Friday Reflections
Friday Reflections is all about reflecting on the week by observing our senses. My hope is that this will be a gentle, easy way to tune into how we are doing and what we are experiencing weekly when journaling in general can feel so daunting.
Now, for this week’s Friday Reflections (with each sense as your inspiration, consider how experiencing it impacted your week).
Here is my sensory round-up for this week:
tasting :: a pistachio encrusted goat cheese salad with local greens, bean soup, tater tots, some seedy whole grain bread, sweet potato and black bean enchiladas, poppy seed chicken, steamed broccoli, a baby Baby Ruth or three, apple bread pudding with whiskey-butter sauce made by Chef Nikki Moore of Food Love (you can make it, too)
hearing :: the clank of library books being dropped into the Bookie Monster (what we call the book return drop box) and squealing and shrieking kids as I ran soccer practice this week for the regular coach
smelling :: various candle scents, the tropical fragrance of a new hair product, and good food
seeing :: really thoughtful presentations about body image and eating disorders at the National Eating Disorders Association national conference
feeling :: inspired by the really thoughtful remarks as people sign the Body Warrior Pledge as part of Love Your Body Day (and for a chance to win a signed copy of Beautiful You). Haven’t signed yet? There’s still time– everyone who has signed by midnight EST on October 18th will be entered into the drawing! Also, really excited to celebrate All Natural Day with my students today (Friday, October 18th). Join us!
wishing/hoping :: to do a little course correction with my sleep. I just haven’t been able to fall asleep when I normally do this week. Eager to make some tweaks that help me get back on track!
What about you? What were your sensational experiences this week? Please share!
This post was inspired by Teacher Goes Back to School who was inspired by Pink of Perfection’s Five Sense Friday.
Love Your Body Day 2013
Love Your Body Day is Wednesday, October 16th, and my goal is to get ALL of you to sign a pledge to making a conscious commitment to be your own body champion. Below, you’ll find The Body Warrior Pledge that I drafted five years ago and is featured on Day 2 of Beautiful You.
Pledge your desire to champion yourself by hitting the comments section below, sharing with us which statement you are making the MOST conscious commitment to embrace, what your first step will be in that journey, and then signing off with your name. Then, share this link with all of your girlfriends who should also be championing themselves and start a mini revolution amongst yourselves.
Sign the pledge by midnight EST on October 18th and you will be entered into a Love Your Body Day drawing for a signed copy of Beautiful You.
Let’s start our journey to body warrior amazingness!
The Body Warrior Pledge
Because I understand that my love and respect for my body are metaphors of my love and respect for my self and soul, I pledge to do the following:
To stop berating my body and to begin celebrating the vessel that I have been given. I will remember the amazing things my body has given me: the ability to experience the world with a breadth of senses, the ability to perceive and express love, the ability to comfort and soothe, and the ability to fight, provide, and care for humanity.
To understand that my body is an opportunity not a scapegoat.
To be the primary source of my confidence. I will not rely on or wait for others to define my worth.
To let envy dissipate and allow admiration to be a source of compassion by offering compliments to others.
To gently but firmly stand up for myself when someone says to me (or I say to myself) something harmful.
To change the inner-monologue in my head to one that sees possibility not problems, potential not shortcomings, blessings not imperfections.
To give my body the things that it needs to do its work well: plenty of water, ample movement, stretches, rest, and good nutrition, and to limit or eliminate the things that do not nurture my body.
To see exercise as a way to improve my internal health and strength instead of a way to fight or control my body.
To understand that my weight is not good or bad. It is just a number, and I am only good.
To love my body and my self today. I do not have to weigh ten pounds less, have longer hair, or to have my degree in my hand to have worth. I have worth just as I am, and I embrace that power.
To recognize my body’s strengths.
To no longer put off the things that I wish to experience because I am waiting to do them in a different body.
To understand that a body, just like a personality, is like a fingerprint: a wonderful embodiment of my uniqueness.
The Weekly Spark: Go All Natural
Every semester, my body image class and I celebrate an all natural day. It is just like what it sounds like– we all come to class just like our mama made us– no hair product, no slimming wear, no make-up. Just us with our skin, hair, and bodies, in their purest states.
For many people, it sounds easy enough. It sounds like every Saturday or, heck, Tuesday. And, yet, for some of my students– both male and female, it is terrifying. For whatever reason, they have come to believe that who they are isn’t naturally enough. They feel they need enhancements to have worth. And, trust me, I don’t have anything against enhancements per se, but when you begin to believe that your worth comes from those alterations– as opposed to thinking those enhancements are just a fun or unique part of personal expression or style- then disempowerment isn’t far away.
