Spring Cleaning for Mind, Body, & Spirit

I recently saw this quote by Marie Condo, “The objective of cleaning is not just to clean, but to feel happiness living in that environment.” I was so inspired I not only decided to create a webinar based on this topic and start writing this blog post, I started seeing mental and emotional cleansing as opportunities to feel happier within my own internal environment. With my background in art, psychology, yoga, and health coaching, I am drawn to inner exploration, personal growth, and healing. I love learning about and doing things that allow me to feel mentally and emotionally more grounded, at ease, and healthier in mind, body, and spirit.

The spring equinox arrives on Tuesday, March 19th this year. Season changes are always a wonderful time to reflect and prepare. As you reflect, you can begin to clear out the clutter and cobwebs from the winter that have lodged themselves within your psyche, your body, and your spirit. Preparing for any changes you’d like to welcome in with the spring season will help inspire the new growth you desire to welcome into your life. Spring represents renewal, color, growth, life, and optimism. I wanted to explore and offer some ways to welcome in the spring season in a way that allows you to lighten your load from the winter, so that your inner environment can feel happier.

Breathing Practices

The breath is our most powerful tool for healing. It’s something we always have with us, it’s a reminder that we are alive. Breathing is an automatic process in our body that will continue to go on whether or not we are paying attention to it. When we do bring our breath into our direct awareness, we can positively impact, and communicate with our nervous system, and therefore all of the systems of our bodies. There is a saying in yoga, the nose is for breathing and the mouth is for eating. Most of the time we want to breathe in and out through our nose. However, there are some practices that are used while exhaling through the mouth, but only while engaging in those specific practices. Here are some cleansing practices that will help you spring clean your mind, body, and spirit through the power of your breath.

• Ujjayi Breathing: Breathe in through your nose, slowly and deeply, open your mouth and exhale as if you were attempting to fog a mirror, let the exhale continue in that way slowly until you complete your exhale. Repeat for one minute with your mouth closed for the exhales. This breathing practice is cleansing, and brings a deeper connection to the present moment. It also builds a little heat in your body, so it has an energizing effect as well.

• Lion’s Breath: Breathe in through your nose until your abdomen and lungs are full, pause, open your mouth, stick out your tongue, look up, and exhale. If you like, you can add curling your fingers in claw shapes as you exhale energetically. This breath is deeply cleansing, and releases stress from your mind and body.

• So-Hum Breath: Breathe in through your nose, exhale through your nose, with your normal breathing rhythm. Allow your breathing rhythm to become calming and serene. Say “So” in your mind as you inhale, and “Hum” in your mind as you exhale. Continue for 1-5 minutes. This is one of the most simple mantras you can use and it offers connection to the present moment. This practice calms the mind and the body. This breathing practice naturally dissipates stress, tension, and discomfort. When your mind wanders, which it will, gently, with compassion, bring your mind back to the mantra, “so, hum” with each inhale and each exhale.

Journal Prompts

Journaling is another wonderful tool to help clear mental clutter, process your inner world of emotions, and offer a place for your psyche to rest. A journal is a container that can hold, separate you from, and provide relief for the inner workings of your mind. Taking time to process your feelings, keep a log of your day, write down what you are grateful for, log your challenges, your wins, what went well, what you need support around etc… can all be deeply healing for your mind, body, and spirit. Journaling allows you to feel connected to yourself, your intuition, and it invites your soul to speak. Here are few journaling prompts that can support clearing the clutter of your mind, body, and spirit.

• When you look ahead to the spring season, what seeds do you want to plant within yourself? This could be a goal, a hope, a plan, a new positive internal belief, just write for 1-5 minutes from a stream of consciousness, anything that comes to mind.

• Take a moment to reflect back, thinking about the past couple of months, has something blocked you, or stood in your way to move towards what you want? If so, how can you reconcile that now in your mind and body so that you can begin to move forward? 

• Reflect on any patterns of self-sabotage all throughout your life. Not to be unkind to yourself, but to look for one way you can disrupt this pattern to ensure it does not cause harm to the seeds you’d like to plant for yourself moving forward. Examples could be, doing more daily reflection with self-awareness, working with a therapist to heal these old patterns, doing more of anything that creates more confidence and trust within yourself. 

