it’s amazing how motivating voicing my goal about the mindfulness posts out loud is.
So mindfulness day 2 part 2 – the idea here is a little bit of “fake it till you make it” and a little bit of “see yourself as others see you.”
It’s not always easy to be self-loving and self-confident and generally I know I am WAY harder on myself than I am on others – especially those I care about. Couple that with being very self-deprecating, brushing off praise with self-put-downs, and it can be a hard habit to break.
Step 1 – accept the compliment. No “it was nothing”; no “I could have done better”; just “thank you.”
Step 2 – start a compliments file. Last year I did this in my journal (for like 2 days or something). This year I am going to try and keep it on my phone – so if someone sends a text or message or posts something on my fb or ig I will screen shot it and save it in an album.
Step 3 – review the file – pretend you actually believe the kind things your friends / co-workers / random strangers / family say. Pretend you said “good job” to yourself. Eventually you’ll be able to say it and mean it!
found on dribbble by Katie Daugherty
Next up is thinking about your values. I know this is hard…
Last week I did a “daily calm” session focused on loving kindness.
You start by saying to yourself:
May I be happy May I be healthy May I be at peace
Then the idea is to say the same about someone you love / care about:
May you be happy May you be healthy May you be at peace
Then someone less central to your life, or a stranger, or the squirrel looking at you through the window.
Then someone you find annoying or difficult to deal with.
So this is where some people may have difficulties. I never do. I can genuinely want the person who cut me off on the highway or the neighbour who parks his car and blocks access to our garage to be happy, healthy, and at peace.
…la di dah we’re just gonna waltz on in here like it hasn’t been a month since my last post and a month and a half since my last mindfulness post…
There are a couple of activities on “day 2” and there’s no way I can do even one of them in a day so there are gonna be at least 2 “day 2 v.2” posts. I guess I should re-name this one day 2a v.2? Or maybe day 2 v.2a… Or just day 2 part 1 – y’all know it’s not the stuff from 2021. …anyway, back to the regularly scheduled programming.
Everyone knows what physical clutter is right? The stuff hanging around that really serves no purpose except for getting in your way, or making you feel guilty, or worry about unnecessarily. Well, it turns out emotional clutter is pretty similar.
That tchotchke isn’t inherently bad – it only becomes clutter if there are too many and they overwhelm you and don’t serve their intended purpose anymore (i.e. reminding you fondly of someone or some place). Negative thoughts and emotions are also not bad – fight or flight is a survival tactic. BUT most people don’t need survival tactics every damn day.
Feeling guilty about something is the same – you can use the feeling to see how to change and grow OR it can cause you to seize up and freeze and never evolve.
My “emotional decluttering” focus is definitely centred on guilt. It’s so easy for me to absorb any and all blame. My train of thought recently, as an example:
“We’re in a pandemic and we were going to go visit the family in BC but another pandemic wave hit and so we can’t go and it’s my fault I never thought we should move to be closer to the BC family.”
Seriously.
So this is my focus: Forget the mistake and learn the lesson. Don’t hold on to regret and guilt.
Toby took this awesome picture during a visit to Balmy Beach.
I got tested on this too soon though. I offended someone last week. I was trying to process something about how I felt after an online conversation and I forgot the cardinal rule that really there is no nuance online and while the second conversation would have probably happened very differently if it was in person, I made a mistake. I didn’t think through what I was saying before I said it and I completely missed an obvious interpretation.
I’ve given myself a couple of days to wallow and while I wish I had done it differently, I cannot go back and change it. I’ll consider a bit more about what I can learn from this and how to avoid – or at least minimize the chances of it – it in the future.
as an aside – I am going to try and make time for this. It’s important to me even if it isn’t (and probably because it isn’t) easy. So my calendar says I have to post something about this every Tuesday from now on… *fingers crossed*
Here’s the galaxy after another week has passed! (so up to Jan 14, I’m a little behind)
I used 3 new colours that I hadn’t used in week 1 and six different colours in week 2.
I have a new “lowest high”: -5* C on January 5
The highest high was 4* C on January 4 – so it was a big of a swing there.
The numbers after the = in the captions are the DMC thread numbers.
1 degree C = 796
4 degrees C = 826
-5 degrees C = 154
-1 degree C = 209
2 degrees C = 797
1 degree C = 796
0 degrees C = 333
AND I figured I should move the hoop after a couple of weeks so here’s the full fabric update. I tried to not move the needle minder so that you get a good idea of what portion of the fabric you usually see in the photos:
The pattern is from Climbing Goat Designs – website – etsy
I thought I ought to check in with how I am doing with my habits and goals and stuff. You know, those daily, easy/hard, things?
Okay first, clearly drinking more water is actually easier than I thought it would be. Even when I did nothing for a couple of days post-COVID booster shot, I still managed to drink at least two of my water bottles full each day. That’s about 1.5L so not loads but more than I was drinking.
Okay – so booster was in the late afternoon of January 5. That first light blue box is January 5. I was soooo wiped out for the 6th and 7th at least.
picture was actually taken on January 21 – but yea, didn’t want to wait till the end of the month for an update
Moving – I was on a good roll there. That booster shot though really wiped me out. You see that lonely red box in there? I got the shot on Wednesday afternoon. On Saturday I figured I should be able to go for my walk – so I did: 40 minutes woohoo. And within 15 minutes of getting home I fell asleep. And napped for 2 hours! So then I guess I just lost my mojo? Will be working on that.
Yoga – ahhh yoga. Again. 5 days straight. Then wiped. And after a couple of days off I realised that my shoulder was actually NOT appreciating all the table top / cat-cow / downward facing dog poses. You’ll see at the bottom of the chart that I thought maybe yoga would take the place of physio maybe? Turns out I was wrong. So I am going to add a physio break to my work day to get me up off the computer at least. Ideally by the end of the month there will be a lot more of that line filled in!
Reading – ahhh reading is one of those things that’s on the list so I get the joy of crossing it off. Actually from the 12th to the 14th I did reading instead of “creating” because I needed to finish this amazing book by bell hooks and get it back to the library. (And yes, it will have it’s own post soon too). But I am also prone to not picking up a book for days, weeks even. So the ability to check it off (or fill in the box) is nice. Same with contests. I haven’t won much lately but it’s a small group of people I’ve known online for almost 20 years!
Ohhh and I made this today for tracking my books. A bookshelf! In my journal 😊
And at least the cats can’t complain much 😉
So creating – the plan from the beginning was:
☐ 1 x each easy list item per week
☐ 3 x each hard list item per month
Well, mostly I’ve been cross-stitching. Once I coloured. A couple of times I’ve written blog posts. Definitely not spreading out the easy list items.
And the hard list? No painting, no trumpet, and no knitting as of yet. At least we baked once before the 15th! Q asked for – and to help make – chocolate cheesecake for his birthday so I got one hard list item done in the first half of the month! Yikes.
And – I managed to bake twice again since the 15th so baking is okay. But none of the other stuff. You’ll see my little note to myself that CREATE is going to get it’s own chart in February and we’ll see if that helps any.
