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Join me (or have your daughter join me) for an upcoming workshop

By Rosie Molinary on May 6, 2012

First, Love You 

May 19 or 23, 9 am until 5 pm, Triple Play Farm in Davidson, North Carolina

Are you ready to fall in love with life because you have finally fallen in love with yourself?

Are you ready to be energized by who you are and what you have to offer?

Are you ready to give the world your gifts because you are no longer distracted by what you perceive as your flaws?

Then, it is time for First, Love You.

Imagine You:

  •     CONFIDENT- able to bloom because you have finally embraced your essential truth.
  •     COMPASSIONATE- armed with the tools, after a day of working with horses and with yourself, to honor yourself in the same way you have always honored others.
  •      INSPIRED- to live your full expression so that you may inspire others.
  •     AUTHENTIC- unafraid to embrace who you are and open to the transformation authenticity brings.
  •     VIBRANT- ready to take your newfound knowledge out into the world to live your passion and purpose.

Spend the day at First, Love You: a soul-warming retreat where you will connect with an intimate group of dedicated women (the group will be no larger than six), learning tricks and tools- from horses and humans- that unleash your authenticity, honor who you are and what you are meant to give to this world, and give valuable insight on how to move forward in self-acceptance.

This retreat includes equine-facilitated learning with Triple Play Farm’s compassionate and compelling herd.  You will also be guided in contemplative and creative self-awareness and self-acceptance exercises. You will experience what it feels like to be held up to be your best self in a relaxing environment and supported with a delicious light breakfast, gourmet lunch, and afternoon snack provided by Nikki Moore of Food Love, a Triple Play Farm t-shirt, and a signed copy of Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance.

There are just 6 spots available at each First, Love You retreat.

visionSPROUT

June 16th from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm, Triple Play Farm in Davidson 

If visionSPARK was all about claiming your vision, then visionSPROUT is all about making it happen. You’ll start the visionSPROUT experience with a pre-SPROUT playbook that will help you declare celebrations and identify sticking points. At visonSPROUT, you’ll reclaim what maters to you, receive guidance on how to live what you want and let go of the rest, and you will leave with tools, tips, and newfound energy for your unique journey.

*This workshop is a private event for this year’s visionSPARK attendees only.

Girl Power Camp 

June 18-22 at Triple Play Farm in Davidson

Want your daughter to learn self-awareness, self-confidence and self-acceptance? Would she love doing it by working with horses and through creative activities? Designed for girls ages 10-14, Girl Power camp combines groundwork and mounted activities with the farm’s gentle therapy horses and lessons in confidence, leadership, teamwork and self-awareness.

Right in the Middle 

August 15th from 9 am until 12 pm or 6 pm until 9 pm in Charlotte 

Right in the Middle is a fun, 3-hour workshop for girls in rising 6th and 7th grades, and their moms. Join us for tips, insights, and solutions to managing the middle school social scene. We’ll deal with changing friendships, boys, gossip, parties, bullies, body image, and being true to yourself. Without an understanding of how to manage this new social landscape, girls can easily become overwhelmed or distracted, and success in school, not to mention self-esteem, suffers. This event is led by middle school expert Michelle Icard, creator of Athena’s Path & MichelleintheMiddle.com, with special presentations by Rosie Molinary, author of Beautiful You, and Melisa Holmes, co-founder of Girlology.

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close your doors, people

By Rosie Molinary on May 4, 2012

Three years ago last week, we discovered an intruder in our house. A stinky, slick intruder under the baby’s bed. Of all the things I have blogged about in the last 5 years, this is one of the most read posts. Evidently, hundreds of people entire ‘black rat snake’ in a search engine every week in the spring and, thus, get directed to this blog entry. Many of you are new readers and so I thought I’d share the intruder story just so that I can be certain that you have had the public service announcement that you should close your doors. And just so you know, BF’s commitment to close our door lasted all of three days.

If you had asked me last week if I was scared of snakes, I would have told you that I wasn’t the kind of person to go running from a snake (well, unless my life was in danger). And there is evidence of this— I have been around snakes in the past without absolutely freaking out. But then this weekend happened, and, as it turns out, I am the type of person to go running from a snake, even if my life is not in danger.

