Home » Encouragement (Page 20)

Category Archives: Encouragement

Healing negative self-talk.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I have come to see a connection between self-hate and addiction. I have come to understand that negative self-talk is the same as eating junk food.

People know it is bad for them, but they keep doing it. Why? There has to be a payoff for any behavior we do, otherwise we wouldn’t keep doing it.

Children who misbehave do so because it gets them attention. Any attention is better than no attention. If the parents don’t make a fuss over them when they do something right, but yell when they do something wrong, the child will persist in the misbehavior. This seems paradoxical. You’d think the child would want to not get yelled at, but really the goal is attention. Getting negative attention is still getting attention.

There are plenty of people whose parents yelled at them all the time when they were growing up. They were constantly taught that they was bad, wrong, stupid. Their parents drilled into them how imperfect they were.

The bad part is that they often learn this lesson well. Even with their parents not around, they will often tell themselves the same things. They may hit themselves or curse at themselves the same way their parents did when they made a mistake.

Sometimes they will seems to set themselves up for failure. They will not plan enough time to do a project. They will leave things for the last minute. They are then constantly late and overwhelmed and making mistakes. It is a self perpetuating cycle.

The scary part – they are living up to their parent’s image of them. There is some odd negative validation going on. There is a strange payoff.

This self-abuse is the same as a person who constantly binges on junk food. Our bodies crave fats and salt and sugar, even though it is bad for us. We will overeat at a buffet and feel miserable, yet we will do it again and again. Why? We know we should eat less and eat better food, but we don’t? Why?

It is the same thing. We get a payoff. We like the feeling we get from overeating and from eating unhealthy food. We like feeling like we are bad, like we are rebels. We are rebelling against good by being bad. The “bad boy” is a hero.

We have to retrain ourselves to get pleasure from good things. Nobody gets excited about broccoli and lima beans. Nobody gets excited about going to the gym. The payoff is quieter. The payoff is slower. It is harder to notice.

Your brain works better. Your clothes fit better. Your knees don’t hurt. Your heart works better. Your health improves. These are pretty good payoffs, but you don’t see them right away.

The same is true with negative thinking.

Negative self talk is an addiction the same way that overeating and drugs are. And it is healed the same way.

We humans need habits. Instead of going on autopilot and living with bad habits running your life, fill up your time with good habits. Seek positive choices and do them. Leave yourself reminders. You’ll forget. That is a normal trick of the bad-habit brain. That isn’t you.

Sometimes our minds are like small children that just want attention. Just like with children, ignore the bad and praise the good.

Make an intentional choice to say good things to yourself. Know that it takes a long time to retrain your mind. Nothing is automatic or easy. It takes a long time to get well. Have patience with the process. Understand that you won’t have patience at the beginning. That too is part of the process.

When you do something good, notice it. Don’t dismiss it. Write up a certificate. Draw up an award. Write down a list of all the good things you did that day.

Don’t make a negative list (“didn’t wreck the car”, “didn’t get into a fight”). While those are good things, work on noticing the little things that you did right. They have a way of hiding at first. It will get easier the more you do this. Make it a daily practice to write down at least three good things that happened that day. When that gets easy, increase the number.

Give yourself easy goals to start with. You are taking baby steps, not running a marathon.

You have to choose to love yourself in a way you were not shown how to by your parents or the people who you were raised with.

Sometimes we have to re-parent ourselves.

Sometimes they broke us, because they themselves were broken. They didn’t know any better. That doesn’t excuse the damage they did. But it does explain it, a little. People tend to repeat bad habits. People who were hurt tend to become people who hurt other people.

You don’t have to repeat the same bad habits. You can heal that wound.

I’m not going to lie here – it hurts to heal that wound. Just like with a broken leg, sometimes it has to be broken to finally heal right. It is painful whether the wound is physical or emotional or mental. It takes a long time to heal.

But it is so worth it. Who wants to walk with an emotional limp all the time? Sometimes it is “the devil you know” so you stick with it, because change is scary. But trust me, press on.

That pain you feel from trying to make a good change is a sign of healing. Don’t run from it. Lean into it, breathe, and walk forward. It will get easier.

And know that you aren’t alone on this journey.

A lot of us hide our brokenness, because we were taught that our brokenness is shameful. It isn’t. It is part of being human, and being human is a messy thing.

pain-notes-poem

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Too much acid (stress) not enough sweet (soothing)

Pain is a symptom that the unconscious problems are about to rise to the surface. You are about to have a breakthrough. You are about to be born.

