FOUR ESSENTIAL KEYS TO SETTING AND MANTAING HEALTHY BOUNDARIES1Step 1- Know and learn exactly what your boundaries truly are.This can change day to day and moment to moment even. You must learn what matters to you, respect your feelings, know what is comfortable and acceptable for you, what you truly desire. This may take some work and practice! 2Step 2 - Learn to recognize the signs and signals of giving up your boundariesso that you can prevent giving [...]
Happy Holidays?!?Or are they? For many people this time of year can be stressful and or challenging on many fronts. What would it take for you to have a truly happy holiday that you enjoy and that works for you? Here are some tips and tools for helping you truly have a Happy Holiday:1Stop taking on other people's stuffHow much of the stress, anxiety, discomfort etc. that you are aware of during the holidays is actually yours? Could you [...]
Four things you need to stop doing if you want to feel like you and your needs matter: Do you feel like you don’t really matter? And that no matter what you do or give, or how much you show up for other people or sacrifice yourself for the greater good it doesn't even matter?And when it comes down to it and you really need someone to help or be there for you no one really is?I struggled with [...]
WHY IS SETTING AND MAinTaiNING HEALTHY BOUNDARIES SO HARD?(even though your emotional health and happiness depend on it?)Most people who struggle with setting and maintaining healthy boundaries: Have been trained throughout our lives in one way or another to ignore our boundaries, accept their violation or blame ourselves when it happens.As a result, we don't have a really clear sense of what our boundaries are.Often don't recognize when or how they are being crossed and instead internalize the [...]
People-Pleasing Archetypes and their Positive and Negative Qualities: You might not think you’re a people-pleaser at first glance.You see, people-pleasing can take a lot of different shapes and forms and show up in a lot of different ways.Here are five Archetypal people-pleasing roles:Rescuer: Always trying to save other people, rescue people from their own poor decisions or crisis situations they find themselves in. The rescuer feels powerful, important, and needed and derives value from others distress… The main problem [...]
Why Loving Yourself Isn't EnoughDo you get told when relationships are challenging, or you're not exactly receiving the love that you desire that you just need to love yourself more? And that somehow, self-love is the magic ticket that will solve all your relationship (and life!) problems? I've been hearing for a long time, and maybe you have too, that in order to have love you just need to love yourself... more. While I DO believe that loving yourself is [...]
Love and Not Love I recently saw a post on facebook about a study showing that spanking is harmful even if the parent has a warm and loving relationship with the child. Wow, ok, so this really set some wheels spinning for me... Inflicting physical harm or pain on other human beings is considered violence, aggression, assault or abuse. Nowhere else in our culture do we sanction inflicting physical pain/harm on another human being, not even on violent [...]
Emancipating Your Anger So, I recently spent the whole day super duper depressed. That doesn't happen to me very often anymore but when it does it can be super intense. There are those days that I experience a little wave of depression and easily find my way out of it, (Hint: Who does this belong to?) and then there are those days when nothing seems to help. This was one of those days. What I discovered at the end [...]
Lessons from Depression Lesson Number Two: There's some part of me that I'm denying Another discovery I'm having around depression is that when it is mine, it usually means that I'm cutting myself off from some part of myself- that I am engaging in some form of self-denial. This could be something I don't want to be aware of- like how angry I am- or having lots of judgment and wrongness toward myself rather than space and acceptance. How [...]
Empathic Women in Relationships: Four Questions to Ask Yourself (That can improve your mental health and happiness and move you in the direction of having better relationships) How loved do you feel? How much does he actually love you? You “Love him so much” but how much are you loving you, how much is he loving you? I have heard so many women say this phase (myself included!): “but I love him so much”. Yes, ok, you love [...]
When you think of self-care, what comes to your mind? Bubble baths? Massages? Days for yourself where you get to do whatever it is you want? Vacations from your life? Sure, that's awesome, that's all forms of doing something nice for yourself and making you feel good, but why have we relegated self-care to something separate from the rest of our life? From our everyday activities? Self-care is not something to be saved for nights and weekends, something we only get to after [...]
Well, a whole lot actually! A name becomes part of your identity and represents who you are.Even more true when it comes to business...Back in 2015 when I picked the name Divine Essence Coaching, I was still a glorious generalist, still figuring out how to describe and articulate my work in a clear and concise way. My work in a lot of ways is about helping you reconnect with your (divine) essence and remember the truth of who [...]
I used to make all sorts of relationship lists- You know the ones- The qualities he should have, what he should look like, what kind of job he holds. How he compliments me, his degrees, is personality, his family. And on and on and on… I've made lots of those lists and know people that swear by them, though I can’t say that they ever really worked for me. Then I fell in love with someone who met [...]
Create Something Different for Your Life This Year A few years ago I got really fed up with looking back at the end of each year to see that I wasn’t really much closer than I’d been the year before to where I wanted to be in my life. I knew something had to change! Wishing and hoping, even visioning and vision boarding weren’t really working. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard that “insanity is doing the same things [...]
Receiving Your Awareness We cut off our awareness for many reasons, one because we have learned not to trust it and believe that it is wrong, and two, because sometimes what we are aware of does not match the conclusions we have about how things should be. Then when things turn out differently, we are surprised. Yet, how often was there actually part of you that knew? This weekend I had the chance to connect in some beautiful [...]