Here’s the story: We have four* enormous oak trees in our yard, and BF is obsessed with picking up all the crap they drop every weekend year round (which, by the way, is totally fine by me as I have zero interest in picking up anything they drop and they drop a crap load of stuff).

As he does this, he comes in and out of the house– getting water, changing his sweat-drenched shirt, etc. You might recall that BF and I set resolutions for each other at the beginning of this year. The resolution that I set for him? Shutting the door.

So on Sunday afternoon, BF was hard at work on his yard project, and baby was hanging with him in his bouncy seat on the front porch. I thought I would use the time to do a little laundry in baby’s room. Just as I rounded the corner into baby’s room, I happened to look down rather than keep my gaze at eye level. And what do you know? There is a snake crawling underneath baby’s crib. A long, black snake.

So, what did our heroine do? Well, she ran out of the house like Phoebe in Friends. Screaming at the top of her friggin’ lungs. I kid you not. I know some of you don’t KNOW me, but, seriously, running out of the house like Phoebe screaming at the top of my lungs is so not me. I am more of the I Can Rescue Me type. Or so I thought.

Anyway, in the yard, I found BF who asked why I was yelling.

“There’s a snake under baby’s bed,” I screamed. And he looked at me like I was hallucinating.

“Can you get it?” Then he looked at me like I was crazy. Because BF– though he does not look like it– is the kind of person who would run away from a snake screaming, and he’s the first to tell you that.

“No, I can’t get it.” So I cajoled BF over to the neighbors’ house.   Where our male neighbor said he couldn’t do it but offered up his wife to take care of business.

Sure enough, Carly, who is equally gifted with cupcakes or raptors, came right on over to our house (in running clothes and shoeless!!!), marched into baby’s bedroom all by herself and when she didn’t see the snake, looked under the crib to find where it had coiled itself into its smallest shape in the corner, reluctantly took the running shoes I made her put on to protect her toes, moved the crib by herself because I was standing on baby’s bathtub (with a camera) and BF couldn’t even be in the house, picked up the snake, identified what it was, and then moved it across the street after holding it up on display and telling us all about it in the yard (‘he wouldn’t have hurt the baby, Rosie, I promise. He just wants to eat mice’). That, my friends, is a steel magnolia…

It’s going to be a long time before I can go barefoot again in this house, and I cannot even think about what would have happened had I not walked into baby’s room just at that moment to see the snake making its home under his crib. Yikes!

Carly picking up the snake.
Carly escorts the snake out.

On another note, snakes occupy not one iota of my thinking and, yet, coincidentally, this morning, I wrote an article on summer safety tips and one line that is sticking out in my head now from it is “don’t reach blindly into spaces where snakes like to hide” as they often retreat in the summer to places where they can cool down. It’s 90 degrees this weekend in NC, and Carly’s sure that Mr. Black Rat Snake wasn’t expecting it to go from 60 to 90 in a day and moved inside, with the help of our open door policy, to regulate his temperature. Close your doors, people. Put your shoes on. And don’t reach blindly into spaces where snakes like to hide which, I will have you know, is everywhere.

PS: BF has now fully committed to closing the door.

*we now only have three enormous oak trees in our yard.

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this moment

By Rosie Molinary on May 3, 2012

nothing like ice cream on a hot day

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i will not let the little things snuff out my peace

By Rosie Molinary on May 2, 2012

 

what my happy looks like...

 

“So,” she asked, “are you always happy?”

I looked confused and so she pressed on.

“It just seems like you are positive and confident and happy every single day.  And is that how it is for you?”  She asked.

It was the last day of class, and, somehow, we had gotten to this question.

Oh, wait, I remember how we got to that point.  I had just said something along the lines of how self-acceptance is a journey.  You likely won’t get to just park it in self-acceptance and never have to think about it again.  Things will happen.  It could be as simple as a zit on the tip of your nose, a bad hair day, a prescription of steroids to knock out that sinus infection that drastically changes the shape of your face.  It could be aging or illness or a car accident.  So much can and will happen.  So you will have to use the tools in your tool kit to always insure you are okay.  But the good news is that once you get to self-acceptance once, it is easier to get back there.  It’s like riding a bike.  You fall off or wobble but you can jump right back on, if you decide to, because there is muscle memory.  And so it comes down to that “if you decide to” because here is the thing about being happy and self-accepting: once you deal with your stuff, once you have the right tools in the tool kit– and, let’s be honest, not every tool kit looks the same- then it becomes easier to revert to or update the tool kit when you need to because you have seen it work before.

