Author: jennifererwin

I’ve always been tidy. Growing up sharing a room with my sister you could see
this visibly. My side (of the room/dresser/bookshelf) would be clean, simple,
and orderly and my sister’s…less so.
Today, this continues. Several years ago, I devoured Marie Kondo’s book The
Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and

Organizing. I fell in love in love with many of her principles and embrace (with
moderation 🙂 the idea of keeping what possessions bring me joy and letting go
of what doesn’t.
However, this same quality often brings me heartache when I turn to what lives
inside of me.
My emotions, thoughts, longings, memories are often very messy and no matter
how much “ordering” of my mind I do (meditation, questioning my thoughts,
journaling) there is always more mess than order. My emotions and memories
pop up at inconvenient times and I seem to have an endless clutter of negative
thoughts that can arrive through the backdoor of my mind and create havoc on
an otherwise lovely day.
And most importantly the more I resist the innate messiness of it all, the more
mess I create. Kind of like when I tried to encourage (okay, coerce) my sister to
clean up her side of the room.
One of my self-compassion teachers said as much in a class. In her charming
accent (she’s from the Netherlands), she said, “We can’t konmari ourselves. We
can’t simply throw or donate what no longer brings us joy and put everything
else into pretty boxes, as much as we might sometimes want to.”
Our minds and hearts are a di

erent space than a closet.

So instead of trying to "clean up" my mind, I’m loving myself, despite the mess
and because of the mess.
The intention of self-compassion isn’t to solve the pain of life or to take it away.
(although many of us - myself included - secretly hope it will!)
The true goal of self-compassion is to give ourselves care, kindness, compassion
BECAUSE we are su

ering. So our aim isn’t to make ourselves less “messy” but

to “become a compassionate mess”.
What does this look like?
Well, messy 🙂
I’ll be honest, it is a work in progress, but the simplest way I’ve found is to just let
myself BE and then embrace my whatever is going on in my “beingness” with
compassion.
I just let myself BE lost, sad, irritable, scared, awkward…whatever.

This is hard, so I often call up the invitation that’s given at the end of many of the mindful self-compassion meditations,
“take a breath…let yourself feel what you feel…let yourself in this moment be just
as you are.”
And I infuse that with as much warmth, presence, and care as I can.
It definitely isn’t always pretty. And there is still an inordinate amount of junk
rattling around in my mind that doesn’t bring me joy, but I’ve found that my
“inner house” has become more spacious and it feels easier to hold the mess.
And in that, there is joy.
My invitation to you this week is to embrace the mess with compassion.
Find a moment to pause this week, take a deep breath and let yourself feel what
you feel and be exactly as you are…just for a moment. And embrace what you
nd with a little warmth and love just because it’s hard sometimes to live within
the mess.
❤
Jennifer

The past few weeks I’ve felt ungrounded, scattered, off.

I’ve been resisting all my regular habits.  I’ve got a case of the “don’t wanna’s”.

I don’t want to meditate, or exercise, or eat healthy, or even give myself self-compassion.

I simply want to stop feeling this way and I’ve turned to distractions for relief  (like Netflix, fried foods, my phone ) but they only leave me feeling yucky and stuck.

I’ve also turned to a subtle form of being critical of myself.  It can sound like tough love, “Come on, Jennifer, you know you’ll feel better after exercise, just do it!!”  While this can be effective for some people, for me it elicits the response, “you can’t make me” and I resist even harder.

So what do I do when I’m in a rut and I have challenging feelings that I don’t want to face?

I head to the lake.

One of the essential practices that helps me turn and hold the seemingly unbearable feelings that I sometimes don’t want to hold, is to find a space that reminds me that I can feel spacious and rooted.

Finding a space like this helps me to call on forces outside myself to help me remember and embody the fact that I am so much larger than this one experience.

I need to remember and get infused with a sense of wide-open-spaciousness and a sense of being grounded and rooted in my body.

While this is possible at any moment by calling on your own internal imagery to generate this reminder, I find that when I’m really struggling I need external support.

I need to BE somewhere spacious like at the edge of a lake, or a field, or under the sky.  I need to BE sitting on the earth with my back against a tree.

Our culture often implies that we need to be self-sufficient and source our own strength.

Sourcing our own strength is wonderful and a capacity to develop but it doesn’t mean that the capacity to find and allow resources outside of us to support us is any less valuable.

In fact, I think it powerfully reminds us of the beauty and strength of interconnection and is something that feeds my soul especially right now.

