Sarah’s Musings on Influential Reads Part I ©

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ~Dr. Seuss

Glennon Doyle’s Untamed

✰✰✰✰✰

Sometimes a book comes along that simultaneously makes you feel so seen, expressed and inspired that you are positively gob-smacked by its aching vulnerability. That is this book. Her opening segment about a cheetah that she witnessed at a zoo, having forgotten it is a god-damn cheetah because of its conditioning, is the ultimate stage for a book about raw courage.

This one was like an arrow through my heart. It’s piercing honesty about her struggles with love, motherhood and sobriety went into the deepest part of me. The tears streamed down my face on the regular as Glennon recounts story after story about her personal agonies and triumphs. It’s a masterpiece of both the ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Spirituality and Inspiration’ genres.

“When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.”

Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map

A Guide to Creating Goals With Soul

✰✰✰✰✰

Confession: I may have a small girl crush on this phenomenal human and her divine gift with both speech and writing. I absolutely devour each episode of her podcast ‘With Love, Danielle’ and revel in the richness of her knowledge on yogic traditions, values, and advocacy for the marginalized. She is something of a hero to me. So it goes without saying that this book gifted to me by my sister-in-law, Jen Holmes, is one of the books I still recommend most often to my Tarot clients.

“When we want to feel courageous more than we want to check accomplishments off our list…When we want to feel free more than we want to please other people …When we want to feel good more than we want to look good …then we’ve got our priorities in order. Divine priorities-the kind that will steer you to the life you long for most deeply.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic

Creative Living Beyond Fear

✰✰✰✰

When a creative being shares their process and epiphanies about art with the world, it is an extraordinary gift. Well known, best-selling author Liz also wrote the wildly successful “Eat, Pray, Love” autobiography. This inspirational little book is specifically designed to have you examine your fears and your doubts about what you are creating and go deep, deep into it.

I was inspired by her passage on not burdening your art by the pressure to prove your talent by making it be your full-time income. But the nugget that has stood the test of time for me (and there are a great many) is the concept that if we do not put pen to paper, or finger to guitar, or brush to canvas when an inspiration or idea strikes, that somehow, in the ether, someone else will have a similar/same inspiration and create it instead. You must give birth to your art or someone else will have your baby. It lit quite a nice little fire under my derriere to honour my creative flashes like Alice chasing the rabbit. This small book packs a big motivational punch.

Michael Pond & Maureen Palmer’s Wasted

✰✰✰✰

In early recovery from addiction, I threw myself at every movie, book or Ted Talk that was about the subject of addiction and getting sober. This book came seven years into my recovery and STILL hit every nerve. The cherry on top of this superbly written and hair-raising chronicle was that the protagonist lived and practiced as a therapist in my hometown of Penticton. In fact, the book was recommended to me by my aunt and uncle as he was their marriage counsellor.

The story follows Michael to the East side of Vancouver and White Rock where we lose count of the recovery houses, relapses and revolving door of hospital visits. I found myself actually cheering out loud many times with tears sliding down my face at the atrocities Michael endured at the hands of alcohol. This is not just another book about getting sober.

Eckhardt Tolle’s A New Earth

Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

✰✰✰

I will admit that I found the message of the book to be hammered home a bit redundantly, but I sympathize with the author as he needed to fill a book and not just write an essay on the topic of ego. *Spoiler Alert* What was a game changer for me when the book came out in 2005 was his concept that our thoughts are not actually us. Furthermore, they are the source of most of our dysfunction. He introduced me to the concept that we are the silent observer of these ego-driven thoughts, compulsions and negative self-talk. He proposes that the earth would be renewed if we could all have an awakening to this new consciousness. “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”

Ground-breaking for its time and still one of the first books on any Google search when you search the topic of Spirituality & Awakening, this is a foundational spiritual must-read.

“Life is the dancer, you are the dance.”

Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love

Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

✰✰✰

A simple, yet universal concept is explored: “Love is the answer, no matter what the question is.” Williamson has a gorgeous eloquence and leans in hard to complex concepts from the Course in Miracles which I fully admit I never did pile-drive my way through.