Take away the pain through counseling; the pain may come back in another way. The basic coping methods have not been changed. It is the same as a person who is an alcoholic who is suddenly deprived of alcohol. He may start smoking or over eating.

We have to have a way to fill those holes.

Quit digging them.

Learn to accept them and realize they will never be filled. You are human and holes are normal.

See the desire to turn away from getting better, from whatever positive change you are doing- is your unconscious mind trying to protect itself.

It doesn’t want these hard emotions to come out. It is afraid of being embarrassed. It is not wise enough to know that if they are cleaned out, the job is done. You aren’t embarrassed. It is over.

Or perhaps it is afraid – it thinks it won’t have a job anymore.

Our body craves sweets and fats when we are depressed, which only make us more depressed. If we stand up to it and impose our conscious will, we will choose good things and break the cycle.

The same is true of thoughts and actions.

Look for unconscious habits.

Add intentional good habits to counter them.

One size

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I think we have lost something with not making our own clothes. We have tried to fit ourselves into a certain mold that isn’t us.

There is no such thing as one size fits all. Sure, one thing covers all, but it sure doesn’t fit.

Premade clothes don’t fit our style in any meaningful way. We are all different and special. We are all one of a kind. Our clothes are extensions of our personalities and show the world something of who we are. How can we possibly express our uniqueness by picking something off the rack at Walmart? Why does Target get to tell me what I want to wear?

Then there is the idea of actual fit. We all have different shapes. Some are taller, some are rounder, some have bumps in different places. It isn’t wrong, just different. When we try to put our unique shape into something off the rack, we are guaranteed to feel that we don’t measure up.

This is a lie. We don’t need to measure up to a generic standard. We aren’t generic. We are each different and that is perfect.

So realize that if the clothes don’t fit, it isn’t your fault.

Recovery – you have to want to get well.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I know a lady who spent $8,000 to learn how to eat.

She went to a group of chiropractors who have cross trained in nutrition. I’m not sure why this particular paring is becoming common these days, but it is. It seems odd that regular doctors don’t seem to care about nutrition, but chiropractors do. Mine does. I’ve heard of others who do. This seems odd because chiropractors aren’t seen as “regular doctors” in many people’s eyes, so even going to them for what they normally provide is seen as suspect.

Sadly, the nutrition part isn’t covered by insurance, so it was all out of pocket. This too seems odd – it is far cheaper to teach someone how to prevent disease rather than “cure” it after it has set in. But this is a foreign concept to insurance companies. They would rather pay to get you well than to keep you well.

She didn’t have to spend any of that money. She could have done what they did for free. They put her on an elimination diet. Strip away all the stuff that usually causes problems, and stick with that for a few weeks to get all the junk out of the system. Then start adding back suspicious things and see if there is a problem. The usual stuff is all processed food and anything with gluten.

We have a winner. She was gluten intolerant. The funny/sad part is that she had figured that out on her own years back. She had gone gluten-free and done much better. Her weight had gone down and her joints didn’t hurt. But she had dropped it. She thought it was too hard.

She did the same thing this time. She said that it was too hard to go gluten free on a fast-food diet. She drives a lot and works a lot. She is too tired to cook when she gets home so she gets food on the way. But this makes no sense. There are plenty of gluten-free options these days. Everything is marked whether it is gluten free or not. It isn’t a special diet – it is pretty mainstream.

The point is that she wanted a magic pill. She wanted something simple and fast and easy. It requires work and sacrifice to make any important change, and that was the part that she found too hard.

It reminds me of when people started to notice that I’d lost weight. They (always large themselves) asked me what was my “secret”. I told them – eat better and exercise more. Their faces always sunk. They wanted it to be something simple like “eat two grapefruit a day and keep on doing the same old things you were always doing”. It doesn’t work like that.

Anything worth having requires work. The easy way is rarely the healthy way.

The point is that if she wants to get well, she has to choose. Her health has to be the winner. If she cannot eat healthy and work the way she is working, then she has to find another job. Or she has to figure out that she can cook up a large pot of food that is healthy on her days off and freeze it and reheat it at work.

The point is that she doesn’t want to take care of herself. She is a miserable person. She sleeps all the time on her time off. She has admitted that she hates everybody and has no friends.

