Low Power Mode

“Low Battery. Switch to low power mode?”

This message appears on my phone all too often – a sign it’s getting older and will eventually need to be replaced.

As I’ve been learning to better care for my body and overall self, I’m realizing I’ve been living life in a sort of low power mode for a long time. I’ve spent so long hibernating, trying to preserve my energy, because I’ve had so little of myself to give; and even what little energy I did have became depleted all too quickly.

As part of my commitment to taking better care of my body, I recently received a massage that helped bring this concept home for me. It had been awhile since I had received my last full-body session (and as a massage therapist, it’s important to receive work regularly). I didn’t realize how worn-out I was until my practitioner stood by my shoulders, slowly and methodically working out tension my body had been longing to let go of. It was as if my body was saying, “I feel seen and heard. Thank you.”

Not only did I feel more calm and more myself after that session, I also felt excited to then go and help other people feel the same way. I returned home with a fresh vigor for life and a desire to serve. This I believe is a glimpse of what human flourishing looks like: having my needs met so then I can help meet others’ needs out of my own abundance.

The healthier I am (physically, emotionally, and spiritually), the better I can serve others. I want to remember this lesson as I continue my journey to living life to the fullest. Life is not meant to be lived on low power mode.

The Passion Conversation, Continued

I discovered a few years ago the idea of cultivating a passion instead of finding it. The article on the Minimalists website explaining this idea brought validation to the struggle I felt so strongly in college to find something I was passionate about so I could be like my peers. During one lecture in college the speaker even asked, “What are you willing to lose sleep over?” as an exercise to determine what we get excited – or passionate – about. But the silent answer I came up with was that I’m not willing to lose sleep over anything because sleep is important. It’s important to live a balanced, healthy life.

And so my journey of personal growth developed over the years. I still love sleep every bit as much as I did in college, and I become vexed if I can’t have my sleep. As I have explored in many of my previous posts, I have many interests and many things I love to learn about. However, I only love to explore them if I can do so in a healthy way.

As I’ve grown, I’ve realized I do indeed have passion within my being, just not a traditional, 21st-century type passion. My passion is not for a particular career or cause, but for life itself.

Getting Debt-Free by Going Waste-Free

As I learn more about money management, I can’t help wanting to learn more about life management as well. And part of living a balanced life involves being mindful of what I consume and how I consume it.

One girl I follow on social media, Lauren Singer, has been my main inspiration for transitioning to a waste-free lifestyle. What does that mean? To me, that means learning ways to produce less waste and live more naturally – not because I’m turning into a hippie, but because being mindful of my consumption is leading me to a healthier way of living.

How do I do that? I’m starting by taking baby steps. After I’m finished with my current plastic toothbrush I plan to buy bamboo toothbrushes, which break down much faster than plastic. I am also using bar soap for my face and body. Bar soap requires less packaging than body wash or other liquid soap, and can also be more beneficial for the skin if it contains natural ingredients. A third step is changing out my plastic razors for a stainless steel safety razor. That is my most recent purchase, and I have to say I’ve actually enjoyed the progress of learning how to use it.

Not all of the change is fun, however. In addition to using bar soap for my skin, I have also started using a shampoo bar for my hair. For the last six weeks, my hair has been one greasy mess as the residual silicone and chemicals from drugstore shampoo have slowly disappeared. In their place, my body is having to re-train itself on how much oil it produces to regulate my hair. One thing that has helped with this is rinsing my hair with lemon juice on occasion; it functions as a conditioner as well as a way to cut through the grease. Showering in the morning has also been very helpful, instead of going to bed with wet hair (although I’m usually a night-shower-er, so that’s really weird for me!).

The most challenging and probably most tedious next step for me will be reducing my food waste. I find it much more convenient, and often cheaper, to buy frozen vegetables in plastic packaging than buying fresh ones and cutting them up and potentially having to throw them out because I didn’t eat them quickly enough. I also don’t like cooking and meal-planning in general, so my journey with eating habits has always been a difficult one. I hope to remedy this by developing more consistent routines with meal-planning, and perhaps even utilizing the local farmers’ market more.

