Rambling Yogi

Tag: self help

  • A meaningful life

    Let the beauty of what you love be what you do – Rumi

    As we edge closer towards the end of the year it’s natural for people to take stock of the year that was and begin to mentally plan for what they would like the year ahead to look like. This sort of reflection may then lead to the bigger picture question; how satisfied am I with the life I am living? Am I living a purposeful / meaningful life?

    It is my hope that we all figure out what a meaningful life looks like for each of us and that we find the courage to pursue it, even if that means letting others down to not betray what you need in life.

    We’re all a little lost and life requires constant reassessment. Again and again you have to find your values, figure out what matters to you and choose who you want to be accordingly. Don’t let your current sense of identity define who you might be and what you do with your life.

    So where do you start. Here’s an activity to help you assess what’s important for you.

    Imagine you’re nearing the end of your life you’re looking back fondly. You’ve experienced what you wanted to experience, done what you wanted to do and are ending as you were meant to end. Ask yourself these questions:

    What three values made your life the most worthwhile?

    What three goals have you achieved in your life that you are most satisfied with and proud of?

    What three personality traits do you want people to remember you for when you’re gone?

    Here are some examples to help stimulate your thinking

    Values: authenticity, creativity, humour, safety, excitement, fun, social recognition, happiness, self respect, status, passion, balance, independence, friendships, growth, loyalty, trust, community involvement

    Life goals: career success, financial security, travel, adventure, marriage, children, learn a language or instrument, health/fitness goals, volunteer, live aboard, start a business, regularly help less fortunate

    Personality: honest, confident, perceptive, kind, generous, brave, hard working, ambitious, decisive, enthusiastic, open minded, rational, sensitive, affectionate, calm, dependable, compassionate

    How well do you answers align with the way you currently live your life. If you find you’re happy with your answers, congratulations but if things aren’t really lining up it’s time to ask yourself what different choices do you need to make to find your true north.

    But what if you couldn’t land on answers here and you’re not just a bit lost but stuck, overwhelmed and/or unsure of what you should be doing with your life. Then I have another suggestion taken from recently watching the Srutz documentary on Netflix.

    Try working on your life force. Like maslow’s hierarchy of needs the base layer is your relationship with your physical body, the next level is your relationship with other people and at the highest level is your relationship with yourself.

    • Physical body – get your body working better – nourish your body with good food, exercise daily even if it’s just a small walk just move your body, get a healthy amount of sleep
    • Other people – take the initiative – put the effort in to build and maintain the important relationships in your life
    • Yourself – get yourself in a relationship with your unconscious – you enhance your relationship with yourself when you write in journal form and allow your unconscious to come out

    Having tired this myself I can definitely say that prioritising exercise daily and starting journaling again has made a huge difference to how satisfied I feel with my life.

    I hope something here resonates with you and you find yourself walking into the new year filled with unlimited possibilities for a magical year ahead.

    love and blessings

    xx

  • Getting things done

    Getting things done

    It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 5 years since I last wrote a post for my blog. Since my last post I’ve changed jobs, had a baby, lost touch with my yoga practice / reconnected with my practice and written 27 draft posts.

    For one reason or another I just haven’t been able to bring myself to complete a post and publish it. So I thought for my first post in a very long time it would be fitting to explore why we put things off.

    Sure all of us can put things off from time to time and sometimes prioritising things to make the best use of your time is the best thing to do. But chronic procrastination is a different beast! In my life right now I feel like I’m the queen of unnecessarily postponing things, even thought I know I’ll be worse off for not doing them . But I’m not alone – it’s a very common habit with recent studies finding that 20 per cent of adults are chronic procrastinators.

    Despite what you might think, procrastination isn’t a sign of laziness. In fact it’s more about emotion regulation than time management.

    So why do we do it? It relates to emotional self-regulation, that is it’s a way of coping with challenging emotions and negatives mood brought on by certain tasks. So in short we procrastinate to avoid feelings like boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment and self-doubt. The nature of the aversion depends on the task, here are some examples:

    • Hating the task – it’s really tedious, difficult, boring or stressful
    • A lack of confidence or self esteem – the fear of failure or being a perfectionist
    • Being easily distracted – just can’t stay focused on the task
    • Feeling overwhelmed – the job feels too big or unachievable
    • Hitting a creatively blocked – can’t solve the problem or feeling uninspired

    It’s important to take some time to try understand why you are putting something off so that you can take actions that will best support you to get the important things done.