• Now imagine, how you will provide these seeds with nourishment? How will you help them grow? How will you ensure that they will be cared for as they sprout, and blossom? Write out all of the ways you will care for these seeds that you’ve planted and commit to their growth within your mind, body, and spirit.

• Write out anything else you’d like to clear from your mind, body, and spirit as you ease into the spring.

After your do this journaling, commit to spending time with the seeds you’ve planted within yourself. Keep a daily and/or weekly reflection log asking, how did I nourish the seeds I’ve planted of my intentions for the spring today? Consistency is key. Believe in your ability to grow what you desire within your life, ask for support and help if you need it, and show up for yourself fully and compassionately.

Self-Affirming Statement Creation

Having a helpful affirmation can offer hope, a reminder, and way of shifting out of the old patterns and beliefs, creating new, more useful ones. When you think about what you’d like to cultivate within your life as you ease into spring, what simple statement would help you re-anchor into the present moment. Think about a statement that will support you to move forward rather than being pulled down into past patterns. Take a moment and brainstorm all of the affirmations that come to mind, and then say them all out loud. Which one resonates with you the most? Write it down, set it as a reminder in your phone to pop up daily, practice saying it consistently, use it as a mantra. This statement will always be available to remind you of your desired outcome and reconnect you to the seeds you’ve planted within. Take it with you, use it to nourish these seeds, and your mind, body, and spirit. 

Visualization

Visualizing what you want is a helpful practice when cultivating the garden of what you want to create and grow within yourself. Our brain is essentially a recording of everything we’ve known, seen, and done up to this point in time. It will always return to default mode, especially if there are lingering negative, limiting, internalized beliefs. It will also return to default mode when we are living mindlessly from day to day. When you visualize what you want, you are offering your brain a new template, a new way of seeing things, a new way to be. This allows you to practice, to rehearse within your mind, new ways of being and offer options for your future self. Visualization is amazing and powerful work.

When visualizing, it is helpful to be comfortable, relaxed, and at ease within your mind and body. Take a moment to steady your breath, letting it become calming and serene. Allow your body to relax, easing the space between your eyebrows, unhinging your jaw, and softening around your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles. Now bring to mind this seed you’d like to plant within your psyche, your mind, your body, your heart, and your whole being, as we ease into spring. Begin to see the daily practice of watering it, feeding it, growing it, nourishing it, nurturing it, see what all of these offerings look like. Now see yourself attaining the blossoms or fruit it’s bearing, how it will impact your life, how you will feel, really allow these feelings to sink into your being. Hold the image for as long as feels right. Bring in your self-affirming statement and repeat it in your mind to strengthen this image, for as long as feels right. Now allow the image to sink into your heart space, and hold it there for a breath, knowing you can bring this imagery forward to return to hope, self-trust, and inspiration to take consistent action any time you need to. As it fades, smile, and say to yourself, “and so it is.”

I hope these practices offer you support to believe in yourself, to trust yourself, and to allow hope and compassion to lead you forward into a healing, resourced, and healthy spring season. Practice letting go daily of what you no longer need, practice breathing, journaling, and visualization to guide you forward. You deserve to live a life filled with compassion, hope, inspiration, and joy. 

Beginning to Heal Food Guilt & Shame

When I’m working with someone on healing from emotional eating, an eating disorder, and body-image struggles in my therapy practice, healing the underlying guilt and shame is always a significant part of the process. Guilt and shame are two of the most common uncomfortable emotions that seem to overwhelm and plague those who encounter challenges with food and body-image.

So many people struggle with emotional eating, eating disorders, and body-image challenges, and when we first begin the work the therapy, their struggles and patterns with food feel impossible to change. When beginning the work it feels impossible to imagine that there is a path towards healing these patterns, and therefore, to healing the extremely uncomfortable emotions of guilt and shame.

All of our emotions are messages about how we are experiencing, or responding to the present moment. There are no good or bad emotions, although some are far more desirable to experience, and some are so uncomfortable that we subconsciously work really hard to not have to feel them. 

Some emotions we experience are congruent with our current experience and others are not. Guilt and shame are emotions that tend to be old, and not necessarily congruent with what is happening in the present moment. When we break it down to the root of these emotions, the message of guilt is “I did something wrong", and the message of shame is “I am something wrong.”

We can liken the experience of feeling guilty as a message from our conscience. If we did something wrong our conscience wants us to make it right, this is really useful, but only when it’s congruent with our present experience. If we ate something we deem as “bad” that does not mean we did something wrong, that does not warrant the discomfort of guilt. Shame goes deeper, Brene Brown defines it as, “Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.” When we are experiencing guilt, we can examine it and understand fairly easily whether or not it’s congruent with our present experience. However, shame is much more uncomfortable, and more challenging to cope with for most of us.

When we experience shame, we often experience many uncomfortable emotions at the same time. When experiencing shame, there are often feelings of loneliness, isolation, and sadness as well. If shame is experienced internally as, “there is something wrong with my very being itself,” if shame is saying, “I’m small, flawed, and not good enough,” then in that moment, I’m experiencing myself as deeply unworthy. When we’ve experienced shame as a result of childhood trauma, or any trauma really, it becomes difficult to not get stuck in a shame spiral.

Many people I work with experience frustration in relation to their patterns with food. Those who struggle with binge-eating, or with feeling powerless to stop eating when they are full, or any other disordered patterns, often express feelings of guilt and shame. If guilt is experienced, we can break it down together in therapy sessions. We can explore, what is the guilt about? Did you actually do something wrong? We can then work to reframe the guilt. When it’s reframed into an opportunity to see how there can be something learned from this experience, that when I’m feeling out of control with food like this in the future, what small steps can be taken to begin to alter this pattern. Through verbal processing and reframing we can search for ways to find more grace, compassion, and therefore greater self-awareness, which is healing. When we apply curiosity to the guilt, it can be released, and we can have a greater understanding of why it happened in the first place. Once there is greater self-awareness and self-compassion, it becomes more likely that we can have the ability to handle a future similar circumstance with food more mindfully. When we can reframe the guilt, and recognize that “I didn’t do anything wrong, I can learn from this,” we feel empowered, hopeful, and more certain of our ability to change. 

When people struggle with this process of healing food and body-image challenges, and they feel it’ll be impossible to change, I prompt them to consider a time when something seemed impossible, and yet they did learn it, and now it comes easily and naturally. Examples often include riding a bike, rollerskating, learning an instrument, a new skill at work, and so on. Most people can identify with this ability, and it becomes an anecdote for the guilt. When you heal your guilt, there is more room for self-compassion, more willingness to use challenges and struggles as learning opportunities rather than it becoming a shame spiral. 

If the initial internal response of guilt with food struggles can be caught, reframed, and worked through in an empowering way, most people feel hopeful and ready for the challenge of learning new ways of being with food, their bodies, and themselves. They can trust that it may be daunting, however, it’s not impossible. Unfortunately, if it has been internalized over and over and over again that “I did something wrong, (guilt)” so therefore, “I’m a bad person, there’s something wrong with me (shame),” this internalized guilt becomes shame. The shame then becomes a dark cloud of pain inside and all around you. If you have experienced trauma in the past, then the shame can often feel familiar, and can lead to a state of internal suffering, anxiety, and depression, as well as an increased likelihood of an eating disorder. Shame is not logical, it’s a felt inner experience of deep pain and suffering.

Healing shame starts with naming the shame for what it is. Understanding and exploring where you picked up the negative internalized belief that “I am something wrong” in the first place is essential to healing. Healing shame begins with talking about it, naming it, and allowing ourselves to truly feel it, to learn from it, to hold it with curiosity and compassion. Only then can we begin to learn what the negative internalized beliefs are that we picked up, such as, I am unworthy, I am not good enough, I am unlovable, (just to name a few) and to heal where these beliefs were created or reinforced. EMDR therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), traditional talk therapy, and many other beneficial therapeutic styles, can all help work through the traumas and experiences that have created or reinforced these negative beliefs. Through the therapeutic process you can call out the shame for what it is, work through it, and ultimately heal it. 

Shame is one of the most painful, and therefore one of the most likely emotions to be avoided. It takes time to learn about your personal experience of shame. To understand where you picked it up, to identify how you experience it mentally, physically, and emotionally is essential. Be patient with yourself as you learn the process of listening to your body, to your internal language, and your true self. You then can benefit from developing an awareness of your personal window of tolerance. How long can you sit with the shame before it feels as though you want to eat, restrict, check-out, numb-out, or escape altogether? This is all helpful information, best when experienced and worked through in therapy. Learning how to be with yourself within your window of tolerance allows you to grow. Know that you are learning the new and difficult skills of emotional awareness and emotional experiencing. This is not easy work. Please be patient with yourself. Just like riding a bike or roller skating, emotional awareness and experiencing are worthwhile skills to stick with, although you might get a little scuffed up along the way. Once you learn the skills and integrate them, these new ways of being with food, your body and yourself, will be yours to keep.

One thing I know for sure after talking to people in a therapy setting for more than twenty years, is that no one gets to escape feeling pain and discomfort in this life. I also know for sure that no one deserves to live in a state of shame, especially those who struggle with food and body-image struggles. Once you can understand and release your shame, reframe any guilt experienced in the moment, you will see the new learning that can take place. Once you feel a sense of hope, you can see it as a skill that you just don’t know yet, but you can learn how to be mindful and intuitive when it comes to your food choices. With this hard work you move from shame toward self-empowerment. Ultimately, the goal of healing is to feel that you are always, unconditionally worthy. The goal of healing is to know that you are the expert on what your body wants and needs, and that you are enough—now, in this present moment, just as you are existing as you. 

10 Reasons You're in a Funk + What to Do About It

When you feel stuck in a rut, a bad mood, or negative mindset, it can be challenging to get out of that funk when you are deeply entrenched in it. Sometimes you might just wake up in a funk that you can’t seem to shake. You might wake up feeling anxious, generally more pessimistic, stressed, or grumpy, for seemingly no reason. Moods can strike at any time, and sometimes these moods seem way out of alignment with what your current circumstances might actually be presenting you with. Trying to “think positive”, “just snap out of it”, or “just let it go” is not helpful advice, because in those moments it may feel like, sure, I would if I could, and wouldn’t that be nice if that could be the case— but when you feel stuck, most likely, you can’t just let it go.

Emotions are powerful, important, and necessary. Emotions provide information about how you are experiencing the present moment through your physical body. When you stuff, repress, or suppress your emotions, they only fester, they do not go away. When you bury emotions, you bury them alive.

The good news is that you actually have more ability to manage your emotions than you might think. However, it takes practice to develop emotional awareness, and a willingness to be present with feeling states that are uncomfortable. When you are struggling with shaking the feeling of being in a funk, it’s important to explore why it’s even there in the first place.

Emotional congruency occurs when you are experiencing an emotion that is providing direct information about your current experience. The emotion is directly congruent with the cause. This is so important as it creates an opportunity in the moment to make a choice about how to respond to the emotion. When you can evaluate the emotion, and begin to understand the message of the emotion, you can then make a sound choice about how to feel, process, and cope, or just be with the emotion. This allows an opportunity to move forward from the feeling state in a way that feels empowering. This is very advanced emotional awareness and intelligence and comes with intentional practice over time. However, now is always the best time to practice.

When we are experiencing an emotion that feels incongruent, like when we wake up in a funk, anxious, stressed, grumpy (or any other uncomfortable internal experience that does not seem to relate to our current experience), it may be time to do some emotional exploration, excavation, and awareness building. Emotional incongruence causes mood states that can take over and feel uncomfortable, and these funks can occur for a number of reasons. Below I’ll explain ten common reasons you might be in a funk, and further down I offer some suggestions to help yourself understand the funk, and hopefully begin tp help yourself out of the funk.

-1. There is an emotion that you have suppressed or repressed that wants to be expressed, felt, understood, and processed.

-2. You are living outside of the present moment. If you evaluate how you are feeling and there is no triggering or causal experience conjuring this emotion, then you might ask yourself, is this feeling connected to something from my past or a worry about my future? If so, there is actually a lot that can be done to help move forward from this feeling state.

-3. You are struggling with a more chronic mental health challenge and it may be of great benefit to talk with a therapist or other medical professional about what you are experiencing. There are so many tools that can support mental health including a variety of therapeutic techniques, lifestyle practices, medication, and supplements. Please don’t suffer alone, there is help available.

-4. You had a rough night of sleep and feel unrested, not fully ready to take on your day and tiredness is impacting your mood.

-5. You had a bad dream that is difficult to shake off, and it’s left a residue of fear, frustration, or other uncomfortable emotion.

-6. You were triggered the previous day and haven’t yet re-stabilized into a feeling of being connected to your body, you still feel unsafe/uncomfortable.

-7. You have created a habit of mindlessly going through the motions of your day, and you feel uncomfortable with and disconnected from your life.

-8. There is something in your current life circumstance that is draining your energy, and you are not confronting it, you are not changing something that you know needs to change.

-9. Your life feels out of alignment with your goals, desires, dreams, and personal needs.

-10. You carry the negative internalized belief that you function best when you are in a state of negativity, self-punishing, and pessimism (these are subconscious, limiting beliefs).

There may be many more reasons you might be in a funk, or experiencing a mood that seems to be incongruent with your present experiences. However, the good news is that when you can evaluate the why, you create more self-awareness. With greater self-awareness, you can make a choice about how to respond to the why, and determine how you can feel empowered rather than powerless to your moods.

Here are some ways to help support yourself and possibly un-funk yourself for each of the above 10 possible causes:

-1. If you are suppressing or repressing emotions, it is most helpful to start creating some type of practice to develop emotional awareness. When you have a greater understanding of why you might be avoiding, suppressing and/or repressing certain emotions, you can begin to do some emotional excavation. This is where therapy can be tremendously useful, EMDR therapy in particular. However, there is a lot you can do on your own as well. Having a feelings wheel handy, and spending time linking emotions that you most seem to avoid feeling with either past experiences or triggers, you can begin to unearth these emotions and learn to process them.

-2. If you are living outside of the present moment, you are letting feelings about the past or future impact your present experience. Practicing mindfulness consistently allows more awareness of how to live in the here and the now, not the past or future. If you think about your life in terms of a set of journals, consider that all of your past journals are filled with feelings, experiences, and memories. If you are living in the past and re-experiencing those feelings in the present, it’s like reading those old journals over and over again without wanting to do so. If you are worrying about the future, it’s as if you are trying to fill up your future journals before you’ve had the lived experience, and often you are filling those journals with fearful, worst-case scenario material. If you imagine the journal that you have for this moment, it is simple, you are writing out your experience based on what is true right now. With each moment, you write only about NOW. If you have material from your past that just keeps showing up, you may benefit from doing some form of therapy to process those memories with a professional. You also may benefit from developing a mindfulness and/or meditation practice to learn how to live more consistently in the here and the now. If you are struggling with constant worries about the future, there are wonderful therapeutic treatments for anxiety, reach out and find the support you need.

-3. If you are struggling with a more chronic mental health challenge, and you feel there is no specific trigger for your current mood state, I encourage you to consider some form of mental health treatment as help is available. You deserve to find a way towards healing. As I previously said, there are so many tools that can support mental health, including a variety of therapeutic techniques, lifestyle practices, medication, and supplements. Please don’t suffer alone, there is help available.

-4. If you had a rough night of sleep, can you practice self-compassion? Remind yourself that if you did not sleep well, it will have an impact on your mood, energy, focus, and your ability to fully engage in the tasks that need to get done. Be gentle with your rough mood, and try to get some rest. Creating a sleep hygiene practice that you stick with consistently for at least a month can help shift your sleep schedule into one that is more restorative and restful.

-5. If you had a bad, uncomfortable, or distressing dream, and now you just feel icky from it, it can be helpful to journal about your dream. One technique that is very helpful is to write out your dream but re-write a new ending. This will help to release the lingering uncomfortable emotions and therefore help to un-funk your mood.

-6. If you were triggered on a previous day and not yet feeling stabilized or grounded in your body, it can be helpful to do somatic exercises. Somatic exercises help to release distress from your physical body. Some examples are, deep breathing, visualizing the discomfort as a color that you can clear out with your breath, shaking out your body all at once while lying down or even just through one limb at a time. Tensing and releasing your body from head to toe—or toes to head—can be helpful to exaggerate the discomfort, but then to release it with a deep exhale to practice letting the discomfort go. You can use your five senses to ground into your present place and time to feel more connected to your body. This may look like naming something you can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch and let your senses create a connection to your body in the present moment. Yoga, exercising, stretching, tai-chi, and other movement can all help release somatic discomfort lingering from a trigger. Journaling, talking about your trigger, and addressing it in therapy can also be very helpful.

-7. If you notice that you are going about your daily life mindlessly and living for the perceived “fun times” such as the weekend, vacation, or some other experience that you have to wait for, you are going through the motions rather than truly living your life. If you are feeling as though you are lacking meaning and purpose in your daily life, you might benefit from working with a coach, volunteering, taking up a new hobby, and journaling about what brings you a sense of meaning, and pursue how to bring that into your life more consistently. You also can try to find meaning and purpose in the small, simple joys of life, stretch out your day a little and find pockets where you have space to breathe, to stop and smell the flowers. Find what enchants you, and pursue that daily. Learn mindfulness techniques to live in the present moment more consistently.

-8. If you just feel like something is off in your current day to day and yet you are doing nothing to address it, it is helpful to get honest with yourself. This might be a relationship that is draining your energy and impacting your mood. It could be someone at your job that you are not happy with, or any other circumstance that is troubling you, and you are actively avoiding it, as you are really attempting to avoid the perceived discomfort you will feel through confrontation. Typically, these types of moods fester and can become more difficult mental health struggles if left unaddressed. Many people struggle with confrontation and/or fear having to change something they aren’t sure how to change. If something feels off in your life, and you are not considering how to deal with it, I encourage you to talk with someone you trust, a therapist, coach, mentor or otherwise, to help you create a plan for how to move forward with more intention so that you can address and cope with what is robbing you of joy on a daily basis.

-9. If something feels out of alignment with your goals, dreams, and personal needs, it is helpful to address this as well. For example, it could be something such as you feel you have pursued a particular career, only to find that you don’t really want to do that for the rest of your life, or that you aren’t satisfied with your peer group, where you live or otherwise. This is a scenario that is usually more connected to a lack of fulfillment versus a deep unhappiness with the direct circumstances you are in. Working with a therapist, coach or mentor can help you sort out how to proceed, how to live more in alignment with what brings you a sense of personal fulfillment. Life is too short to not live in alignment with your dreams. Sometimes you have to make a radical change to create a life you love.

-10. If you struggle with negative self-talk, you may feel that you are motivated by the negative inner language that gets you up and going each day. However, this negative self-talk also causes you to feel pretty bad about yourself most of the time. If you are running your life based on negative internalized beliefs that can be changed! If you feel you need to beat yourself up to get things done such as get out of bed, exercise, eat nourishing foods, even simple daily tasks like brushing your teeth, there is a better way. Having self-compassion, speaking to yourself as you would a friend, and giving yourself the opportunity to motivate yourself through believing in yourself will actually help you go much farther in the long run.

If you carry negative internalized beliefs, such as I am not good enough, I am unworthy, I am a failure, I have to be perfect to be loved, I am unsafe… (the list goes on and on)… please know that you are not alone and that there is help to rewrite these old negative cognitions and beliefs into their opposites. EMDR is a powerful therapeutic modality that is evidence-based, and proven to help release negative beliefs and create positive ones through the course of treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness techniques, self-compassion practices, compassionate inquiry, and traditional talk therapy can all help as well.

I am going to be back to talk more about common emotional incongruences soon, but in the meantime, I hope you will take a deeper look at the mood states you are experiencing and just get curious, ask yourself, “is this about what I am currently experiencing, or can I look deeper within and learn more about my emotions, my present experience, and is there anything I can do in the here and the now to feel empowered to un-funk myself?” If so, I hope you choose to do it, so that you can feel more hopeful, grounded, and aligned. I hope you choose to take hold of the power within yourself to live and feel in alignment with how you want to live and feel in this very moment.