And, so, when I answered my student, I was consciously aware that the premise of my answer really came from that “deciding to.” I’ve been to the place where a bad day happens just because I woke up late.  And I know that I don’t ever want to go back there again because it is disproportionate, it is punishing, it is not even real.  That ten minutes late or 60 minutes late isn’t enough to label a 24 hours bad.  I also know that a bad day doesn’t come packaged in leaving the house when the painters arrive and coming home after they are done to learn that, Holy Cow, you really don’t like the color you picked at all (yes, that happened to me last week).  Nor does a bad day come packaged in my hair or not having the “right” outfit for my body or the “right” body for my outfit.

It is not so much that I am happy (I am not unhappy either, its just that I think another word might better describe me than happy) as it is that I think I am at a place of personal peace, satisfied that I have mostly done right by myself and that in the ways that I haven’t, I am trying.  And that it is the trying that matters.  It is the journey that is the goal.

A bad day, I have learned, is going with your mom to see your dad in the hospital after a routine surgery and, while you are driving to the hospital, he goes into respiratory arrest without you knowing it so that when you arrive at the hospital, the unassuming greeter directs you to ICU and, there, you find your dad, the dad you had just kissed good night the night before as he was going to get some rest post-surgery, in a medically induced coma with a tube holding his throat open.

A bad day is your child being hospitalized or your best friend facing a diagnosis that catches in your throat.  I guess I’ve lived enough now to realize this, to have this perspective.  Maybe this, actually, is why women in their thirties speak about their happiness and confidence, because they’ve lived enough life at this point to know that their heel breaking en route to the interview is a funny story, not a bad day.  Their parents are old enough or they have kids or whatever and so the intensity of how much there is to lose is so much more apparent and so a bad day can’t really ever go back to being getting a run in your tights, because now your life periodically- fortunately, not everyday like you once thought those smaller things did- hands you the real bad days.

And so I told my students that bad things happen to me– small bad things like waking up late or the house getting painted the wrong color or trees smashing down on our house over and over again within the matter of days– but I now know those are just moments.  They add up to nothing at all, just funny or poignant stories or inconveniences but, really, nothing more.  My imperfect outfit, imperfect hair, imperfect whatever aren’t imperfect at all, they are just that day’s flavor and I am not imperfect, because perfect is such an incredible fallacy that imperfect is, too.  Just like the broken plate, the smashed windshield, the ruined silk blouse, the disagreement with your mom.  That is all just texture.  And what I’ve figured out with self-acceptance is that texture enhances, not diminishes.  And so I welcome it, knowing it will make me better.  And I don’t let it amount to a bad day, I don’t let it thwart my happy, if you will, or, more precisely, my peace.

There will be days where I will be crushed again.  Walking into that hospital room will be a metaphor for other moments in my life.  And I will hope that I can rise up to meet them.  Maybe I will be able to or maybe I will actually hide under the sheets and cry for it to go away (this is what I kept wishing I could do while we kept vigil at the hospital when my dad was in that coma), who knows.  But here is what I do know.  I will not let the little things snuff out my peace.  Not my body, not my hair, not a bad paint job.  And as I looked out at my students’ bright eyes, I prayed that I had done enough so that they won’t either.

 

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May’s Three Goals

By Rosie Molinary on May 1, 2012

Back in January, I suggested some different beginning of the year rituals that might resonate with you, even if you aren’t a traditional New Year’s Resolver.  One of those suggestions was to consider setting three goals each month.

