Your Year of Miracles

Month: September 2021

  • How to Escape the Approval Seeking Trap

    How to Escape the Approval Seeking Trap

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    Today’s Miracle Moment is about how to escape the approval-seeking trap…

    We’ve all experienced wanting to be accepted by other people and to get their approval. While this is a normal feeling, trying to get this kind of external validation can leave us feeling disempowered–that’s the price of being caught in the approval-seeking trap!

    To free yourself from the approval-seeking trap, start by becoming aware of any of your approval-seeking patterns. Ask yourself the following questions: 

    • Do you follow your heart, or do you follow the voices of others instead?
    • Are you able to say no and set healthy boundaries in your relationships? Or do you overstep your preferences to please others?
    • Do you view rejection as “God’s protection” (i.e., the universe guiding you to something better suited for you)? Or do you take rejection personally? 

    To escape the approval-seeking trap, we need to build new patterns of self-love and self-celebration. 

    Maintaining healthy self-esteem requires learning to fill ourselves up from the inside out. We can do this through validating, acknowledging, and loving ourselves completely and unconditionally. Most people don’t do this, and it just needs a little practice.

    Here’s an exercise you can do to start building the circuitry of self-validation and celebration: 

    1. When you act or speak in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, stop and acknowledge it.
    2. Reward yourself with praise and joy.
    3. You can tap your heart or do a little internal victory dance. The important thing is that you acknowledge yourself. 

    You can also do this any time you experience a “win” in your life. For example: getting a new job, doing an act of self-care, or working towards a creative goal. Take a moment to celebrate your win!

    Self-acknowledgement helps us to shift from looking outside of ourselves for approval to validating ourselves instead. 

    When we’re celebrating ourselves, we’re supporting our brain chemistry to experience happiness, joy, and fulfillment in life. The more that we build these circuits, the more that we can stay in an ongoing state of self-love. You can start simply by celebrating yourself in small baby steps each day.

    “Stop looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment for validation or security or love. You have a treasure within that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.” – Eckhart Tolle

    Please leave us a comment below and share the ways you can celebrate yourself.

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  • Let It Be Easy

    Let It Be Easy

    Today’s Miracle Moment Is About How to Let It Be Easy…

    Do you ever feel like life is full of struggle, and you wonder if it’s possible for life to just be easy? In today’s Miracle Moment we learn about the art of letting it be easy from a very special creature that I (Marci) came across on my recent trip to Maui, Hawaii… the sea turtle!

    On Maui, you’ll often see the sea turtles’ heads bobbing in the water as they swim across the ocean. You can also find the sea turtles on the shore before sunset, when they come to rest after swimming all day long. And if you’re lucky enough, you might even see them swimming right next to you in the water, which I did a few times one day. The next day, someone gave me a gift of a little 3D magnet with a sea turtle on it. 

    Knowing that every animal carries a specific medicine and message for us, I was delighted to find out the special medicine of the sea turtle: 

    Turtle Medicine says: “Let it be easy. Struggle is not required.”

    Is there a particular area where you seem to encounter struggle again and again–perhaps in your relationships, finances, living situation, or job? Most of us have developed certain specific patterns of struggle in our bodies and minds.

    To shift this pattern of struggle, here’s a simple practice you can experiment with:

    • When you’re in the middle of a situation that feels like a struggle, practice releasing the muscle tension that you’re experiencing in that moment.
    • Breathe up and down your body and imagine that you’re opening your chest, opening your belly, and opening your solar plexus.
    • Then take a big belly breath and when you exhale, drop the breath straight down into the earth, as if there were a channel of energy that’s connecting you to the Earth. 

    This breathing exercise is powerful because it connects you to the Earth’s frequencies. The Earth’s energies are in “ease” rather than “struggle.” That’s what we want more of in our lives. 

    We can also look at how the sea turtles model “letting it be easy.” 

    Turtles go slow. They aren’t in a rush. Like the turtles, we can trust that no matter what, we’ll get where we need to be in perfect timing. 

    Turtles go with the flow. The ocean current is supporting them so they don’t have to work as hard. 

    We can go with the flow by listening to ourselves and honoring our intuition, which is our divine compass that can guide us and keep us in the flow of life. 

    And, turtles are great at following their internal rhythms. They swim during the day, and then when they need to, they rest on the shore. So if you need permission to rest and follow your internal rhythm, look to the turtles.

     “Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is relax.” – Mark Black

    Please leave a comment and let us know which of these practices you’ll experiment with to help you “let it be easy.” We look forward to hearing from you!