Daily Affirmations + Introspections

A medicine wheel is used as a symbolic teaching and healing tool by various Indigenous cultures in North America to promote spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional balance and growth. 

It represents the cycle of life and the interconnectedness of all things through its four quadrants, which correspond to the four cardinal directions (East, South, West, North), the four seasons, and different stages of life and self. The medicine wheel serves as a framework for understanding personal journeys, life's complexities, and the natural world, emphasizing the need for balance and harmony in all aspects of life. 

How we will honor this structure daily: 

Body Anchor (East – Earth): Grounding movement (simple stretch, barefoot walking, hand on heart/belly)

Daily Belly Breathwork (South – Fire): 2–5 minutes coherent breath, generating inner fire through breath

We all get mental rainy days.

And when these mental gray days pop up for me, there are a series of things that I try to do to allow myself space to feel like shit and also space to offer myself love, compassion, and healing.

Gray day protocol:

• don’t run. I think the most important thing when you’re not feeling mentally great is to not use a form of escapism. Don’t reach for alcohol, don’t grab the video game controller, don’t text your ex, don’t do drugs. Running away from ourselves only further that feeling of disconnection and loneliness. 

• Be sad/mad/hurt. Validate your feelings and experience. Write it down or talk about it out loud to yourself and simply bring validation to your own personal perspective and experience. Don’t try to talk yourself out of how you feel, allow yourself to feel that feeling in its entirety. this is where…

I have a mindfulness practice for you today called beginners mind.

In this practice you are encouraged to stop and think about a task as if it’s your first time doing it. Like the dishes. Imagine for a moment this is the first time you’ve ever washed a dish. Focus on the warm water, how wonderful to have it to wash these dishes with. Focus in on the suds and how your effort and energy with the soap is what is cleaning the meals you’ve worked hard to prepare.

This practice is about coming into the freshest viewpoint of the moment. The beginning. And children are exceptional at this practice since most things ARE so new to them. The excitement and adventure of life is so infectious and beautiful.

tap into your inner being and practice beginners mind in one of your tasks today.

Don Miguel Ruiz has such an amazing book called the four agreements, and I highly recommend everybody reads it. One of the agreements that he talks about is not taking anything personally.

Taking this to Hart, I have been trying to embody the lessons of nothing being personal by working to let things go. Reminding myself that it is never about me. People are consumed with themselves and their own thoughts, and they operate as such.

It’s not personal.

Even when it feels deeply personal. It never is.

This has been one of the hardest things on my healing journey to accept and embrace. Today I’m feeling it!!!

Something that was very vital on my meditation journey, was when a teacher told me that the process/practice of meditation is about learning to be OK with beginning again.

In meditation, again and again and again and again and again we have to come back to our breath. That’s the whole practice is learning how to gently redirect your mind back into your body using your breath. Sometimes we use visualizations for this other times it’s simply just focused breath meditation.

This principle can be applied to so many different aspects of life. When we stumble a little bit, because it will happen, we have to pick ourselves up again. When we make a mistake, because it will happen, we try again. We meet ourselves where we are at again and again through our self work and through our practice of sitting still. Again and again.

Our practice trains us…

We have a women’s circle on the topic of boundaries tonight, so this topic is the only thing on my mind.

I’ve been deep diving into what it is to have and maintain strong boundaries and something that is a central component of healthy relationships with boundaries is self respect and esteem. We have to feel worthy of the boundaries we are setting. We have to feel like we are worth protecting and advocating for. The other key element for boundaries is not being so fearful of confrontation and conflicts.

Our relationship with conflict is usually with a negative lens. However, conflict is how we come to resolve. Conflict is how we bring everything to the table and say “okay now what?” Conflict, when addressed in a mindful way, can be the stepping stones to peaceful and productive communication and change. When both parties feel heard and seen, meaningful resolve…

One of my favorite aspects of shadow Work is being able to transform my perspective on those parts about myself that I’ve always seen as “ bad”. Because in reality I am just human. And all humans have feelings of jealousy of fear, of an adequacy of resentment. This is just a part of our human experience.

I want to share with you a quote out of a book called when things fall apart by Pema Chödrön.

“ we are trying to learn not to split ourselves between our “good side” and our “ bad side”, between our “ pure side” and our “ impure side”. The elemental struggle is with our feelings of being wrong, with our guilt and shame at what we are. That’s what we have to be friend. The point is that we can dissolve the sense of dualism between us and them, between this, and…

This is going to be a long post.

These are the 5 mindfulness trainings from Thich Nhat Hanh. These are things i study and live by, to help keep me on the path when i begin to veer off.

Reverence For Life

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of

interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and

minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in