And now for some serious truth-telling

A lot of people ask how I began my recovery from my eating disorder(s).  What was it that finally broke through the walls I had built up.  What was the thing that finally helped me to WANT to feed myself.  How did I recover?  People want to hear that it was one particular moment, that the light bulb went off, that I finally realized there was more to life than weight and food, blah blah blah…

Here’s the truth, and it may surprise some, anger a few, and make total sense to others.

I didn’t.  There was no light bulb.  There wasn’t a decisive moment when I had had enough.  There were many of those moments, and they would last anywhere from a few days to a couple years.  And then there would be a trigger, an event, a stressful couple months, a major (or minor) shift, and I would be sent spiraling back.  Only each time was a little worse because everyone expected me to be “better”, “recovered”, “over it”.   The shame and guilt over my behaviors, the fact that I was slowly ripping my body apart, was worse than I could bear, and so to alleviate that pain, I’d sink deeper.

I did a pretty okay job of covering up this intense shame and self-loathing by soaking up all the knowledge I could about health, yoga, meditation, spirituality in general, healing work, bodywork, emotional holding, Ayurveda, herbalism from multiple traditions, Chinese Medicine, how to heal trauma, nutritional theory, shamanism, tarot, anything I could get my hands on.  I learned how to eat really healthy.  I’m now one of the most educated 27 year olds I know, and all that is simply a compensation, a distraction from dealing with the fact that I still had no idea how to nourish my Self.  I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting with myself long enough to hear the answers that my soul had for me.

And then for the greatest cover-up of them all, I decided to coach OTHER women with eating disorders, because if I couldn’t fix myself, maybe I could fix them and then my own struggle would be justified.  And that’s when it all started to crack and crumble.  My soul was speaking to me through the eating disorder, telling me it was time for transformation, for letting go.  My body was beginning to feel the (quite frankly) terrifying effects of years of starving and purging.  Before I could do anything I needed to heal my body and my heart.  To give myself the space, let myself be seen in the most vulnerable way.  Everything about it felt raw, exposed, torn open.  It was time to learn the lesson of asking for what I want and need.

And I did.  And my community has risen up more than I could have ever imagined to offer support, space, guidance, words, and witness.  And no judgment whatsoever.

So here I am now, bearing all my scars, all my shame, my pain, anger, grief, everything I’d been working SO hard to conceal for fear of your judgment.  Now that I have nothing left to hide, I can begin the real work to connect with a deep love for myself not because of my imperfections and battles, but because I Am.  Because all of us have the right to love and be loved simply by being born into this world.  We don’t need to earn love.  We ARE love.  And so begins the heroine’s journey…

Dreaming out loud

Oh you guys!  I meant to write earlier this week, and then got so distracted.  This windy weather we’ve been having always leaves me feeling a bit ungrounded, not to mention that it’s 80 degrees in January, so my body is all kinds of confused.

At first I felt guilty for my day dreaming.  I tried finding ways to justify it, but I had work to do.  Blogs, marketing copy, programs, irresistible product descriptions, and meditations to write.  Reading to catch up on.  Silver to get polished (seriously).  Instead of doing any of that, I’ve spent the last week visioning, dreaming, and heart-storming.  I watched that guilty “I feel unproductive” feeling come up, wreak a little bit of havoc on my peace of mind, and then I made the best decision I’ve made in a long time.  I decided to let it go for just a couple days and see what happens when I let my intuition, my soul truly guide me.  To see what happens when I just let myself dream, even if it got to feel a little bit too big and too daunting.

And I’ve come to a profound soul truth.  It feels expansive!  Still big, still daunting, but powerful, spacious, and authentic.  And f*cking awesome.  So awesome, in fact, that I wanted to share it with you all!  Because I know dreaming can be scary, we see these amazing things that we want to do, and then think, “How in the hell am I going to make that happen?!”  It’s easy to proclaim “Follow your passions!”  Rumi even tells us, “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.  It will not lead you astray.”  And you listen to your heart and everything sounds wonderful and bright and shiny.  And then it comes to taking the steps to ACT on that wisdom.  And we freeze.  And sometimes we stay frozen.  But I don’t want to feel stuck, and I definitely don’t want you to feel stuck.

So now you get to take a journey inside my head, through my visions, and a peek into my dreams…

When I was young, my mom had me watch Practical Magic with her.  She must have known that I loved witchy things.  From the moment I saw Sally’s shop, I needed to have my own.  (You all know what I’m talking about, so no judge-y snickering.)  From then on, in my heart of hearts, I wanted my own space for herbs, magic, healing, teaching, and communing.

