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new★★Some Self Love -Food For Thought From Jennifer Louden

 

Some 'food for thought' from Jennifer Louden:

 

Quote Follow the timing of your human life. Sally Kempton tells the story of two radical callings in her life, and both times, she took the time she needed to make the changes she was called to make. You are living in a human body with human limits and needs. Proceed accordingly. (Note: your journey may be metaphorical, completely internal, quietly subtle and it is no less sheroic. You define what all of this looks like. Always.) ★ღ✰˚ ✰Jennifer Louden

 

 

 

 

 

I define comfort as self-acceptance. When we finally learn that self-care begins and ends with ourselves, we no longer demand sustenance and happiness from others. ★ღ✰˚ ✰Jennifer Louden

 

    • ►•A Guide to Being Yourself
      by Jennifer Louden
      1 Dedicate yourself to wholeness. Perfection appears to be a much sexier partner but is actually a demon lover who will suck you dry and leave you bitter and broken.
    • 2 Acknowledge what you experience and how you feel. It’s not about you being right and someone else being wrong, it’s about claiming your experience. It’s your experience and seeing it, feeling it, sitting with it, helps make you you.
    • 3 Healthy desire birthed all of creation. Let it birth you, again and again. Being yourself springs from knowing what you want.
    • 4 Healthy desire is never about perfection (outcome). It is about going deeper than your mood, deeper than your stories of what is allowed or possible, into the sensations and energy of desire itself, and letting that move you into inspired action.
    • 5 Healthy desire is the source from which you renew your commitment to what matters most to you. Acting on that commitment will mean constantly unfurling into the unknown. The sooner you make peace with doing that (yes imperfectly which means people will be pissed off at you) the more energy you will have for adventure!
    • 6 Every time you say “I can’t because…” you are giving your power away to someone or something else, which is giving yourself away. Power is a foundational spiritual quality. Pretending that you don’t have power or that you are not responsible for your life is the quickest way to hell. Trust me on this one.
    • 7 Have practices that help you open your heart, love yourself, and witness your thoughts and reactions. Because here’s the hysterical truth: there really isn’t a separate self to be and that is the most delicious discovery of all.
    • 8 Waste no time guarding the self you are forever becoming. It’s one thing to have strong boundaries and another to jealously guard your heart

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Here are some of the questions that Jennifer Louden uses as soul-prompters:

• What small act of kindness could I offer myself in the next hour?

• How connected am I to my heart these days? When did I last feel connected to myself?

• What desires want to be heard?

• What life insights have I been steering my life by lately? What life insights do I wish I’d been using to steer my life?

• Body, what do you want to tell me about what I need to find my center again?
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    • ** Love these daily questions from The Life Organizer: A Woman’s Guide to a Mindful Year and The Life Planner: Companion Questions by Jennifer Louden Life Planner review
    • Have to:
  • Could do:
  • Want to:
  • Let go of:

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    1. Cast yourself as the lead in the story of your life. Frame that story as worthwhile, beautiful, important, even epic. Dress accordingly for the adventure ahead.
  • ~~ ✰~~
    2. When you wake at 3 a.m., do not go back to sleep. Listen. What is scratching at the door of your heart? Let it in and let it speak. This is your Gandalf arriving with a map, a map that reveals your first step.
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    3. Look for what was lost, perhaps between the ages of 8 and 12, and pledge to reclaim it – not for fame, fortune or love, but for yourself. Hint: it always seems to have a creative component.
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    4. Begin the journey for yourself, and yourself alone. Do not journey for others, not even those you love, not even what breaks your heart. Instead, go because you want to, because you desire it. This will set you free to be of real service when the time is right.
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    5. Follow the timing of your human life. Sally Kempton tells the story of two radical callings in her life, and both times, she took the time she needed to make the changes she was called to make. You are living in a human body with human limits and needs. Proceed accordingly. (Note: your journey may be metaphorical, completely internal, quietly subtle and it is no less sheroic. You define what all of this looks like. Always.)
  • ~~ ✰~~
    6. Cultivate your necessary magic by owning your precise gifts – not “I’m good at helping people” but “I’m great at seeing what people are good at and where the world needs their particular gift.”
  • ~~ ✰~~
    7. Follow what obsesses you. Do not ask what it will get you or why it beckons. Noorjahan Akbar collected Afghan women’s folk songs which inspired her, in time, to start a non-profit which lead to a women’s internet cafe, a tailor shop, two libraries, and more. She did not know exactly why she was collecting and recording these songs. And she did it anyway.
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    8. Stay awake by questioning and find others to question with. The status quo, the familiar, the safe will try to lull you off your path, back to sleep. Allies help you stay awake.
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    9. Trust the darkness, trust the descents, do not shy away from your sorrows and pain. That is where wisdom is, even if takes years to harvest it.
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    10. Cultivate ways to take care of yourself in the descents. Proceed at the pace that your heart can bear. Learn to discern drama from descent.
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    11. Let love carry you forward. Not duty, not shame, not guilt. Love.
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    12. Return knowing you will share your boons with your community in a way that feeds you and them. The martyr way is dead to you. Return knowing you will journey again so you have to keep listening
    • Take a few moments to imagine you are can be nourished by something larger than yourself. Nature, God, love, anything that is not you, breathe that force in, imagine it filling you up, like the most delish meal or warm golden sunshine. If your logical mind says, “Bull,” ask it, “Did I make gravity that is holding me to the earth? The oxygen I am breathing? I am part of the larger whole, I am always supported and I can consciously draw on that support to befriend myself.” Relax into life.

 

Embrace your Experience
Each time you deny what you are feeling or thinking or judge it as “bad,” you reinforce the idea you can’t be trusted, that you aren’t somehow good.

For example, I made a stupid business mistake recently, a mistake I have made many times before. I can grit my teeth, chastise myself and eat a bag of cookies or I can pause and be with what I am experiencing. Do it with me right now. Stop making anything about this moment, or you, wrong. Breathe in your feelings, any sensations in your body, your thoughts acknowledge them. Then exhale and create some spaciousness for your experience. Ahh….

Inspiration will flow from you like champagne at a wedding when you meet yourself as beloved. Let us befriend ourselves so we can befriend the world—and have a blast doing it.JENNIFER LOUDEN (:

 

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Jennifer Louden articleLife Organizer New Way to Flow With Time article
So, you’ve made lists, prioritized your goals, prioritized your lists, and listed your goals. You’ve scheduled, compartmentalized, and tried to keep everything in its own little, neat box on the calendar. But despite all your color-coding and scheduling, “life” doesn’t always work.

The issue is that life isn’t something to get “done,” to check off a list. Life – especially as we have learned to live it in the past decade — has become much more fluid and complex. And, to be blunt, little in life gets done – nor should it.

Do you feel a pull to be present, to embrace what is and even to live like the poet Rilke: “Let what I do flow from me like a river/No forcing and no holding back?” If so, that means the old time management tools won’t work. In fact, the more traditional approaches to managing your life and structuring your days can hog-tie you, forcing you to relinquish the skills you most need in today’s world – like intuition, emotional intelligence, creativity, and big-picture thinking to read more article
1. Connect: Move your body – breathe deeper, stretch your arms overhead, step outside and feel the breeze on your skin- anything that connects you with your life energy.

2. Feel: Tune into your heart, which can give you information your head can’t. Simply put your attention on your heart, perhaps by placing your hand there. Recall a time in which you felt loved and appreciated or loving and appreciative toward someone else. Linger there for a few seconds.

3. Inquire: Ask a mindful question. This opens up possibilities you literally couldn’t see before. My favorite mindful question: What do I need to know right now? (What if you really didn’t need to know more than the next immediate step?)

What do I want? (This is one of the most liberating questions — and one of the scariest. Remind yourself that you don’t have to act on what you want, that wanting doesn’t mean getting, and that the ultimate in creativity is being in touch with your undiluted desires.)

What don’t I want? (Sometimes using the process of elimination can be a less intimidating way to inch forward than naming your desires outright. Desire and yearning are powerful forces!)

How can I be gentle with myself in this situation? (We can all benefit from asking this many times a day)

4. Allow: To allow is simply trusting that, by connecting, feeling, and inquiring, you will hear or see or feel or sense what your next step is—and only your next step.. Allowing is not about belief: it’s about noticing your experience, and opening to your next step, allowing love, allowing inspiration, allowing knowing to come into your body and heart, to inform and direct you.

5. Apply: Action is how you taste the fruit of this path and where the practical and results-oriented parts of you get their due. Without action, without decision, you remain in possibility, which is safe and beautiful but eventually enervating and boring. That doesn’t mean eating the whole elephant in one bite; small steps aren’t just okay; they’re encouraged. Taking small actions of trust builds your “trust muscles.”

Every time you make a casual promise to yourself — without checking in first to see if you actually want to and are able to keep this promise — you erode your trust in yourself
Jennifer Louden
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By Jennifer Louden Greatest fear dissolver : I never thought of myself as a fearful person — just the opposite, in fact. I was pretty fearless! After a few years of suffering, I realized that what had been shoving me into a smaller, narrower, far less rewarding life for years was actually fear. And I didn’t even know it. Anxiety, feelings of being overwhelmed, and even procrastination and self‐pity are often symptoms of fearfulness — fear of being fully alive, fear of death, fear of meaninglessness, fear of growing old. Once I saw the insidious ways that fear was ruling me, I began to learn about everything I could possibly do to dissolve it. I’m going to share one idea, an idea so small that it’s easy to overlook, yet can open the way to a far more courageous, alive life.
To thrive in the face of fear, uncertainty and even deep grief, you first need to acknowledge that you don’t want to do anything to make yourself feel better.

