Rambling Yogi

Tag: self study

  • 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.

     

     

  • Lessons of 2015

    Lessons of 2015

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    With great challenges come great lessons. While this year has been one the most heart breaking and challenging periods in my life thus far I can honestly say that I have also never felt more alive, capable and on purpose.

    I want to share my big lessons from this year in the hope that they enrich your life in some way.

     

    1. Let go of all the ways you thought life would unfold. Letting go of the plans and expectations you hold for your future is extremely liberating and allows you in live in flow with the universe. I realised the more I agonised over the loss of the future I had always dreamed of the harder life was to stomach. I had never even imagined a life where my dad wouldn’t be around to simply talk to and one day walk me down the aisle. Letting go isn’t a simple little choice you just make one day and then you’re done. It takes self awareness and consistent choice. When you begin to let go and allow things to just be as they are you’ll be blown away by the possibility that stands before you. Sometimes things better than your wildest dreams can just show up but you have to be open to the possibility that you don’t always know where life is taking you. You can fight that and try and control things or you can dance through the journey…the choice is always yours.
    2. Don’t fight with hard emotions. When you’re sad and you go into overdrive trying to shake it off and make yourself happy again you can wind up doing more harm than good. I never really realised until this year how much I truly loathed feeling sad. We’re all probably guilty of trying to numb or suppress undesirable emotions from time to time but doing it repeatedly not only means that you’re living an inauthentic life but it also dulls down all the good stuff. You can’t selectively numb emotions. When you let yourself experience sadness and pain the happiness and joy in your life also intensify. Allowing yourself to really sit with and feel your emotions grows your ability to experience the full spectrum of human emotions.
    3. Don’t get addicted to emotions. This is a follow on from my last point, while you should always let yourself feel what you need to, you also want to have enough self awareness to discern when you’re dropping a little too deep into an emotion or spending a little too much time there. I talk about this mainly in relation to pain and sadness but know that excessive emotion of any kind can be damaging to your body. It’s important to honour how you feel but you don’t want it to consume your life. Know the people, places and things that bring joy to your life, that make you laugh, balance and ground you, restore your calm and heal your heart.
    4. Don’t compare the beginning of your journey to some else’s middle. When I first lost my dad I’d often to talk to people who had been through a major loss and I’d find myself getting jealous of how well they were doing. There were times where I got insanely frustrated and felt like it wasn’t fair that I had to go through all of this, why couldn’t I just get back to good. It wasn’t until I got comfortable with pain and sadness that I began to realise how much I had to learn. Don’t cop out on the lessons in the challenges. As much as possible try and live in your own life and embrace your precious journey.
    5. Slow Down! Time will pass regardless of what you choose to do with it so don’t be in such a rush to get everything done yesterday. You never know when your time is up so be micro ambitious. Care more about short term goals and the everyday things. The only time you have to be alive is in each moment so live for your moments and enjoy each breath. And if you find that you’re living for future goals and wishing away your days I hope you find the courage to make some changes and take back your life.
    6. Know your worth. When I started telling myself “I am enough” each day I was amazed by all the things that came up. I was able to really clearly see all the areas that I didn’t believe I was enough and that awareness began to create a shift in my thinking. The stories I’d been subconsciously telling myself about my shortcomings we’re getting replaced with this new story that I am enough. All the crazy expectations that I pushed on myself in a bid to reach some dreamed up ideal fell away.  I began to believe that I don’t need more in order to be my best self…I was already there. I can’t even begin to tell you how much easier life got.
    7. Get help when you need it and don’t be too proud to accept it when it’s offered. I’ve never been overly brilliant at asking for help or accepting help when it’s offered but I’m so glad that all of that has changed. I knew this year that old habits and ways of coping were just not going to cut it. Accepting and asking for help from family and friends made me feeling so supported and really reassured me that I was going to be okay.  Getting professional help made me feel a bit sick at first but it was truly one of the best things I’ve ever done. There were sessions where I felt like I was making heaps of progress and then there were sessions that felt a bit pointless but it’s all contributed to bringing me into an amazing space.
    8. Make it happen; sort it out. All those things you’ve been putting off – the hard conversations, the mess and clutter, the mile long to do list – just do them. Previously I’ve been a pretty big fan of sticking my head in the sand when things have felt a little too difficult, unpleasant or overwhelming. All the things that I knew I should deal with would buzz around in the back of my brain creating a mild anxiety that I could usually balance out with a bit of yoga and meditation. But when I lost my dad I realised that I just didn’t have the capacity to carry the mild anxiety that lingered in the back of mind and I started to learn to deal with things. It didn’t just happen over night but like learning any new skill bit by bit I got better and better at dealing with things when they came up. I slowly stopped letting things run out for weeks and started taking action.  It feels absolutely brilliant to live in such a bold way.

     

    Take the time to figure out what your challenges have to tell you about yourself and find the lessons hiding in your experiences. You hold the answer to all of your questions you simply have to look within.

     

    Love and Blessings

     

    xx

     

     

     

  • Learning to Live

    Learning to Live

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    When my dad first passed away a number of people who had lost loved ones told me that you never really get over your loss. At the time it felt like I was being told that I was never going to be okay again, that somehow I was now broken beyond repair and I truly hated hearing it. Over the past few months I’ve been pushing myself to maintain my usual routine, believing that if I just kept pushing through I would somehow come out the other side. But the real truth is there is no other side to grief, it’s not finite, it’s not a linear path or a journey to a light at the end of a tunnel. It changes with you and it comes in and out like waves rolling onto the shore. After much soul searching I can finally say that I’m okay with that. I’m okay with no specific end to my grief and I’m comfortable with my pain.

     

    It’s been a long journey to get to that point.  I went through what seemed like a really good period where I felt almost weirdly together and at peace with everything. Looking back now I’d say it was a pretty heavy case of denial. Then the reality of how much I had lost started to set in. I found myself reduced to a crying mess day after day and I began to get really frustrated. I could cope with bits of sadness here and there but being upset every single day really started to take its toll.

     

    Desperate to find some reprieve from the constant crying and sadness I  began to hunt for a fix. I decided that I must be out of balance and so I went to my list of self care activities. I went through all the possibilities in my head: maybe I need to practice more yoga or run more or just get more sleep or perhaps regular massages are the answer…everyone loves a good massage. Now while self care is extremely important to good health it really doesn’t work if you’re using it to try and numb unwanted emotions. You see the problem with numbing is that you can’t selectively numb emotions. Just like yin and yang all of our emotions are interconnected and you can’t numb sadness without numbing happiness just like you can’t really appreciate light unless you have known darkness.

     

    At this point I hadn’t recognised just how much I was trying to avoid my pain. I confided in a good friend that I’d been crying and feeling down every day and that I didn’t know what to do to pull myself out of it. I was desperate for some sort of advice on how to make it stop. What I got instead was raw heartfelt honesty, he told me that I’d just been through one of the most significant and testing periods in my life to date and I can’t expect to just bounce back out of it and think I’ll cope. His words cut me to my core, I was immediately reduced to tears and could hardly breathe. This was the first moment that I realised just how badly I wanted to bounce back and return to something familiar.  At the time I felt so defeated and a big part of me wanted to argue that I could bounce back I just needed to do A, B and C. But instead of getting defensive and at least talking about how I felt, I did what many before me have done and internalised my feelings. I took the argument inside my head.

     

    Still desperate and believing that I could find a way out of my pain I began to go through all the things I was doing in my life that were perhaps too much for me. The list I came up with was pretty much everything and that sent me into a total tail spin. The thought of having to pull back from everything in order to be okay made me feel stressed and anxious. Note to self – Internal problem solving while overwhelmed is not the best idea. So I then found myself in a sad, crying, stressed and anxious mess and it was time to see my psychologist.

     

    At this point I’d been seeing my psychologist for a little over two months and I’d never let myself cry in front of her. And yes I know that it’s crazy to not let yourself cry in front of someone who’s there to help you work through your pain but I’m working on the whole vulnerability thing. In contrast to pervious sessions, this session I was a blubbering mess. I told her how I felt like I’d come such a long way; I’d made peace with all the painful circumstances surrounding my dad’s death, I’d let go of my fixation on better understanding his cause of death and I even felt untroubled by this death being under investigation and yet despite all of this I felt like I’d reached an all time low.

     

    With tears running down my face I went on to tell her my idea about needing to pulling from pretty much everything. The next few things she told me really shifted the way I was seeing things. Firstly she pointed out that part of the reason that I was feeling so frustrated was because I’d been through a good phase and this down phase felt like a step backwards. Because it felt like a step backwards I was then looking for a fix it in order to get back to good again. Secondly she spoke about the necessary role that tears and sadness play in healing. And thirdly she also told me that I didn’t need to stop doing things just because I was feeling down but if I did decide to scale back anything that I’m doing I should change the language that I’m using. She said that saying I “need” to do this because I’m not okay was making me feel like I had no choice in the matter. Instead I could rephrase to I am “choosing” to do this to give myself time and space. It was such a simple rephrase but it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.

     

    I walked away from that session with a new sense of calm. Over the next few days I still found myself randomly crying every day but I wasn’t as troubled by my sadness. Then another bit awesome wisdom came in the form of a YouTube clip by Marisa Peer called You can be enough.  In this clip Marisa instructs her audience to set two reminders in their phones one for every morning and one for every evening. The reminder is to tell yourself “I am enough”. She also suggested to write it on a mirror that you see each day to really drive the message home. I decided to give it a go for a week and I was amazed by the things that began to happen. The biggest thing that came from it was letting go of many of the unfair expectations I put on myself. Letting go of some of the expectations I held for myself meant that I began to feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin and I was able to really accept where I was in my grief journey.

     

    I can now see that all the time and energy that I put into fighting with my pain was actually time and energy put into my own suffering. Pain and grief are unavoidable parts of life that hold enormous potential for growth and learning. The same cannot be said for suffering. We make ourselves suffer when we wish for a reality other than our own.

     

    Self acceptance has been huge in getting comfortable with pain. Showing up for myself and truly embracing who I am right now and how I feel in each moment has allowed me to detach from this idea of needing to be okay. What the hell does okay even mean anyway! We’re never in a fixed state where everything comes together perfectly and stays that way. Things are constantly coming together then falling apart, it’s the nature of life.

     

    With my new found self acceptance I found myself able to make decisions that really honour what I need from myself right now. I stopped forcing myself to push through things and I was able to discern what was making my life harder than it needed to be.

     

    The one thing that stood out to me was my Chinese medicine course. When my dad first passed away I was in my first trimester of my course. I was determined to not fall in a heap and pushed myself really hard to get all of my assignments done to a high standard and in on time and I did well in all of my exams. This current trimester has been a very different experience. I would sit at home listening to lectures on the physiology of the heart and lungs and relate every last bit back to what was going on with my dad. After a few weeks of continually relating most class content to my dad I became emotionally exhausted and began to disengage with the content to protect myself. I went from being a student that got great marks to being a student that was just scraping through. Acknowledging that I wasn’t doing that course justice, that I couldn’t expect anything more from myself and that I needed some time out to heal wasn’t easy. But as soon as I made the choice I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders and I knew I had made the right decision.

     

    We often get so caught up in chasing these long term goals we set for ourselves – finishing a degree, saving for a house, working towards a promotion – that we don’t pay attention to how we’re actually experiencing life on a daily basis. I don’t know where this great urgency comes from that makes us feel like we must be in a certain place by a certain age but there’s a huge amount of harm in the hurry.

     

    While I would give anything to have my dad back I can truly say that I’m grateful for just how much I’ve learnt and become aware of over the past few months. I consider his passing my wake up call. A reminder that you never really know how long you’ve got so don’t get so caught up in the pursuit of long term goals that you forget that you’re only really living right now, don’t try and avoid hard feelings they hold invaluable lessons for you and most importantly know that you are always enough, so make sure that you turn up for yourself, back yourself and know that whatever life bring to you….

    You got this

    With love and blessings
    xxx
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  • The Puzzle of Life

    The Puzzle of Life

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    One night I woke up at 2am struck with an idea about life and how it all fits together. Being only half awake I wasn’t sure if it was brilliant or just pain silly but I wrote it down all the same and drifted off back to sleep. In the morning I came back to it and started testing it for flaws and to my delight it held up pretty well. That was several months ago and since then what have I done with this idea? Pretty much nothing! I’ve just sat on it.

    Why have I not shared what I originally through was a pretty damn good idea? Well I still thought it was a good idea, that hadn’t changed but I was making excuses that pushed it back. I was telling myself that I was saving it for a really good blog post and that I didn’t want to write it until I had the time to do it justice but on reflection I think I was just afraid of putting it out there.

    So what prompted me to share now. Last Friday night I went to an awesome workshop run by InsideOut, at the start of the workshop founder Campbell Butterss shared this vision of how life can get small and messy. I thought it was brilliant and I also saw a lot of my own vision in his. That was the start of stepping towards sharing. Later in the workshop one of the facilitators Miroslav Petrovic took me to a place where I had to sit with and breath through the story I regularly tell myself about not being good enough. To sit with all the harsh expectations I put on myself and to breathe into the emotions and the tightness in my chest was invaluable for me. In going into the feelings behind the story I was able to loosen its grip and step through a place of fear.

    After my three paragraph introduction it might seem like what I’ve got to share is pretty huge. The truth is it isn’t really that profound, but I wanted to be real about how much I’d built it up to be a big deal in my head in the hope that people are inspired to share their struggles and break through their fear. And maybe just maybe the journey of sharing holds a bigger message than my idea ever did.

    Now finally to this idea about life; so I was looking for a way to explain how I’d experienced figuring out who I am at my core and how I had detangled a lot of the rubbish that blocked me from knowing my true self. This is how I see it:

    When you’re born you have a few key puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly and that’s who you are in your truest purist form. As you go through life and have experiences you begin to pick up new puzzle pieces. Some of these pieces belong to you; fitting well with your original puzzle pieces and others really aren’t your puzzle pieces at all, they’re often pieces that others have pushed on you and led you to believe are part of who you are. These puzzle pieces that don’t belong begin to cause a lot of problems. You see we’re always trying to complete our puzzles and when something doesn’t fit what do we do? We pull apart the whole puzzle and try and make it work thinking that maybe there was something wrong in the core puzzle and if we do a little rearranging we should be able to make it work. There in lies the mess.

    Over the years we can collect so much rubbish along with our true stuff that it can turn into one big fat epic mess. While some lucky humans naturally get better at discerning what’s theirs most of us get to some point where we end up questioning why we’re unhappy, unfulfilled and struggling with elements of our lives.

    So then how do you then begin to sort out what pieces you need in your puzzle and what pieces just make life harder. Let me start by saying brilliant puzzles take time and dedication there’s no quick and easy fix but it can definitely be worked through. It becomes a matter of figuring out when you picked up certain puzzle pieces then deciding what needs to stay and what needs to go. When that puzzle gets a little less messy and you begin to really be able to see who you are, let me just say that life gets awesome!

    For me journaling, reading all sorts of self help books, my yoga teacher training and working with some psychologists really helped to trace back to when I started having certain limiting beliefs about myself and forming certain views of the world. I think this process of building the picture of who we are is always a work in progress and it’s evolving nature is part of the magic of life.

    If the puzzle was perfect and finished what more would there be to do.

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    Enjoy the journey, laugh at the confusion, breathe into the moment and know that everything happens for a reason.

    xx

  • Are you living a life that you are proud of?

    Are you living a life that you are proud of?

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    “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!

  • How much love do you have for yourself

    How much love do you have for yourself

    wpid-70237ad5e9a014dbe3e2ee8249f910dc.jpgHow 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.