So I called upon the lake.  I sat underneath a canopy of cottonwood trees and felt the earth holding me up.  I took some moments to sit quietly and let the power of the space remind me I am more than this moment in time, more than these uncomfortable feelings and thoughts.  I let the egret standing still on the shoreline remind me to be patient and observant.  I let the power of this space with each inhale and exhale remind me that I too am spacious and grounded.

I left feeling more centered, capable, and connected.  

I’ve been a little kinder to myself and my experience since leaving the lake.

This is a practice I encourage you to take if you need the same reminder.

It’s such an essential and fundamental practice that I’ve included it in my online course: Become Your Own Best Friend: Tame Your Inner Critic and Awaken Your Authentic Self.

Our best friends offer us the space to be held in loving grounded awareness and when we cultivate self-compassion we need ways to generate that spacious, grounded feeling within.

For this month, I've unlocked Module 4- Presence Yourself: Getting Grounded and Expansive. This module is dedicated to this concept of grounded and spacious awareness.  Head to the course site HERE and on the course page click on Free Preview to take a peek and try it out for yourself.  My hope is that it offers a concrete way to generate a sense of confidence to hold whatever comes your way with more depth, ease, and space.

“I’m 95 years old. Happy and content sitting on my front porch in my favorite rocking chair staring out into a sea of evergreen trees. The sun is just peeking up over the mountains and the birds are beginning their morning chorus. A dog happily sits by my feet and a dear cat is purring on my lap. I slowly rock and think about my life. What has brought me joy? What has brought me peace? What am I so grateful I put time and attention toward? What regrets linger?”

Happy New Year!

What is your relationship with the New Year and creating goals and resolutions?

Love it? 

Overwhelmed by it?

Dislike it?

Never do it? 

Set them and then don’t follow through?

Wherever you land with them, I believe I’ve been there. As a recovering perfectionist and overachiever I generally love setting goals. Most years I adore sitting down with a brand new calendar and a blank journal page and thinking about what I want to create for the year ahead.

However, those same tendencies are also my downfall and can create a sense of overwhelm and discouragement.

• I’ve found myself with a list so long, so urgent and important that I can’t decide where to start.
• I’ve set myself up with a rigorous schedule that soon falls by the wayside when living a messy life sneaks back in.
• I’ve felt discouraged that my big goals and plans often don’t leave me with the feeling that I ultimately thought they would.

What I’ve discovered about setting goals is that there are often two missing steps that most of us fail to stop and do before setting our goals.

• The first place to start is to reflect on your values. What is truly, TRULY important to you? If you were in your 90’s reflecting back on your life what would have mattered? Where would you have wanted to spend your time, attention, and resources?  This clears out goals that land as "shoulds" and also helps you narrow down your list to the things that might really matter. Then only choose 1-2 goals that fully align with your values and where you want your attention and focus to go. We can get a lot done in a year but if we scatter ourselves in too many directions we can easily lose focus and will accomplish less on the things that matter the most.

• The second place is to uncover any sneaky beliefs that are hiding out underneath a goal. One of my biggest beliefs is that I will become “better” and thus “feel better” by doing a goal. Now this sounds great right? Who doesn’t want to improve and become a better version of themselves? So let’s dig deeper. Underneath my desire to become better is a desire to escape the hardships of life. There is a belief that if I become better I won’t feel as bad about myself or get as angry or frustrated. Maybe people will like me better and I won’t worry about being rejected? See? Sneaky!  The truth is that to try to avoid life’s hardships is a fruitless task. Suffering is part of being human. Experiencing challenging emotions is part of it all. Creating, achieving and living our best lives does not exempt us from this. So dig deep underneath your goals and ask this question, “so that I can/will…?” and see what comes up. Ask this at least 4 times for each goal to understand all the thoughts and beliefs (beautiful and challenging) lurking around it.

• I want to meditate regularly...so that I can/will…?
• I want to lost x amount of weight...so that I can/will…?
• I want to be more patient….so that I can/will…?

What I’ve realized through these steps is how much I’ve let goal setting be a barrier to actually loving myself exactly as I am. It obviously doesn’t need to be this way. Creating and achieving goals is a perfect way to learn and gain a lot of joy out of life. But if we do it out of a desire to escape who we are then we are missing the boat in terms of satisfaction and growth.

This quote by Pema Chodron has been a good mantra,

“We can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is...not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.”

Whatever your goals are this new year, I hope that along the way they support you in befriending yourself!  That is who we are with for the whole of our lives.  At the end of our life, I imagine we would like to enjoy the company of the one person who has been with us the entire journey.

