Author: VKM

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Habits to Improve Mental Health

Habits to Improve Your Mental Health

Do you believe that you can have good mental health?

It might seem mysterious and elusive, but mental health is an achievable goal. The psyche has a natural state of fitness that we can practice and sustain, just like physical health.

Like physical health, mental health is not static, but fluid, alive, and changing. We will have times when we are temporarily ill when we become obsessed, one-sided, and extreme in our inner experiences. But most of the time, if we live in healthy enough ways, we can reasonably expect our psyches to be healthy and fit.

We each have a purpose for being here, a reason we said yes to the invitation to human life. We need our mental health to be able to live out that purpose.

In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, what do you want to do with “your one wild and precious life?” Whatever your answer to that question, optimal mental health habits will help you get there.

Make Mental Health a Habit This Year

Could we make mental health a habit? Yes! As we all know, the only thing you need to do to make something a habit is repeat it over and over again until it becomes automatic.

Many daily abilities that we now take for granted were once learned. How to speak our native language, how to use our thumbs and forefingers to pinch, and how to eat with a knife and fork.

When we reframe mental health as something we are learning by way of repeating positive behavior until it becomes habitual, we can dream up and set many goals for ourselves.

Journal Prompt

What is your definition of psychological health?

Looking at that definition, what mental-health-promoting behaviors could you begin to make a habit, now?

Here is my definition:

When I’m psychologically healthy, I feel my lively, friendly spirit seated firmly in my body. I’m brightly eager, willing, and open, and my thoughts and emotions are harmonized to serve my true purpose. I feel grateful, alive connected, and curious to see what happens next. 

What mental health practices could I turn into habits, that will help make that definition a reality?

I could do a 1-minute body scan meditation every morning when I first wake up, to check in with how my body feels

I could journal for 15 minutes every morning with my coffee, to clear negative thoughts and invent new positive ones

I could write down 12 things I’m grateful for every night

What about you?

Tips for Making Mental Health a Habit

1. Find the Right Level of Challenge

Use the Goldilocks Principle to find the level of challenge when forming a new habit: not too hard, not too easy, but just right. When you are in the just-challenging-enough zone, that’s when your brain and body systems are changing but also still able to maintain the previous homeostasis.

2. Rinse and Repeat

As the Karate Kid knows, it’s wax on, wax off. Repetition makes something a habit. If you do something over and over and over again, eventually you do it without effort.

Anecdotally, it takes at least 21 days for the body and mind to get used to something and stop fighting it. Therefore, whatever you wish was easy for you, start doing it for the same amount of time every day for 3 weeks, and you’ll find that what was once effortful gradually becomes graceful.

It’s important to give yourself the full three weeks to form the habit, adjust, and get past initial resistance. Then you can make amendments to the practice once it’s already anchored in.

What you want to avoid is changing the practice reactively during the habit formation phase, such that our mood rules when and where the practice happens, instead of the other way around. If we change too much during the habit formation process, it doesn’t ever become habitual but instead stays new and difficult for us.

Shoot to complete several little practices, and build up, just as you might work out with the 2-pound weights for 3 weeks before you try working out with the 5-pounders. Each little habit formation process is key because then that habit becomes a building block on top of which you can place other positive habits.

3. Keep Calm and Carry On

A very important part of every habit formation process is the day we do it anyway, even though we don’t feel like it.

The simple act of doing it anyway, in the face of a complaining mind and rebelling emotions, is where the magic is.

Forming positive mental health habits won’t always be uncomfortable, but some days it is. On the hard days, be proud of yourself for the simple act of persistence.

Some days your mind wanders all over the place during your meditation. Some days you don’t want to do your gratitude journal, or you want to skip your walk because it seems tedious.

But do it anyway, if only to tame and train the part of you that wants to change it all up based on how you feel right now. The reward for sticking with it will come to you down the line – on another day, it will be surprisingly easy to stay calm even in the face of what used to be very overwhelming circumstances.

It is uncomfortable to make a change to your habit, routine, and lifestyle, but rest assured, the power of habit cuts both ways – one day you find the positive behavior has become your new habit, and it becomes uncomfortable to skip it.

4. Good Mental Health Habits for Everyone

Here are 3 positive mental health-promoting practices that everyone can benefit from.

Eat Clean

The impacts of a clean diet cannot be overstated – mental, emotional, physical, and even cognitive health are supported by positive food practices! So however you want to wade in, it is highly recommended to find a way to make healthy eating habitual. Make fresh veggies the main attraction of every meal, eat lots of probiotics, and choose foods for nutrient density as a starting point.

If for just 21 days straight every day we eat clean, the body will adjust and start to associate a feeling of mild pleasure with that clean food. Rather quickly, the body will lose its taste for sugars, over-processed food, unhealthy fats, and other toxins.


Exercise

Exercise is nature’s anti-depressant. And nature’s anti-anxiety. And anti-stress. And natural mood regulators. And it’s pro-creativity, intelligence, and relationship health. And and and. Exercise, intertwined with holistic therapy, is a powerful healing agent. So let’s find a way to make exercise a strong habit.

Again, we look for the just-right challenge. It’s good to work up a sweat, to get warm, to have the heart pumping, and our muscles tingling or even sore because we used them. The body likes it.

Gentle stretching and walking are great places to start if we’ve gotten sedentary or have movement restrictions. Any kind of cardio (biking, running, dancing) and core strengthening exercises are also enormously helpful for mental health.

Whatever our situation, there is some kind of way of moving the body more that will help, even if it’s just 5 minutes a day at our desks. And any little bit of loving attention we throw the body is massively rewarded in the mental health department.


Journaling

There are many kinds of journaling practices, and they’re all helpful for clearing mental-emotional clutter daily.

For those of us who find it hard to sit still in meditation because we become unbearably anxious, or have overwhelming emotions in our daily lives (if we are grappling with trauma symptoms, maybe), journals can be especially helpful.

My three favorite ways to journal are:

1. Freewriting – set a timer for 15 minutes and just keep writing and flowing, not worrying at all about whether it makes sense or is spelled right, just thought-dumping.

2. Dialoguing – in script form, have a little conversation with yourself, possibly between parts of yourself.

Something like this:

Me: What’s going on, how are you?
Inner Child: I feel sad.
Me: Aw, I’m sorry honey. Come here and tell me what’s going on, lovie.
Inner Child: Well…I feel like Jim doesn’t like me. I can’t please him.

This one is helpful for when you’re upset or in a state, where something’s wrong, and you need to talk it out with a friend. You’re the friend you talk it out with.

3. Lists

Listing items in different categories helps the psyche helpfully and helps us see and release. Things I’m mad, scared, or ashamed about. Things I’m happy and grateful about. Things I wish would happen this year. Wishes for others. Wishes for the planet. And so on!

