When hustle is winning the day, you might feel distracted, a lack of inspiration or like you can’t make a decision to save your life.
That’s okay! There are several areas of our lives that can be nurtured and cultivated with the common goal of our happiness in mind.
I, personally, can identify with all of the areas of cultivation. And I also believe them to be all relative. Maybe you’ll see what I mean as I go over each one.
Cultivating Authenticity – letting go of what people think.
Cultivating Self-Compassion – letting go of perfection; loving ourselves
Cultivating a Resilient Spirit – letting go of numbing and powerlessness; isolation; facing fears.
Cultivating Gratitude and Joy – letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark.
Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith – letting go of the need for certainty.
Cultivating Creativity – letting go of comparison.
Cultivating Play and Rest – letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self worth; clinging to your job; forgetting what you enjoy.
Cultivating Calm and Stillness – letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle.
Cultivating Meaningful Work – letting go of self doubt and “supposed to”.
Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance – letting go of being “cool” and always in control.
I’m sure that you can spot the common theme of “letting go”. But as I said previously, I believe they are all relative.
I specifically relate the most to authenticity, intuition and trusting faith and creativity. Those all seem to be weak points for me.
I’ve always cared about what people thought of me. Maybe it stems from my low self-esteem, in the need to seek approval. Not just that, but I think I’m a “mind reader” of sorts in always thinking that some people have negative opinions of me, regardless as to whether or not they have reason. The amount of energy consumed by these thoughts alone is very exhausting.
In letting go of the need for certainty, my goal is to try and remember that not everything needs to be set in stone. The only thing I need to be certain of, is who I am and who I want to be. At this point, I’m hoping the rest just kind of falls into place. I need to believe it will.
When I think of Cultivating Creativity, I automatically think about art. Something different and unique. But in this instance, it’s letting go of comparison. I can’t measure my happiness by someone else’s standards or ideas of what happiness should be. I also can’t worry about keeping up with the Jones family. Our values may be completely different and we might find happiness in different things. It’s not fair to myself to hold myself to someone else’s standards of what “good enough” might look like.
Like I said, I can relate to all of them in some form. But those three stand out to me the most.
I was told they are called the ten guide posts for wholehearted living.
As I work on me, as a whole, I may come back to these individually as blog topics. But there are too many other things to talk about right now.
It seems they hit me with something new every day.
For now I’ll leave you with a quote: “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do. ” – Brene Brown
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