    Here are some things you can consider to help things along

    • Attach a reward to getting the task done. This is essentially the Premack principle – a less desired behaviour can be reinforced by the opportunity to engage in a more desired behaviour.
    • Focus on just the next action. At the start of a task can you consider what the next action would be. Ask yourself, what’s the next action I would take if I were going to do it. Maybe it’s writing the heading at the top of a document or it’s the separating of washing or opening an email. Don’t wait to be in the mood to do a task, let your motivation be built on your action.
    • Set yourself up in a distraction free environment. This might mean just putting your phone in another room or turning off notifications while you are trying to focus.
    • Enlist Help. Find someone to keep you accountable. Tell someone that you won’t do X until you’ve done Y or that you want to do X by a certain date.
    • Build your skill set. If you’re lacking confidence in a particular area are there any courses you can take, people that you can learn from, opportunities to practice and get feedback. No one is an expert at anything straight away, so try to support yourself to crawl before you walk. And if you find yourself stalling out of fear try and tell yourself the mantra “progress not perfection”.
    • Look after yourself. It’s really hard to get anything done if you’re feeling exhausted or your anxiety is through the roof. Take a look at how you are living – are you getting enough sleep? are you eating well? do you get regular exercise or send time outdoors? do you meditate or find time to decompress without technology? If you read this list and its overwhelming thinking about all the things that aren’t what they should be then try starting with sleep. That is unless of course you have a tiny human that’s in control of your sleep right now, then maybe it’s getting out for a walk with bub once a day.
    • Practice self compassion. There’s so much to be gained from being compassionate with yourself, particularly when mistakes are made or things don’t turn out the way you had hoped. Finding kindness and understanding for yourself can do a lot to help improve motivation and personal growth. Things that can help build self compassion include guided meditations on self compassion, practising daily gratitude where a least one thing you are grateful for each day relates to yourself and if you catch yourself being critical try flipping that thinking on its head by replacing it with something kind and positive. Of course it’s not easy to just change the way you speak to yourself but like any new habit if you start small and gradually build it up, that small change could build into a lift changing new perspective.

    Before writing this post I’d assumed that procrastination was all about motivation and time management. I’d never considered that it would be more about trying to avoid unwanted emotions. But once I knew what it was all about it made a lot more sense to me; I’ve never been very good at sitting with unpleasant emotions and am a big seeker of ways to avoid.

    So in light of what I’ve learnt writing this post I’m going to put it out there that I will write at least 1 post a month. Here’s to getting things done!

    With love and kindness

    xx

    p.s if there’s any particular topics you’d like to me explore and write about please do reach out and let me know

    The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now.

    Chinese Proverb
  • Don’t look back in anger

    Don’t look back in anger

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    When my father passed away unexpectedly on Friday 3rd July 2015 my entire world changed forever. I remember the most intense feeling of disbelief, as the ICU doctor explained that he was not able to be revived, my brain when into overload.  I had been with him an hour and a half before hand, they had said he would be out of hospital next week. My brain screamed how can he possibly be gone, it wasn’t meant to happen this way, he shouldn’t have been on his own, it’s too soon, he needed more time, I needed more time, this can’t be happening, he wanted to live.

    Losing a loved one in any circumstance is traumatic, losing them before they’re ready to go is the sort of heart break that will stay with you for life and losing them under questionable circumstances can steal part of your life too if you’re not careful.

    My fathers death was referred to the coroners court for investigation because there was so much confusion surrounding this death and a cause of death was not known. At first I was relived that our concerns around the level care he received were being acknowledged with an investigation. But that quickly turned into anger as I began to form the opinion that somebody was to blame.

    For a long time I blamed myself, I was the last person to see him. If I had of stayed another hour and a half maybe things would have been different. I remember clearly the first time I said it out loud, in a session with my psychologist through my tears I told her that I should have saved him, he always protected me and looked after me, I should have done more. I truly believed that it was somehow partially my fault even though I wasn’t a medical professional. There were so many memories that  haunted me; I would constantly repay moments in my head that I thought may have changed the way things ended.

    With the support of great friends I managed to ease up on blaming myself but redirected the blame straight on to the hospital and all the staff who I felt could have done more. I believed that we had to fight for him so that some positive came from losing him.  The hospital failed him and things needed to change to protect other people. No other family should live through our hell.

    Coroners investigations don’t happen quickly, we’ve spent the last 18 months waiting to here any sort of update on my dads case. Then last Friday my family received a letter from the coroners court saying that after considering the circumstances the coroner had decided not to proceed further with the investigation into my fathers death.

    I never saw it coming. I was completely blindsided. I didn’t really know how I felt about it. My brain started to process; so they’re saying that no one is to blame, that’s bullshit, I’m not giving up.