Villa Kali Ma Can Teach You Habits to Improve Your Mental Health

There is an art and science to the habits of mental health. If you’re curious, or having a hard time getting ahold of mental health for yourself, come talk to us at Villa Kali Ma.

We have made our life’s work out of the study of happiness and how to make it a habit, despite all the challenges we women face in the course of human life. You’re welcome in these halls!

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Self-care Strategies

Strategies to Promote Self-Care

Care and Feeding of the Human Being

When you go to the humane society to adopt a pet, you understand you will need to care for that animal.

Not only do you understand that you will need to feed it, clean up after it, and take it to the vet, but you understand also that this animal is going to need your love. Your attention. Your patience, sometimes. Your affection, certainly. This animal’s life will be in your hands.

And how do you as the pet-owner-to-be feel about all of this? Excited. Here for it. On board. You can’t wait to take this cute little being under the sheltering wings of your care.

What motivates you as a pet owner to take on the needs of another? Nothing more than the instinct to love and care for life. Do you know that kind of excitement about the journey, privilege, and challenge of caring for life?

Well, guess what? You, whoever you are, already have one animal who needs care, attention, affection, and love: You.

Self Care: A Requirement of Human Life

Though many of us learn it rather late in life, loving care of the human being we are is necessary to have the full bloom of the flower we are here to be.

Since human beings are multidimensional, complex life forms, that care needs to address several layers and levels of our experience. The physical body needs a lot, sure. And so does the emotional body, the mental body, and the spiritual body.

But we don’t get a pre-printed guide to self-care. We have to learn what we can from our parents and teachers, from friends and people around us, and make up the rest as we go along. We are all writing our manual, filling it with our own experiences of what works and what doesn’t.

What would you put in your self-care manual in each section: body, mind, emotions, and creative spirit?

What Is Self-Care?

Self-care refers to all the practices that are generally recommended and required to make sure that the human being you are is living a full-flowered life in all dimensions of your being.

There are orders of priority: the survival of the physical body is number one. The body is the basic vessel in which we sail on the seas of life, so we have to take care of it first.

Enough of the right kind of healthy food for our bodies, abundant water, plenty of exercise, quiet time, sleep, affectionate touch, undirected play time, time in nature – all of these things are good self-care practices for the body.

The body is remarkable and can get by with less. But it does better with more – to keep the flame of health bright and strong inside of the body, all of these practices are beneficial.

The emotional body, a delightful and very tender child inside of us, needs a lot as well. How indeed can we secure all the love, connection, warmth, contact, and companionship we crave? All that it takes for the emotional body to feel safe and secure, happy and attached to life?

And then there’s the mind – our hunger to learn, to make meaning, to interpret our world and act upon it. And our needs for spiritual dimensions, creative expression…the list goes on.

Human beings might be infinite in dimension, and at each layer of us, we can pose the question: how do we nourish and give love to this layer of our existence?

The good news is, that self-care has been practiced since the arrival of earth’s first human beings. Because even though there are a lot of different kinds of human needs, and there are many different ways to meet those needs, all humans have the same needs.

The needs that make self-care necessary are built into the species of the human being. So we can learn a lot from others around us, and how they are answering the same question we are: how to have the best life in this human form?

What Are Some Examples of Self Care?

Here is a list of universal human needs put together by the Center for Non-Violent Communication:

CONNECTION

acceptance

affection

appreciation

belonging

cooperation

communication

closeness

community

companionship

compassion

consideration

consistency

empathy

inclusion

intimacy

love

mutuality

nurturing

respect/self-respect

safety

security

stability

support

to know and be known

to see and be seen

to understand and

be understood

trust

warmth

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING
air
food
movement/exercise
rest/sleep
sexual expression
safety
shelter
touch
water

HONESTY
authenticity
integrity
presence

PLAY
joy
humor

PEACE
beauty
communion
ease
equality
harmony
inspiration
order

AUTONOMY
choice
freedom
independence
space
spontaneity

MEANING
awareness
celebration of life
challenge
clarity
competence
consciousness
contribution
creativity
discovery
efficacy
effectiveness
growth
hope
learning
mourning
participation
purpose
self-expression
stimulation
to matter
understanding

Looking over the list, we can ask ourselves, what self-care practices would help us get these needs met?

The need for physical well-being can be supported with practices that promote physical health:

Exercise – walks, hikes, workouts, yoga, dancing, sports, outdoor activities, etc.

Hygiene – showering, washing your face and hair, brushing your teeth, etc.

Sleep – limiting screen time, reducing caffeine and sugar, going to bed earlier, following circadian rhythms when we can, etc.

Nutrition – the right amount of foods that nourish us, heal us, resonate with us

Our many social connection-based needs can be met by self-care practices as well. Support groups, teams, classes, and hobbies, accepting invitations to try new things.

For each kind of need, there are best practices that address them. For our need to play, we can do improv or play board games. For the need for beauty, we can listen to classical music, look at paintings, and spend time in nature.

Journal on Your Self-Care Needs

Looking over the list of universal human needs, which of your many human needs feel met already? How are you meeting those needs? What self-care are you already doing that helps you get those needs met? Appreciate yourself for your positive ability to meet these needs.

Take note also of those needs that are currently unmet. Is there a self-care practice you could design for yourself, which would help you get that need met? If you have no path of self-expression at the moment, could you pick up a creative hobby, learn to paint, or sing? If your need for learning is unmet, could you take a course?

Strategies to Promote Self-Care

Here are some ideas on how you can bring more self-care into your life.

1. Write a Permission Slip

A lot of us struggle to feel that it’s ok to care for ourselves as fully as we need. It sounds indulgent, or that we must be exceptionally needy if we want all that. But remember, although we can get by with less, we thrive with more, at least when it comes to self-care.

Write yourself a permission slip in which you give yourself full, unfettered permission to care for yourself as much and as well as you can, and put it up somewhere you can see it. It might be as simple as writing, “I am allowed to care for myself as best I possibly can”.


2. Make a Commitment

Commit to self-care. You can write out a strong why-based statement of commitment:

I, [Your Name], hereby commit to excellent self-care, every day of my life. I commit to care for myself at all levels of my being, to the best of my ability.

I am doing this because I know self-care is …[your reasons for deciding to care for yourself more fully from now on].

Revisit your statement of commitment and the specific reasons you’re choosing to prioritize self-care frequently.


3. Put Self-Care on the Schedule

Draw up a weekly schedule of self-care practices, and put it on your calendar. If you have a paper calendar, that can help with making it visual, easier to see gaps, and places where a self-care activity could be snuck into a busy day. But any calendar will do.

You might want to make a time-based commitment to a specific self-care plan and agree beforehand to stick with it no matter what distractions, thoughts, or feelings come up.