And now it’s finally beginning to take shape…

I’m beginning to allow myself to really want it, to let that desire guide me, and take real, practical steps to making it happen.  I’ve even looked at potential spaces for it!  And the most fun part, I’ve begun to imagine it.  To feel, see, smell it…

Think vintage apothecary meets Hogwarts meets gypsy caravan with a touch of whimsy.  And a lot of hanging plant matter.  Are you starting to see it come together?  No?  Here are some pictures to help for those of us who need visuals.

An apothecary like this…

With a touch of this (yes, I absolutely need to skeleton too)…

A bit of that…

And a lot of this…

It’s being dreamt, manifested, and acted into existence as I move through my fears of rejection, of commitment, and of playing big and showing up for my own desires.  So here is your reminder to keep dreaming.  Big dreams, small dreams, scary, whimsical, childlike, black+white, and colorful dreams.   It can be pretty terrifying to share our dreams of what we really want because if someone shoots us down it hurts A LOT!  You need to trust in your vision so much that even if someone tells you that you can’t, you KNOW in your deepest, gnarliest knowing that you totally can.  Now that you’ve heard about/seen my dream, I’d LOVE to hear about yours!  Feel free to comment below and share with me what you envision, what you most deeply desire to do/create/have/feel in your life?

Shadow work + embodying the Feminine

I don’t know about y’all, but 2013 kicked my ass.  As I mentioned here, it was a hear of lots of shedding.  A couple weeks ago I began looking back at this last year, thinking about where I was at this time a year ago, what I had wanted to accomplish, where I thought I’d be by now.  My first reaction was to be hard on myself, to judge, to step back into the “not enough” mindset.  I briefly got caught up in the pushing, forcing, and do-ing masculine energy of trying to make things happen, believing that I needed to make up that lost time before the end of 2013.  And then I realized this year has been an IMMENSELY deep dive into everything I thought I was, every role I’ve played, the joys, the traumas, all the layers of “shoulds” and “have-to’s”.  I had to clear all of that before I could begin walking the path I knew I was meant for.

Here’s my crystalized lesson of 2013…

Every time I thought I had gotten to the essence of my soul, there was a whole new layer to work through, explore, and let go of.  A big theme for me this year was that of TRUST.  Mainly trusting myself.  Believing that I have all the knowledge I need to create the business, the life, and the relationships that I want for myself right now.  All I have to do is get out of my own way.  And the same goes for all of us.  So often we allow our shadow side, our own darkness, to keep us from being and doing what we really desire.  There’s some part of our ego that says we don’t deserve to have that life.  Or that we haven’t worked hard enough or done enough.

This year I not only met my shadow side, but I sat, played, danced and fought with, and finally loved my shadow.  She had always been lurking off to the side and I had done a pretty good job of ignoring her.  Now I invited her out front and center, looked her square in the eye, and said “Okay, whatever’s here, whatever lessons you have for me, I’m ready to face with compassion and an open heart.”  And here’s what I learned: Shadow work is INTENSE!  (Side note: it’s going to be a major part of my upcoming group program)  It requires crazy amounts of courage and strength that I didn’t know I had until now.  I got to finally learn what it meant to approach this inner work in a feminine, receptive, compassionate, and supportive strength.  And then I realized something huge…this is what I’m meant to teach other women.  So many of us have forgotten how to use our intuition, how to trust ourselves, how to ask for what we want, how to be gentle even as we’re moving mountains.  We don’t remember how to go inside, connect with our wildness and tap into that age-old wisdom that has been passed down through generations of mothers to their daughters in order to heal ourselves.  We don’t realize that each of us have every answer inside of our soul.  We have insanely wise inner guides, angels, whatever you want to call them.  It’s a process of relearning how to listen, how to trust, and align our actions with that inner wisdom.