Here is to a year of compassionate presence and befriending ourselves just as we are.

❤

Jennifer

"The goal of practice is to become a compassionate mess"

-Rob Nairn

You set amazing habit goals and never fully achieve them

You feel anxious a lot of the time

You are harder on yourself than you are on anyone around you

You get irritable and cranky when you know you’ve made a mistake

You feel frustrated when you don’t get what you want (even though you haven’t asked for it)

Does any of this sound like you?  Have you been working on self-development for years?  Have you read book after book always excited and energized to try another strategy promising to generate greater happiness, ease, peace.  Only then to try it for a couple weeks, and eventually, have it gathering dust on your shelf (with all the other self-help books).  

Are you on the hamster wheel of personal growth, always hopeful that you are getting somewhere new, but end up feeling like you are spinning your wheels and replaying the same patterns over and over again?

Do you feel worse and worse the more you try, and have a story that maybe you aren’t disciplined enough, dedicated enough, or working hard enough?

Many of us sensitive, aware, and growth-oriented women have been reading books, taking courses, and trying numerous strategies to “fix” these patterns and challenges in our lives with short-term success.  

You are not alone!

The problem is not with our lack of discipline or dedication (although goodness knows we often blame ourselves for it).

The problem lies in how we relate to ourselves while executing these strategies.

I cannot tell you the number of programs, books, and strategies I’ve tried, worked through, completed, felt an initial hit of success, and then a return of the old patterns of thinking and doing things. 

As a recovering perfectionist, I can be incredibly hard on myself wanting to grow into a better human being.  However, what I‘ve found through my journey toward greater growth is that it is really hard to do better if you feel bad.  When you feel bad about yourself and you are internally shaming or blaming, you end up having two choices: rebel or submit.  

I vacillate between both.  

At times when I am harsh with myself, I end up feeling miserable and submitting to the thoughts as the ultimate truth, “ Of course, I can’t get anything right...I’m not enough….I always fail…etc”.  I agree with my inner critic and end up sabotaging myself by reinforcing the beliefs that are playing in my head making it even harder for me to grow, change and learn. If I always fail, what use is there in trying?  If I’m not enough, then, of course, I’ll need to work ten times harder than anyone else and become exhausted and overwhelmed in the process!

Then there are times when I feel bad about a choice I’ve made and I choose it again just because I’m so sick and tired of feeling bad about myself.  Here is where my inner rebel comes out. Let’s say I’ve watched too many episodes of a TV show in a row (anyone else love a good Netflix binge??) I know I have other things I’d like to do that day and so I start shaming/blaming myself for not stopping earlier, not having more willpower, or maybe even for watching any TV in the first place.  I might call myself lazy, a loser, weak, anything to motivate myself to get off the couch and onto something else. When my rebel comes out though, I just keep watching out of spite and to show “myself” that while I may be all those things I just don’t care. If I am all those things, I may as well enjoy it!

Both of these strategies leave me feeling empty, agitated, less present, and definitely less productive.  

Sadly, I’ve discovered that whether I submit or rebel, beating myself up is the least productive way to feel satisfied in my life.

However, being harsh with myself is my top “go-to” strategy to find deeper satisfaction.

Ironic, right?  

The one tool that blocks joy, peace, fulfillment, growth from my life is the one tool I always pull out when I want more of these.  

The quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” is quite apt for this pattern in my life!

Do you have this “insane” pattern?  Most of us have harsh inner critics that play repeating thoughts and beliefs in our heads.  While some are harsher and some are milder they are all trying to do the same thing: keep us safe

Yep, we are hard-wired to keep ourselves safe (physically and emotionally) and this is one of the biggest ways we do it.

The sad truth is that this strategy makes us less safe and doesn’t allow us to play our biggest game.

When we are playing the shame/blame game we pay less attention to the environment around us, we lose touch with our own wise inner voice, and we miss clues that would help us make good choices.  These are all invaluable skills when we are trying to navigate the world and live fulfilling lives.

Women, as a whole, are emerging into a beautiful time period where we are freed up from the daily grind of survival.  Most of us in first world countries have freedoms and opportunities that women in the very recent past couldn’t have dreamed of.  However, for many reasons including thousands of years of conditioning and a culture that demands more of everyone, we are stuck in patterns of shame and blame.  

Most of us are not facing true outward constraints (all our basic survival needs are met), however, we place inner constraints on ourselves that hold us back from becoming the fullest version of ourselves and living a satisfying life.  

This to me is a great tragedy!