To meet my need for peace, I will eat my lunch outside in the garden every day for the next two weeks, with no phone.


4. Resolve Your Ambivalence About Self-Care

Many women feel conflicted about self-care and the self-love it represents. Becoming conscious of what you fear will happen if you care for yourself is a tool we may need to use again and again.

Here are some common associations that people have with self-care:

Other people will think I’m lazy, uppity, or spoiled – who do I think I am that I deserve to be treated so well?

People will think I’m selfish or feel I’m not there for them enough

If I care for myself, I’ll start to feel better and get my hopes up about life, and then it will just hurt even more the next time I’m disappointed.

Write out your negative associations or lingering doubts about whether it’s safe and allowed for you to thrive and be happy.

If these kinds of self-care-sabotaging thoughts feel familiar, a possible cure is to journal on the following:

Are these fears or negative expectations 100% likely to be true?
What evidence is there that these beliefs are not completely true, or not true in every single case?
Where do these beliefs not apply? Look for exceptions.

Trace the fear-based beliefs and values back to their origin. Where did I get these ideas? Who taught them to me? Do I want to be like that person, live as they live?

Villa Kali Ma Can Teach You Self-Care Strategies

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we’re all about self-care. We believe each woman’s life is precious, and the world needs all of us women to heal up and make some changes for the good.

We know that when we care for ourselves, we are doing something good for all of life. Self-care strengthens the love in the world. It fortifies those who need strength and amplifies those whose voices should be heard. Adding more love to the world is never wrong.

If you need help learning to care for yourself even more, to love yourself more wholeheartedly in all the dimensions of your unique being, we’re here with lots of good ideas for how you can do that.

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Mental Health Boundaries

The Importance of Setting Mental Health Boundaries

Boundaries are so much more than statements we make to other people about what we want and don’t want. Boundaries are real, palpable membranes that exist in the subtle, felt-sensed domains of the psyche, body, and spirit.

All humans have boundaries. Boundaries have a natural function to perform in human life: to define and protect us.

Picture a sheet of paper with a circle drawn on it. Imagine that the space inside of the circle represents you. Within the circle is all the consciousness material that belongs to you as an individual being. All that’s yours to feel, think, and experience as a part of your life’s unfolding journey.

What’s outside of the circle is all that’s “not you”.

Boundaries create a skin for our psyches, keeping what’s ours to experience on the inside and what’s not ours on the outside. Like the skin of our physical bodies and the membranes of our living cells, our boundaries are semi-porous, letting some stuff in and out when it’s good for us to do so.

Sometimes we join others to create a new kind of boundary together, as when we fall in love. Then another skin is created, around the two of us together, which holds both of our circles inside of a larger circle.

We can have many of these circles within circles – boundaries that define and protect our families, our tribes, our nations, our species, and so on. But no matter how many shared identities we are part of, we are also our distinct being.

What Are Healthy Boundaries?

Healthy boundaries create a container that protectively separates and safeguards us. Like a jar that keeps the water of our life from spilling, a treasure box that keeps our precious trinkets in one place, a nest that holds Robin’s eggs.

When our boundaries work well, we contain ourselves, like a mother with a child in her arms. The holding makes us feel loved and connected and keeps us safe from harm.

When we have healthy boundaries, we can be in charge of what we choose to let into our experience, and what we choose to keep out. Like kids in a tree house, we decide who comes in and who’s not allowed.

Boundaries can be flexible and transparent, prickly like a chestnut pod, or soft like a lavender sachet, but whatever they’re like, to work they must hold strong under pressure, keeping the good stuff in and the bad stuff out.

Stop and Reflect:

Take a moment to consider your own interpersonal, and psychological boundaries right now. There are many different kinds of containers in this world, from light to heavy, large to small. What are your boundaries like? Is there an image that comes to you, which helps you understand what your boundaries are like?

Here are some images that have come to others:

My boundaries are like a soap bubble, easily popped

My boundaries are like a tornado bunker, I hide in there and hope for the best

My boundaries are like a big glass house, I wish I had more privacy

My boundaries are like a boat with a hole in the bottom, I can’t get anywhere because I’m always bailing out water

What image comes to mind for your boundaries?

Why Are Healthy Boundaries Important for Mental Health?

Boundaries are a big topic for all of us. For women who suffer from low self-esteem, mental-emotional imbalances, and self-destructive behaviors, it might be the biggest topic of all.

Until we can sense our own being enough to know what we want, and until we can love ourselves enough to be willing to draw lines that protect us from harm, forming some boundaries will always be our main job.

We must have sufficient self-love to know we have a right to exist in our way, just as we are, and that we are allowed to, even supposed to, stand up for ourselves when our lines are crossed.

We must learn how to feel, respect, and defend our boundaries without causing harm to another. Without lashing out, or dumping responsibility for our lives onto someone else. We have to recognize the feelings that indicate a boundary has been crossed (anger, shame, fear), and find a way to restore the boundary.

Mental health requires the love, willingness, and courage to investigate to find out what our boundaries are. For those of us with boundary confusion – a legacy of trauma – this is the most important task we face.

What Are Some Tips for Setting and Maintaining Healthy Boundaries?

1. Explore Your Body Resonances

The body has a very simple language to help us feel what our boundaries are. It is the sensation of body resonance or non-resonance.

We can get good information from the body by asking ourselves, is this a yes or a no for my body? And then see which feeling the body points to, a harmonious yes feeling or a discordant no feeling.

When something is good for the body, we will feel it. Yes-resonance feels good, open, spacious, warm, and pleasant.

Like a string in a piano that hums along with another string, when something is in tune with us, we feel it as a positive humming, buzzing, or other kind of personal signal in the body. This humming, positive yes I like this, this is good for me is a way that the body communicates what is good for life.

Here are some things that my body likes, that give me a “yes I like this”:

-picking up a puppy and holding it to my chest

-stepping onto a warm, clean white beach with bare feet

Cool fresh glass of water with a squeeze of lemon in it

What Do You Feel a Body Yes To?

On the other side, there are things that feel quite distinctly to the body like a “no, yuck, this feels bad”. This feels to the body like notes that don’t sound good together, like colors that clash, like a repellent smell.

Things that give me a Body No are:

-going into a cold, beige room with fluorescent lights with lots of computers droning

-the smell of fumes in a dark, labyrinthine parking garage

-a stranger standing too close to me in a crowded space

What Do You Feel a Body-No To?

If you move towards your Body-Yes and away from your Body-No, this is a good guidance system. Through respecting them, our natural, life-given boundaries will bounce back in place to do their job of safekeeping and protecting you.

What weakens our ability to sense the body boundaries is when we override our Body-No. When we force ourselves to stay close to something bad for us and don’t listen to the natural desire to pull away, we are weakening ourselves.