To my astonishment Marianne’s publisher granted me permission to open my Tarot book with one of her famous quotes: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”

Honourable Mentions:

James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy

An Adventure

A great read for those new to exploring their beliefs in Spirituality “A man journeys to Peru and discovers the meaning of life through Nine Insights, which are invaluable to living a spiritually enriched/evolved life on Earth.”

Jen Sincero’s You Are A BadAss

How To Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life

This book is motivation at its finest, despite the superfluous title. She lights and stokes the fires of inspiration and action towards the life you dream of. It was one of the single biggest kicks in the pants to become an entrepreneur in my own right instead of lining the pockets of others.

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet

A genius and profound group of “prose-poem-fables” that was written way back in 1923! Some of the poems written…”On Death”, “On Marriage”, “On Freedom”, “On Pleasure”, could be re-visited and re-studied all life long.

Authored by:

Sarah Mayes

Sarah's Musings on the Self-Care Movement ©

By definition

The concept of self-care is a new one, but a tried and true one.

1. Self: “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action. (From Oxford)

2. Care: “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.”

“Serious attention or consideration applied to do something correctly or to avoid damage or risk.”

And together:

“The practice of taking action to preserve or improve one’s own health; the practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress.”

Being “busy”

Like anything that has gained in popularity and has a buzzword status and wanes, it collects with it: ideas, concepts, bad behaviours, and ridicule. The concept of self-care remains nonetheless vital to a growing dissatisfaction with another one of our first world boast words: busy-ness.

Busy: Another concept that once heralded a life of fullness, being in demand and popular, of being needed by others and society at large. Now, busy is an albatross to bear, it is rare to find a person who is not immersed in various stages of it ranging from mild to crippling. It’s a casual excuse texted to acquaintances and I’ve definitely used it to dodge outings deemed not a priority. Too busy in life then feels like a sacrifice of our own flow of desires. The other streams of demands we capitulate to, steal our pleasure from us.

This modern-day, convenience-laced world most of us first worlders live in, has produced this too busy side-effect at great detriment to our bodies and spirits. It is no secret that anxiety, depression, addiction, and isolation are ever-present and ever-increasing across the board. 22% of surveyed Canadians reported that they had been diagnosed with depression, with another 20% saying they had received an anxiety disorder diagnosis, 1 in 5 people in Canada will experience a mental health problem or illness in any given year. By age 40, about 50% of the population will have or have had a mental illness.*

Like with any illness, we need a remedy. Medication has its place but only after wellness options have been exhausted. We may discover that a regime that is entirely personal can be curated that provides daily relief to the demands on our senses and on our time.

In my opinion, self-care will save many of us from this ever-rising bell curve of situational anxiety/depression, feeling overwhelmed with modern life and the leaching of our precious and yet “up for sale, bargaining or trade” minutes, hours, and days. There is an anonymous quote that states: “If you don’t have time to meditate for an hour every day, you should meditate for two hours.” Ha!

Self-indulgent?

The damaging undercurrent to this concept becoming trendy is that self-care has been spun by some as indulgent, privileged, or shallow. Often teamed up with another “oh-so-now” judgment: Entitled. It may be lamented that it is incredibly indulgent to spend time on pleasing or nourishing oneself with 2+ jobs, mouths to feed, and all the responsibilities we are laden with. There’s bills, taxes, dishes-a-never-ending, chores, pets, bosses, partners, and the list goes on and on ad nauseam. So the cycle churns and the rise of unhappiness, distress, purposelessness, and fatigue grow ever more powerful as new lords to stay enslaved to. Punitive lords, ruthless lords, savage lords. Like an invisible toxic gas cloud that floats over us, we are being poisoned in the name of our duties and our selflessness.

Commitment

So I propose that we get curious and question what duty really means? Also, discipline? And, responsibility? One only needs to talk to almost anyone that has decided to start at a gym or go on a new diet (explicitly with the goal of weight loss in mind) to see how incredibly out of balance, the mainstream mindset is.

As a fitness trainer and former manager at a studio franchise, I was approached daily by people who are nervous and eager to start a program. Nine times out of ten, these individuals have the idea that weight loss should be punishing. Why else would their calories be restricted to the point of starvation, or would they endeavor to work out almost every day of the week without a break for their muscles to repair and recover? For the lactic acid (soreness) to subside before re-delving into their workouts? Left unchecked, this psychology of newcomers sees them succumb to injury, burn-out, and utter emotional deflation.