I’m so grateful for the teachers and the time I had in 2013 who showed me, often against my own resistance, that the only way I could teach women how to honor themselves was by doing the deep work with my own wild soul, by acting from my intuition, and by embodying the sensual, earthy, and receptive feminine.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s always more work to do, more to learn, more to uncover and love about ourselves.  And I believe in cycles, in the ebb and flow, so now it’s time to put this into practice.  To build the container that will allow me to bring this wisdom to my community of wild and graceful women in the form of lots of free content, group programs, and intensive one-on-one coaching.  I can’t wait to better serve all of you now that I’m fully serving myself.  Happiest of new years to all of you…

Why I don’t have New Years Resolutions and what I do instead…

Maybe I just don’t like doing what everyone else is doing. My inner rebel likes to do things differently. Maybe it’s because I know myself well enough to know that when I’ve had NY resolutions in the past, they last for about a week. Maybe my resistance to New Years resolutions is something I should look at. Whatever the reason, since I was young I just decided that I don’t do resolutions. To me, it can feel like we’re telling ourselves, “you’re not quite good enough the way you are, so these are the things we’re going to work on changing this year.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for growth and development. It’s just that resolutions typically sound like a list of things that we’d like to change about ourselves.

Jeff Brown, author of Soulshaping, posted this beautiful quote today:

“Sometimes we forget how far we have traveled. Good to acknowledge what it took to get this far, all those hoops we had to jump through, all those difficult overcomings. Good to stroke our face with love and remind ourselves how much courage it took to brave the journey. Good to say ‘thank you’ to the spirit that walks within and beside us, reminding us that we are simply and utterly worth fighting for.”

This is what the new year is about to me. It’s about looking at this last year, and 2013 was a doozy for me, and telling myself “Damn! Look at all the amazing things I did and learned!! How lucky am I to have received this love, these lessons, and to have been in communion with such beautiful souls. How can I expand on this moving forward and how do I want to FEEL as I do?” Because it’s not about getting things done or losing that weight or reaching a goal. It’s about EVERYTHING that happens through the process. It’s about the way you feel in the moment and what that’s reflecting about your soul and your journey.

I’ve noticed we have some resistance, consciously or subconsciously, to feeling at ease, in our flow, and allowing things to happen without pushing. We like to MAKE things happen. We RESOLVE that things should be a certain way, so we’re going to do whatever we need to do to get that outcome. That we need to be busy, to be working, to always be doing better (whatever that means). This year has taught me that all that is SO overrated. When we’re in our flow, letting things take their course, moving and acting from the way we want to feel in our lives…THAT’S when the magic happens. That’s when our soul and our vision can move through us and things can be seemingly effortless. Don’t get me wrong, it takes effort to show up, to do our own work, to be present. But when we make that effort, the Universe/God/Goddess/etc. conspires and synchronizes to bring to us exactly what is needed.

So instead of resolutions this year, I’m taking time to reflect on what I want to FEEL more of this coming year. I’m inspired by one of my mentors, Danielle Laporte, to think about what my Core Desired Feelings this year/month/week/day are, and what can I do in order to feel those CDF’s.

This year I want to feel In Communion, Abundant, Playful, Flowing, Expressive, Sensual, Free. What are your Core Desired Feelings? How do you intend to grow, expand, allow, and show up in 2014?

Shedding off one more layer of skin

As a dear friend reminded me the other day, we’re coming to the end of the year of the snake.  It’s been a year of incredible shedding, peeling back the layers of old stories, relationships, labels, beliefs, and assumptions I’ve held onto.  The past few weeks I’ve been in a slow, painful yet beautiful process of crawling out of my skin.  An old skin.  Like snakes do when they’ve outgrown that layer and it’s time to move on.

For a long time I thought I was meant to work with women struggling with eating disorders.  I even wrote a one-on-one coaching program for healing emotional eating.  I thought it was my calling, my mission.  All along there were lots of signs from the Universe telling me that it wasn’t.  That it was just one step along the way.  I realize now that it was a way to heal MYSELF.

And it was the easy way to respond to the much afeared question: “So Katie, what do you do?”  It was simple and sounded good to just say, “I help women struggling with eating disorders to heal their relationship with food.”  People understood that.  I didn’t have to explain myself or justify my place in life.

Each time I’d say that out loud I’d wonder, “Whose voice is it saying those words?  It certainly isn’t mine.”  It was a cop-out.  An easy answer that in no way encompassed my place in life or my truth.  The problem was I didn’t trust that when I was in alignment with myself, sitting still enough to listen, the people I was meant to work with would find me.  So I resisted what my heart kept telling me.  I stood on my soapbox and told everyone to listen to their gut.  That if they asked their Soul what he/she wanted and needed that they’d get their answers.  That their body would tell them what they needed.  That it’d be scary to trust themselves at first and that’s okay because courage was feeling that fear and doing it anyway.

