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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