So, in an effort to help my students see that their worth doesn’t change if they change how they present themselves to the world, we go all natural, together, for a day. That day, is this Friday. Here are the guidelines we play by:
On Friday, October 18th from 6 am until 6 pm, we will be celebrating All Natural Day. That morning, feel free to take a shower, put on moisturizer (as long as it is not tinted or light-reflecting), brush your hair and your teeth but that’s where the primping ends.
Here are some things that should not be part of your All Natural Day:
Contacts (yep, wear your glasses!)
Perfume/ Aftershave
Make-Up
Nail Polish
Fake eyelashes
Weave or extensions (the clip in kind. If it’s sewn in, you can keep it there!)
Hair products (shampoo and conditioning in the shower are fine– no leave in conditioner, de-frizz or straightening products)*
Flat Ironing/ Curling/ Rollers/ Blow Drying
No slimming garments like Spanx
If you are a trans or gender-variant person, participate by not using items that you would consider appearance enhancements but please feel comfortable using items that are part of your identity.
I am sure I’ve left something off the list so, here’s the deal, if anything feels like it could be an enhancement, it probably is- so skip it. And while it would be tempting to just throw on sweats (and pull your hair back into a pony tail if you have longer hair), I encourage you to dress nicely for the day (whatever that means to you– just not sweats) and to wear your hair down- showing yourself that you don’t have to be dressed down in order to forego enhancements and forgoing the all or nothing thinking that often plagues us (if I am not wearing make-up, I don’t deserve to pay attention to myself or my body in anyway, sound familiar?).
Want to take the challenge one step further? If you are on a social media site, share a photo of you without the enhancements and encourage your followers/ friends to do the same. If you do it, please send me a link or copy of the photo! Want to tweet about it this experience? Do so under #allnaturalday.
This week, I would love for you to join my class in observing an all natural day– on Friday, October 18th or whatever day suits if the 18th does not. If you can’t completely go all natural in your life (for example, you can go make-up less to work but it would be frowned upon for you to walk in with wet hair from the shower), then, by all means, do what you HAVE to do but don’t do what you WANT to do.
Are you in? If so, what day(s) will you participate? Why did you decide to participate in all natural day? What are you looking forward to and what makes you nervous?
Here’s to loving the skin we’re in, as it is.
Friday Reflections
Friday Reflections is all about reflecting on the week by observing our senses. My hope is that this will be a gentle, easy way to tune into how we are doing and what we are experiencing weekly when journaling in general can feel so daunting.
Now, for this week’s Friday Reflections (with each sense as your inspiration, consider how experiencing it impacted your week).
Here is my sensory round-up for this week:
tasting :: pizza from the local joint, wonton, mushroom, chicken and rice soup, skillet-fried chicken with macaroni and cheese and butter beans from King’s Kitchen, caramel cake and molten chocolate cake (shared desserts from King’s Kitchen), hot chocolate, roasted asparagus, a delicious mixed greens salad with homemade ranch, a scrambled egg with just the right amount of cheddar cheese, and the MOST AMAZING breakfast crepe from The Homegrown Crepe (incidentally, one of my birthday list items was eat from a food truck and we just happened upon one Saturday morning and I ran to it! So glad I did. Delicious!).
hearing :: 19 gorgeous, aching songs from the Indigo Girls as they performed with The Charlotte Symphony, this was both an incredible high and a bittersweet experience. We took the Circle de Luz Class of 2014 to the concert as three of them are musicians and they LOVED the music. It was a wonderful show– so electric– but the Indigo Girls song catalog takes me back to the days where I sometimes felt lonely or invisible or was nursing heartache so there was a part of me that felt so tenderhearted. This song, my all time favorite of the IG catalog in all its gorgeous impossible love, had me teary eyed. And truth-telling: there has been some listening to that song on repeat this week because sometimes your soul just needs a little defibrillation.
smelling :: cut grass, candles, steamed broccoli, knock-out roses
seeing :: pumpkins, pumpkins everywhere as we hauled the wagon to the pumpkin fundraiser and loaded up on gourds of every variety. We know have a fabulous pumpkin tower on our front porch, gourds displayed in the fireplace, and a pie pumpkin on Happy’s dresser (you know, as it should be).
feeling :: really, really inspired by the medical students I worked with this week on reflecting deliberately about becoming doctors and writing mission statements. I am in the midst of a really inspiring partnership with a medical school around helping medical students examine and grow from what they are experiencing internally as they see and treat patients and these young doctors give me so much hope for the future. One of the things we did was write mission statements together and I was just blown away. I would have signed up to have anyone of them for a doctor with the way they were so deliberate (and excited about) claiming who they will be in their practice. I look forward to watching them this year and seeing where they go.
wishing/hoping :: to make a positive impact this weekend as I travel to Washington DC to speak at the National Eating Disorder Association‘s annual conference. My topic? Eating Disorders Don’t Discriminate: Impacts of Acculturation, Barriers to Care, and Unique Contributing and Protective Factors. Really excited about this opportunity to be with so many amazing people doing this healing work.
