Category: acceptance

Mojo Monday ~ Freeing Your Spirit and Dancing with Life

Michelle Fairchild

A melancholy feeling had overtaken me.  My most recent music mix even took on a slightly gray hue of sadness.  I knew it was bad when spending some time in my artist room playing with paints and glue and glitter could not pull me out of my funk. In fact the funk grew deeper as the art piece I had envisioned and was attempting to create would not come together.  Instead of feeling pleased with the creative process I grew more frustrated because what I was seeing on the canvas was making me feel more mediocre than ever.  My woe-is-me attitude began to spiral into questioning my purpose and bemoaning that I don’t have a local women’s circle.  One way for me to try and short circuit the negative thought patterns is to pick a favorite book to read or take a bath.  Even better yet is to combine the two.  So that is exactly what I did. 

As soon as I was immersed in the hot comforting water I began to read from a well-read copy of Finding Joy: 101 Ways to Free Your Spirit and Dance with Life by Charlotte Davis Kasl, PhD.  My spirit chose well that evening because the short excerpts in this particular book were so perfect for what ailed me. 

There are twelve themes in the book and each one has a multitude of topics within it. The twelve themes are as follows:
  1. Discover the Power of Joy
  2. Loving Yourself, No Matter What
  3. Tapping the Power of Your Mind: A Training Manual for the Brain
  4. Lighten Up: Finding Balance in a Crazy World
  5. Marvel At Your Amazing Body
  6. Reaching Out, Breaking the Rules: Tips for Making Life Easier
  7. When You’re Sinking Grab a Life Line
  8. Loving Your Body In Spite of It All
  9. Loving Children, Discovering Ourselves
  10. More years, More Wisdom
  11. Dancing with Life
  12. Joy to the World
Here are some excerpts for you to explore.

From Discovering the Power of Joy ~ #10 Allow Grief and Other Scary Feelings

One of the barriers to joy is a pent-up grief, sorrow, or anger.  Other barriers are the secrets we keep because we are ashamed.  Burying emotions and keeping secrets is like wrapping a shield around your soul that shuts out the smells of spring, the delicacy of touch, the softness of love.
It’s difficult to feel free and open when we’re congested with buried pain or rage or secrets. Joy flourished when we accept all of who we are.  This includes experiencing our feeling and clearing out guilt and shame by being honest. How can we ever know we are loved if we show only a little part of ourselves to others?…
In my work as a psychologist I frequently see people emotionally constricted by repressed grief and anger.  Over the years they become divided, detached or distant or turn to addictive substances or relationship.  Because the human psyche is a holistic system, to numb one part of our being is to numb the rest and create constant inner struggle.  I have worked with many couples who believe the love between them is gone. Often, after they open up and express their anger, hurt, and frustration, the love starts to return.  It feels like magic, but it’s not magic; it’s the power of our ability to shift to new states of consciousness as we unblock the illusions that come between us and our love…
So when we sob with grief over a loss, cry because we’re hurt, respectfully express our anger and frustrations, or tell our shameful secrets, we are freeing ourselves emotionally and physically, which makes room for joy.  This is a process that takes time.  We need to be gently yet remind ourselves that freedom comes when we stop repressing our feelings and honor the truths of our inner world.

From Tapping the Power of Your Mind ~ #30 Accept Yourself, Remembering and Forgetting.