Here was the take-away:  If keeping track of a resolution all year long feels overwhelming or suffocating but you do like the idea of some vision for your days, setting three goals per month might be a nice tool for you.  At the beginning of each month, set three goals that reflect dreams you have for yourself.  You could set goals that need to happen daily during the month like write a gratitude list, drink 60 ounces of water, or to read for pleasure for 10 minutes daily or you can set activity goals like try a new recipe, complete the family photo album from last year’s vacation or approach your boss about taking on more responsibilities.  The nice thing about three goals a month is that there is a finite amount of time to get the goal done and so this might resonate more with people who want things in a neater timetable than having a whole year to do something.

Though I do keep a daily to do list that I really focus on every day, some bigger projects have been overlooked in recent months because the length and immediacy of the daily list really keeps me from being able to move to these longer term or more time-consuming tasks.  While tunnel-vision can be good, it can also be short-sighted.

So, for May, I am choosing three more time-consuming tasks to put on my radar for completion.  We’ll see if it helps to focus in on just three of them at a time (because what I do right now when I have a spare minute is look at ALL these long-term projects and think, well, where to start?) helps me get them tackled.

 

May’s 3 “Simple” Goals  

Get copies of Happy’s birth certificate (this seems like a simple task but the bureaucratic madness is more than  you want to imagine, I promise).

Plant vegetable garden.

Write at least four entries in my journal to Happy (I’ve been slacking off lately).

And a bonus:  Run at least 3x each week.

How about you?  Do you think 3 simple goals would help you with some of those bigger projects that just get put to the side over and over again?  If so, what are your 3 simple goals for March?

Love that print?  Check out this Etsy vendor!  

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2012 Summer of Intentionality

By Rosie Molinary on April 30, 2012

definitely going on the list: read on the hammock!

It is that time again.  What time, you wonder.  Time to start working on my summer plans.  I call this project my Summer of Intentionality and it was born from something a friend’s family did while he was growing up.  Here’s the story:

For a LOT of summers, I worked at an intensive, residential, summer enrichment program for high school students called Love of Learning.  The program always began with a very intense, often emotional staff retreat to help us form bonds and make plans that would enrich our work.  Usually, the retreat started with the writing of personal mission statements.  I LOVED writing my mission statement (and included a mission statement writing exercise in Beautiful You) and hearing everyone else’s.  One of my closest co-workers was a dear friend who was a year behind me in college.  One year, he include part of Rudyard Kipling’s If in his mission statement, adding the words from the top of his head as he and I worked in the corner with some chocolate candy between us.

“Dude, how did you know that?”  I asked, impressed.

And that’s when he shared about the coolest parenting strategy I’ve ever heard.

Every summer that he was growing up (I believe this started the summer before Kindergarten), his parents sat him down and said, “what all do you want to do this summer?”  And he would come up with this super list:  go to the local amusement park, check out a pro or semi-pro baseball game, have a friend spend the night, camp out, go to the beach, you know the stuff of little kids’ (and not so little kids’) summer dreams.  They then said, “what do you want to learn or experience this summer” and that list would read like: learn how to throw a football spiral, identify 5 insects, write grandma three times, read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, etc. Then his parents would add their own things to the learn or experience list like “Memorize Rudyard Kipling’s If”, “volunteer”, etc.  Next, they’d line up reward with experience.  Write your grandma three times, you can go camping, etc.  Memorize Kipling’s If and you get to go to a baseball game.   Those lists hit the refrigerator and then it was up to my friend, by being intentional about how he spent his time, to make things happen.  If he did what was on the “to experience” list, he earned what was on the ”to do” list.  Hence, more than a decade later, he still had If (a great poem for a kid to know) in his head.  Does it come as NO surprise that this friend is the one whose parents let him fall asleep reading? 

Anyway, I tell you about this now for two reasons.

1.  I have a lot of friends who have kids who are the perfect age for the summer lists.  And it is just too great an idea for me NOT to share it. So maybe it inspires you and will work for your family.

2.  That said, while Happy is a little bit too young to get the full corollary of the list, we do it some at our house, too, because I love a good list and a list is the best way to get me out of my routine and doing fun things for me and for Happy.

May 1st kicks off my Summer of Intentionality brainstorming.  When I have my list put together, I’ll share it here and then update you over the summer with how it is going.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.  Could you see Summer of Intentionality working in some way or form at your house?  What would you put on your list for you?  How about for your family members?