Begin with just noticing, what does my body say Body-Yes to and Body-No to? Start moving towards Body-Yes and away from Body-No and see how this affects your life. You will probably start to feel more safe and protected, more like you have boundaries and are worthy of having them.

2. Practice Saying No Nicely

For all the women out there, I feel it’s important to emphasize the adage, “‘No’ is a complete sentence”. It’s always ok to simply say no, and that’s it. Sometimes you have to say no and not be nice at all about it. Truly.

However, it’s also ok to work on saying no, nicely.

If you have someone in your life you want to communicate a no nicely to, it helps to articulate what your body would say yes to and share that as transparently as you can.

For example, “Honey, can I have the kitchen to myself for the next hour? I like to have a lot of space around me when I’m cooking, that helps me feel comfy and good and in my flow” is a way to share a boundary, kindly. (Compare that to, “Get out of here, I’m trying to cook!”).

3. Let Go of External Validation of Your Boundaries

Boundaries, by definition, are ours and ours alone to self-validate and self-approve.

People might give us blank stares, push back, or fail to understand. That’s ok. We still need to have and communicate boundaries.

Understand that sometimes in life we have to stand alone in our corner. Boundaries are one of those times. It’s not other people’s job to love it when we tell them no or when we don’t choose to comply with what was in their flow. Don’t expect that, and have your own back.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist in Setting Mental Health Boundaries

Boundary confusion is the legacy of trauma. If we have struggled with boundaries now – if we can’t say no even when we want to, or we have no idea whether we feel a yes or a no to something – this isn’t a fault of ours, but rather an indication that we have had our boundaries encroached upon, if not shattered, in the past.

Villa Kali Ma is devoted wholeheartedly to helping women heal, in large part by recovering, repairing, and nourishing our right to have and listen to the boundaries that protect and define what’s precious within us.

Come find out for yourself, how much better life can be when we recover our natural right to good, healthy boundaries!

Categories
Behavioral Health Benefits

Benefits of Behavioral Health

What Is Behavioral Health?

There are many ways to look at health and well-being and different lenses through which to examine human thriving.

Behavioral health is the lens that focuses on how humans behave, and how that behavior reflects and relates to our life force being supported or inhibited. How do our choices, habits, and actions in the world support or thwart our joy, health, and vitality? Do our actions lead to wellness or harm?

Behavior communicates a lot about what’s going on inside of us. Imbalanced behaviors reflect an inner imbalance. Balanced behavior says we’re balanced on the inside too.

Behavioral health overlaps with mental health and physical health, but is distinguished by its specific emphasis on action in the world. Using an outside-in approach, behavioral health works to better our insides by first balancing the outsides.

By embracing and looking into what “healthy behavior” means for us, we can experience many benefits that come from being in a greater state of balance, peace, and ease.

This way the vessel we are stays intact enough to truly sail on the seas of life, without getting shipwrecked by every storm.

How Can Behavioral Health Help Your Mental Health?

Taking an action-first approach to health has a lot of power. By deliberately acting in ways that create health, we sooner or later bring about a state of health.

The phrase “fake it ’til you make it”, used in addiction recovery circles, could be a behavioral health mantra. First, behave and act in accordance with what creates health, and eventually, health will come to your inner world too.

You can’t stay sick and unhappy if you regularly take the actions of a healthy, happy person. Depression withers away when we get up early in the morning to work out. Anxiety will never beat a regular yoga practice.  Even the wildest, unruliest mind will fall into a pleasant flow state if we meditate for long enough.

If we eat a healthy, clean diet we find our optimal weight. If we sleep enough at night, we have energy for the day. If we go outside enough, we feel refreshed and connected to nature. If we go once a week to a board game night, eventually we make friends. If we keep going to AA meetings, we get and stay sober.

It’s a powerful law that right action helps us live the life of the person we long to be. Right action builds a house, a structure, that we can live inside. As the old saying goes, we make the beds we lie in.

Behavioral health helps us make good beds.

What Are the Benefits of Behavioral Health?

Behavioral health shines in the treatment of addiction and other compulsive behaviors like eating disorders and self-harm, where self-damaging behavior is the presenting symptom. When negative behavior is repatterned, inner thoughts and feelings are changed as well.

If a person is in a good enough state of health, we will see it in multiple layers of the person’s life. They will have healthy bodies without pain or symptoms, and they will also have relatively balanced minds and emotions, and reasonably functional relationships.

This person who is in a state of holistic overall health will make generally effective decisions, be able to set goals for themselves in areas of life that give them meaning, and behave in ways that support their intentions.

Working on our behavioral health leads to positive and health-promoting behavior out in the world:

-better physical health through exercise, lifestyle and diet

-better relationships through self-awareness, communication, and interpersonal skills

-better life skills, including work, finances, and achievement of goals

By the outside-in effect, behavioral health also affects what it feels like on the inside, too:

-better, more effective thoughts (positive and reality-based at the same time)

-feeling emotions in a more modulated way (able to get the color and depth of life, but not be pulled under by a tidal wave of feeling)

-stronger self-esteem through interpersonal boundaries and positive relating

Try This Exercise to Experience the Outside-in Effect

Smiling is a fun way to try the outside-in effect. Set a timer for a minute, and smile for the whole minute. Start with fake smiling and see where it goes.

What we discover in a good round of smiling is that when we force ourselves to smile for long enough, it eventually turns into a real smile, including the fun positive feeling that normally causes a spontaneous smile.

Pretending can be a doorway to the real. If you like this, try it with a friend too.

Journal to Optimize Your Behavioral Health

Think about your definition of a healthy, happy person. Imagine this person going throughout their day. How do they approach the world, and what actions do they take? What activities do they participate in? What do they steer clear of?

Now think of yourself, and imagine the healthiest, most optimized version of yourself. How does that person (the perfectly healthy you) behave, what decisions does she make? What actions does she take, and what activities does she involve herself in? What does she stay away from?

Think about this: when we behave according to how the healthiest version of us would behave, we will sooner or later become that person more reliably and naturally, here and now in our real lives. What behaviors from your “perfect health self” could you start practicing now?

Villa Kali Ma Provides Behavioral Health

When it comes to addiction and self-destructive behaviors, it’s very important to get actions and choices sorted out first, because such seriously harmful behaviors put our very lives at stake.

Here at Villa Kali Ma, it is our experience that the healing force only has a chance to take root once the momentum of negative behaviors has stopped. It’s necessary to be in a protected environment to have a chance at starting over.

Villa Kali Ma is a behavioral health provider, who treats addictions, mental illness, and trauma in a uniquely holistic and female-positive approach. We combine ancient healing approaches like yoga and Ayurveda with the latest in cutting-edge scientifically developed methods to help women get their lives back into their power.