    As I revisited all the mistakes and the distressing level of care my father received, all the anger and pain I’d been storing in my heart began to pour out. I didn’t even realise just how angry I still was. For the first time I could clearly see just how much I’d been holding onto and I started to see the impact it had been having on my life.

    As I took all of this in and became fully aware of my anger I knew there was no other choice. Fighting and holding on to this anger was having a terrible impact on my life. It was time to let go, to accept that no amount of blame will bring him back and make peace with the circumstances that he left us in.

    Beginning to let go wasn’t some simple ahhh I’ve decided to let it go and now I feel great moment. It hurt like hell. I spent almost my entire Saturday crying, journaling, meditating, listening to inspiring talk about life and then crying some more. I let myself fall into habitual patterns of beating myself up. I spent time agonising over the way I had let my anger and victim mentality drive my life and damage relationships. Then I found the awareness to see that thought patter for what it is and with kindness reassured myself that I did the best that I could in the place that I found myself.

    Sunday morning I woke up and my eyes went straight to a quote I have stuck on my wall. It simply reads “you are entirely up to you”. I felt myself filled me a new sense of purpose, I got a bunch of jobs done, went and ran along the beach and decided to end my Sunday with a delicious yin and meditation class.

    As soon as I slowed down all the memories of my dad’s last few days began to flood back into my consciousness. The usual story was playing then the strangest thing happened I began to think about one particular nurse in a way I had never even contemplated before. She was the one person I felt really made the wrong decision at a critical time and I had hated her more than anyone else. As I lay hugging my bolster I was overcome with a deep sense of compassion for her, for the very first time I thought my god she must have felt awful. Tears ran down my face and I began to wonder how many times she may have questioned her decision. I was deeply concerned about the impact my fathers death may have had on her and in the moment I knew something profound had shifted in me.

    It’s been an unbelievably challenging couple of years but with the challenges has come some of the biggest lessons of my life. The most important being the value of acceptance.  I would of course give anything to have more time with my dad but longing for a reality other than the one I have is a recipe for deep seated suffering.  From here I make the commitment to try and live in a way that honours the amazing person he was by making courageous decisions, actively choosing happiness and believing in endless possibility.

     

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  • A little boost of self love for valentines day

    A little boost of self love for valentines day

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    The stories we run in our heads often don’t provide the most compassionate perspective on who we are and what we have done. We are often our own biggest critic and when we rerun stories of our perceived inadequacies we begin to believe them. These stories and negative viewpoints can lead to really miserable situations and ultimately hold you back from the greatness that is you. The mere fact that you are on this earth and breathing means that you have immense value and have something extraordinary to offer the world.

     

    This valentines day I want to offer you an affirmation for love and acceptance; a new story to replace the old rubbish. Whether you’re loved up in a relationship or flying solo, give yourself a little extra love today! Because you just as much as anyone else you are worthy of your love and affection.

     

    I am enough. I completely love and accept myself just as I am. I recognise that I have always done the best I can in any given situation and I expect nothing more from myself.  I am grateful to all the challenges that helped me to become the person I am today.  I let go of the need to criticize myself or replay mistakes of the past. I replace negative thoughts about myself with positive ones.

     

    I love and value my body. I treat it with respect. I let go of any insecurities that I have ever felt about myself. I am strong and empowered. I am beautiful and amazing. I appreciate my health and I nourish my body with good food and exercise. I am worthy of all things wonderful. I release any self-sabotage that holds me back for living my life to its greatest potential.

     

    I free myself from the things that do not support my sense of worth. I do not judge myself. I am not a victim. I take great care of myself. I am patient with myself. I allow myself to go with the flow of life.  I take this journey of healing one day at a time.

     

    Happy V Day beautiful souls

    xx

  • There will be days like this

    There will be days like this

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    There are days where the pain hits me so hard I could almost choke on it. A song will come on the radio that reminds me of my dad and I’m gone – tears are immediately rolling down my face, I can hardly breathe and I find myself doing that loud childlike crying. In the privacy of my car it’s a good release, it helps me to bit by bit comprehend what happened.

    While my brain knows full well what happened, it’s taking my heart a while to catch up, that was until a couple of weeks ago. It was a good girlfriends wedding and the first wedding I’ve been to since I lost my dad. I really hadn’t even contemplated it being a hard day emotionally for me, I was so excited for my girlfriend.

    It started in the church that sinking feeling, the lump in the back of my throat, the first realisation that my dad will never walk me down the aisle, we’ll never share that final smile that says here we go as the doors open. My mind started going to a thousand places but I have quickly reeled it back in not wanting to take away from her amazing day.