What about you? What were your sensational experiences this week? Please share!
This post was inspired by Teacher Goes Back to School who was inspired by Pink of Perfection’s Five Sense Friday.
pondering time
With just about 40 days to my 40th birthday (and everyone asking me what I am going to do to celebrate the BIG ONE), I am thinking about time…
I have a crystalline memory from high school that taunts me now.
My dad had just picked me up from my job at Rich’s department store in Columbia, South Carolina. I was fifteen. As we made our way past the Columbia Mall movie theater, he turned on the radio. NPR drowned out the sound of traffic as the turbo-engine of the red Mitsubishi Cordia picked up speed.
Bored, I stared out my window and thought, “You are officially old when you listen to public radio and care about your yard.”
By twenty-three, I was a donor to public radio. In my early thirties, I started caring about the yard.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the passage of the years in ways that I never did. Maybe it is because my parents’ now need my care or maybe it is because I am a parent and the adage that the days are long but the years are short has never seemed more true. Maybe it’s because I have finally realized that I have less days left than yesterday. Likely, it is a bit of all of that.
When I first realized the speed at which it feels time is slipping away, panic licked at my stomach. I wasn’t worried about my ever increasing number of grey hairs or my more defined laugh and worry lines. When I considered what the panic was really about, I found it was less about the appearance of age and more about the passage of time. Am I doing what I want with my days? Does my life have meaning in a way that brings me joy? What needs to change?
That teenage girl riding in her dad’s car might have been naïve enough to think that life stops being fun after the most significant, self-interested milestones have been crossed. But what I have learned is that there are so many more milestones than I could have imagined back then and that there is meaning in more than just that first kiss or that acceptance letter to the college of one’s dreams. There’s joy in the 1,000th kiss and in seeing a seed you plant come to fruition and meaning in helping your parents navigate their retirement needs and in the tears that flow while you listen to a Story Corps feature on that damn public radio you once bemoaned.
There is also joy in the quiet realization that with adulthood comes the ability to always take stock and then to practice what I have learned: that I should say no to responsibilities that aren’t a fit and yes to experiences that are, even if they are outside the box of how I would have defined myself back then. There is meaning in realizing I can control how much my work responsibilities bleed into my family and personal time and satisfaction in seeing every smile I’ve beamed etched on my face. And, ultimately and perhaps most importantly, that it is my responsibility to be kind to myself, to treat myself well, to nudge myself forward with gentle encouragement and not debilitating berating.
I may have started listening to public radio and gardening earlier than my teenage self ever expected, but what age has given me is an appreciation for the way lived experience yields to wisdom and how that wisdom informs my choices. What I relish most about my age, let’s be honest, is the ability to make those choices, to make life happen, to find meaning where I choose to go. Turning forty doesn’t scare me in the way that I might have imagined at 15- that life wouldn’t be fun anymore, that I would no longer be of use. But it does give me incredible perspective. The days are yielding. Am I doing what I am meant and wish to do, in the way and measure I am meant and wish to do them? Do I dare live most like I am meant to, most all of the time? Or maybe the more critical question is do I dare not?
The Weekly Spark: Boss Your Email
Last week, my email crashed, and I spent 7 hours on the phone with lovely Yna from the Philippines as she shut down my email, rebuilt it and transferred everything over. As Yna and I chatted, I kept my eye on my smart phone: 10 emails, 22 emails, 29 emails, 44 emails, and on and on. And a little feeling of panic began to well up inside me. When am I ever going to get these emails answered, I kept thinking. If we tend to our email all day long then we don’t necessarily notice how many emails we process, reply to, send each day. But when I finally got back into my email that night, I saw just how much email can pile up and was reminded that while I do take some measures to control my inbox so that I am able to maintain focus on the work that I am most meant to be doing in this world and not get overburdened by distractions, my inbox control measures could use a little extra attention.
So, this week’s spark is all about becoming the boss of our email. Here are five steps that I take to wrangle my inbox or my attitude and sense of peace around my inbox, and I would love to hear your strategies, too.