Curious about last year’s list?  See it here.  

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April Round-up

By Rosie Molinary on April 29, 2012

I had several different posts around the internet in April and wanted to share some of them with you, in case you missed them and wanted to check them out.

At Voxxi, you can read these pieces:

How to Stop Judging Yourself and Others 

What We Can Learn From Samantha Brick 

How to Stop Obsessing Over Your Appearance

What is Self-Acceptance  

 

 

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this moment

By Rosie Molinary on April 26, 2012

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listen to your body; it’s pretty smart.

By Rosie Molinary on April 26, 2012

I had one of those days yesterday and so didn’t get to write the blog post I had wanted to write.  And then in doing some other blog work, I came across this blog post and thought, yes!  So I am reposting today from July 6, 2011.  For those of you who weren’t reading the blog then (or don’t remember), this blog post came weeks after we had two tree strikes on our house and had to replace our roof 2 different times (the 2nd time the tree came through the roof was 26 hours after our roof had been replaced the first time) and our air conditioning unit was struck by lightning and had to be replaced.  Things were tense at the little cottage that could, and then I came across this little bit of wisdom in an unexpected place:

After the trees fell and the lightning struck (did I tell you that our ac unit got hit by lightning, too?) and the tree needed to come down and all that, I just stopped.  I didn’t work for a few days.  I didn’t move for a few days.  Because after getting us up, dressed, and fed after fitful nights of sleep because of the heat, because of the storms that left us laying paralyzed in our beds, because of the prep for the next day, after just getting ready for the day, the roofers, the tree guys, the insurance adjusters, and the AC repairmen were here doing their work, in and out and around and loud, and so I just stopped and beared witness to that tree coming down, to the pains our old house was experiencing, to the wonders of wind and electricity and water.

Until one morning, almost a week into the latest round of madness, I woke up and, though I wanted to stay in bed longer, I raced outside and logged my workout, my muscles moving in sweet relief.  Let us do some of the work for a minute, they were saying.  My brain whispered a thank you.  No, who am I kidding? It shouted its thanks.

And then I ate a thoughtful breakfast and took Happy to his morning preschool camp, and I came home and started to work- to dust the cobwebs off my computer and my work brain- but still my body was saying, “I need more” and so I did something I never allow myself to do.  I went to a Pilates class while Happy was at preschool (usually I am so protective of those work hours that the only thing I allow myself to do during that time is workworkwork).  And as we were lifting ourselves into Teaser with added arm movements, the instructor offered a proverb so casually that I am certain she didn’t know it would become my mantra for the rest of the day.

“Listen to your body,” she said.  “It’s pretty smart”

She was telling us that in case we needed to back off a pose and rest. But I was hearing it not about the class but about everything.  About how my body told me to get out of bed that morning and move.  How my brain wanted that, too, but just couldn’t show its sense of relief until I had turned it off for a bit.  How my body told me it needed just a bit more and how listening to that had brought me to this Pilates class.

Now, as I reached my Teaser pose, my body was saying something else. “This frickin’ hip flexor is WAY TOO tight,” it wailed.  And so, giving myself a break from the pose, just as we’d been instructed, I asked myself, “What’s the least I can do for my hip?”  Stretch it, I thought.  And then I asked, “What’s the most I can do for my hip?”  Have a massage, I thought.

“Can I afford- both financially and time-wise, to have a massage?  Can I afford not to do it?” I continued.  And just then the stretching seemed like such a drop in the bucket compared to the tightness, the massage seemed so necessary for my body, that I knew I’d soon be getting a massage.

Listen to your body; it’s pretty smart.

For the rest of that day, I thought, I was just going to let that mantra be the guide, to press myself even further into intuitive living.  To take that question from my three small questions exercise: what do I need right now more than anything else and live it through every minute of the day.  And so I got up from the computer and stood to read a few pleasure reading pages.  I stretched instead of pounded out a few more sentences.  I thought about this and that. I called a friend right when she flashed into my mind’s eye.  And I liked every moment of living that way.

