| With as much grace as possible, you may now lay your body (and your disempowering life stories) in the final resting pose of śavāsana. 🥱💪🏽🎆 Say goooodbye and thank you to 2021! What are you laying to rest from this last year?? Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand… To the best of the rest of your life! Life is good. |
I recently spent a glorious 11 days on my own, in and around the city I live, while one husband and one son traveled overseas on a guys trip.
I loved every SINGLE minute of living the intentional 11 days (both personally & professionally, I only did what was a hell yes and I made time for retreat and spontaneity, my lifeblood).
While they devoured time, I did, too.
To me “higher love” back when I first heard the song with my Mom in the late 80s was about finding a boy and keeping him (boy crazyyyy ;-)…
Though I saw my Mom protect time for herself and I so felt her individuality, I still thought of a boy completing me (hinting at a more “complete” happiness?).
Now, yesterday, today and for some time now, I know that this “higher love” is about something more elusive that society doesn’t teach us ~ it’s about enjoying who we are, with or without company or a wedding ring (a ring I have consciously decided not to wear beginning eight months ago ~ it had felt like a symbol more for society than for myself, plus I belong to me plus plus our relationship needs not a ring to be a healthy or whole one)…
It’s about taking care of ourselves in a new, more honest way, again, even though the thing that society *does* teach us is to forgo that impulse and self-grounding and, instead, feed everyone else’s needs or expectations of us as a woman, partner or mother.
Steve Winwood wrote it & James Mcmorrow sings it (partial lyrics below):
🎶”Think about it, there must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
Look inside your heart, I’ll look inside mine
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love
I will wait for it
I’m not too late for it
I could light the night up with my soul on fire
I could make the sun shine from pure desire
Let me feel the love come over me
Let me feel how strong it can be…”. 🎶
We can not love others without self love.
True love you can keep is you and me, ladies, W I T H ourselves, truly w i t h ourselves ~ when we’re doing this, the diamond 💍 within sparkles most bright.
Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…
To the best of the rest of your life!
Life is good.
I’m thankful Monday through Sunday for this lived truth: grief turns into gratitude (it IS gratitude).
The journey of grief is, in fact, feeling an over abundance, the kind that spills out through your eyes, of gratitude for having had them in the first place.
Thank you Mom and Dino and my new connection to you, for teaching me so much over the last eight years, all of which has brought me even more fulfillment, wild joy, creation, silence, play and connection to what’s most important ~ healing, people and self agency.
Everything the dance…my work, family life, reflection time, adventure and travel time is all about.
Though no one would ever wish for the path of sadness (like Nolan told me at eight or nine years old, “I would rather have many smaller moments of sadness in life than many big ones”), it is a path we all walk at some point, so to all currently setting out or continuing on this path, I say, remember that sadness only exists because of love; of having had or felt great love.
Remember, too, that the sun, whether you see it or not, will be there to greet you each day (get out into it that day more) and the moon will be there to help ease you into the night (close those eyes).
When you feel no one else has got you, nature has got you.
Grief turns into gratitude.
It is gratitude.
Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…
To the best of the rest of your life!
Life is good.
** If you are currently unhappy or unfulfilled, it may not mean that you are not in the right place, right household or right relationship(s) with loved ones, it might simply mean that you are unfulfilled with the time you spend with yourself (quantity or quantity of it). **
I’ve had my “own thing” the last 20 years inside things like my business…my own friends, my own trips with those friends, service trips abroad, business trips, my own chosen challenges or adventures, my own growth moments etc, BUT it happens, equally for men and women, where we can *still* lose part of ourselves in relationship (& not just romantic relationships, but in the relationship we have with our children, too).
Maybe little of how you’re feeling means you need to look for a purpose project [no matter how much I love them & talk about them with clients], it may simply mean you need to create a lane for yourself — or a bridge OVER TO YOURSELF — more often, while living inside the joy of family (The photo at the top is of our last family trip to London four years ago, which is where my boy band of two is for 10 days over the holiday, where they sent me the picture right above)…
A lane that has less to do with what we normally coin “self-care” & more with actually listening (BE-ing), in consistent moments everyday outside that once in a blue moon bath, to the space between the words…the space we normally rarely hear over everyone & everything we DO for those every ones.
Because it’s ultimately when we are quiet with ourselves that we meet a greater level of true HONESTY, outside of plans & busy-ness (modern society is so very good at busy-ness) where creativity is truly unleashed & where all your primo north star ideas for where to go next live.
A kind of fulfillment can come from the external (which is where many look for it), but sticks around with the internal (meaning: the time + times we take to consciously BE with ourselves in our lives & to hear, once again, what we want to do with them).
Though we might think the love we have for another or they have for us is part of the “internal”, it’s not. That is external.
Our honest contentment has nothing to do with how much someone loves us or if we’re in a relationship or not.
Loving ourselves is (the) internal and means being more than ok by ourselves.
As I’ve shared with a couple friends in the last few days, sure, I felt a missing of them as I walked away from them at the airport, but since then, none. No missing and I felt it/said it with a laugh each time.
(Just happy here and happy they are together).
Sooo, as much as I talk about external relationships and the deep love I have for my little family, the through line, everyday, in what I write (or don’t write, but hopefully live), is, just like my brand identity work…richly-based inside self identity and how important it is to maintain this relationship of, hopefully, *your* own deepest love and affection.
Definitely miss that if it goes away (but don’t miss it for long)!!!
Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…
To the best of the rest of your life!
Life is good.