Our offerings represent the wisdom of the outside-in approach, teaching women habits and behaviors of a good life. We show each other how to live positively – how to act in a way that the goodness inside us can bloom and grow at last.

Categories
Be your own valentine

How to Be Your Own Valentine This Year

A Day to Honor Love

In the secular West, February 14th is the day we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Named after the 3rd-century Roman clergyman St. Valentine, whose martyrdom is said to have occurred on the 14th of February, Valentine’s Day is the day we set aside to honor romantic love.

The link between the historical person of St. Valentine and heart-shaped candy isn’t obvious. Valentinus is also the patron saint of beekeeping and epilepsy, for example, and is not known to have displayed any ardent romantic leanings.

Be that as it may, on the day of St. Valentine we celebrate a conception of romantic love handed down to us from the High Middle Ages, when the practice

of courtly love flowered. Associated with knights and ladies of the royal court, love was codified during that time with a formalized set of rules of chivalry, believed to capture the nobility of romantic love.

The Arrival of Self Love

In 2024, our notions of love have expanded and changed in more than a few ways. We have largely moved on from the chivalric code, with some charming vestiges lingering in the form of gifted chocolates, red roses, and the sweet notion of agreeing to be someone’s valentine.

One big, interesting change since the heraldic days is the emergence of self-love as a healing concept. Hasn’t almost everyone you know at least heard of the idea that we have to love and care for ourselves? Self-love has become a household name.

And it’s a good thing, too. Because we humans, and especially us women, need self-love so badly our failure to love ourselves can be called an epidemic. We can’t feel love. We don’t know what it is. We don’t think we deserve it. We push it away. We run after the wrong people, thinking we can get love out of them.

How many of us try to replace love with everything it isn’t: with attention, with looking good, with meaningless sex? How often are we mixing love up with narcissistic reflection, with the need for a valuable, admirable self in the eyes of another?

We need some help in the true love department.

Valentine’s Day as Self-Love Day

This year, Villa Kali Ma would like to invite you to be your own Valentine. Here are our suggestions for celebrating your lovability and expressing your sense of romance with someone who deserves and needs your love: you!

If you’re like us, you need your love most of all, whether you’re paired up or flying solo this year.

Our suggestion is to take it as a creative challenge this year, to think about all 5 of the love languages, and give yourself some love in each of the channels. If you’re not familiar with the idea of love languages, it can be helpful to read about it.

The basic idea is that love can be expressed and received in a lot of different ways. The key languages are words, gifts, time, acts of service, and touch.

5 Love Languages: 5 Ways to Give Love to Yourself

1. Words

Make yourself a Valentine’s Card, just like in school, using glue, stickers, and all the colors you like best.

Then open it up and write yourself an over-the-top love letter on the inside. Write the letter that you have always wished someone would send you.

See if you can channel the energy of young love, of besottedness, of being weak-kneed. Convey to yourself how very worthy you are of being in love with, of falling for, of being enchanted by.

If you have been in love, you know what it’s like – the person’s eyelashes seem like perfection, every little detail of their body sings to you. When you look at any person with the eyes of being in love, you see things differently.

Imagine someone looking at you that way, being charmed by you, under your spell. Then write from that point of view, as though you, yes you, are the only one for you.

Another powerful way to do this is to record a loving, gushing voice message for yourself, and then listen to it. Take on the perspective of the lover you need, the one who is made just for you, who is completely yours, who would never leave you.


2. Gifts

Get or make for yourself a meaningful little gift that symbolizes something to you personally and touches your heart.

It doesn’t have to be luxurious – sentiment more than the price tag is what counts here, as in life. But it’s also ok to spend a little more than you might normally, especially if you rarely spoil yourself and this is an exceptional behavior.

You can look for gifts linked explicitly with romance: beautiful flowers (picking out a bouquet of all the flowers you love and respond to energetically can be a fun activity on its own), or a box of chocolates.

Sometimes the best gifts are home-made. In the old days, we used to make each other mix tapes. What would be a meaningful creative gift that says, I love you, you’re the one I want, I’m all about you?

It can be helpful to think about an ideal romantic partner, and what they could give you that would make you feel so seen, so known, so understood, and so loved beyond doubt.


3. Acts of Service

Do something for yourself that needs to be done, an act of service that you honestly wish someone would do for you.

It might not sound romantic at first, but haven’t we all been touched at one point in our lives by someone’s thoughtful act, when someone took care of something for us, took a burden off our back?

It can be surprisingly healing to fix one’s broken sink, do our taxes early for once, and weed the garden.

If we can’t feel the love in that, consider something like cooking ourselves a lovely meal, the kind where you have to go get special ingredients and try something new to make it. Do something for yourself, that you feel is helpful, supportive, and a way of signaling that you have your own back.


4. Touch

Love the body you are this year, through the love language of touch.

Take a hot bath with essential oils and salts. Moisturize with something that smells like heaven to you. Wear something that the body loves to have on its skin.

Get some naked time if you haven’t in a while. Give yourself a long, slow, thorough massage, without rushing. It doesn’t have to be sensual per se – just something that feels like an expression of love to the body.


5. Time

Alone time is precious, worth its weight in spiritual gold. If you’re not partnered up right now, that means you have a beautiful chance to spend quality time with yourself in whatever way you secretly want, making Valentine’s Day a day to savor.

Create protected circumstances for being present with yourself, whatever that looks like or needs to be. Maybe you want to take a little trip to the mountains for a hike alone. Maybe you want to re-read a wonderful book you read as a young adult. Bake cookies and eat them. It’s your day.

The Most Super-Powered Self-Love Activity

If you want to take your self-love to the next level, try this very powerful exercise on Valentine’s Day this year.

Set a timer for 12 minutes. Look at yourself in the mirror for the entire 12 minutes. After the first minute of gazing at yourself, start saying to your image, I love you. Say it over and over again for the entire 12 minutes. Look into your own eyes, say your name, and see what happens.

It will feel uncomfortably long. Perhaps you will feel like you’re faking it. That’s ok. The words count to the woman in the mirror.

Villa Kali Ma Can Help You With Self Love

Villa Kali Ma is dedicated to supporting women to rediscover the lively, warming power within them that gives rise to their unique lives.

We know all about how the life force within gets discouraged, how we lose our fire and our heart when life beats us down a little too much. We know how we blame ourselves, and how we take the suffering we feel as a further sign of how much we’ve failed.

None of it is true. The only truth is love. If we are not seeing ourselves with the forgiving, renewing eyes of life’s love for us, we are not seeing clearly.

If you need a hand remembering how to love yourself, others, and the world – we’re here.