I still live pretty wastefully, so when I say I’m taking baby steps I mean really baby steps. I imagine it will take many months for me to transition to where I want to be, but it starts with becoming a conscious consumer and growing from there.

Taking Care of Debt By Taking Care of Myself

As shared in my previous post, my goal for 2018 is to be debt free by December 1. Throughout the year I will be focusing not only on financial freedom, but also overall wellness. Taking care of myself will help me achieve my goals in a healthy way.

I am mindful of my health this year, since I want to put money toward debt rather than emergency expenses. As such, for the month of January I am working on developing routines to help keep my body healthy.

I have been doing 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene via her YouTube channel, and after January I am planning to continue a consistent yoga practice several times per week. It is not only great for improving the body’s strength and flexibility, but also for calming and focusing the mind. I don’t love working out, but yoga takes the focus away from working out and instead directs it to being well overall.

This winter, I am developing a nightly routine of making tea (it’s actually a concoction of cinnamon, honey, and hot water). These ingredients are loaded with antioxidants that help fight bacteria to keep the body healthy. I’m finding it helpful during the cold months. Plus it’s also a cozy way to end the day.

After tea, I do oil-pulling with coconut oil to enhance my dental health. Recently I began noticing some sensitivity in my gums, but the oil pulling has helped clear out any bacteria as well as eliminate the discomfort.

Before going to sleep at night, I wind down by doing a bit of reading. I’m aiming to read 15 books this year, and I keep track using the GoodReads app. It’s a lot of fun and I’ve discovered some interesting books. Reading helps keep my mind alive.

I still have trouble sleeping sometimes. I used to struggle with really bad insomnia, and I still awaken several times at night, but I am thankfully able to go back to sleep. I use a sleep-tracker app to help maintain an awareness of how I’m doing, and I will say that having a daily and nightly routine has helped tremendously.

As I start the morning, I usually drink hot water. I don’t have much desire for coffee or tea, but it is a welcome treat on occasion. I really do love the warmth of hot water in the cold weather. It helps me ease me awake as I begin working.

I’ve discovered that developing healthy routines has helped nurture a spirit of contentment in my being. And while I’m ambitious about the future, I’m also learning to become one with the moment I’m in. And it’s even okay if my plans or goals change, because I’m satisfied with the now. It’s all I’ve got, and I’m loving it.

When Self Awareness Is Really Rumination

Many have complimented me for my self awareness, my ability to understand my personal growth challenges and identify my weaknesses. However, what many do not understand is that not all of my musings are a result of self awareness, but rather rumination.

Like a cow chewing its cud, I regurgitate my thoughts and turn them over and over in my head. Unlike a cow, I can never seem to fully digest them. They keep coming back up to haunt me. While I have done this for almost as long as I can remember, some periods of time are worse than others. My obsessing over various topics has kept me awake at night, trapped me in bed in the morning, and made me late or absent to scheduled engagements. Sometimes I can distract myself long enough to be productive; sometimes I can’t.

In trying to dig to the root of my struggle, I think I may have begun doing this as a self-soothing tactic to remedy my loneliness. I know that my thoughts are not logical, so instead of communicating them to others, I allow them full reign in my head. I don’t really think of it as anxiety as much as a means of comfort, much like a child sucking on her thumb.

I have tried to process these thoughts with people I am close to, but what I have discovered is I reason them away. I may acknowledge that they are illogical feelings, and almost apologize for them to the people I talk to. In recent reflection, I realized I still talk to my friends about the same thoughts and feelings I was having a year ago. The obsession is relentless.

So what do I do with all that? I have tried reasoning my feelings away, because I am a huge fan of being a person of reason, but there is no reasoning with feelings, no matter how convincing the argument. I think what I crave more than anything is for someone to enter into the worry with me, to cry with me before helping to bring me out of it. To help me realize that my feelings, however illogical, are valid.