    For the next few hours of the night I managed to drop back into normal mode, enjoying the champagne and hanging out with some of my best friends. But then the father of the bride and the father of the groom both got up to do speeches. There was so much in their speeches that I know my dad would have said. All the things that I was going to miss having him around for began to flood in and my heart started to grasp the reality of not having him here.

    My girlfriends took me outside and I let myself cry a little more but not wanting to be so miserable at such a joyous occasion I forced myself to push my feelings back down and went back to an old coping mechanism for numbing. I began to drink a hell of a lot more. I did such a good job of excessive drinking that everything after 9:30pm is completely gone for me; I was proper blackout drunk.

    The next morning, I woke up on a girlfriend’s couch because I’d been too drunk to get my own way home. Not only was I feeling devastated about my dad but I hated myself for having gotten so drunk.  I hated that there was so much of the night that I would never remember and more so I hated that I’d slipped back into something that I’ve worked so hard to stop.

    There was a time in my friendship group I felt like I was the drunk, the liability, the person you couldn’t trust to just have a few drinks. On the outside I played up to the party girl persona but on the inside I hated myself. It became a self-perpetuating cycle; the more I had these completely out of control nights the more I hated myself, the more I hated myself the more I wanted to get blind drunk so that I could disappear and not face myself. It wasn’t pretty and it took my dad getting sick and hitting rock bottom to really force myself out of the pattern.

    For the next few days I hardly slept. I found myself constantly tossing and turning, anxious and upset. I hated the idea of having to really face any of it, it felt too painful to willingly sit with and so I continued with my regular routine and simply hoped that everything would just settle back down in a couple of days.

    To a certain extent it did settle down a little, I stopped feeling like I was going to burst into tears at my computer but it still sat just below the surface and began to manifest itself in different ways. I found myself less able to cope with life, more easily stressed by work, more emotionally reactive to people and quite scattered in general. Still I persevered through the mess not wanting to acknowledge that perhaps I needed to unpack what the wedding had brought up for me.

    But you can only let things sit below the surface for so long before something gives. I thankfully already had a session booked with my psychologist and when I found myself crying on the way there I knew I was in for a tough session. We talked at length about what had happened that night and how I felt. She asked how my dad would have felt about my wedding day would he have been excited? What might he have said in his speeches? Just thinking about it was heartbreaking not only from my perspective of not having him there but also from his perspective. I hate that he doesn’t get to be there, that he doesn’t get to be part of something that I know he would have loved.

    I was finding it hard to answer her questions honestly because the answers felt so painful then she asked me if my dad was excited about having grandchildren one day. I could hardly speak, the thought of him missing out on that part of my life hurt more than anything else. He loved children and was beyond excited about future grandchildren. He would often talk about the things he planned to do with my future children. In that moment my heart broke for him and his dreams that he will never get to live out in this life.

    As I was finding hard to speak my psychologist suggested that I journal about how I felt. She asked me to fully explore what I expected these major milestones to look like with my dad, to go into detail about the part I envisaged him playing and also come up with ways that I could still include him in the future. She suggested that maybe on my wedding day I might like to keep a seat reserved for my dad, acknowledging this presence in a different way and I have to say I really loved that idea. She told me that it would be hard and would bring up a lot of tough emotions but I needed to give myself the time and space to let that pain come out. I agreed that journaling about it sounded like a good idea but when I got home I just felt so emotionally exhausted that I decided that I really couldn’t deal with anything more right now.

    Then the stomach pain started – really severe stabbing abdominal pain that would almost stop me in my tracks. After a week of relentless pain, I went to my GP who cleared me of anything serious and gave no real other explanation expect that sometimes this happens and if it’s still happening in a week come back. I’m a strong believer in emotional issues being connected to physical issues in your body and after that GP visit with no other real explanation I decided that the pain in my gut was perhaps about what I wasn’t emotionally digesting.

    As much as it hurt there was a feeling of disentanglement as I slowly loosened my grip on my shattered dreams. At first I was hardly able to get a sentence down before I fell apart but then slowly as I began to let myself soften into the pain I was able to read back over things and find a sense of peace. I was slowly letting go of the attachment to what I thought my life would be. It won’t ever be what I thought it would be and no one will ever take his place but it will be wonderful in its own way and that I am sure of.