I cannot imagine living this kind of life. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to be in this life, just going through the motions. She goes to work and hates it. She goes home and sleeps. She is escaping everything. She is trapped in her body and in her life. I can’t comprehend why anybody would want to stay in this situation. By her choice she has said that miserable is better.

She was hoping to be able to retire when she gets to be 50. She didn’t check the retirement rules correctly. Sure, she can retire, but she won’t collect her pension until she is 65, and then it willl be greatly reduced because she didn’t work long enough.

She wants to retire early because her husband is significantly older than her. She is concerned that by the time she is able to retire, he will be dead. She would like to spend time with him now. The problem is, the way her health is going, it is highly likely she will die before him. The sad part is, she already has, she just doesn’t know it. By refusing to take care of herself and sleeping all the time when she is home – she has already decided to not participate in life. She is already not alive.

I hate this. I hate all of it. There is no reason for any of this. There is no reason for her to be miserable.

Sure, it is hard to swim upstream and take care of yourself. Sure, it would be great to have everything done for you, and done well. It just doesn’t happen. Nobody is going to exercise for you. Nobody is going to turn off the TV for you. Nobody is going to make you take care of yourself.

She reads a lot of books about health and talks like an expert on it, but still won’t do it. I feel like I’m just standing by, watching her drown. I can’t save her. I want her to choose to live, and live well. Right now she is just mimicking life, just going through the motions. She has to want to live. I can’t instill that in her.

I’ve realized that this situation is just like any other addiction or mental illness. If you don’t want to get better, no amount of outside intervention will help. You can only be committed to the mental hospital if you are a danger to yourself or others. Nobody can put you on the path to recovery – you have to do it yourself. This applies to regular life as well. She has to want to get better. I’d hoped that spending all that money would be the incentive to start taking her health seriously, but it hasn’t worked.

So I wait, and pray.

Life wasn’t made to be endured.

Glasses for mental health

Posted on by | Leave a comment

What if anxious and nervous is your normal? What if it isn’t something wrong at all, but just your way of being?

Think of it as the same as needing glasses, or a hearing aid, or an orthotic shoe. There is nothing “shameful” or “wrong” about these conditions. We can’t control the fact that we are different from “normal”. We can’t control the fact that we need a little bit of help to fit in with everybody else.

Why do we think we have any real control over our emotions?

Some of our emotions are trained into us. We are taught to behave and react in certain ways, some of which aren’t that useful. We get that from our parents. What if some of our neural pathways are different genetically as well? Forget nature versus nurture. They both have an effect.

What if we aren’t to blame for feeling afraid or angry or hesitant? What if that is just the way we are? What if we stop trying to define these feelings as “bad” and we just accept them for what they are?

There is a big push in society for everybody to be the same – but we aren’t. We all look different – but we can have surgery to all look the same. We can wear clothes to make ourselves look smaller or taller or skinner or have curves in different places. There are girdles and pads aplenty to make you fit in and make you look more like everyone else.

There are things to make you fit in mentally as well. There are pills if you are depressed or manic, or eat too much, or don’t eat enough, or have anxiety, or ADD. There are pills to counter every state of humanity.

But why fit in? Because it makes them feel better, or you? Wouldn’t it be healthier for them to see you being you? When you are honest about who you really are, then you are giving everyone else permission to be themselves.

I say we all just take off our masks and say that we are the way we are, and that is OK.

On self-sufficiency and faith.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

When I was young my Mom taught me how to sew using the sewing machine. It was a finicky one and the bobbin kept messing up, or the feed dog would get jammed, or the thread would break. I would ask for help and my Mom would fix the problem. The bad part however is that she didn’t show me how to fix the problem myself.

Years later, after she had died, I wanted to sew something and I still didn’t know how to fix it when something didn’t work right. I fooled around with the machine but it wasn’t budging. I decided to buy a used machine that was simple to operate and had an instruction manual with pictures. I learned how to use it and wondered why my Mom never thought to teach me how to do this myself. It was really easy to do. By hiding it from me, she made it seem like it was something special that only she could do.

It seems to me that part of the job of being a parent is to teach their children to be self sufficient. If they still needing your help to fix things when they are adults then that is a bad reflection on the parent.

I’ve encountered the same attitude from church. I’m hopeful that all churches aren’t like this, in the same way that all parents aren’t like mine. But my experience over all of my life has been that in every church I’ve gone to, the minister has treated me as a passive observer in my faith life. They have acted as if the life of faith is something that happens to you, rather than something you do.