You get on the path of exercising, saying affirmations, writing regularly, paying the bills on time, not criticizing your partner, and then…yikes!  You revert to old behavior.  You can’t seem to drag yourself out to exercise, you start carping at your partner, you gorge on food, In short, you forget to do all the things that are good for you.
One the path to joy, it is important to accept that we wax and wane like the moon.  We remember, we forget—and it’s all part of the dance.  We push through our fears, get organized, take a risk, then retreat for a while.  After a break, we once again push through inertia, and get going again.
Remember, you never have to do anything perfectly. Four affirmations are better than none.  Walking one a week is better than once a month.  Fresh vegetables three times a week is better than an unmitigated junk food diet…The important thing is to watch yourself play the remembering and forgetting game and be gently at all times.  How you fall of the path is part of the path.  It’s easy to love yourself when you’re winning.  The real test is maintaining that love on the tough days.  So keep remembering (until you forget) that it’s all drama, it’s all a dance, and it’s all okay.
From Reaching Out, Breaking the Rules ~ #48 If It’s Worth Doing , It’s Worth Doing Badly
Many people block themselves from undertaking new endeavors—from learning a language to taking up a sport or music lessons—because they are afraid of being clumsy and mediocre.  I suggest that clumsy and mediocre can be wonderful compared with burying one’s dreams and shrinking one’ life.  It is excellent for the spirit to be a beginner at something.  Being a beginner keeps us humble, helps us understand children, and can bring tremendous pleasure if we stop judging ourselves and just enjoy.  Better to a be a run-of-the-mill piano player than go to the grave regretting you never tried.
From Reaching Out, Breaking the Rules ~ #50 Stay Awake, Stay Aware—Learn from your Struggles
Sometimes we resolve to control a behavior and then find ourselves doing it again.  At 8 am we say we aren’t going to eat sugar and at 10 am we’re munching on a sweet roll.  We tell ourselves we shouldn’t spend more money and three hours later we’re ordering a new dress from a catalogue.  It feels like something driving us that we can’t control, but it’s usually a substitute for a deeper, underlying need. Lonely?  Eat.  Angry?  Seduce someone.  Ashamed of a mistake?  Blame someone.
The stay-awake-stay-aware approach helps you gain insight when you are going against your principles but can’t seem to stop yourself.  The basic principle is that by adding awareness to compulsive or addictive behavior you transform the behavior.

From When You’re Sinking, Grab A Life Line ~  #56. Connect, Connect, Connect

We have talked about feeling overwhelmed or feeling like a child.  Usually when children are upset they need to get rest, be held, be reassured.  There are several types of connections that can help us out of an emotional jam.  We usually need to do one or more of the following:
1)     Connect with feelings.
2)     Connect with another person.
3)     Connect with our spirit.
Connect with feelings.  When you suddenly feel disconnected, scattered, self-abusive, or nasty to others, it can be the result of repressing feelings about an event that recently occurred in your life.  Backtrack to when you first go off course.  Did you not stand up for yourself when you were angry with someone?  Did you feel misunderstood and not tell anyone?  Have you been rationalizing your feelings and need to be honest with yourself?….
Connect with another person.  When we’re in crisis or being hard on ourselves, making a connection with another person can reassure us.  No, we’re not unlovable to the core.  No, we’re no the only one who ever blew it.  Yes, other people care about us even when we get scared or make mistakes.  Talking with another person can bring back perspective on a situation.  The goblins in our mind get bigger in isolation….If you tend to tell yourself you shouldn’t bother people with your troubles or that you should figure it out on your own, you may have to push through shame to call someone.  But on the path toward joy, connecting honestly with another person and sharing your vulnerability is crucial…
Connect with your spirit.  Simply remember, this is drama, it’s not about your worth.  You are sacred, you are life.  You have the capacity for joy no matter how buried it seems at the moment.
When melancholy looms large in your life what do you do?
Did any of the excerpts shared spark something for you? 

Author Charlotte Kasl describer herself this way on her web site: 
“I wear the hat of psychotherapist, author, and teacher, but at my core, I am a peace and social justice activist. I believe the starting place for healing the planet is in our hearts and in the ways we practice respect, empathy, understanding and equality in all human relationships, including our relationship to ourselves.” ~ Charlotte Kasl

Charlotte has written a number of books.  One I have already read is called If the Buddha Married: Creating Enduring Relationships on A Spiritual Path. Her newest book that has yet to be released is called If the Buddha Had Kids: Raising Children to Create a More Peaceful World.  It is one I will read once it is released.

Have you read any of Charlotte‘s books?  If yes, do you recommend any?

