Before Moving on, Pause, Reflect, and Celebrate.
We move through our lives from task to task, from challenge to challenge. We keep moving forward, sometimes with ease sometimes with fear, but always moving forward.
For many of us, the past year and a half has been filled with challenges. We’ve been asked to do things we’ve never done before. We have navigated challenges that seemed impossible at first and yet we kept going the best we could.
The challenges were emotional as well as physical. Doing everything differently, being separated from our jobs, isolated from our birth families and soul families, and then getting back to a new normal, it took an emotional toll.
How do we continue to move forward with all these challenges?
We pause, reflect, release, and celebrate.
Pause, Reflect, Release, and Celebrate.
It may seem counter intuitive to celebrate while we continue to experience challenges but hear me out. What if we acknowledge what we’ve overcome and endured, and allowed it to fuel us forward?
As Glennon Doyle says, we can do hard things! So, let’s do this, let’s pause, reflect, release, and celebrate.
Pause – Make time for yourself to sit and be with your own energy. Tell the family you need time to be with yourself to do some personal work. Schedule time to be alone. Make it happen.
Reflect – Set a time frame, since March 2020 may be interesting, but choose what works for you and your experience. Create a list of the challenges you navigated, the lessons that grew you, the skills that you learned, and every little and big that happened. All of it, the good, the bad, the ugly and all without shame or judgment.
Release – Using your list as reference, what have you moved past? What can you release? Can you release unhelpful emotions? Can you release fear? Create a way to release, fire and/or water can be fantastic for releasing unhelpful energies. Take a bath, burn a list of what you’re releasing, do what serves you.
Celebrate – What on your list will you celebrate? Little things, big things, anything, celebrate what you can. Especially if your chosen timeframe has been hard, think in terms of gratitude and celebrate that. If all you have is gratitude, celebrate your ability to be in gratitude. Celebrate in any way that serves you, dance, cheers, share with loved ones, sit in the glow of your growth. Celebrate you!
Now, when we are faced with new challenges, we can remember that we can do hard things. We know that we can overcome challenges. We have been through so much and navigated it to the best of our ability. We can release what no longer serves us and celebrate our accomplishments and who we are now.
My List, What I’m Releasing and What I’m Celebrating.
When I did this exercise for myself, I freaked myself out. My timeframe was ‘since March 2020’, and had I not done this I may have glossed over a very important time for me, a time with as much to release as there was to celebrate.
My list – Since 2020 I have; changed careers, completed coach training, created a website, launched my business, started writing a weekly blog, had articles published for the first time, started and completed three online mindfulness and consciousness courses, started and completed meditation teacher training, been diagnosed with breast cancer, had a bilateral mastectomy, completed radiation treatment, survived the pandemic, moved apartments once, and continued my spiritual awakening. Whew! It was a very transformative time for me.
What I’m releasing – Fear of speaking my mind, fear of showing up authentically, overthinking everything, playing small, and disregarding my needs.
What I’m celebrating – The strength that I’ve gained by putting myself out there, surviving cancer, learning to create balance in my life, creating a career that I love, serving clients that I love, learning to prioritize my needs, and my self-care.
Cancer Journey Update.
This past week has been tough…again. Radiation treatment caused a blister under my right arm which then became an open wound about the size of a quarter. I had no idea how to treat a wound like this because it’s a radiation burn and not just a normal skin wound. With the help of my radiation oncologist and the radiation nurse, we figured out a way to treat it, bandage it, and manage it. It’s improving...slowly.
I’m like a human lava lamp, reddish burns flare and fade, come and go slowly. There are still parts of the radiation treatment area that are flaring up and others that are healing. It’s so weird and I’m so grateful to be healing.
Self-care is my full-time job now. It’s a lesson that I needed to learn so I’m grateful to my cancer for teaching me that lesson. The balance that it’s created in my life is beautiful.
I’m so grateful you’re here, dear reader. I hope this serves you in some way. I would love to hear about your list and what you found to release and celebrate. Please leave comments on social media where you found this post.
The image this week is of the page in my journal with my list from July, 28th, 2021.
Until next week,
Be well,
Nikki