And as one of my mentors says, we’re great at giving the advice and teaching what we ourselves need to learn.  So rather than sit, listen, trust, be gentle, and know that my soul had a plan, I questioned, ignored, blamed and shamed myself into speaking words that weren’t mine.  Into claiming a place in this world that wasn’t for me because it was easier than owning the work that I love to do and claiming my space.  Luckily, my inner guides had other plans and things began to fall apart so that I could let them go and trust that something bigger was coming.  That the work I had done around emotional eating was really for me, to heal my own scars and wounds.

Now comes the hard part.  The scary, messy, and ultimately beautiful part.  When I have to commit to myself, to my tribe, to the souls who have been on this journey with me from the beginning.  Now I commit to doing what I tell everyone else to do: to speak my truth, even and especially when it’s a bit terrifying.

The truth is, I want to go deeper.  I don’t want to tell women who are struggling with how to love themselves and to own their power that they need to eat.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s unbelievable value in that.  There are amazing souls whose work IS to support people to nourish themselves with real food.

And I want to peel back the next layer.  To go to those deeper, darker places of your soul, to read and listen to the story of your spirit.  Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, “Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed.  It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead.” I’m fascinated by the connection between the Soul and the physical body.  By the way our body manifests health and dis-eases of our deeper Self.  The way that our body holds, negotiates, and releases trauma.  And how my education through experience and more formal training have prepared me to hold space for people to explore and go through their process.

I’ve known this to be true for a long time, and it’s taken me until now to own this truth:  I’m here to heal through renegotiating trauma, through the power of myth and stories, through plants and the medicine of the earth.  I’m here to teach women to listen, speak, and feel.  To hold space for ritual and soul retrieval.  To go with you to the deepest self in order that your own spirit can heal your emotional and physical body, the connection between the two.  And to help women find happiness by being in alignment with their soul’s truth and loving themselves enough to ask for that much out of this life.  I work with archetypes, movement, your desires, and dreams.  Through the medicine of heartbreak and recovery.  And through holding sacred space for the Soul to come back home.

P.S.  Extra credit to anyone who can tell me what the title of this post is from…

XO

There is no such thing as a toxic relationship

Let’s face it…we’ve all had at least one relationship (and probably a lot more than one) that we’ve labeled as “toxic”, “unhealthy”, “codependent”, “draining”, etc.  It makes us feel better to be able to label it something so that we can push it away, leave it behind, or some how properly deal with it.  We break up with toxic boyfriends/girlfriends, we can move out of codependent family situations, and not hang out with friends that we deem as energetically draining.  But when we simply leave it behind because it doesn’t feel good, we fail to grow.  And when we fail to grow, we repeat the SAME patterns OVER AND OVER AGAIN…

So here’s a little bit of truth that I’ve picked up after spending my entire life judging and labeling my relationships…

No one is sent to me by accident.  I have something to learn from everyone I am in relationship with, whether it’s a partner, friend, family member, student, boss, or coworker.  If we see that people are all lessons, there’s no more need to label good, bad, healthy, unhealthy/toxic, functional, dysfunctional, codependent, etc.  They all serve a purpose.  Our souls call in the people, the teachers, and the lessons we’re ready for.

When we call a relationship or a person “toxic”, it creates shame and guilt around seeing that relationship as a “mistake.”  We judge them and ourselves instead of really seeing the truth about experience as it is.  They’re on their path and so are we.  We attract the people for which we need the lesson and the lesson is never “good” or “bad”.  It just is.  And it’s always necessary.  It’s always exactly what we need in that time.  All those lessons, or experiences, whether big or small, fun or not so fun (and let’s be honest, not too many of them feel good or fun at the time) make up our life’s curriculum.  And what we do with that completely depends on us.

Do you see how none of that is about the other person?  How it’s ALL an inside job?  Do you see how we have all the power the moment we decide to stop judging, labeling, and shaming ourselves and others and just start seeing what is?  What’s here for us in this very moment?  That it’s all so perfect, so divine, that it couldn’t possibly be any other way?  Of course this is all a process, it takes practice to not judge and really SEE.  Just be gentle with yourself and watch what happens.

What I learned from a busted shoulder…

Today I want to share an important lesson that it’s taken me a LONG time to learn.  I’m pretty stubborn, so hopefully it won’t take quite as long for you to learn it, or maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who already has.  If that’s the case, consider this a gentle reminder.

Four years ago, during my yoga teacher training, my right shoulder started feeling a bit tweaky.  I asked my teachers about it and all of them said to rest it, stop doing chaturanga (the ultimate shoulder shredder) for awhile, and work on my alignment once it felt better.  At the time I was 23 and knew everything, so I didn’t listen.  I was also in the super yogini, vegetarian, yoga-every-damn-day mindset and taking some time off and being gentle with myself just didn’t fit the program.