Mojo Monday ~ For Keeps

Michelle Fairchild
“With everything the world throws at us, imagine how wonderful it would be if we women could stop struggling with negative feelings about ourselves. This book takes a big step in that direction. Every one of these authors has reminded us that we can be positive, we can face illness, injury, and the sometimes insidious signs of aging, and feel wonderful about ourselves.
And therein lies the heart of this book.”
For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance emerged from editor Victoria Zackheim’s belief that “our bodies and souls are woven into one beautiful and often bewildering pattern, and that life for many women would be less stressful and more fulfilling if we knew how to live in our bodies, accept our bodies, and stop viewing ourselves through an out-of-focus lens.” She writes that “It was my wish to create a book in which women of all ages could write about courage and dignity, about overcoming physical and emotional hardship, including injury and illness, depression and age, and share with you their insights hard-won through that battle we call life.”
She adds in her introduction “Too many of us go through life worrying more about taut stomachs than about healthy aging; we fret more about society’s expectations than our own personal growth. Perhaps this is because, whether we’re young girls or elderly women, we are bombarded by the media’s idea of perfection: lithe young models with perfect skin and smooth bodies too often achieved through eating disorders and fad diets, or older women maintaining that illusion through plastic surgery and Botox treatments. No matter what product a manufacturer is trying to sell, the substance of that message remains the same: Women are imperfect, and, unless we succumb to the hype, that imperfection will thwart our chances for happiness.”
In the book For Keeps you have the opportunity to meet twenty-seven women who share their stories about living through physical, emotional and spiritual challenges. There is great honesty and courage in their tales, which will at times make you laugh and in some instances might make you feel uncomfortable or touch a nerve with you.
One reviewer described the book in this way: “For Keeps is not an easy book to read. It is not about pretty women with perfect bodies who find easy acceptance in a beauty-obsessed culture. It is an impolite, impertinent, irreverent collection of essays written by twenty-seven much-published and gifted writers who are not afraid to tell the truth about the imperfect bodies they have learned to live in–and learned to love.”
Sara Nelson shares her belief in “My Mother’s Body Image, My Self” that our obsessions about the size and shape and appearance of our bodies are often taught to us by our mothers–who may have been obsessed with their own bodies. She writes “I was not angry, at least not then—I loved my mother, I wanted to be close to her, and if that meant worrying, obsessing over how we both looked, how alike we were, well, to my mind that was okay. Our weight and body obsession was what connected us.”
Aimee Liu
“Dead Bone” is written by Aimee Liu who shares how she first became an anorexic, then an “exercise zealot” for whom physical suffering was a path to perfection. She writes “The more my body hurt, the more my willpower gloated. A war was underway, my physical constitution its battleground. Health was no more my real goal than cheap tea was the object of the American Revolution.” A series of disabling injuries at least teaches her a necessary lesson. “My body finally, definitively, forced the message over my perverse will: I could no longer afford the fallacy that pain would make me better.”
Ellen Sussman
 Ellen Sussman shares in her essay entitled “What I Gave Up” how at the excessive encouragement of her father she went from being a “killer tennis player” to being a compulsive competitive runner to the practice of yoga–each transition accompanied by the rupture of a spinal disk. Now facing her third spinal fusion, Sussman can say, “What I hope for is this: that I can live in this body without pain; that I can use it as well as I’m able to; and that my mind can accept these changes with the grace of an athlete.”
“It’s a new experience, living in a body that feels old,” writes Joy Price in “Making Love and Joy in Seasoned Bodies.” “My body surprises me every day: What parts will and won’t work today?” She also shares fun tales about taking on a sixty-three-year-old lover when she is fifty-seven. “How joyful and thrilling it was to cascade into love and exhilarating sex at our age! We were as giddy and frisky as a couple of teenagers but with the added richness of decades of experience and self-knowledge. In fact, it was, and continues to be, the best sex I have ever experienced.”

Do you struggle with self-acceptance?  Acceptance of your body?
Do you think that your views and thoughts about yourself have been affected by your mother or the media?

What is beauty to you?
Who or what has most defined for you how you view beauty? 
Do you still want to embrace this definition?  Or do you want to create your own?

Do you find that your happiness is connected to your appearance?

What do you love about yourself?

What do you love best about your body?
Do you believe that you are beautiful? Why or why not?



The Self-Worth Project

Michelle Fairchild

Photographer Tommy Corey

www.facebook.com/selfworthproject

“The Self-Worth Project is a photo documentation of people expressing their deepest and most vulnerable fears and insecurities.  Through this project and our insecuritites, we hope to bring people together by showing you that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.”

“We are all human, we all have insecurities, and through those we can start to form an understanding of one another, despite our race, gender, orientations, backgrounds and affiliations.”
 
“Specifically, the Self-Worth Project looks to open up conversations with young people about the increasingly hostile environment in schools today. Whether young people have felt bullied, ostracized, or ridiculed, SWP would like to recognize that this kind of derisive—and sometimes violent—behavior amongst youth is a growing problem. And while ending bullying would be ideal, the important message of finding help, feeling supported, and not being alone is imperative.”

A special showing of the Self Worth Project will take place on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 in Redding, California at the Cascade Theater.  Click here for theater information.

More photos from the project: