Category: Self-Love Page 3 of 11

I launched the 30-day Self-Love challenge on November 5^th 2013, and over a hundred people joined me on this journey of focusing on self-love at least once daily.

My personal self-love practice did not end after the 30 or 45 days the challenge lasted last year – and I’m still committed to self-love, although sometimes I need a little reminders. I created a reminder on my cell phone, and I also got a little white board magnet (seen on this post’s image) for my fridge, and wrote to myself: “I love you”.

It made sense to have a daily reminder that I’m loved, especially by me. Pretty soon, as in many things in life, I stopped reading it or paying attention to it. Until one of my sisters visited this summer, and she wrote “I love you too”.  A few weeks ago, a friend spent the weekend at my house, and although she didn’t know the board's story, she also wrote “I love you too”. When I saw it I smiled, and told her who had written the previous messages. Now, my little reminder got even more special.

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When I had a full time job, my personal life rhythm was established by my schedule. I had a long commute to work, and had to leave home early to make it there by 9am. My bed time was at 11pm, mostly non-negotiable, as I was used to getting up really early, writing, having breakfast and going to work. Even on weekends, I rarely could sleep late, as my rhythm was set up.

Since I’ve been self-employed for a while, I’m able to make my own hours, and at first, I was able to keep up with the same rhythm. But during the spring, things started to change. I was teaching late evenings, and was getting home too late to make it to my 11pm bed time. That led me to not be able to wake up as early as I’d have liked either.

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For over two years I’ve been participating on a chat on Twitter called #SpiritChat. The host Kumud Ajmani has gathered a group of people from all over the world, and it continues to grow. In addition to being a great and inspiring way to start our Sundays, I also met one of the participants in person and we became great friends. I highly recommend, if you are up on Sundays by 9AM EST, that you join the chat.

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to co-host the chat. I wrote the introduction to the topic The Spirit of Authenticity, based on my own experiences with being authentic, or not. One thing that I didn’t include in that article is how the topic came to me. I was on my way home after teaching an all-day course, followed by teaching another 2-hour course, and I was a bit out of it. I started to cross the street when the light turned white for pedestrians to cross. But before I took the next step, I heard “stop and look”, so I turned, and there it was – a car was speeding my way, the driver ran the red light, and if I hadn’t stopped, it would have run over me.

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I moved from Belo Horizonte, Brazil to New York, USA 15 years ago today. I had no idea what to expect, or what was ahead. I knew I was in a relationship, and that I was going to study the MBA. That was all. I also had a few aspirations in mind, to change careers and become a consultant (the term coaching wasn’t around back then), and possibly a writer. I was writing a fiction story in Portuguese at the time, it took me a couple of years to finish it, if I’m not mistaken, but the file was deleted accidently, and the story was never published, and never read from start to finish by someone other than me.

When the file was deleted, I decided not to write for a while, as I had put a lot of effort into it, and it was disappointing. A year after I graduated from the MBA, the idea came up to start WomenandBiz.com. That’s how I sort of launched my own writing career. The term blogging didn’t exist back then either.

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For the past few years, as long as I have time available, I have created gifts for friends and family, instead of buying them something. I started a little over two years ago, by drawing the flower that is shown at the top right of this post’s image. At the time, I was taking photos of flowers and trying to draw them. This was the first time I actually created a gift - I printed the photo, and drew the flower, put them both in a picture frame, and gave it to Robert Baker, a friend/spiritual teacher/mentor, who sadly passed away a year ago this Sunday. It meant a lot to me that he received it graciously, and displayed it right away. In most situations, I don’t receive the same response though.  Out of all the picture frame gifts I created for friends, I’ve only seen one displayed at another friend’s house, and it warmed my heart when I saw it. The others may have kept it somewhere hidden, or they may have thrown it away for all I know.

One of Robert’s lessons helps me to let go of any attachment to the response I may receive regarding the gifts I create:

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I’ve been reflecting on this quote by Maya Angelou: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will not forget how you made them feel." for the last several weeks, after two dearest people in my life passed away unexpectedly within 30 days from each other. All I keep thinking about is what they meant to me, even if for only the four years we knew each other in one case, and twelve years in another.

Both of them in their own unique way made a big difference in my life. In addition to the tangible help I received from one of them, which inspired me to pursue my entrepreneurial and writer’s endeavors over the years, the most important impact they had was how they made me feel. They made me feel that my life mattered, that I could achieve anything, that I was loved, and that my presence in their lives served a purpose and that it brought joy to them.

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I keep getting this image of taking the first step to achieving something, and then taking the next one, and the next, and the next. The first step simply isn’t enough anymore.

A few years ago I decided it was time to get in shape. One of the things I did was to go for walks and runs on weekends. I started really slow, walking for 5 minutes, running for 30 seconds, and the running time increased after a while. It didn’t get great since I was only practicing on weekends, and my best run was 12 minutes non-stop at my pick. Life got side tracked by a relationship, and I stopped my weekend routine. After it ended, I didn’t feel like doing it again, and several months later, I slowly started walking as a means of commuting, and that made a huge difference. I lost so much weight (can’t pinpoint the exact reason, but walking, releasing old emotional wounds through meditation and energy work, and making better food choices helped), that people were asking me if I was sick. I wasn’t, but part of me felt worried, and I stopped exercising/walking/eating carefully. Needless to say, with time, I stopped fitting in some of my clothes again.

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The other day I had dinner at an Indian restaurant with a client, and on our way out, we each picked a saying from a bowl. The one I picked said “The main block to transformation is the thought that we shouldn’t be where we are, that we should already be further along in our growth than we perceive ourselves to be.” Does it resonate for you? It did for me. I also realized that it is one of the blockages I address with clients.

The interesting thing is that once I read it out loud and I acknowledged it, the energy shifted. It felt as if a dark cloud was moving away, and there was space for new things to happen, and to be created. I also got inspired to remind myself of what one of my teachers used to say: you are where you are supposed to be.

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A few weeks ago I wrote an article inspired in part by a Creative Writing course I was taking, and the not so positive feedback I received on my first homework. Each week we got different assignments on non-fiction and fiction, and we were required to focus on the many aspects of creative writing. I could easily have decided not to come back, but I really wanted to go through it, especially since some of the writing exercises were outside my comfort zone.

The course gave me the opportunity to learn from a great and experienced writer, and she shared different processes, methods, writing styles, and techniques. My teacher and I had some things in common, and I enjoyed her energy, which made it easier to decide to continue taking the course. It did help that I dedicated the time necessary to attend the course and do the homework, and the feedback I was receiving improved each week.

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All we do in life takes practice. You may have heard that Malcolm Gladwell explored the fact that it takes at least 10,000 hours practicing a craft; and he gave examples of famous musicians, professionals in IT, sports and others; for someone to really become a master of it. It makes sense, and he presents the research and examples in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. He also talked about it in this video.

I wanted to take it a step further, and share with you two quick examples that came up for me, and got me thinking about how it takes constant and daily practice, and commitment to shift old habits and master new behaviors as well. The two examples are about how I became a person with patience, and how I learned to remember people’s names.

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