Encourage yourself

Self-praise activates: 

  • Love

  • Trust

  • Joy

  • Excitement

  • Oxytocin 

  • Abundance 

Self-criticism activates:

  • Fear

  • Anger

  • Disgust

  • Shame

  • Sadness 

  • Scarcity 

Under praise’s spell, no one’s light can diminish our own. We need to bask in that shit.

On the other hand, criticism is contracting and makes us small. Small is not who we are.

Remember a time when you felt encouraged, seen, loved. Sit with that. How does it feel in your physical body? In your emotions? Mind? In your Spirit?

If you’re like me, you can feel it best in your physical body. I stand a little taller. Maybe my shoulders drop.

“Good job, Joce” I say to myself as I post this. 

Get out of your logical mind

Here’s another way to say it:

Take a bird’s-eye view. 

From high up, details fade and we can access the big picture. This vantage point can lead to fresh ideas and inspirations.

From here we can: 

  • free-associate

  • harness our emotion + intuition

  • feel our gut feelings

  • access the creative well inside

I’ve been a bit under the weather. Yesterday I had just enough energy to make an ikebana arrangement.

Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arranging. The practice roughly translates to “making flowers come alive.”

You could call these arrangements abstract. They aren’t trying to achieve a particular design or mimic something in nature. 

You could say they don’t “make sense.” 

And this is the exact source of their beauty.

They are unconventional, each botanical given the space to be, and, when successful, to also be in harmony with one another. 

When it rains

Well, you know, it pours.

It’s been windy this week. I regularly drive by the coast in Ventura, CA. When the wind picks up, so do the tides. They become choppy and white-capped.

I don’t love the wind but we need the wind, I heard myself saying.

Wind in the spring:

  • disperses seeds + spores

  • drives ocean currents

  • powers renewable energy sources

Wind has purpose. Like rain.

Like bad art.

Like “failure”.

Taken figuratively, the idiom suggests a wave of bad luck. It can also be used to suggest a wave of good luck.

Either way, it’s a wave we ride to get from one point to another.

Good or bad, growth is what we want.

Let it rain.