Think of your best girlfriend, your sister, your role model, your favorite female teacher/speaker.  Aren’t they brilliant, beautiful, kind, generous?

We already have an amazing talent for lifting others up around us, listening deeply, serving to the utmost the needs of others.

However, our biggest responsibility and the one most essential to our growth is to turn our powers inward and listen and honor deeply all that arises within us.

This I believe is the key to our growth, our joy, and our power. I know it has been for me.

Self-empathy is a term used in NVC-Non Violent Communication (a.k.a. compassionate communication) that describes the process of turning towards ourselves in the way we would with another person when we are trying to attune to what is going on for them.  

This is a foreign concept for most of us.  It feels unnatural and difficult and many stories and blocks arise when we try and attune to ourselves.  I struggled with this for many years trying to find a way to relate to myself that felt real, kind, and open.

Once I found the place within me where I could turn towards all that was happening inside me, I felt an immense amount of freedom and peace.  I developed a deeper sense of trust that I was alright, just as I was. I began to build a spacious pause between my thoughts and actions, which enabled me to see the stories of “not enough” for what they were, just stories.

The process of self-empathy is simple but not always easy.  It is about connecting with the part of you that is already capable of holding a spacious place for whatever feelings and true needs are happening.  Then turning towards them with that same spaciousness, witnessing all that comes up, and allow it to be.  

Allow yourself to feel angry because you’d like respect  

Allow yourself to feel despair because you’d really love deeper connections and intimacy with others in your life

Allow and acknowledge that you feel scared and anxious because you want a grounding sense of safety and belonging

This allowing and being with is a radical shift from anything that we’ve been taught.  We resist it because it feels overwhelming or scary and we often worry that our emotions will sweep us up and never let us go.  We might also be afraid to look at what we truly want and need because it means that we have to acknowledge that we deeply long for it.   We have to stand in a place of power knowing that our needs matter just as much as anyone else’s.  

This first step of learning how to be connected to the powerful and wise part of ourselves is essential if we are to move toward fullness and joy in our lives.  It is essential if we are going to contribute our gifts and feel a true sense of belonging, safety, and purpose.

______________________________________________________________________________

Imagine, waking up in the morning renewed, refreshed, eager to start the day

Imagine, feeling comfortable asking for what you truly want

Imagine, feeling joy at another woman’s success

Imagine, making a mistake, finding the lesson and then….moving on!

Imagine, living in alignment with your values and with purpose

______________________________________________________________________________

This all becomes possible and viable once we start attuning to ourselves and allowing our internal landscape to become spacious and kind.  We can truly become our own best friend and feel confident and resilient as we continue to grow into the most vibrant and courageous version of ourselves.

So today, I urge you to stop, take a breath, and try this process of self-empathy:

• Find a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed. Take a breathe and connect with the ground, focusing on the sensation of being supported by the earth.
• Imagine an open, welcoming space surrounding you.  (I like to hold an image of a wide-open field). Then feeling both grounded and open, connect to yourself.
• Ask, “What am I feeling?” and listen with no agenda, with love, and openness.
• Acknowledge the feeling by saying to yourself, “I see you are feeling….”
• Breathe, connect to both the groundedness and the openness.
• Ask, “What am I needing?” and again listen with no agenda, openness, and love.
• Acknowledge the need by saying to yourself, “I see you are needing….”
• Breathe, connect to the feeling of groundedness and openness and allow your feelings and needs to be just as they are.  Allow them to exist without changing them or wishing them away.  
• Move into a space of gratitude.  Give thanks for whatever feelings and needs arose, feeling gratitude that they revealed themselves to you.  
• Take a breath and connect with the earth and the spacious feeling around you, knowing that you can return to this practice and offer yourself this space of acceptance and allowing any time you want.

Trying this process can feel awkward, uncomfortable, or foreign but I promise that over time it can become a touchstone and a practice that transforms EVERYTHING!

If you'd like more help turning the part of yourself that easily offers compassion and care to others towards YOURSELF, please sign up for a FREE *Start from the Heart* session and I'd love to support you in uncovering this latent superpower of transformation.

I am an excellent dart player! I mean really top notch, My aim for the heart of things is spot on and I can unleash darts without thinking too hard about it.

Unfortunately I always lose at this game of darts!

Most of us do.

In their wonderful book, Budda’s Brain, the authors discuss suffering and how in life a certain amount of suffering is inevitable….we live in physical deteriorating bodies, we can get hurt, people die, and eventually we do too. However, there is a great deal of suffering that is not inevitable but we choose to experience it anyway.

