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Each New Year can feel full of potential for resolution and transformation. Entering 2024 as a woman who strongly believes Aging Gracefully is essential for life, I naturally gravitate towards optimizing the experience we all share on the planet to commune with nature, friends, and family. I place patients in my community of family. Reflecting back on 2023, I realize I have included myself in this experiential opportunity. Unlike the instinct for survival we are born into at the time of birth, there is no known instinct for self-soothing and hence optimizing our experience with Self and enjoying our own company likely starts much later in life as we acknowledge our own needs and honor them as manifestations of our growth and maturation. Enjoying our SELF must start somewhere and Self-awareness is a good place to start this journey into a deeper relationship with our SELF. Self-Awareness over time enables us to recognize and honor our feelings and behaviors in response to our environment.
As we approach ourselves with Self-Awareness, we open the doors to Self -Compassion. As one of my favorite authors and Mindfulness guru, Pema Chodron, reminds us,
“Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves” and “opens our eyes of compassion to see our shared humanity”.
Self-Compassion provides a compass to follow as we navigate negative, self deprecating self-talk which too often follows in response to our own self-disappointments. If rather than inflicting pain onto ourselves through self-judgement, we instead approach ourselves with comfort and kindness, everyone benefits as we embrace practicing Self-Compassion. This level of Self-Awareness brings us closer to ourselves and enables us to kindle deeper relationships to live more fulfilling lives and age gracefully each day.
A quote l like very much by renowned author Geneen Roth:
“Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you’d feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.”
–Geneen Roth
Transparency, like Compassion, must start with Self. As we embrace Self-Compassion, we naturally move towards transparent authenticity with the brutal honestly and truthful clarity required to reach inside ourselves and check in on our “motives” and whether there is true alignment with our life’s mission.
I have discovered that with Self-Compassion at the helm, I am more comfortable with uncertainty because I have more faith in the process instead of the outcome and allow myself to be guided rather than to be in charge. Not to say I am not anxious at times about the road ahead, but I have learned to truly embrace a Costa Rican adage “Lo que va, viene”; what goes around comes around. This circular/reciprocal relationship between the future outcome and the present moment in time has the ability to remove the urgency and pressure of life and replace it with solace and gratitude. Honestly.
Changes made in 2023 abound for us all, and I thank all the people that I am committed to serve as parent, partner, friend, and physician for supporting me through this transformative 2023 year.
Please accept my small gift of Gratitude when and if you participate in one of the changes I have made in 2023 with Your Holistic Doc (YHD) LLC. As a subscriber to the FullScript service on the YHD website, you are able to order most every supplement I sell online PLUS 1000’s of other high-quality supplements from Fullscript; my wholesale distributor for over 24 years.
My Gift to you is a 10% discount on all supplement orders through our Fullscript store
https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/yhd/store-start
**this offer is good from January 2,2024 thru January 7, 2024
*also available
15% off with a $300 minimum purchase on our www.Yourholisticdoc.com website
enter code : 15NEWYEAR24
https://yourholisticdoc.com
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