40 Ways to Practice Self-Kindess

40 Ways to Practice Self-Kindness

I recently read this article. Some of the items I have been working on for some time. Some of the items I have been working on for a shorter period of time. Some of the items I don’t like at all and rejected them as suggestions.

Usually when I read lists of suggestions for doing things better in my life, I like the suggestions and often like the idea of doing several of them. But usually I do nothing. I guess I get kind of overwhelmed and the article or suggestions from books or others often get lost in the effort of managing my daily life and healing work.

So I decided this time to try something different; to pick out five items from the list and to try to work on them for several years.

Here are the five things that I have been working on:

Don’t forget to play.

(Always a difficult thing for me to integrate into my life. But I have been working hard at playing. One thing I did do this past week was to buy the dvd It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and have watched it several times. I love that show and try to watch it each year, and now I can watch it whenever I want instead of trying to catch it’s once a year airing. I’ll be writing about this suggestion more in the next few weeks and months.)

Listen to your body.

(Especially I have been using this suggestion the last few weeks for when I am tired and need to lie down, and need to rest or sleep. Look, I really don’t want to do this, but when I need to lie down and need to rest or need to take a nap or go to bed in the middle of the day or can’t sleep at all, I really need to be good and kind to myself and not try to tough it out like I have done a lot in my life. I need to be gentler with myself. I need to listen to my body.)

Be who you really are.

(Article suggests not being concerned about what others think of you, which had always been a huge issue for me. I had been working on this for a while. I decided it might be good to approach that issue from the other side, really being who I am more of the time. I had been doing this through the blog world and practicing being more engaged in the world.

Unfortunately I get shy in public often and this hugely gets in the way of being comfortable with myself. I think my shyness has been coming out more often because I really haven’t been around a lot in public over the last nine months and now being around others is making me shy. This is a lot worse because many of the times when I am interacting with others is in a group where I don’t know others, making my shyness and social anxiety worse.

Still, with these restrictions I am still working on this issue, and I am hoping that as time goes on I will get to know more people and be getting more support, which will help for my shyness to go down to a more manageable level. I have joined a support group and gone to a Reiki share, and gone out to eat several times with several friends, which I will be writing about more on the blog. )

Express yourself.

(This item is about expressing yourself creatively. I had been kind of stuck, in a couple of important ways and am trying to overcome those.

Last week I made a goal of writing a poem and I wrote a poem. 🙂 I’m not saying that it was the best I have ever written, but it was important to do it. I also read a lot of poems, that seems to get me going creatively with words. I hadn’t written a poem since February 2013 when I started getting ready to move and then had so many bad things happen with my new roommate and the apartment. I realized that I was stuck, by the bad times, then living in a shelter for a month, then my new place, and not being online here for months due to money concerns, well it really kept me stuck and thinking about it was not getting me anywhere.

I finally got some more beading supplies so that I can make earrings, bracelets, and necklaces again. It has been about five years since I really did any real beading work.

I finally got some poster board and bought some old magazines so that I can make some collages, that too has been a long time since I created one.

I’ve also been working on bringing more of my creativity into my daily life and seeing it in more of the things that I do. One of those things is to see and acknowledge my blog as being creative and as a big part of my creative expression to the world.)

Clothes. 

The suggestion is to wear the clothes that you feel the most ‘you’ in. I had been thinking about this for a while, wanting to wear clothes that are not only very comfortable, which is always what I need to do for my health issues, is to be comfortable and for my clothes to be loose, and start adding more creative touches that are whimsical, silly, and fun. I had been buying some bead bracelets and assorted pins at the used store and I wear them on my backpack. I am always looking at clothes when I go to the used stores and sometimes at the regular stores, and rarely finding something great to go with my ideas of comfort, fun, and casual attire.

 

Creativity and Survivorhood

We are all creative. I think that creativity is an intrinsic part of life. We might have known this inside ourselves when we were children, but I believe it got shamed out of us.

I remember when I first started working on healing from ritual abuse. I was in the process of joining a support group for ritual abuse survivors, that was moderated by two women at the local sexual assault and abuse center. I had a one-on-one session with one of the women who had previously helped me find a therapist, with a referral to the therapist who worked at the center. I told her that I wished I could be creative and could create things and yearned to be creative so much. She looked at me and said, “well I don’t see that, everything about you is creative; the way you talk, the way you dress, the way you move through the world, you are creative. Give it some time, you will become more outwardly creative in other ways as well.”

I can’t say that I can see what she saw, even after all my healing work. But what I know is that I am creative and that it has been instrumental in my healing from childhood sexual abuse. What I also know that belief in creativity or being creative has very little to do with doing creative healing work and how effective it can be in healing from childhood sexual abuse.