Categories
How to get back on track with new year's resolutions

How to Get Back on Track With New Year’s Resolutions

We’re already one month into 2024, dear readers! Can you believe it?

Thinking back to the visions that charmed us for this year, the intentions we outlined in words or writing… how do the opening musical phrases of 2024 sound so far?

How are we feeling and sensing the qualities of this fresh, newborn year? What about our goals? How healthy is our resolve to apply willpower toward positive outcomes?

If we’re doing well enough, and showing up each day we can meet ourselves and our true intentions in this world, and we might be feeling positive, strong, and sure-footed.

If, on the other hand, we’ve had a slippery, scrambly start to 2024, full of hesitation and struggle, that’s OK too. Human.

Maybe we have even let ourselves down, skipped out on our promises, gone out for cigarettes and never come back, psychologically speaking. Well, OK!

Anything that matters is worth trying again. Also, anything worth doing will be somewhat hard, some of the time.

Whether the light of our spirit has glowed or guttered so far, let’s begin this moment anew with a fresh cleansing sweep and start again.

Here are some encouragements from us at Villa Kali Ma for getting back in the saddle and sallying forth towards our true intentions.

1. Revise and Reprioritize Your Goals

We are always allowed to reconsider our goals and fiddle them into the right shape for us, as we are right now. Life is fluid and changing. Our goals might need to be too.

Sometimes life just doesn’t fit the image we had of it. We are always allowed to adjust the map as we go along and get information from the real terrain of life.

Perhaps after one month of mixed effort or even full-on failure, we have more information than we did before starting. Maybe reality has prompted us to reassess whether or not our goals were feasible and realistic. Or whether we even wanted those goals.

Whatever your situation, for each intention you set forth for 2024, take this opportunity to revise if needed, toss out if it’s truly legless, and recommit to those you’re serious about.

2.  Use SMART Goals

Good, helpful goals are worded in such a way that they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based.

While grand New Year’s Resolutions tend not to last past February, well-worded goals that follow the SMART acronym’s recipe are luminously achievable, because they’re designed from the start to ensure small successes we can build on.

3. Makes Goals About Practices, Not Results

You may want to consider reframing your goal as a practice rather than an outcome. For example, losing a specific number of pounds is an outcome, but exercising three times a week for 30 minutes is a practice.

Sometimes the pressure to reach a specific result is too much for us, but a practice-based intention is always easy to succeed at, since if we do the practice we succeed, by definition.

And the success is important. Each promise we keep with ourselves is worth its weight in gold.

4. Make Your Goals Smaller

Even if a specific outcome is important to you, you might want to make the goal smaller and less intimidating, knowing you can always reach further in your next set of intentions.

If you want to be able to run a marathon eventually, what about starting with running 20 minutes three times a week for a month and taking it from there? When we’re ready for it, we can take on the greater challenge.

It is better to do a ridiculously modest goal successfully than it is to try something too big and let ourselves down again.

If you have a low opinion of your ability to follow through on your promises to yourself, design a foolproof experiment for yourself, something you can do for sure. 3 minutes a day of meditating for 7 days straight? Yes, I can do that. Complete that goal, small as it might be, and raise the stakes from there.

5. Fortify Your “Why”

The biggest assist for change, including integrating yoga therapy into our lives, is having a good reason for change. Change is hard. It takes effort and discomfort. We have to do and feel things that in the moment we might not feel like doing.

What will bridge us over the discomfort, resistance, negativity, and discouragement that might come up for us? Not to mention our urges to self-sabotage, to wreck our lives again?

A powerful why.

Love is the most powerful “why” of all. When we connect our goals directly to something or someone we love, that energy of love in our hearts will soften the edges of difficulty and infuse our efforts with nobility.

Excitement, eagerness, and curiosity come to our aid when we can connect goals with something we feel naturally passionate and positive about. Joy can move mountains.

When we have a powerful why, we will endure a lot, maybe without even feeling the pain of it, because the positive, benevolent glow of our desire and loving will are protecting us.

For each of your resolutions, try to generate at least 12 compelling good reasons that this resolution is worth fighting for. Make the entries on your list as poetic, evocative, and stirring as you possibly can, to waken the dragon of your powerful why.

6. Remember Your Why Not

If you truly don’t have a powerfully motivating reason that makes you smile and feel some uplifted energy, then you might want to ask yourself why this particular goal is on your list at all.

If you have an important health goal that you really feel like you “should” have on your list, (like getting sober!), but you can’t quite connect emotionally to the “why” about it, it’s ok to have negative whys be your reason. Things you want to avoid, and never have to experience again, are powerful motivators too.

I want to be sober forever because I don’t want to ever have to feel afraid of losing custody of my daughter again, I don’t ever want to have to ask my parents for money to go to rehab again, and I don’t want to ever have to feel so ashamed of myself ever again…

7. Have Compassion for Your Struggle

The truth is, life is hard a lot of the time. Of course, there are the good aspects of living – joy, love, humor, creative expression, passion for our work, and people. But if you also do suffer, if you find it hard to be in your skin – that is the human condition.

Suffering is part of change. It’s not the result of change, it’s part of the middle part of change.  It is normal to be beset with challenges.

An argument can be made that the fight for your life, your happiness, etc, is part of proving to yourself how serious you are about this. Everything good is worth fighting for. When there’s a lot of opposition (even from within you), the answer isn’t to shrink back, necessarily. Maybe you need to lean in and just keep going.

But if it’s hard, be nice to yourself about that and know that it’s hard for everyone else, too. Maybe not all the time, but at some point in human life, there is a challenge for each and all.

8. Psych Yourself up With a Positive Rant

If you’re getting that feeling of dread and oh no before something you promised yourself you’d stick with, it can help to do a short burst of out-loud or inner pep talk monologue to fire yourself up:

I want to exercise because I like the feeling of relaxation and being “spent”. It’s going to feel so good! It’s going to be that warm, delicious feeling of stepping into the shower after I’m done and I’m feeling all good all over! I’m going to have so much energy and have such a good sleep tonight! It’s going to feel GREAT to slip into the sheets! I’m going to feel so proud of myself for doing it!

9. If You Don’t Want to Do Something, Find Out Why

If you’re facing a lot of inner resistance, take some reflection time to find out why.

Journal on the following questions:

What are you afraid will happen to you if you make this change?

Are you sabotaging yourself?

Do you truly want to achieve this goal? If yes, why? If not, why not?

Is it a goal you should do, or is it a genuine expression of who you are, and what you’re here to do with your time on planet Earth?

Villa Kali Ma’s Whole Body Approach to Your Goals

Villa Kali Ma specializes in how women can evolve and change themselves for the better, shaking off the burdens and shackles of addiction, trauma, and mental health trouble so the bright spirit we are can finally thrive.