Fast forward to the present day.  The slightly-tweaky shoulder of 4 years ago is now so inflamed that it hurts ALL THE TIME.  Finally, I went to see a physical therapist recommended by a trusted fellow bodyworker and after an hour of slightly painful myofascial release and a stern talking to about “seriously staying off of it for 2 weeks”, my shoulder feels better than it has since I started teaching!  Of course I still have to remind myself every day to stay off of it.  No demonstrating, no handstands, no down dogs, no planks, just stop.

This yoga hiatus has forced me to re-evaluate the way I practice, the way I teach, and the way I treat myself.  I’ve had the time to really sit with myself, feel my body, and check in with what would FEEL GOOD, not what I think I should do, not how many days it’s been since I did a vinyasa, or worry about losing the strength I worked so hard to build up.  Because none of that matters if I’m not doing it mindfully.

So here’s the lesson: It is SO NECESSARY to listen and deeply nourish yourself, both body and spirit.  Injury, illness, and pain are signs of imbalance in our physical or energetic bodies that shouldn’t be ignored.  Resting isn’t weakness.  I’ve noticed resting and taking time to replenish my stores of energy is actually more work and takes more courage because it requires silencing the guilt and fear of being “lazy” and going against everything I’ve done for 27 years.

How can you deeply nourish and love yourself more?  What are some of your favorite self-care practices?  And what might you be doing that is causing your physical, emotional, or energetic body more stress?  What might it be like to let that go?

Love,
Katie xo

Expect to be a Revolutionary – Tara Sophia Mohr

Yesterday, a dear sister shared this passage with me.  It seems appropriate for a lot of the work I’ve been doing with women lately…

“If the angels could have sat you down for a chat when you were on the way in to this life (among some other comments about love, fear, and your glory), they might have said this:

“Now, my dear, a little context: you are entering into a transitional time.

The past: A world led, designed and defined by men.
The future: A world led, designed and defined by women and men.
The present: The transition. Yes, we’ve put you on the transition team.

What’s so tricky to understand, dear one, is that as a woman of this transitional time, what is inside of you will be very different from what is outside of you. What you have to bring into the world will be very different from what you see before you as the status quo of the world. Yet what you have to bring forth is not crazy or wrong. In fact, it’s just what the world needs.

It’s as if the world is all purple and you — and your sisters — are going to bring in the yellow. Or as if it’s blue and you are going to bring in the red.

That means that whether you signed up for it or not, you will be a revolutionary. You will be a revolutionary whether you love that idea or whether you’d prefer to just do your thing quietly — to be a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, a businesswoman, an artist, a mom, a grandmother, a volunteer, an entrepreneur.

You will be a revolutionary because any woman who is being authentic in her work will bring forth ideas and ways of working that run counter to the status quo of her company, industry, community — a status quo defined by masculine values and masculine ways of working.

The angels might have added this: “So if you ever start to doubt or hold back or silence yourself because the questions you have, the ideas in your mind, or the way you work are so different from the status quo, remember that difference is exactly what is meant to be. You are here to bring forth a different way.”

It’s the hard — and thrilling — work you get to do this time around. It’s the “women’s work” of our particular moment in history.

You don’t have do the whole work, but you are asked to do the slice of that work that has been given to you.

Now, before you exclaim that you just don’t know what that slice is, or panic because you don’t have time or bandwidth for anything extra, let’s remember: This isn’t work that takes additional time. This is work about how you live each moment of your life.

And this isn’t work you have to go find or discover. It’s the work that is right in front of you, in the ways you feel called to speak, to act, to reinvent, to heal — in the imperfect, messy situations you find yourself in right now. Your piece of the work is already whispering to you — if not talking to you loudly yet. It’s the ideas in your mind and heart right now.

You are only asked to not stop up those things in you that most want to be expressed. If you let them flow forth, you will have done your revolutionary work, and you will have done it beautifully.

You don’t need to do it alone, though sometimes you might feel like you are alone. You walk on this path with a world of women who are surviving on the rocky ground of this world while also changing it to a richer, healthier soil. If you look for it, you will start to see all around you this shared path of the women in your midst, each working to bring forth a different way to some aspect of the world.

Know this: You are blessed in this work. Every step of the path you walk in this work has been blessed and blessed and blessed again before you traverse it. The angels are giddy, for they love love, and they can see the world that you are enabling to come into being.”