They refer to these two types of suffering as the first and second dart. Here is an example of how it works:

Let’s say that you forget to use an oven mitt when taking something hot out of the oven (*my husband can attest I experience this sort of suffering way too often)

It is hot, burns your hand, and it hurts---First Dart

Then there is the thought, “Jennifer! How can you be so stupid….? You do this way to often?….Are you ever going to learn? You talk about being mindful but this is being unmindful at it’s worst!!” -----Second Dart parade 🙂

Then I might even add even more insult to injury and snap at my partner who is shaking his head at me (with love) and then experience the negative consequence of hurt feelings and guilt for having snapped at him-----extra Darts for sprinkles.

Do you see how an inevitable dart of life can cause pain but then most of us add at least another dart or two (or more) for good measure and suffer a lot more than is necessary?

Then there are darts that get thrown with no first dart to begin with. We all sometimes react to something good with a well aimed second dart.

Someone gives us an amazing gift and all we can do is feel bad that we didn’t get them something as good in exchange.

Our boss gives us a great review at work and we worry that they will find out that we are not really worthy of the praise.

We are having a sweet moment with our child and all of a sudden we panic at the thought that something could happen to them.

These are the saddest dart games of all because we are given the opportunity to experience joy, gratitude, and happiness and we are suffering instead!

I’m on a mission to stop playing this dart game altogether and definitely stop being my own target.

Here are 3 first steps to get started:

The first step is awareness. Once you realize what kind of dart game you are playing, stop take a beat, breathe and activate your thoughtful self.

The second step is acknowledgment. Turn towards yourself with tenderness and acknowledge that this is a moment of suffering. Our brains are built to support negativity and pain (in order to learn lessons and survive). However, our brains are also super flexible and good at learning new neural pathways. Help your brain by being kind to yourself and firing a new neural pattern in your brain.

The third step is to breathe and watch the darts fall….but move yourself out of the way so you are no longer the target.

I still touch hot pans from the oven (more often than is comfortable to admit :). However, my new choice is to stop, breathe, be ever so kind to myself, and then watch the cascade of darts that will most likely come at me from my inner critic and move out of the way. That way I can watch the darts fall like rain drops around me and I can move on with my day…choosing of course to find the oven mitt and place it on my hand before opening the oven again!

Hi, I am Jennifer and I am a perfectionist.

I probably will always have the propensity to aim for perfection but I am in recovery.

I had a recent experience that I want to share. I showed up to a meeting unprepared. I had agreed the week before to be the notetaker and was supposed to read our shared agreements at the designated time. I got on the skype call and was chatting away relaxed and enjoy the company of others when someone asked who had signed up for what roles and I realized one of them was me. I had totally failed to be prepared.

So I started to frantically set up the notes, adjust my screen so I could type and see everyone, and was feeling overwhelmed because my computer was being so slow and google docs was freezing on me.

As the meeting got started, and we jumped into an opening meditation, in the background of my mind I could hear that oh so familiar critical voice of mine, “Why are you so unprepared? You should have looked at what you were supposed to do? All the other women here are prepared and you don’t have your s*** together? “ ….and then the feeling of dread of the thought, “If I’m not perfect (and perfectly on top of my game) I’m letting others down and they won’t accept me and I’ll be left all alone and won’t survive” ----dramatic yes, but often our inner voices from childhood are in survival mode and still running the show.

So as this is running through the opening meditation and I’m trying to get my bearings on getting the notes set up for our call, the leader then asks for the notetaker to read the shared agreements. Well, that was the moment for me that changed everything. I did not have the notes in front of me, it would take me a moment for me to locate them while everyone waited. So I made a choice, I decided to stop beating myself up and ask for support. I shared my imperfection with the group saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t come prepared, it will take me a moment to locate the notes but if anyone has them in front of them would they be willing to read them in my stead”

So the shift from, "I’m all alone and only if I’m perfect will I be supported, cared for, and allowed to BE" shifted into a new and emerging belief, "life and others can be forgiving (especially in certain environments). I don’t have to rely only on myself and that others will honor me whether or not I am perfect or not". In fact, the modeling of imperfection was perhaps the biggest gift I could share in light of the group that we were in. Some people might have had some minor frustration but that was (theirs not mine) and no one was going to ban me from the group for this minor flaw in my performance.

This is my daily practice in my journey as a recovering perfectionist. I keep showing up as if life will support me and that I am ENOUGH in my imperfection and witness with delight all the ways that it shows up as TRUTH.

Are you a recovering perfectionist? Try this belief on for size and see how life can transform for you!!