#1 - be kind to yourself

This blog begins with a departure of sorts, on June 29th this year I kiss my 20's goodbye and enter into a new chapter of life that in some ways feels like a settling and in other ways brings up a myriad of feelings around age, agelessness and what it means to complete a decade of personal growth, memories, struggle, resistance, expansion, acceptance and self-love.

For the next 29 days I will share reflections on what the last 10 years has meant to me, in a profoundly personal yet global way.  The more days I spend on this earth the more I realize how intricately connected we are, even if our inner selves would like to believe differently.  I've witnessed the pulling of the threads that bind us to each other, some drastic pulling of threads that have stripped people away from me with my bare hands left clinging on to any last remnants I could salvage, asking the powers that be why this had come to pass?  And yet with my maturing over the last 10 years, I began to see that I may not get it now, but someday the whole picture will become clear and I will nod in agreeance that yes that was the way it was meant to happen.

In beginning this ending on June 2nd 2014, I will leave you with this: be kind to yourself.  

If there is one thing this last year on earth has taught me above all, its that if I don't think that I am worthy of love, abundance, dreams coming true, the relationship of my dreams, expansion and good things coming my way, then there is no way that good things are going to be able to show up in my life (without a whole lot of struggle). And let me tell you, the struggling way, ain't worth it!  Say GOODBYE to the "its only worth it if you worked for it", "I should only get something good because I deserve it or earned it" or "one should only get a raise/job/increase if someone else notices, never ask for it yourself" crud.  

Since when is our worthiness dictated by how hard we worked for something?  Isn't just showing up fully as your bright, brilliant, magnetic, expressed and alive self the whole point - not how good you were at showing up today!  Love the you that is there right now.  Love all of it, not just the shiny parts we call our "strengths" that we've been honing ever since we knew what it meant to excel at something.  

Instead of shoving down, disengaging, hiding, pretending, defending and avoiding the parts that we're not so sure about, let them out into the light and I promise you they won't be so scary after all. You may even begin to laugh along with them and say, "hey you know what, you're pretty interesting when you get scared, and wow that fear really takes ahold of me and lets you win. But I see you now and I understand that all you really ever needed was to be acknowledged.  You wanted me to know that you were there in the first place, and you wanted to be seen and heard and loved."  All we ever have to do in this lifetime is embrace all of the parts of ourselves, instead of hand picking the ones that we'd really rather only have. Because let me tell you, the hand picking leads to a world of self-deprecation where there are no survivors.