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Your Body
We often have an intense fascination and attachment with the most tangible aspect of our being, our physical bodies.
It’s comforting to be able to touch something in the flesh, in the physical form, isn’t it? It seems more real if you can hold something and experience it with your senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. It is solid matter. It feels stable and solid, something you can rely on.
Feel free to take what you like and leave the rest.
In order to become a Loving Self-Advocate, you need to be able to see yourself through clear lenses of perception. My hope is that this blog will help you to understand yourself more. Therefore you’ll be better able to get your needs met in a healthy way and have more joy along the journey of life.
You’ll see three options, Extremely High Self Discipline, Extremely Low Self Discipline, and Balanced Self Discipline, the LSA Way. Pick the one which best describes you without shame. This tells you how you’re currently showing up, not where you’re heading necessarily. Then select one action step from the list of 13 ideas, or choose your own action step that you’ll take this week, to become more holistically balanced.
Option 1) Extremely High Self Discipline
Does this describe you? You’re extremely self-disciplined with your food/exercise/appearance/work life/overall life to the point of feeling deprived and overworked. You are very busy physically, emotionally, and mentally.
Tendency To Over Plan And Over Control
You can be like a drill sergeant. You like everything in its place, and you try really hard to keep it that way. This sense of control feels good in the moment, when things are going your way. You love to delegate and see that tasks get accomplished, when people are cooperating with you.
When things don’t go according to plan, it can throw you for a loop. It exhausts you because mentally you’re trying to figure out how to connect all the dots in your favor. But because so many unknown elements are involved, namely people and their reactions, you never feel totally relaxed and at ease.
Things Have To Look A Certain Way
You expect others to behave according to your values. When they don’t, you feel less safe around them. When all of these things line up, then you allow yourself to relax. The problem is that your ducks are never in a row for too long, and so you rarely get to relax.
In fact, your nervous system has “maladapted” to the anxiety. In other words, the anxiety feels normal.
Inflexible
Because you have this clear plan in mind of how life should be, you bend over backwards to make sure your plans unfold. The agenda, the ways things “should” be, creates tight muscles in your neck and shoulders, stomach, etc.
You know how people brace themselves right before they get into an accident? They “see” the accident about to occur, and so they tighten up. Similarly, your body feels like it’s bracing for the “other shoe to drop.” On a deep level, you know you can’t control life, but that doesn’t stop you from trying to. Your tense muscles reflect this rigid need to control outcomes.
Deprived
You are very hard on yourself. We’ve already established that though you want to relax, you actually seldom do. Some part of you feels that you’d be lazy and unproductive if you watched TV without guilt, took a nap, took a vacation, etc.
So you limit pleasure and self indulgence in your life. This leads you to feeling self-deprived and even more anxious. It’s a vicious cycle. You want to relax and believe that if you can control everything, you’ll feel safe, but that doesn’t work. So you work harder, which allows even less time to relax and have fun.
Option 2) Extremely Low Self Discipline
You have little or no self-discipline or structure in your life. You don’t do much activity in the physical world, but you have a lot of mental and emotional activity that keeps you anxious. Even though this is the opposite extreme to the extremely self-disciplined person, they both come from places of needing to prove one’s worth.
Too Little Structure
You have little structure to your day. Perhaps you go to bed late and get up late. You lack productivity and feel guilty about this because you know you’re not living up to your potential. Because you lack focus, you wonder where your time went.
Easily Distracted
You get caught up in trivial tasks, like checking social media and getting lost in all of the drama of other people’s lives. You’re able to get distracted by others’ agendas because you have a lax plan yourself. When you’re not the captain of your own fate, someone else will be.
Uncomfortable Goals
Goals make you very uncomfortable and almost panicked because you’re worried about failing. This is not uncommon. The nervous system responds with stress to goals because our mind conjures up all the reasons we’ll fail to meet them.
Too Much Indulgence
Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Yes, it is! If you ate birthday cake every day of the year, would you value it as much on your actual birthday? Not a chance. You’d be sick of it. And you have this thing called a Conscience that tells you that you’re violating your boundaries when you’re living in conscious conflict.
In other words, you feel guilty when you consciously know what you should be doing in life, but in reality, you’re not doing it. That is conscious conflict–when you are doing harmful actions against your highest good.
Option 3) Balanced Self Discipline, The Loving Self Advocate Way
The Loving Self Advocate Way is balanced and honors the path to your highest good.
Self Imposed Boundaries
You implement self imposed, disciplined boundaries around food, drink, work, and overall life choices. You limit how much alcohol and sugar you have because you don’t like how you feel when you overindulge. You do this out of love and respect for your body, not deprivation.
If you are feeling out of sorts emotionally, you avoid using things or substances to numb out your feelings. You know that if you pursue that path, you’ll have two problems, the addiction PLUS the emotional pain of the problem.
Solid Self Care
Instead of coping with life through addictive substances and habits, you put your efforts into healthy habits and activities.
For example, you build your day around a solid, morning self care routine. You breathe, cry, take a walk, talk to a good friend, anything to feel your feelings, release the pent up anxiety, and move forward.
Gentle Self Talk
No matter how old you are, you realize there is more to you than your fleshly body, cellulite, wrinkles, fat, and all. You don’t compare yourself to the air brushed, perfect models on magazines. Bodies age. You’re doing your best to take care of your body, mind and heart. That’s all you can do.
You give yourself gentle self talk. When you look in the mirror, you say, “I got you, girl. You are loved, lovable and loving. Your body is enough right now. Let’s love that body to health, rather than criticize it. OK?”
Calendar Your Priorities
You create time on your calendar for working IN your business (i.e., fulfillment with clients) and ON your business when you do planning work. You also schedule time OFF. You honor these calendar times like you would for an appointment with another person.
13 Self Care Ideas To Honor Your Body
Don’t buy into the EGO which will tell you this minor change is not enough. It’s just not true.
1. Switch to quality water instead of soda. Check out a Kangen machine and plasma energy water.
2. Replace a processed food choice with a whole food choice once per day (i.e., chips to apple).
3. Savor and relish three moderate meals/day. Be really present to your food and chew it slowly, helping you digest more nutrition.
4. Prepare your own dinner for you and your family, with love. Use organic, fresh ingredients.
5. Start a small, herb garden.
6. Stop dieting and restricting yourself. Eat intuitively when you’re hungry. Eat slowly and be present with your food without the distraction of TV, scrolling on your phone, etc.
7. Take a 5 minute daily walk (longer if you like).
8. Go to bed 1/2 to 1 hour earlier and get up 1/2 to 1 hour earlier. I’ve seen studies that indicate for each hour of sleep before midnight, it’s like “double time.”
9. Get done eating your last meal one hour earlier than normal.
10. Fast if your system can tolerate it without uncomfortable hunger (from 8pm to 8am) or longer.
11. Self impose limits around alcohol (1-2 glasses of Scout & Cellar or some other consciously created wine per week–this is a clean crafted wine without all the additives).
12. Begin working out and moving your body slowly, even 60 seconds daily. Then gradually increase your workout time to 15 minutes daily.
13. Take your supplements consistently.
I’m all about holistic healing and helping you to relieve your suffering if you’re ready for that. I love the Ram Dass quote, “You’re here and I’m here. You have an interesting life story. I offer a space of peace, quiet and presence so that if you’re ready, you can get loose from your suffering. But I have no moral right to take away your suffering.”