“What?! I don’t want to feel like my head is going to pop off. I want to feel good.”

The truth is, most of you wants to feel better. But parts of you don’t. Like all of us, you contain a multitude of selves, and some of those selves hate change, even if it’s shifting from “My head is going to pop off” to “I can handle what life brings my way. ” These aspects must be acknowledged or they can keep you stuck — for years.

“I don’t feel like doing anything” — and that’s OK

Have you ever seen a tired, fearful child trying to get her parent’s attention? Mom keeps putting off the child, and the child’s behavior keeps escalating until she gets undivided attention. Once the parent gives the child loving attention, the child, in most cases, calms down.

Parts of you and me are like that child. Before you can deal with your fear, before you can take action to create a life you love, you must acknowledge the resistance, the whiny voice that says, “I don’t want to do anything! I just want this all to go away!”

By simply acknowledging — without judgment — that you don’t want to do anything (even fun things like taking a bath or going to yoga), you extend mercy and compassion to yourself. In doing so, you calm the parts of you that are freaking out. You stop the inner rebellion that typically results in you not doing anything (that’s how procrastination starts) or nurturing yourself in ways that don’t truly nourish you, like watching hours of TV or eating a pint of ice cream.

Love = acknowledgment

This doesn’t mean you let yourself be ruled by the parts of you that don’t want to do anything to feel better. The parent does not give the child whatever she wants — even if the child is throwing a tantrum in the grocery store. Loving acknowledgment actually restores the wise you to the center of your life, freeing you to choose what you want to do and opening up to life instead of shutting yourself down.

So, when you’re feeling squirrelly, whiny or stuck, take yourself by the hand and say something like, “I don’t feel like doing anything, but I can acknowledge how I feel without being impressed by it. I can accept that I am feeling this way, even if only for a blink of an eye. And when this part of myself feels heard, I can ask, &;squo;What is one thing I can do to be kind to myself right now?’” Love, which is what acknowledgment really amounts to, is truly the great fear dissolver.

Acknowledge your resistance and watch yourself bloom

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Food For Thought From Jennifer Louden

 

related material

self talk …Jennifer Louden popular and respected women’s life coach[quote]

“I trust myself to eat in ways that feel great not because someone else says so but because I say so. Because it feels kind and nourishing to me.” a self-trust inspiration e-course from Jennifer Louden

What makes a good promise to yourself, a promise that grows self-trust?

Clarity,

Competency,

Conditions of Satisfaction,

and Completion With clarity,

she asked you to ask yourself to be be clear with your promise/intentions to yourself.

 

I declare that I will With Competency, she asks you to review if you are able to comply with your intentions.

With Conditions of Satisfaction, she asks you to ask yourself find a way to know if you did what you said you were going to do.

And with Completion, you ask you to to follow up on yourself to see if you keep your promises.

 

[For myself, I write about my follow-thru, to discover why or why not, without harsh criticism. •selfcare~

 

more related material

affirmations coming soon

Conditions of Enoughness quiet the Hounds and sustain you in consistent, mindful action.

COE’s are using four simple steps to create a boundary or container around anything in your life (and I mean anything – parenting, finding a partner, writing a book, doing the yard work) that you want to shape and build. In  a nutshell,The four steps are:

1. Name what is enough in simple facts.

What you will actually do next. Measurable. Factual, no aspirations. “I will write new material on my project. I will start and finish an exercise video. I will write one section of my Match.com profile.”

 

2. Include a time element.

For how long…
How often…
By when….

Name a boundary so you know when you are finished, not the big finish, but each step. “I will write new material for 30 minutes.” “I will write one section of my Match.com profile by Friday at 5 pm.”

3. Ensure they’re dependent on ONLY YOU on an AVERAGE day. Not a superhuman day.

The quickest way to experience enoughness? Stop making an aspirational to-do list that you never complete. Stop expecting a day in which you are someone you aren’t. Start planning for average, a day in which you have to take the car in because it has a flat, a day in which you sleep in and forget to meditate, a day in which you get brain fuzzed at 3 pm: a day of reality.

4. Declare you are satisfied when your conditions are met—even if you don’t feel satisfied.

Everybody likes to skip this step. They feel stupid, especially saying it out loud (super powerful). But this is where we stop to notice, and very briefly celebrate, what we did. Research shows this is what allows us to build and sustain our momentum. So don’t skip it.

 

 

 

 

I AM
Peaceful:
Emotions, Sensations ,
& Feelings

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