Surprisingly I’ve been able to write a few poems lately sort of effortlessly. That has been incredibly wonderful and wonderfully shocking. So happy. I believe that I will be able to do it much more after moving.

I’ve been doing more creative expressions while doing Reiki distance healing work and Reiki energy healing on myself as well. I have been doing singing during sessions and am figuring out what I have been doing instinctively. It’s helping me to understand the value in my singing and toning and chanting during healing sessions. Seeing the energy healing work that I do as creative is helping me to understand and accept myself even further and deeper and to value myself much more.

I have plans on doing more creative healing work in the next months. I’m really excited and really looking forward to this next year. I will definitely be posting more about that and projects as time goes on.

Success in Coloring

I am very happy to report that I have accomplished my goal of coloring in a coloring book before the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas.We colored in some Christmas coloring books.

I am working on making up some goals for this year and coloring is one of them. I think it is realistic to do a goal of once a month, based on how hard this is for me and how much of my life is still up in the air, how small of a space I have in my bedroom, and how little room I have for activities of any kind and what with living in someone else’s house who is planning on trying to sell it and having to find another place to move in the spring. But I am going to try to color in the coloring books at least once a week. If I can’t I will try to be happy with the plan b goal of once a month.

Ever since I was very small my sister always tried to take everything away from me. She used to buy me or convince my mother to buy me ugly things for Christmas. She was great at robbing all the joy from me. A perfect example of this would be what she always did to me around coloring.

On my first day of kindergarten my sister went to class with me. I know that I was so scared and this is something that she had agreed to do with all of her younger siblings. I was grateful to her. The reason that I was so scared out of my mind was because my own mother was a monster, a child beater, and a sexual offender. Since my own mother was a monster, someone who was supposed to feed and clothe, love and protect me, and she didn’t I had no expectation of safety anywhere in my life.

I was scared of everything. I was scared of teachers, the school building, the other students.  My teenage sister sat in a little tiny chair next to me sitting in my chair, in front of my desk. When it came time to color, the teacher handed out a sheet of paper with a drawing of little red riding hood. I was so scared I couldn’t. I had been taught that I was completely incompetent, at everything, by my mother. I’m pretty sure now that my sister really enjoyed that, took part in it from the time I was very tiny, and liked the idea of me thinking that I was worthless.

I told her I couldn’t and that she could. She did. It was beautiful. I still remember the dark red cape and how striking that looked. I could never color that well. I took that paper home and kept it for a long time. As a child she loved to reinforce how much better she was at coloring. Yes, well I was a child and she was a teenager and then an adult.

As an adult I’ve still tried to color. My sister loved to color with me, always making sure to point out how good her coloring was. Even when she knew that I was multiple and that it was The Littles who wanted to color, she would still go out of her way to make me feel bad about myself, because my coloring just didn’t measure up.

I have never gotten good at coloring. But over the years I have continued to try, because The Littles have continued to ask to color. I’ve bought lots and lots of coloring books over the years. I currently have about 50 coloring books and 3 new sets of 96 crayon boxes.

Well actually only 2 new sets of large boxes and one box that is slightly used, after yesterday. I still judge my coloring so harshly, even while I’m aware that it is little kids doing the coloring. I would never do that to real kids. Even if they don’t have kid bodies, they are real kids and I am going to try to keep reminding myself of that. This is for them.

Usually the ugly hateful voice in my head are direct quotes from my mother abuser, but in this case I think that they are fueled and sustained by my sister and her hateful voice. Seriously, what kind of person makes a child feel bad about coloring?

I am going to try to include coloring in our creative activities and think that might help me to do it more often. I’ll post more this month about my goal setting and through the months on how that process is going.

Connectedness to Artist

There are two quotes that stick in my mind about this topic.

One is of a teacher who said that when she is teaching art to a classroom full of five year olds and she asks them to raise their hands if they are an artist and all of the five year olds will raise their hands. But in a classroom full of ten years old and she asks the same question to only half of the students raising their hands.

Probably the opposite is true. Probably artistic ability has increased rather than decreased and yet they doubt themselves.

The second is a story from the movie Six Degrees of Separation. The person is telling a story about going to his child’s school and seeing so many beautiful paintings on the walls done by the children. He asked the teacher why they were all so good. She said the genius is not in the work, but in knowing when to stop and that is when I take the painting away and say they are done.

So, like most things, having a someone to take the roles of teacher, mentor, and supporter means so much to believing in yourself and doing. I never had that before; before finding my survivor friends. But more and more I am getting support and that has helped me to be bold and to believe in myself.

I am an artist.