Then I started going to a spiritual director. She has been to seminary, but she isn’t ordained. She is like a personal trainer for the soul. If the journey of faith uses a car, not only is she teaching me to drive, she is teaching me how to find the tools and repair it myself. Meanwhile, all the ministers I’ve ever been lead by have treated me like I was a passenger. They didn’t teach me how to drive. They didn’t even let me know I could.

It is a little overwhelming. I feel like I’m late to the party. I feel like I should have known this all along. This is part of the purpose of my blog – to let you know that you too have the right to drive this car of faith. I describe tools to you as I come across them.

Imagine how powerful the body of Christ will be when we all wake up to our true potential and realize we aren’t passive observers.

Occupy your health

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Perhaps the Occupy movement needs to teach us something else – don’t wait on the government to take care of us. We need to do it ourselves. While we are all holding our breath about the Affordable Care Act and whether Congress will get over its collective snit fit and start working again, we can do something ourselves.

Let’s not wait for tragedy to strike before we take care of ourselves. We’ve already seen that the government doesn’t really care about taking care of us. Instead of getting upset about it, use it as an impetus to not need to be taken care of. Remember, prevention is cheaper than cure.

The insurance companies, sadly, don’t think like this. Yet.

I remember one time when I lived in Chattanooga. There was a tree that was leaning too close to my house. I could see that any time now the thing would topple over and destroy my roof and everything under it. I called the insurance company and asked if they would pay to have the tree cut down. Nope. They would pay to repair the house and for a hotel room for me to stay in while the repairs were going on. But prevention? No. Prevention was a lot cheaper and faster. They would rather wait for the inevitable to happen and clean up the mess.

Insurance companies are doing the same with our health. Let’s spend a lot of money on a cure for cancer. Let’s spend a lot of money on diabetes supplies. They don’t think to encourage exercise and eating well.

If the government really wants to regulate health, it needs to ban cigarettes and vending machines. Ideally, we’d have enough self-control to know that we need to not smoke and not eat processed “food.” Obviously we don’t. So we have way too many people dying of entirely preventable diseases.

Sometimes the government does us a favor. Remember when you would go into a restaurant and they would say “smoking or non-smoking”? It really didn’t matter what section you went to – if there was smoking in that place, it travelled all over the whole restaurant. You were in the not-as-much-smoke section, but not the smoke-free section.

Sure, people have the right to smoke. They have the right to kill themselves that way. But they don’t have the right to take other people out with them when they do it. That is where the government stepped in and made it illegal to smoke in public buildings, and for that I’m very grateful.

I remember a lady who got really upset when she heard that she was no longer going to be able to smoke in restaurants. She got mad at the government telling her what to do. I was glad that finally they did something to protect me. But we can’t expect the government to take care of us all the time. We have to step up.

This should be an idea that will appeal to all the people who think government needs to get out of our lives and let us live the way we want to. This should be an idea that will appeal to all the do-it-yourselfers.

Let’s not sit around and wait for the government to do anything for us in regards to our health. We see what they have done with education. Why let them dumb down something else? We don’t need our health reduced to the lowest common denominator.

If health insurance is going to live up to its name, it needs to insure health. Paying money to restore what has been lost is backwards. Health insurance should pay us to go to the gym and eat well. We should go to nutritionists and personal trainers more than we go to doctors. We should all get stress-reduction training before we even are stressed.

We go to the dentist every six months to get our teeth checked. This prevents bigger problems. We brush our teeth three times a day to prevent problems too. Why are we so reluctant to take care of our bones, our muscles, and our hearts? We can get replacement teeth. Replacement bones, muscles, and hearts are another matter entirely.

People say they don’t have the time to exercise. That is all in your head. You have the time. You don’t want to do it – just be honest. You’d rather spend the time playing videogames or drinking beer or watching “reality TV”. I do all of these things to – well, except for the TV part, but I do them in moderation. And I exercise. I realized that my health was more important than my leisure time. If I didn’t take care of my health, I wouldn’t have any leisure time in a few years.

We have to change the way we think.

People say they don’t need health insurance and they shouldn’t be forced to buy it. OK, so do they have a card on them so that when they are in a car crash that they don’t get rescued? They don’t get their bones set? They don’t get a blood transfusion? If we all don’t pay into it, then we all don’t get to benefit from it. That only seems fair. But it isn’t the way we do things.

