Tag: mental-health

Self-compassion: a reflection

Written Oct. 15,2016 

Why’s and giggles

Life has felt very much at a juxtaposition lately.  One moment asking why has life been so challenging and the next playing and laughing with my daughter, my class or my friends.  This has made life feel chaotic and content all at the same time.  I am working on being self-compassionate…this is very hard.  I have made a life habit of being too hard on myself.  Along with putting a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect.  Except it has come to my attention that I am trying to be perfect by society and my own unrealistic expectations.  This is where the self compassion is coming into play.  I have worked a lot on saying it is okay if I don’t get to everything today.  As always it will be there tomorrow and as long as no one is hurt (including myself) by not getting to it today all is well. 

The why’s:  there is a quote about being given the life you can handle.  Basically stating that we are given so many challenges because we are “strong enough” to handle them.  I can now confidently say I am strong enough to handle them.  However, why do I have to be SO strong all the time.  When do I get to lean on someone else?  Why so many tests in this life?  What am I to learn from being SO strong so much of the time? 

I know I am not the only person who feels this way, but in our society it is not ok to share out loud these thoughts…that makes you broken and weak.  Not many people are equipped with the compassion to listen with an open heart and not judge others in their time of need.  How do we make this change?  When will it be seen as a strength to be self-compassionate and compassionate towards others?  I hope one day soon we can move towards being more compassionate to everyone including ourselves!

Compassion: n, deep awareness of the suffering of another, coupled with the wish to relieve it.

This leads me to the idea that self-compassion is noticing your own suffering on a deep level. Along with wishing to relieve it. I believe this wish is only helpful if you take action to relieve your suffering in a healthy way. This is different for each person. Healthy in a physical, emotional or spiritual way. I don’t want to confuse self-compassion with excuses to avoid the hard in life or suffering. I do want to find ways to process the hard. For me, I process through writing and creativity. I love journaling, finding thoughtful prompts to reply to , shamanic letter practice and stream of consciousness writing ( aka – dump my thoughts on the page). I also love to draw or paint with music to help me let my thoughts drift around and see what may be bothering me or “solutions” to what’s bothering me. 

Self-compassion has helped me process the whys from my previous writing. I still know and believe I am strong enough to handle hard things. However, I am also learning to ask for help ( this is hard). I think this learning of hard lessons is helping me to love myself, set boundaries and to know I am worthy of my own love, kindness and compassion.

With coffee & kindness – Heartwriter Studios

Healing and Grief

The following piece was started as I restarted my blog about part of my breast cancer story.  Then recently I unexpectedly lost one of my dogs.  This lead to adding more about grief. I am sure there will be more in future, but this is a good start to the ideas of healing and grief. 

Healing – what is it?

It is physical, emotional, years in the making! It ebbs & flows. 

The definition of healing is: vb., to make free from injury or disease: to make sound or whole.

So then my question is how does one make you free from your emotional injury? How do you become whole again? Is it the same wholeness as before? Or a changed wholeness? What has changed? Is it “better”? Or just changed?

Hmm, let’s look at the word disease. The definition of disease is: a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment. 

Sometimes healing is physical as in healing from a disease, but sometimes healing is from emotional pain like grief. At its essence grief is emotional pain in the form of sorrow, sadness and/or suffering. This can come from many different hardships.

The definition of grief is: n., suffering hardships; n., emotional pain, generally arising from misfortune, significant personal loss, bereavement, misconduct of oneself or others etc.; sorrow, sadness. 

Personal loss, this feels like many different things wrapped up into one. Grief at the loss of people, animals, life changes, the lost ideas of what you thought life would be and more. How do we unpack these losses if we have put them in a box on the shelf? If we take the box down and open it, what will happen?