Reclaiming Joy

This has been a challenging year for me personally and as the time approaches for my next birthday I have been reflecting on all the changes that have happened in my life in the past year both personally and professionally.

I have made a promise to myself in the past couple months to reclaim my joy. It’s so easy to get lost in all the things I have to do that I recently realized I don’t often ask myself about the things I want to do, much less make the time and space for those things. It’s a difficult thing to realize, but it has prompted me to really give myself more space. So, my birthday resolution this year is to do more of the things I want even if it means I do a little less of the other stuff.

Here are some tools I have found helpful and perhaps you will too:

• Make room for curiosity. What are you curious about that you talk yourself out of?

• Do non-productive things badly. You don’t need to be the best artist or dancer or baker. Give yourself permission to do fun things just because.

• Do set limits. In personal and work relationships. It will be uncomfortable, but limits are about you and not about other people allowing you to have them.

• Let go of that which is not serving you. Take inventory of your beliefs, stories, and daily habits. What is not serving you? Why are you holding on to it? What would happen if you let it go?

• Face your fears. Often the narrative about the thing we’re afraid of is much worse than the thing itself. Our mind creates dragons where there are puppies.

A final bit of advice: being uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe. It’s important to cultivate skills to be able to discern the difference. If this is something you would like to work toward please feel free to reach out.

Diet Culture Myths and How to Fight Them

As we get more into the holiday and new year’s resolution season, I thought it might be helpful to reflect on diet culture.

You have likely heard the term “diet culture” before, but what exactly is it? Diet culture is perhaps best defined as a set of social norms and assumptions around the way we eat, move, and look. There are a number of social narratives that reinforce diet culture every day and we experience those narratives in variety of contexts from the office, grocery store, advertising, and TV show plotlines.

Here are some narratives to be aware of:

• You have a social/moral/health-based imperative to lose weight.

• There are “bad” foods and “good” foods.

• There are “clean” and “toxic” foods.

• If you have eaten a “bad” (i.e. high calorie) food then you have to “burn it off” with exercise.

• You earn “cheat meals” by being “good” and restricting your foods at other times of the day/week.

• You are led to believe that simply eating what you want, when you want it, in whatever quantity feels satisfying to your body will result in “letting yourself go” (i.e. gaining weight).

• Compliments when people have lost weight and the assumption that people who have gained weight must have something wrong with or about them.

A common and particularly pernicious myth we experience is the equation of someone losing weight as a path to becoming more attractive or worthy of love, admiration, and/or success. Here are a few ways you can start to combat the pressures of diet culture in your own life:

• Learn about the frameworks that keep diet culture in place and actively explore anti-diet resources to learn more accurate information about health and nutrition. Check out the podcasts Let Us Eat Cake or Food Psych. Both are created by anti-diet nutritionists.

• Create space to nurture your body. Shift out of the self-punishment and self-discipline mindsets.

• Make meals fun, play with your food, use your imagination. Try new recipes, arrange your food in fun ways. Make a smiley face in your morning oatmeal. Create a broccoli tree forest.

• Get rid of any clothes that don’t fit. Stop buying things are too small so you can motivate yourself to lose weight. You deserve clothes that fit you exactly as you are now.

• Get rid of your fitness apps. Stop counting/tracking everything you eat and every time you exercise.

• Prioritize “movement” over “exercise.” Moving your body should not hurt, make you nauseous, or leave you feeling exhausted and sore for days.

• Throw out the “inspiration” photos, unfollow the fitness influencers, and step out of the body comparison game. Shaming yourself into having a different body is not a great strategy for cultivating self-love.

• Ask yourself how you’d rather spend the time you dedicate to losing weight and/or changing something about your body. Would you play with your kids? Have a nap? Read a good book? Do that instead.

If you’re struggling with deconstructing diet culture messages, intrusive thoughts about your body shape or size, or chronic dieting don’t hesitate to reach out for help!

Incorporating Mindfulness into Daily Life

One of the questions I get asked the most about mindfulness is how to transition the practice of meditation into application in daily life. People often report that even when they make time to sit and meditate on a somewhat regular basis they have difficulty connecting that practice with their everyday life experiences.

In order to fully benefit from a meditation practice we must not only go through the motions of sitting on the mat and/or doing a guided practice, but also make the effort to learn about meditation and reflect on the practice. It’s the difference between knowing what a hammer is and understanding when and how to effectively use a hammer to build a birdhouse. Unfortunately, the more that a principle or practice becomes commodified the harder it is to trace it back to its roots and the more it becomes about the rote repetition of a task. It is vitally important to ask ourselves why we come back to practice and how that practice affects us.

The most important aspects of meditation and mindfulness are not about clearing your mind or focusing on your breath, but about the underlying principles that create the foundation of why and how we practice. Mindfulness and meditation are not about being comfortable, relaxed, or at peace with the world, though those things can certainly be auxiliary benefits of a practice. Instead, meditation is an open invitation to build compassion, non-judgement, and radical acceptance of discomfort. The discomfort may be around parts of ourselves or others that we dislike, or aspects of the world and our experience in it that are not to our liking.

A truly mindful way of being requires ongoing work, it is never complete, and it is always evolving. It requires us to build a routine around checking in with ourselves consistently. A mindful life requires us to incorporate and practice the following principles:

• Non-judging: shifting out of the evaluation of experiences based on our likes, dislikes, and personal biases.

• Non-striving: shifting out of goal-oriented behavior in order to allow an experience to unfold.

• Acceptance: accepting each moment and experience exactly as it is rather than how we wish it would be or fear it might be.

• Curiosity: bringing a beginner’s mind to each experience, slowing down, and allowing ourselves to fully be present in what is happening rather than moving through on autopilot.

• Non-attachment: allowing ourselves to let go of clinging to a particular goal, outcome, fear, or experience. Acknowledging at every experience is finite.

• Compassion: genuine compassion for our own and other people’s lived experiences rooted in shared connection and humanity.

• Patience: willingness to dedicate as much time as it takes without rushing to a goal or end point in an experience.

All these principles create the underpinning of mindfulness and meditation. They are also deceptively challenging to practice because they require letting go of our ego, need to succeed, and inherent bias. There is no mastery in mindfulness, only ongoing practice.

If you’d like to practice and learn more I recommend checking out the writings of Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Jon Kabat-Zinn. If you’d like to learn more about how to incorporate mindfulness to support your mental health, don’t hesitate to reach out!