We have a deep understanding of all that opposes the human spirit from thriving, and all of the many forces of positive growth inside of us which can be activated to help us bloom.

If you’re ready to bloom bigger, friend, consider us your ally!

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Luxury rehab

What Is Luxury Rehab and How Is It Different?

Luxury rehab refers to high-end inpatient substance abuse treatment, or residential addiction treatment, administered in a resort-like facility. Good luxury rehabs are not just about comfortable settings, but also provide exceptional quality, variety and customizability of treatment modalities and offerings.

At Villa Kali Ma, for example, we have taken care to bring the most cutting-edge and transformational healing therapies available in the field of mental health and addiction recovery to our treatment experience. We feel we represent the best of what is available in individual and group psychotherapy approaches, community recovery practices, trauma treatment, and alternative healing modalities.

True to our founding philosophy, we weave this array of recovery opportunities into a personalized treatment experience that powerfully and comprehensively addresses broader topics than symptoms alone.

Because we know a whole-woman approach leads to more total and lasting healing, we include yoga, acupuncture, functional medicine, reiki, breath work, expressive arts therapy, shamanic journeying, ayurveda, equine therapy, and more. Our treatment plans reflect who you are and what you want to change in your life at many levels of being.

How Are Luxury Rehabs Different From Traditional Rehabs?

Luxury rehabs and traditional rehabs differ in two basic ways – the value provided by the accommodations and the value provided by the treatment program itself.

The value of the environment is typically about niceness of the accommodations – what kind of a setting is it, how much privacy will you have, where in the country is this facility located? What kind of food will you have available to you – is it organic, healthy, clean food? What are your recreation and relaxation opportunities at this location? How nice are the rooms and shared spaces?

The value of the treatment itself is about how beneficial the available modalities are for healing your troubles, how personalized the approach to working with you will be, and how much personal attention you’ll get. This is measured in how many hours of treatment you receive, the experience levels of the clinicians and healing specialists working with you, and how helpful the treatment approach is for your personal case.

Luxury rehabs promise a softer and more private environment. At Villa Kali Ma, we believe that when it’s possible, making the body feel safe and comfortable through harmonious environment is a supportive background context for the inner work of self-transformation.

It is our general orientation that recovery is hard enough, and that organic food, sunshine, coastal breezes, nice linens, pleasant decor and sufficient privacy are not so much luxuries as basic assists to help create a foundation of safety and calm. These are good conditions for any kind of healing retreat, and if more people had this available to them, we’d recommend it to everyone.

The more important difference between luxury rehabs and the traditional model relates to how much customization and attention is possible in each. Traditional rehabs are more likely to service more clients at once, and to offer standardized protocols of care designed to meet more people’s needs at once.

Is this good or bad? This is largely a matter of healing philosophy. Proponents of more individualized care feel that addiction and mental health treatment can be less effective when delivered in a more en masse style, due to less attention and time for each woman.

In luxury rehabs clients have greater privacy, a smaller cohort of other participants, and receive more personalized attention through more customized treatment. Treatment options, including holistic therapies, are more varied and more specific. It is more common to treat a person as an individual, through a combination of approaches.

What Are the Benefits of Luxury Rehabs?

As we at Villa Kali Ma see it, the biggest benefit of a luxury rehab is access to quality of care. Luxury rehabs tend to have the resources to hire expert clinicians and to offer new treatments which can be hard to find elsewhere.

Given the smaller cohort and the personalization of the treatment program, luxury rehabs might be compared to private versus public school. For some people, being in a more private and personalized context makes all the difference for learning how to recover in the way that’s just right for them.

Personal attention for your unique case, from an experienced professional who has time to really get to know you during your stay, has enormously positive impacts on treatment outcomes. The therapeutic relationship is a huge factor in healing, independent of the modality itself. A strong-enough trust bond and personal connection to a healer is really only possible with time and presence.

Who Can Afford Luxury Rehab?

Addiction treatment at a luxury rehab is, by definition, more expensive. Treatment costs at any rehab vary by length of stay and services offered, so it stands to reason that if you’re staying in very comfortable accommodations with higher end treatment services, there is a different value exchange that has to be calculated.

However, more and more luxury rehabs – including Villa Kali Ma, we’re happy to be able to say – accept a broad spectrum of insurances, which means it’s likely you can cover some or all of the costs associated with your rehab, even if it’s a higher end one. Villa Kali Ma is an in-network provider for several major insurances, so it’s worth checking with yours or calling us to speak about your options.

Villa Kali Ma’s Luxury Rehab

If it were possible, we healers here at Villa Kali Ma would offer our high standard of treatment, including the level of customized attention and our comfortable, retreat-like setting, to all women who need it! When we can, we sometimes sponsor a woman’s rehab for that reason.

If you’re in a position to consider coming to a high-end healing facility, we do recommend our own offerings. In all of our facilities, we’ve created refined, supportive environments for learning how to heal at the deepest levels. Throughout your stay here, you’ll benefit from our transformational, revolutionary trauma-healing modalities, our traditional psychodynamic therapies, and the most ancient, tried-and-true practices of bodily and spiritual wellness from around the world.

Categories
Mental health goals

Goals for Mental Health in the New Year

Set Goals for Your Mental Health

Did you know that you can set goals for your mental health? It’s true. Would you care to join me, dear reader, in finding out how happy, peaceful, positive, healthy, and connected we could become in 2024?

Mental health skills can be learned, practiced, and eventually mastered, just like any other skill, through the repetition of small, strengthening tasks. Through many days of showing up in the zone of “just-right-challenge” – not too hard, not too easy – we will meet real-world milestones.

Gradually, as we collect milestones, and the covered ground behind us grows long, we get somewhere. Building on each success, we get stronger. We wake up one day and realize we are quite resilient, actually rather capable of facing what’s ours to dance with today.

The Power of Goals

Having change goals is part of feeling connected and engaged with life. Goals imply feelings of purpose and hope, bringing color and shape to our imagined future.

Before learning a new skill, even a mental health skill, we can only hope that we will be able to learn it. Once we’ve learned it, we are in a different situation. We know for certain we can do that skill. But also, we now know that we can learn new things.

But we can only have this learning, this change in understanding of ourselves when we try (which often involves a lot of falling down and then trying again). It is through experience (including failure) that we find out for ourselves that we do have the capacity within us to change, to direct our destinies.

If you’re someone struggling with addictions or other kinds of heartbreaking, self-defeating, demoralizing difficulties, I do mean you too. I promise.

Three Ingredients of Change: What, Why, and How

To change, we need three things. A clear definition of our desired outcome (what), a good personal reason that we can rely upon to powerfully motivate us to do the work of the change (why), and a good plan (how).

