’t make me happy too. It blows my mind that my only response would be “me too” and that after that conversation I did not change one solitary thing, I just put my head in the sand and let it get worse.

When this particular relationship ended a good friend a good friend gave me the relationship advice I have ever been given he told me to spend some time on my own and mend my relationship with myself. Mending my relationship with myself has been the greatest thing I’ve ever done for myself.