Moderation is not something we celebrate and embrace enough. Rapid results are paraded on reality tv shows as desirable and worse: awarded with prizes, money, and 15 minutes of fame. This philosophy has left a residue on the general public that weight loss, fitness, and changes in eating need to come from a place of self-flagellation. That it is our punishment for indulgence.

The very problem of “more” that landed many of these people in the predicament of extra weight on their frames is the thought process being used to escape it. More exercise must be better, right? More calorie restriction too? And that’s where we’re dead wrong.

Setting aside the argument that the mindset is inherently obsessive and opens people up to susceptibility to addiction, let’s play Devil’s advocate in the name of diligence and commitment: what people need to make lifestyle shifts requires ease. Easing into new patterns of habit has a higher chance of being adopted long term. And yet, the knee-jerk reaction of many newcomers or those returning after injury or illness is au contraire. It channels the willpower, grit, and pushing past your limits that our culture also promotes to become a successful entrepreneur. Thus, the pervasiveness of our attachment to dedication, duty, and all-or-nothing behaviors is pathological. And, failing many of us.

Counter-Culture

Self-care gets flack as being “something that snowflakes do”, but that’s just another argument to keep the status-quo ticking. If we want to begin to address that our busy way of life, spearheaded by an epidemic of growing mental health illnesses and disconnection to our humanity is not working for us, then a great place to start is to entertain that perhaps we need to try living life-less in servitude to those ideals (and to other people) and start to be experts at “refueling” ourselves.

First, I feel it’s important to identify if you are extroverted, introverted or ambivert (on a spectrum somewhere between the two.) That way, your self-care regime can be tailored to activities that need to be done solo (introverts) or with others (extroverts) or a bit of both (ambiverts)

Introvert Self-Care Ideas

• A virtual yoga class and guided meditation at home

• Read a good book curled up in a soft blanket with a quiet house

• A bubble bath by candlelight with melodic music playing

• Make a craft from Pinterest

• Write in your journal, poetry, or a short story

• Spend a cozy day watching favourite movies and eating nourishing, high vibe food

Extrovert Self-Care Ideas

• Have a Heart-to-Heart with a Good Friend

• Go to a concert or comedy show

• Attend a group exercise or yoga class

• Host a dinner party or games night with your favorite people

• Visit a second-hand store with your partner or friend and dress each other on a budget

• Go to a sacred place and meditate with the residents, wise ones or monks

Ambivert Self-Care Ideas

• A walk outside, in the forest, by the water, somewhere beautiful. Greeting everyone who you pass with a warm smile.

• Listen to a favorite podcast or try a new one while you’re on a long drive

• Go for a massage

• Visit a museum, or place you’ve never been solo

• Slow dance with your lover

For Everyone

• Cuddle with your pet

• Buy a new plant or build a garden

• Do a self-reading with Oracle or Tarot cards

• Buy a new plant or build a garden

• Make a new vision board

• See a therapist

• Write a gratitude list

The key is that you tailor your self-care practice very carefully. If you try an activity, it must elicit a few key points in order to qualify as self-care:

~It provided a state change emotionally even if it’s subtle, perhaps it’s from overwhelmed to calm but more often it will be something like unable to relax due to overthinking into a state of feeling some inner spaciousness

~You do it purely for yourself and no one else

~You feel healthier in either body, mind, or spirit (or all 3)

Let’s remove the stigma of selfishness from taking care of ourselves. To replenish our energy and our state of well-being is what is needed so greatly right now. This will take a major shift in the dominant mindset that currently values self-sacrificing, ignoring our own needs and desires, and pushing our limits to the point of break-down. We’ve tried that way for decades and the experiment has proven to fail us as we are more miserable than ever. Let’s embrace self-care, normalize it and celebrate others for prioritizing it. There is a saying in one Twelve-step program that counsels: “Try it for 90 days, if it doesn’t work for you, we’ll be happy to refund your misery and your old way of living.”

Written by & Copyright to Sarah Mayes

*According to the Canadian Mental Health Association website.