Chronic Guilt

Of the many difficulties women tend to face, one that I particularly wrestle with daily is guilt. To quote a woman I once knew, “I came out of the womb apologizing.” Different women may struggle with this to different degrees, and some may not encounter it at all, but it is a very real thing, regardless if it all seems to be just in your head.

Regardless of how many times we tell ourselves that we don’t have anything to feel guilty about, that nagging feeling that we’re doing something wrong never fails to wheedle its way into our subconscious, contaminating even the most innocent of intentions. If I say such and such, it might come across wrong. But if I don’t say it, I’ll be wishing I did. Just recently, I was talking with a friend of mine about this, and we were surprised to discover that we both feel guilty spending money. Buying food is perfectly logical and necessary, but saving money is essential. Buying clothes that fit well is important, but we can survive without – no use wasting money. The problem with this mindset is that money in and of itself isn’t really worth anything, but is rather a tool that we can use to help us obtain what we need to survive, and perhaps even splurge on an occasional treat if circumstances allow.

No matter how many times I hear the saying, “Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish, it’s an investment,” I still think that I am inconveniencing someone just by existing. So to all the women (and men), who battle with this, I want to tell you that you’re not alone. Let’s be friends, and then we’ll feel guilty together.

The Intricacy of Intimacy

“Had a great talk with a friend of mine last night. We conversed until well past midnight about life, relationships, and our personalities. We got to talking about Myers-Briggs personality types, and how my friend’s personality is complimentary to mine, mine being INFJ, and hers being ENFP. With our two middle letters being the same and the outside letters being different, our personalities work well together. We joked about how it was a shame one of us wasn’t a guy so we could marry each other.

Later that night something clicked while I was lying in bed: I almost began feeling less lonely. Yes, I still longed for intimacy with a guy as well as sarcastic banter, but I realized that I found it really refreshing to be with someone whose personality complemented mine and who was aware of her mental health. I realized that while my loneliness didn’t go away, she is someone I would feel comfortable being lonely with. Not in a weird, romantic way, but such that we’ve been able to develop a friendship over the years that has allowed us to share personal things with each other. And that realization makes me happy.”

That was a journal entry of mine from back in April of this year. I was visiting a friend whom I hadn’t seen for awhile, and I loved how we could pick back up from where we left off despite not having talked in who knows how long. We have been friends for several years, and if the saying is true that says if you’re friends with someone for longer than seven years you’re friends for life, I guess that means that she and I are pretty much stuck with each other, no matter how many miles are between us.

I share this to express my reflections on the human desire to bond, and how that desire has affected me. Often I would describe myself as being lonely, no matter how often I spend time with people. I have realized that loneliness cannot be cured by another person, and while socialization does help to remedy it, becoming dependent on other people for our own happiness is unhealthy. This is why I say that I don’t want someone to take away my loneliness, but rather I want someone to be lonely with.

A few months ago when I visited my friend, I realized that she was someone I enjoyed feeling lonely with. We were able to share with each other things we struggled with, things we dreamed about, things we thought were funny. While we couldn’t solve each other’s problems, we could offer our friendship to each other, and that has been an incredible gift.

Our personalities are not the same, but that allows us to learn from each other. It is through my friendship with her that I realized that intimacy comes in many different forms. When I hear the word intimacy I automatically think of physical closeness, but it is so much more than that. When conversing with this friend, I have felt somewhat of an intellectual intimacy, if you will, because we would explore philosophical topics and life issues in a way that people don’t normally do in everyday interactions. Other times I have felt an emotional intimacy because I would share with her a personal battle that I was facing.

My realization of the complexity of intimacy is important because it has helped me to understand that loneliness is often very complicated, but that does not necessarily make it a bad thing. Sometimes I crave emotional or intellectual intimacy in the form of something mentally stimulating, while at other times I just flat out want to cuddle with someone. Knowing this helps me to better understand how to take care of myself, and hopefully will help me be able to better care for others.