1. Manage what comes in. A couple months ago, I went on a fierce unsubscribe tear which has reduced what comes in– a lovely thing. In addition, I created a Do/Watch/Read file to put the things that I am really interested in reading in detail (newsletters I am subscribed to and the articles and videos people send me) when I am not overwhelmed. My weekly goal is to go Do/Watch/Read 1-2 items out of that file a week. Finally, I managed some of my social media accounts so I wouldn’t, for example, get an email every time someone spoke to me on Twitter since I can see that on my Twitter account (note to self: I need to do this for Pinterest, too, so I don’t get an email for every repin).
2. Pick up the phone. Sometimes, one email is not going to take care of the entire situation at hand, but one phone call could. Opt for the phone call when it is the more efficient, effective option.
3. Reign in the group email. Need to schedule a group meeting? Opt for Doodle when you have a lot of dates, a lot of people (or both) or use BCC so folks just respond directly to you so you can gather the dates, for example, and then get back to everyone on a final option. When you are on the receiving end of group emails, read everything that is in inbox before responding and then try to just send a response from one email.
4. Put some parameters in place. I taught high school during the age of beepers. My leadership students once told me that they needed me to get a beeper so that way, they could reach me if they needed me on the weekend. My response? “First, of all, I am not that essential. There is nobody who needs me THAT much that I need to be reachable at all times. And if I haven’t taught you what you needed to know about life before getting yourself into that situation, I am certainly not going to be able to teach you a darn thing while you are in the midst of it.” Now, we are in the era of smart phones and people think we should all be ALWAYS reachable. Except I don’t really want to be always reachable and maybe you don’t want to be either. Here are some ways to be less reachable…
A. Set your email hours. In your email signature, set your hours. Tell folks when you check and answer email. This will take some pressure off yourself to always answer quickly. At the beginning of each semester, I tell my students that I check email from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. If they need me, email me during business hours and I’ll answer. If they have a paper due on Friday and have a question, they know they need to email me by 4:45 pm on Thursday to get an answer from me. My students do not even blink when I tell them this and I think I model a good work/life balance with this parameter. In addition to communicating that parameter to students, I very rarely do email from Friday afternoon to Sunday night. Unless it is time sensitive to those few days, it sits in my inbox and I try to do a quick email clean out on Sunday night to prepare for the new week.
B. Control what is on your smart phone. The way that I keep myself honest about not answering my students’ emails at all hours is that I do not have my university email account on my smart phone. I have no idea what is in my inbox until I log onto the university site from my computer. Automatic control measure right there. If it is your phone and you are paying for it and you aren’t saving the world or humanity IMMEDIATELY via email, don’t feel like your work email has to be on your phone. Granted, I do a lot of my work via my personal email account but having at least one work email account not on my phone does help.
5. Back away from the email. When I really need to focus on a project (like writing a book proposal or putting together a new workshop), I put an out of office message on my email and refocus my energy and attention elsewhere. I know that at any time I can choose to pay less attention to email but officially putting up the out of office helps me really shift my energy into whatever I am working on.
I know some people only answer email at set times during a day, and I am sure there are many other strategies for bossing your email. What are yours?
Friday Reflections
Friday Reflections is all about reflecting on the week by observing our senses. My hope is that this will be a gentle, easy way to tune into how we are doing and what we are experiencing weekly when journaling in general can feel so daunting.
Now, for this week’s Friday Reflections (with each sense as your inspiration, consider how experiencing it impacted your week).
Here is my sensory round-up for this week:
tasting :: white chicken chili, chicken pie, celebratory cake (thank you, Leslie and Anne!), roasted parsnips, spinach artichoke leek soup, salted caramel brownie, shrimp and teriyaki vegetables
hearing :: Nothing by Edie Brickell, Canadian geese commuting through our skies, the sounds of rocks splashing in a nearby pond as Happy threw and threw rocks to his heart’s delight on a pretty October afternoon
smelling :: fresh cut grass, cut tuberoses, hibiscus yuzu candle, sautéed onions
seeing :: my boys and Lola (yes, even Lola slept in the tent) camp out in the backyard last weekend (I slept in my own warm bed!), the pumpkins arrive in town for the annual pumpkin sale fundraiser, my students enjoying each other and class and especially snack time (years ago, I had one of my classes do snack time where 2-3 students bring in a snack for class each week. Brought it back this semester. Such a fun thing)
feeling :: tender-hearted as people I love battle health woes
wishing/hoping :: a season filled with an abundance of love and healthy good wishes for all of us
What about you? What were your sensational experiences this week? Please share!
This post was inspired by Teacher Goes Back to School who was inspired by Pink of Perfection’s Five Sense Friday.