We have a way of thinking in America that if someone is hurt, they will be taken care of and that we’ll just sort it out later. So do you need health insurance? Yes, but not the kind that we currently have. Take matters into your own hands. We need insurance for accidents, but not for the things we can do for ourselves.

We are looking at the problem backwards.

Sometimes, just being able to do forward fold is a big thing.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

This last Friday was the first time in three weeks I could do a full forward fold. For three weeks I could barely bend forward at all, much less put my hands flat on the ground. I could touch with my fingertips, and then with my knuckles. But the full expression of this pose eluded me.

After I slipped a disc in my back things got a lot harder, and a lot more frustrating. I’d been making really good progress for a while. I had gotten to the point where I could do full wheel. And mermaid. And side plank. And full cobra. And bound side angle.

These are all pretty cool moves. Not near as cool as scorpion or firefly, sure, but still pretty advanced for me. Then I couldn’t do anything. I was stuck. Just sitting was hard. Bending my neck forward was hard. I could stand or lie flat. Transitioning in between wasn’t easy.

But Friday was the first time I could even do something as simple as a full forward fold. It wasn’t just that it hurt before. It was that my back was too tight and I couldn’t reach that far.

I was dismayed. I felt that I’d gone twenty steps backwards. I felt a little betrayed too. Surely all those exercises that I’d done for all these years would mean that I’d insured myself against such indignities like a slipped disc. My self-righteousness got a good hard kick in the butt.

But this too is yoga. It is showing up, and giving it your best, and not judging. It is not judging others or yourself. It is doing your best, and forgiving yourself if doing your best means just wanting to go to yoga class but you just can’t make it this week. Or this month. It means being OK with the practice, wherever you are in it.

Just wanting to is part of the practice. Falling is part of the practice. Getting back up, body and ego bruised, is part of the practice.

I remember how I felt when I did headstand and handstand a few months back. I felt like a rock star. Those are pretty amazing moves. Sure, I was braced up against a wall so I wouldn’t fall over, but I stayed up. The strength in my neck and in my arms held my entire body up. I never would have imagined I could do it. I’m glad I tried. I felt invincible.

Funny thing, this Friday, when I did forward fold for the first time since I hurt my back, I felt the same way.

Maybe that is the secret. Be content with what you can do, right now. Don’t judge it, and don’t expect it to stay that way. It is what it is. Take your successes but don’t gloat about them.

“Be anxious for nothing.”

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Be anxious for nothing. Fear not.

Jesus tells us to not worry, not be anxious. So what does it mean to not be anxious? Be perfect? We can’t be perfect. That isn’t possible for humans. And trying to not be anxious makes me anxious. I get all wound up about how wound up I feel, and then I wind myself up even more.

There has to be another way through this or into this.

Both my parents were anxious. My Mom lit up a new cigarette every twenty minutes. When she had to quit because she got lung cancer the anxiety was still there. In fact it was worse.

Her coping method had caused her problem. When we took it away she was of course worried and anxious about her cancer, but she didn’t know what to do. She’d reached for a cigarette every time she felt the least twinge of a bad feeling. She still had all the anxiety that she had before she had cancer, with the added anxiety of cancer on top of that. It overwhelmed her.

I stepped in. I gave her massages every time she wanted to smoke. I gave her some creative visualization techniques to try. We worked on breathing. In the end she still felt that she needed some outside means to calm down, so she got put on Valium. It wasn’t called Valium – it was Elavil. Same thing, new name. It was a benzodiazepine. I find it interesting that she didn’t want to take her pain pills because she was afraid she would become dependent on them, but she happily took those mood drugs.

My Dad was the same way. He smoked himself to death too. He was on various drugs from his shrink as well. He was constantly nervous. He too didn’t know how to deal with his feelings.

Perhaps anxiety is “normal” for my family. Perhaps it is the same as needing glasses. Perhaps it is hereditary in the same way that being short is.

I am anxious. I have been for years. I used to smoke pot and clove cigarettes to calm down. I finally decided I needed to grow up and quit doing these dangerous and expensive things, so now I drink a glass of wine with supper instead.

I have other stress-busting techniques. I walk. I work out. I do yoga and write and walk and draw. I used to do most of those every morning before work. Then I’d not do all of them because I was running short on time and I’d freak out and think I was slacking. Somehow I got to the point where I’d realize that just trying to cram all those activities in every morning was causing more problems and more anxiety.

Funny how the things we do to relax can end up causing us more problems.

So I prayed.

