This includes your greatest joys (embrace them).
And your greatest pains (keep attending to them).
Remember this as you gracefully move forward throughout your day and into your new year.
I help busy people do inner work.
This includes your greatest joys (embrace them).
And your greatest pains (keep attending to them).
Remember this as you gracefully move forward throughout your day and into your new year.
Everything you’re carrying… you’ve picked up.
Maybe put some of that down before the New Year, eh?
Achieving goals—moving forward—becomes a heck of a lot easier when you’re traveling light.
Trust the whispers of the body.
Question the yells of the mind.
Your body might whisper “sore legs” to which your mind might amplify to “TAKING THE WEEK OFF FROM EXERCISE!” Question the mind:“Is that really what sore legs means?” Listen to the body: “Sore legs—noted. Light stretching and upper body it is then.”
Before a public speech your mind might yell, “DANGER! RED ALERT! RUN!” while your body might be whispering, “you’re ready for this… you know this topic… stay calm.”
Or, after a hard breakup, your mind might be saying “GOOD RIDDANCE! WE DIDN’T NEED THEM! THEIR LOSS!” while your body might whisper, “that hurt.”
You see, the mind is in the business of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain which usually means staying inside of the comfort zone and fabricating situations to make them more—comfortable. But, that’s not what the body needs.
What the body needs is for the mind to respond properly to its signals; for the pain to be confronted, felt, and expressed; for the emotions and trauma to be seen and heard.
It needs for the mind to be a compassionate ear—an ally. Not a lazy megaphone that operates as an independent.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
Dr. Seuss
To which I would change to:
Cry if you feel to, smile at the wholeness of what happened.
Not as catchy, I admit. But, worth considering.
Telling yourself not to cry—to not acknowledge the weight of a hard situation is to reject a key component of any given experience.
Only focusing on the smiles will limit depth. Only focusing on depth will limit smiles. It’s the whole experience—the entirety of the human experience—that we should be after.
Allow yourself to flow freely between both—and all.
Heaviness doesn’t get lighter with time—it gets heavier.
You might try to trick your mind into ignoring, suppressing, or avoiding its heaviness—but that doesn’t change it’s weight. It only increases the time you’re holding it for.
Which, counterproductively, makes it heavier.
This all might sound relatively straightforward, but what about what weighs on your mind?
Hard conversations might be avoided, but they carry on within your mind—until they’re finally had.
Trauma might be suppressed, but only to the pit of your stomach—until it’s finally given the attention it needs.
You might cleverly distract your mind from facing your toughest problems, but as soon as you’re no longer distracted, there they are.
Want to lighten your load? Face the heaviness. Have the hard conversation. Confront the trauma. Face the tough problems.
It takes a lot of energy to carry around heavy shit.
But, when you face it, while it might be heavy upfront, you can finally free yourself from the increased heaviness that comes with time.
For good.
My friend’s Instagram got hacked.
She had 27k followers.
Then, get this, the hackers messaged her on WhatsApp asking for a ransom.
There are people out there who actually do this.
This is simply to say:
Pretend like all of your accounts just got hacked and you lost everything you’ve built.
You lost all of your connections and you had no way of communicating with anyone on social media.
If you really want to feel that reality, delete all social media apps on your phone for the next week.
See how it feels.
Then, imagine you finally got them back after a ton of back-and-forth and pain-in-the-butt customer service interactions.
What steps would you take to prevent that from ever happening again?
Do that now.
Hustle without mental health is self-hate.
Did that feel too aggressive?
If it did, then I’m speaking to you.
Because anyone who argues in favor of hustle at the expense of mental health is arguing for what exactly?
And how exactly does any of that help with hustle?
It doesn’t.
More importantly, it doesn’t help anyone or anything that’s involved with that person’s life—least of all, the person themselves.
And by ignoring this—yes, they’re choosing to commit an act of self-hate. Because self-love doesn’t ignore signs/calls for help.
Take care of yourself, first. Spend time inspecting the state of your mental wellbeing. Listen to what your body is telling you—and respond.
Hustle can wait. Your mental health can’t.