It’s February and not surprisingly, we are writing about love. Our focus for today is the basic building block of love–the love we hold for ourselves. Truly, without self-love, we have little hope of personal joy or the fulfillment we glean from loving others. Why is it so difficult to love ourselves? When was the
Last week we defined shame and made the important distinction between shame and guilt. The next step is identifying shame and its origin. Unhealthy, prolonged feelings of shame, cause us to deny and therefore hide. Unwilling to accept the feeling of shame, we repress the message for corrective action. Prolonged denial evolves into secret avoidance.
A quick Google search yielded enlightening statistics: Nearly half of Americans make New Year’s Resolutions. And six months into the new year, over 40% of those people remain successfully engaged in the resolved behavior. Articles and blog posts regarding the over 60% who “fail,” exponentially outnumber those referencing folks who succeed. Lists of popular
Back to balance. We have discussed the five dimensions of living a balanced life. A discussion which could not be complete without visiting the notion of defense mechanisms, the coping strategies that aid us in our quest for balance. Properly applied, our defense mechanisms help us live in harmony and like our emotions, they are
We now add the idea of Spiritual Inspiration to the first three elements of living a balanced life: The Physical, The Mental, and the Emotional. In this context, inspiration refers to a time when we were engaged in something that actively lifted us beyond our present circumstances. Most of us can readily think of activities