And I got back that perhaps my anxiety isn’t something to be anxious about. Perhaps it is who I am. Perhaps I need to face it and embrace it. See it as a gift and not a problem. Perhaps God needs me to feel this way, and is using this feeling as a pathway, an opening.

Perhaps I need to see my “anxiety” as not a problem, but just a feeling. Or perhaps see it as the same as my need to wear glasses, or that I’m shorter than the average person. It isn’t a defect. It is my normal.

God doesn’t want us to compare ourselves to anybody else, either good or bad. God loves us exactly the way we are. God made us this way.

Be anxious for nothing. Fear not.

“I’ve commanded you to be strong and brave. Don’t ever be afraid or discouraged. I am the LORD your God, and I will be there to help you wherever you go.” – Joshua 1:9

The cyclical effect of pain – stress/pain/tension/pain

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Our bodies feel pain in ways other than pain. Pain is the last part. Pain means that the problem has popped the fuse and we are now desperate.

When a baby is hungry he will make signs. He’ll smack his lips or suck his fist. Crying is the last thing he’ll do. If his mother doesn’t notice the signs in time he will get frustrated. His needs aren’t being met.

Pain is the same way. It has subtle signs at first. Our body wants to protect us from pain. Our adrenal system races to the rescue when we hurt so that we don’t feel it. This is backwards, because then we don’t know that there is a problem. We find out later when the adrenal system gives up and we are just like that baby, crying and miserable.

Pain has a cascade effect. It affects everything. It is kind of like dominoes. One thing leads to another. If we are in pain, our stomach will get in knots, our teeth will clench, and then we will get headaches. Our breathing will get shallow. We will become irritable. Then the tension from all of that will only make things worse.

Tension causes pain, and pain causes tension. Anger can cause tension which causes pain. Pain can cause irritability which leads to anger. It isn’t just a domino effect, it is circular.

You can feel pain in other areas than where the actual pain is. Acupuncture teaches us this. If you’ve ever gotten a tattoo you know this. If you get a tattoo on your ankle it can hurt on your lower back. If you get a tattoo on your upper arm it can hurt on your face. So be mindful that just because you feel pain in one area doesn’t mean that is the source of the pain.

You can head things off at the pass. You can learn to recognize the signs of pain before they are off the charts. You can stop the cycle.

Do a body scan every now and then, several times a day. Just pause for a moment and see how you are feeling. This is useful to do at least once an hour. You won’t remember to do it that often to start with – that is normal. Just do what you can.

How is your breathing? Deep or shallow? Fast or slow? You can change a lot by changing your breathing. Intentionally breathe in slowly through your nose, on a count of ten. Exhale slowly through your mouth on a count of ten. Do this for a minute at least. See how you feel. Do it again if necessary.

How do you feel? Do you have tension in your back or shoulders or face? Are you clenching anywhere? Intentionally release it. We tend to hold tension in our bodies. Tension raises our blood pressure.

Check your tongue. Are you pressing it up against the roof of your mouth? This is a sign to your body that you are under pressure. It will raise your blood pressure the same way that breathing shallowly or clenching your muscles will. Do your best to relax your tongue from the roof of your mouth as often as possible.

Remember that whenever you are checking your breathing or tension, you are making a positive change for yourself. Don’t get mad at yourself for having shallow breathing or clenching your muscles. This is totally normal. To get mad at yourself only causes more tension. Instead, focus on the fact that you are doing something good about it. Every little step towards health is something to celebrate.

Find activities that you enjoy to reduce stress. Do something creative. Draw, paint, bead, write, garden, cook – the list is endless. Pick one, and if it doesn’t work for you, try something else. Get regular exercise, and don’t make it “exercise”. Children don’t “exercise”, they play. They are better off for it. If you find some way to move your body that you enjoy, you are more likely to do it.

Look at the things that cause you stress. What can you do about it? Can you make a change? Can you ask for assistance? Can you tell someone that what they are doing is harmful to you? People can’t read minds – you have to ask for what you need. Sometimes just thinking about this can make you feel more stress! Pick a book in my “survival” books list and read it. They are lifesavers.

I wish you well on your journey. We will never be stress-free. Life is all about challenge and growth, and stress gives us opportunities for that. Stress and pain are just signs that we need to slow down and reassess things. In this way, they are blessings. Otherwise, we’d not grow, we’d not ask for help, and we’d forget to be thankful for all the many gifts that we have.