Rambling Yogi

Tag: wellness

  • The grief journey

    The grief journey

    wpid-miyntjibouyn2hu9gbe-zt_ecqdsib-tofnoq5cuz1l0wxhubg3jn1sog7w5tl81r3hzketzgfvyfba8eqouw5tsuqlbiek154appqvwatwr1zcwm7r8gxdrr0b9ixmhaqw470-h313-nc-1.jpg.jpeg

    As I made the long trip up the coast to Merimbula I was struck by how my journey on this road trip reminded me of my journey through grief. When I set off I did what I usually do and quickly looked over the map of where I was going, it all looked pretty straight forward, I took note of the main towns I’d be passing through and then I set off on my way.

    As I got about two hours into my trip I realised that I was in a town that I wasn’t supposed to be. I pulled over and took another look at the map and sure enough I was in the wrong place.  On the map it had looked like a straight route but in reality what looked like the continuation of a road was actually a turn off. By missing my turn off I accidently ended up in a town that my dad used to call on for work so I decided to make the most of my mistake and stop and get food where I knew he used to go. From there I restudied the map and realised that I could keep going on the current road and would link back up with the road I was supposed be on.

    Missing that first turn had simply taken me on a surprisingly nice detour but now I was back on track and I knew that there was one more major turn off that I didn’t want to miss before stopping for lunch. After another forty five minutes of driving I started to wonder if maybe had missed the next turn off and then I see a sign and yup I’m in another town that I’m not supposed to be in. This time I was seriously not impressed with myself. My first response was WTF Clare are you kidding. How did you miss this one and with that I finally turned on my sat nav. Yeah that’s right I had one the whole time, I figured I’d be right driving streets I’d never driver before because I usually can just glance at maps and know where I’m going.

    What has this story got to do with grief? Well first I want to quickly discuss the stages of grief. I’d always figured that there was a stage of  denial but I hadn’t ever really through about the rest until an amazing friend suggested I read Grief on Grieving: Finding the meaning of grief through the five stages of loss. I highly recommend this book to anyone  who is feeling lost in their grief or wants to better understand a friend who is grieving. The five stages that this amazing book talks about are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The book explains that there is no prescribed order for experiencing the stages and that not everyone will experience them all. For me being introduced to these stages really normalised where my head was taking me and I began to think of the stages as places I visit. 

    So coming back to my road trip this is how I began to see it. The journey is life and the towns that I didn’t mean to end up in are the stages of grief, quite often you don’t realise that you’re heading for a particular stage it simply blindsides you like missing a turn. You don’t really know how you came to be in a particular place you just find yourself there. Sometimes you find yourself in a stage of grief and it actually sits well with you, it’s what you know you need or at least your ok with it, like my first unplanned town but other times it’s a really unwelcome stage it doesn’t sit well with you and you can get really upset that you find yourself there.

    When you find yourself in these different stages of grief there are different ways to be respond just like getting lost. You can pull a u-turn straight away and head back the way you came refusing to pass through this new town, you can pull over and become overwhelmed with this new place and perhaps needing to stay the night, or maybe you get out your map and realise that if you keep driving down the road you can pass through this town and get back to the main journey.

    There’s absolutely no right or wrong way to manage getting lost; if you need to turn around then turn around, if you need to stay and sit in a particular place go for it, if you want to slowly move through you should and if you revisit a particular place over and over again that’s fine. Your journey doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s, it should only ever be what you need it to be but know that you can always turn on your sat nav for guidance. Professional help can make unfamiliar roads a lot less daunting.

    To all those that have lost people dear to them I send you love and blessings for a brighter tomorrow.

    xx

  • 30 Days of Kindness

    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.

    wpid-img_20150804_202331-1.jpg

    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

  • Bone Broth Magic

    Bone Broth Magic

    wpid-img_20150529_211112.jpg

    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.

    wpid-img_20150529_212049.jpg

    Happy Brewing!

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

    Are you living a life that you are proud of?

    wpid-screenshot_2015-06-03-16-15-32-1-1.png

    “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.

  • Why not now

    Why not now

    wpid-img_20150126_135520.jpg Freedom is a theme that keeps coming up for me and it’s something that I definitely struggle with back home in Melbourne. Yesterday I had a bit of a light bulb moment and simply must share what lit up for me.

    So let me just quickly speed you up on my life right now. I’ve been accepted into the Chinese Medicine course that I’ve been wanting to do for lord knows how many years now and will be finishing up work with my corporate job on the 8th May! It’s still pretty scary, every so often I think about being a poor student for the next 4 years and feel a little sick but then I come back to the day I went to the open day for the course I thought I’d be there for an hour max, sus a few things out and then be on my way. I ended up staying for 5 hours, it all just made sense in a way that nothing else ever has not even yoga and I knew it’s where I need to be.

     

    While all this greatness is in place to happen in the future ask me how my current life is? How’s my work life balance? I’ve resigned from my corporate job and I’m teaching a few classes a week everything should be great right? Not so much… I’m still falling into the trap of taking on too much. I could go into the detail of all the craziness, my insane lack of sleep, the things I should have said no to and all the excuses I make to justify my overload. But I’ve come to realise this, it doesn’t actually matter what the stuff is that I’ve taken on this is just my pattern and it’s going to follow me around. I tell people that things will be better once I start studying and that I will have more time but that’s probably not actually the case either.

    I think a lot of us fall into that trap, giving the things that we need now future dates or believing that certain goals once attained will bring the desired emotion; I’ll be happy once I’ve got blah or I’ll be less stressed once I’ve gotten through blah. Now I’m not about to say that you shouldn’t plan or have goals but I’d like to know what feelings or emotions have to attached to a future goal or situation. And then I’d like to know do you really have to wait to experience that emotion, why can’t you feel how you’d like to feel now? If you’ve got a really seriously good reason why you can’t feel however you’d like to feel right now I’ve got one more question for you – How true is your reason?

    In an amazing workshop yesterday with Krista Jane I was asked how do I want to feel? It’s a question I’ve never been asked before but I knew the answer without hesitation, I want to feel free. I just as I had started to decide that freedom was a once I’ve finished my corporate job thing I was asked what can you do to feel more free now?

    It seems kind of bizarre to me now to say but I actually hadn’t contemplated feeling more free now. I had resided myself to the fact that life is going to be super crazy for the next few months and that’s ok I’ll get through it and then things will be better, I’ll just automatically feel more free from not having to do the 9-5pm daily grind. Sure not being in my corporate job and moving towards something that I’m so passionate about will be liberating but it’s not going to bring about the type of freedom I’m looking for. I fall into this way of think that time equals freedom, that if I have more time I can do more of the things that bring me joy, I’ll be more connected with my true self and everything will just fall into place. Part of this way of thinking also comes from people continually giving me the advice that I need to say no to more things and yes I know I do need to do but if it were as simple as just saying no I would be doing it already. Which is what leads me to believe that not overloading myself is really more about self love and caring about myself enough to say no I wouldn’t do that to myself (that’s another blog post to come).

    So back to Freedom. Freedom is only going to come from me, my freedom resides within me, it’s not about a certain environment or situation it’s purely about my state of mind and how I choose to see things.  Freedom is about vulnerability, connection and worthiness and let me tell you I’m not very good at any of it. The work I need to do is around figuring out what past experiences have shaped my aversions to these emotions and how I might be able to make peace with what has been so that I have a more authentic tomorrow.

    The work starts now, no more putting things off or believing that  emotions are only accessible in a future environment or situation, The time is now, the place is here and the person who’s going to make it happen is me.

     

    Live well beautiful souls

    xxx