A lot of times, I listen to my mind.  It’s tidy and neat and organizes things in ways that make sense.  But it also is ever aware of the growing to do list and it feels an incredible responsibility to the doing, without as much awareness to how I am doing.  Filtering my day through what my body can stand- another five minutes of sitting or no?  another few minutes outside in this heat or not? - was a different way for me to trust my intrinsic intuition- the intuition that just courses through my body and knows, without my mind ever having to strong arm the situation.  Like all things, a good mind-body balance is ideal but for a girl who can be pretty in her head it was nice to filter my actions through my body since it does so much of the heavy lifting my mind requires.

Do you tend to be in your head most of the time?  If so, try a day of listening to your body first and see where it guides you.

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an alphabet update

By Rosie Molinary on April 24, 2012

Last month, I shared with you that I was suffering from severe cognitive difficulties from a vitamin deficiency and today I wanted to update you on how I am as so many of you offered such kind support.

The diagnosis came after the type of doctor’s appointment that has your whole life flash before you.  As I told my doctor, also an old friend, what I was experiencing, he shared an analogy with me of how he thought I was feeling.

I stared at him blankly.

“I know that I am supposed to understand what you just said.  And I heard the words.  I could say it back to you, but I can’t tell you what you meant.”

Unlike me, my doctor is not transparent.  His face doesn’t show his full deck of cards.  No doctor’s should, I reckon.  And, yet, there was an almost imperceptible twitch when I said that, a twitch that alarmed me just enough.

“What do you think it is?”  He asked, either willing to trust my instincts or wanting to distract me from what I just thought I saw.

“A B12 deficiency,” I told him.  And he nodded saying he’d test for that and a few other things.

Then he paused, finding the words, perhaps preparing himself to prepare me.

“I… don’t… think… we’re going to find dementia.”  He wasn’t being flip.  From what I had just said and demonstrated, it was on the scale of possibility.  Far down the scale, but on it nonetheless.

I blinked.  What else could I do?  At that point, I couldn’t change what was going on inside me.  Desperate, beggy prayers (as Anne Lamott calls them) weren’t going to change the outcome, all I could hope for, pray for, expect was the ability to act with grace.

A few days later, I saw my doctor and he emphasized how very low my B12 levels were (to my relief, for sure, and I imagine his, too).  No wonder I felt the way I did, he said, but the good news was that this was treatable, fixable, doable.  It would just take time, he said.  I probably wouldn’t feel like myself until August but chances were good that I would regain most of or maybe even all of my cognition.

You know how you sometimes re-write things to be a little better than what was said. I am going to go ahead and be honest and say that I rewrote that to say I would feel like myself WAY before August and I would regain all of my cognition.  Because I am an optimist.

Now, here I am, two months into treatment and already I can tell a difference.  My B12 and D vitamin levels are up.  They still need work, but they are better- and better enough for me to notice positive differences in my daily life.  My understanding of things as they are happening are better right now.  I feel more like myself in the moment and more like I can contribute meaningfully to conversations and support my friends and family in the way that I want.  I am not as mentally exhausted or physically exhausted– and that’s been awesome.  So progress is definitely being made.

Sadly, though I thought the August recovery prediction was a bit pessimistic- it seems my doctor might be right.  My memory still isn’t great; my creativity is still a bit slow for what’s been my history, I still have some expressive aphasia, I cannot multi-task, my thoughts are fleeting– if I don’t write them down immediately, they are gone.  I could be distracted by what’s missing but I am so thrilled with what’s back that I just can’t be.  I probably overemphasize how much I better I feel because I can now recognize just how bad I did feel, how lost I was in my mind, how much I was becoming someone I didn’t know.

So I know myself again; my jokes are back; I am moving faster, thinking more clearly, feeling more confident.  And that is just so good.  In the past few months, people have approached me about whether or not B12 could be their issue and, I tell you, it really does seem like a lot of us are out there walking around without the B12 and other nutrients we need.  If it feels severe, go to your doctor and get tested or ask your doctor about starting a multi-vitamin or B12 supplement.  Far too often, we blame external factors for what we’re experiencing– mom brain, work stress, whatever- and those things are indeed debilitating but sometimes it’s not what it seems and really can be something going on inside.  Take care of you, so you can take care of everything else that matters to you.

Image source 

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