    And as for my stomach the next day it felt about 80% better and it’s almost back to completely normal, you can draw your own conclusions from that…

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    I thought a lot about not publishing this post. Part of me worried about how people would take the honest account of my pain. My initial thought was that I don’t want people to feeling sorry for me and that is the old person who thought that strength was about putting on a brave face for everyone, sucking it up and moving on. But really strength is about vulnerability it’s about being real, talking about the struggle and owning your story. So I give my story a voice here in the hope that it provides a source of strength for others as I believe we are all made stronger by sharing our truth.

    Love and Blessings

    xx

  • Old habits die hard

    Old habits die hard

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    What happens when you fail; when you regress back into an old habit that you’re trying to kick. Do you give up, wave the white flag and tell yourself you didn’t really care that much anyway or do you dust yourself off, reassess and get back in the game.

    Let’s face it we all fail at things from time to time. We’re not perfect nor should aspire to be. We’re absolutely not meant to get everything on the first go and yet most of us are pretty hard on ourselves. What happens when we don’t meet our self imposed, often unrealistic expectations?

    Perhaps you beat up on yourself and begin running through past events, telling yourself you should have this and why didn’t you just do that. Or perhaps you begin to feel really defeated, like all you ever do is let yourself down. Maybe you even put on the I don’t give a shit mask and then make yourself really busy so you don’t have to confront how you feel. Or maybe, just maybe you respond to your failure with kindness, you tell yourself that it’s okay and you re-evaluate the situation.

    In the past I’ve been a big fan of the I don’t give a shit mask and getting real busy but over time I’m really starting to appreciate the lessons that come with things not working out on the first go. I’ve found that in working on my ability to stop, accept failure and identify opportunities for growth my whole capacity for living has expanded.

    So when I set myself a goal to not buy any new clothing for a whole year and on the 24th of January walked into a little boutique and bought myself a hat I was at first pretty disappointed with myself. Not even one full month in and I just couldn’t stop myself.  I thought about just never speaking about it and pretending it never happened and I thought about just completely giving up…I’d failed challenge over. But then I stopped myself and began to try and better understand why I hadn’t been able to stop myself.

    When I was in the store there was a little voice of reason that asked what the hell are you doing besides the fact that you don’t need any more hats you’re actually not supposed to be doing this! But then my old mate piped up – the voice that hates to say no and can justify anything – and simply said if you like the hat get the hat, you only live once.

    The first thing I recognised was that clearly I don’t like to tell myself no, I don’t like to feel like I can’t have things. This way of thinking can be both useful and problematic. It means that I take a lot of risks and I get a lot of what I want in life but in this situation it meant that I had no self control. I began to question myself further, so I can’t say no but why do I feel like I need the hat in the first place? Why do I always want so much material stuff?

    I believe the answer lies in the fact that I was completely ignorant to how much I really owned. I always wanted more because I had no real concept of excess in my wardrobe. Just the other day a girlfriend was talking to me about a beautiful dress that I own and I realised that I had totally forgotten that it even existed. It sits in a dress bag at the end of my wardrobe saved for a special occasion and it had completely left my mind.

    With this realisation I decided that in order to stop buying things and live more simply I had to take stock of what I already had and more importantly let go of some of the excess. I knew I needed a little help in this department and so it was time to get myself a copy of the Life changing magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo. I’d been told before that I needed this book. In the past I would often go to clean out my wardrobe and just end up reorganising things, never really getting rid of anything. In order to have some sort of lasting change I needed more from myself than a little reorganisation.

    So has this one little book made much of a difference? It most certainly has. It’s reframed the way I look at the stuff I keep, given me some perspective on how much I have and more importantly made me assess how much I want to have. To feel like I don’t need more, that is a luxury unlike any other. I honestly couldn’t recommend this book more highly and I’d like to share some of my favourite little quotes from this magical little book.

    • “Visible mess helps distract us from the real disorder.”
    •  “Relieving yourself of the burden of excess is the quickest and most effective way to put your things in order.”
    • “The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it.”
    • “To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose. To get rid of what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a closet or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy. Free them from the prison to which you have relegated them. Help them leave that deserted isle to which you have exiled them. Let them go, with gratitude. Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying.”
    • “The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life. Attachment to the past and fears concerning the future not only govern the way you select the things you own but also represent the criteria by which you make choices in every aspect of your life, including your relationships with people and your job.”
    • “The act of folding is far more than making clothes compact for storage. It is an act of caring, an expression of love and appreciation for the way these clothes support your lifestyle.”
    •  “From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change. That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. It allows you to confront the issues that are really important. Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.”

     

    With a fresh perspective, a few garbage bags for the salvos and more knowledge on tidying up than I had ever considered possible, I embark again on my challenge to not purchase any additional clothing for the rest of year.