Hustle and Flow

Kickstart your mornings with lemon water. The benefits are too good not to. 🍋🙌🏻🍋

Summer rains, sudden showers, and winter sun remain my favourites.
Because, it’s like life stops a second to say, “Hold on. I can turn around any minute.”

~ Sara Jothi

This is profound and resonates big time. We all practice self care in one form or other and it’s not always in our favor or best interest. Read every sentence. 🙏🏻

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

~ Brianna Wiest

💫Never let anything stop you. Not the rain, another person, nothing. You are your own champion so if you’re not feeling it don’t look to others to make it happen. I’m not saying that others can’t lift and lend a hand but ultimately you have to be your biggest fan.
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Learn to embrace change and adjust your sails accordingly. One of my favorite sayings is change is the only constant in life. Sure it can be hard, challenging, uncomfortable but it’s not supposed to be easy. Nothing worth having EVER comes easy.
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Be authentic and transparent. At the end of the day you have to own who you are when no one is looking. You absolutely cannot wear more than one face unless you’ve got the devil in your back pocket.
💫It’s one thing to lie to another and it’s something else entirely to lie to yourself.
💫We will all struggle at times but it’s about rising out of the struggle and being better.
💫Put your faith in Jesus, commune with nature, give an animal a soft place to land and in turn, you will give YOURSELF a soft place to land.

Oh boy if this isn’t a clear representation of my life right now. 🙄 I’m a firm believer that little happens to us that is totally out of our control. Yes, there are exceptions and this post isn’t meant to demean those events which often bring sadness and despair. What I mean is that in not paying attention, whether we are overwhelmed or grinding and only ‘paying attention’ to the absolute daily things that allow us to function - autopilot - we fail at other important life ‘things’. It’s important to recognize this and acknowledge it. Being hard and shaming ourselves isn’t beneficial; being real, owning it and making changes for the future IS beneficial. Break unhealthy patterns, whatever they may be. When you KNOW better, DO better! Most importantly, don’t forget to implement healthy activities and nutrition to fuel your body, mind & spirit when things get tough. 😘

Seriously just laughed out loud, because...

Don’t cut your bangs. 😂