~ Tara Sophia Mohr

Self-Love: Not Your Mom’s Golden Rule

The Golden Rule.  We’ve all heard it a million times before.  “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”  It’s a nice thought.  Nice.  Another forthcoming post will be all about how much I dislike that word.  (Yes, sometimes I can be a hater, but it’s all in the name of self-love. ) Today I’m keeping my words short and sweet, so let’s get to it…

Here’s my revised and improved version of the Golden Rule: Treat yourself how you want others to treat you.  Be your own best friend.  We’ve all been wired to give, give, give until we’re completely tapped out, and then give some more.  We drain our own energy because we feel obligated to family, friends, bosses, and coworkers to give of ourselves until we have nothing else to give, and then hope that it’s enough.  All the while, we haven’t been trained to nourish and love ourselves so that we can replenish our energy of love.  We think a day at the spa or getting a message every couple months is the same as self-love.  I have BIG NEWS for you: It’s not.  I have so many clients coming to me because, in their words, they want a more “balanced lifestyle.”  Well, working your a$$ off on a regular basis is not balance.

But what IS balance?  Honestly, most of the time I have no idea.  Maybe it’s best so save that exploration for another forthcoming post too.  But I will say this…You can’t love others until you love yourself.  In the words of my girl Christine Arylo, author of Madly in Love with ME:

The more love you generate for yourself, the more love you have to give…love always creates more love.

Does the idea of self-love scare you?  Confuse you?  Do you equate self-love with narcissism, vanity, conceit, or self-centeredness?  If so, in the next coming weeks I have some MAJORLY TRANSFORMATIVE information for you!!  So if you haven’t already, bookmark my website: www.wildgrace.me and make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter (It’s where you put your email in and click “Subscribe”) so that you’ll receive the videos, meditations, activities, and exercises I’ve made for you…

So here’s my takeaway of the day: When you love, respect, nurture, and feed yourself, others will do the same, both for you and for themselves.  Start setting an example of self-love and watch what happens around you.  “If enough of us embrace love, the world will eventually be saturated with love. The love in the world begins with the love within ourselves.” ~Deepak Chopra (who is, incidentally, on instagram as @deepster2)

xo

I don’t know where this photo came from, but it’s a sweet tattoo + reminder

Why I dress up to work at home…

Art by Cori Barnick

Here’s a little known fact about me – When I was a kid, I was ALWAYS dressed up.  I refused to wear pants or shorts until I was 6 years old (at which point I went to a school with a uniform consisting of polo shirts and navy blue shorts…not cute).  I had more than one pair of sparkly red shoes at any given time and I only wore dresses with skirts that went out flat when you twirled around.  I had a bow or ribbon to match every outfit.  I wore ruffly socks (obviously).  I showed up to one of my mom’s parties in a green and gold sparkly tutu.  You get the idea.  Maybe it’s the Leo in me that at some level loves to be the center of attention, or maybe it’s just that I’ve always liked shiny, sparkly things that stand out.

At some point, I decided dressing up was a waste of time.  I figured there are so many things that are more important than clothes and how someone looks.  We shouldn’t judge people by their appearance anyway, right?  Plus nice clothes are expensive!  So when I first started working more from home or seeing bodywork clients I thought, “This is great!  I can stay in PJ’s or yoga pants all day, I don’t have to wear shoes, put on make up or do my hair!”  BUT I also get much less done, I feel frumpy, disconnected and distracted, out of my flow, and like the day never really starts.  Not to mention that I have SO MUCH make up (I go through a phase every year, usually around this time, where I get semi-obsessed with Sephora), and I’m still a sucker for cute dresses.  It’s made me realize something that I already knew back when I was 5 — putting time and effort into anything sends a signal to our spirit that whatever that thing is, it’s special, valuable, true, and worth our time and effort.

It’s not about materialism, or needing to have stuff to make us feel good, or valuing ourselves based on our appearance.  It IS about allowing yourself to feel what/how you want to feel, creating space and getting inspired to do the work you’re on this earth to do by taking your time, and taking care with yourself.  Don’t get me wrong, we all need those days where we stay in our jammies, watch movies, lounge under the covers, and give ourselves space from the outside world.   How might it feel, though, for those of us who work at home or in a more casual environment, to put that effort into how we show up for ourselves?  What message does it send to ourselves when we approach our morning routine with playfulness rather than the “whatever no one’s gonna see me today anyway” attitude?