When we know where we’re going, why we’re going there, and have mapped out the road, we’ll have nothing left to stop us and naturally we’ll set out walking in the direction we intend to go.

7 Tips for Making Mental Health Changes

1: Less Is More, Rinse and Repeat

Even if you’re walking across the country, you can only take so many steps each day. Start at whatever level you can have success at, and know that when you’re stronger, you’ll be able to tackle more, but you have to build up your strength.

If you want to be physically fit (a very good mental health goal), but it is a challenge to even walk for 5 minutes, start with 5 minutes. Do 5 minutes a day for a predetermined amount of time that you know for sure you can commit to, even if it’s only 5 days in a row. Then when the 5 days are up, set a new little, achievable goal. You might be ready for 10 minutes a day.

If we size and frame things in a way that we feel a natural motivation and desire to engage, and we see the very real possibility of our success if we keep showing up, then we’re very likely to succeed. As they say in AA, easy does it.


2: Make a Decision (Again)

If we get blocked or start self-sabotaging, we may need to start over again and make a new decision. That’s always ok. Our own will and our commitment are necessary, we won’t get far without them.

Many of us are attached to our suffering and are scared of health and happiness. If we subconsciously connect our suffering with staying safe, and happiness with risk, then we will stay in our suffering.

The only way to work with this factor is to be honest with ourselves. Everything is in place for a reason.

When we see our priorities, and once we accept them, we may be able to change them or find them changing naturally. We may realize, yes, I want to be safe, but actually, at this point, I want safe and happy. I will try for both.


3: Make a Time-Based Practice Plan of Right-Sized, Challenging Tasks

The way to change is to put ourselves in the place of gentle challenge, over and over again.

Here are some sample ideas for how you could work on the mental health goal “think more positive thoughts” – an example for inspiration.

The idea is to set up a short plan of very achievable challenges which you complete from start to finish before evaluating or changing anything.

Easy Peasy: for 14 days, every day for 5 minutes I write down all my negative thoughts and just let them be, practicing my observing skills.

Medium: for 21 days, every day for 15 minutes, I will take the time to write down several negative thoughts, and reframe each of them to better thoughts that still feel true to me.

Hard: for 30 days, every day for 7 minutes, I will look in the mirror, and I will speak positive things out loud about myself and my life.

At the end of your short practice plan, you would devise and commit to a new one, adjusting the level of challenge to keep you in the just-right challenge zone.


4: Use Time as a Tool

Every goal can be achieved through tiny time boxes.

Think about working out more, a fine mental health goal. Perhaps it sounds most doable and enjoyable to you to work out for 20 minutes on three separate days. You could also do 10 minutes a day 6 days a week instead. 60 minutes on one day is also a possibility.

Those all are ways of working out for 60 minutes total. Each one has different pros and cons, but all are a way of improving physical fitness. They will all strengthen you, more quickly or more slowly.

What you’re looking for in mapping any goal is a frame that’s doable and very repeatable, so that the large task of change moves through time in an easy, flowing way.


5: Decide How You Will Get Back in the Saddle

Slips happen. Decide in advance how you will handle it if you miss the mark for a day, if you slip out of the practice or if something comes up which makes it impossible to complete.

Perhaps you agree with yourself that you will make up the practice by doing a double time box the next day. Whatever it is, decide how you approach this in advance, so that you keep your promise with yourself.

This is a kind of contingency plan – I will do my best to follow this practice plan, but if I do slip, here is how I correct it and get back on track.


6: Evaluate Only at Pre-determined Moments

With all goals, it’s important to complete the task in the time frame you set out for yourself, before evaluating results or deciding to change the frame.

Resist the urge to reach big conclusions about yourself during the change process itself. Thinking we’re doing terribly and thinking we’re doing magnificently are both ego traps that throw us off the path.

Remember it takes a couple of weeks for a change to have benefits. Only change or adapt your practice at pre-determined points between cycles.

And again, make those cycles as small as they need to be. Completing even a very short plan builds confidence, and can always be repeated or extended if you want more. This is psychologically more strengthening than setting a big, vague, unsustainable, or unrealistic plan and failing.


7: Surrender

The paradox of change is, that the moment we start moving, the letting go begins. While remembering our what, our why, and our how, we must now find the grace to adapt to the reality of the journey, the difference between the plan and how it unfolds.

We stay flexible. We do not turn against ourselves when it turns out there was an unforeseen obstacle when the terrain is not exactly like the map portrayed it. We let go of control and defenses, to face the fires of change, knowing there is no change without suffering.

We lean into our humility. We are not, and we do not have to be, the best. It’s not a competition. It is a practice, a process, a cultivation of ourselves. All are allowed to grow, to find out what potential we have inside of ourselves. Growth is its joy, all living things grow.

We surrender to the journey. It’s ok to be unequal to the totality of the task because we only ever need to do the small little part right in front of us. Life will move heaven and earth to help us.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist With Your Mental Health

Villa Kali Ma was founded because we care about mental health, our own, and everybody else’s. We know a lot about it – how things go wrong and how to set them right again. If you want to get some help for feeling good, strong, positive, and healthy in 2024, well drop by – that’s exactly what we’re here for!

Categories
Sobriety

10 Tips for Staying Sober This New Year

Are you aiming to have a sober 2024? Good for you, my friend. Yes yes yes! Go you.

Sobriety is so important. Your physical body can only be happy, strong, and resilient with sobriety. Your thoughts and your emotions can only heal and create positive vibrations for yourself and others with sobriety.

Your relationships can grow, change, and trend towards the positive only with sobriety. Your financials, your material life, your career, your family, your pets…everyone is better off when you’re sober.

Here are ten tips from Villa Kali Ma, ten reminders for all of us who are seeking to walk a positive path of change in our lives, whether we’ve been sober one day or one decade.

1. Revisit Your Why Frequently

In his very poignant work Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.“

Frankl was writing about the human being’s remarkable capacity to withstand adversity, and how helpful it is to have a good reason.

What are your reasons for staying sober this year?

The more compelling your why, the easier it will be for you. If you can’t remember, stop right now and journal for 7 minutes on this topic:

I commit to sobriety today because…

Here are some reasons we can think of.

We stay sober because life is better sober, in every single way.

We stay sober because we want to be in charge of our own lives.

We stay sober because of the love and gratitude for those who helped us get and stay sober.

We stay sober because we know our sobriety helps other people get and stay sober.

We stay sober because we choose to believe we matter. 

What are your reasons?

2. Connect With Your Higher Power

Cultivate your relationship with a positive, benevolent life force power that you believe can and will help you stay sober.

The definition of a higher power is very broad and permissive in AA. Famously, one early member prayed to a doorknob and found it effective.

In or outside of AA circles, truthfully you are allowed to choose your own higher power as long as you understand that sobriety requires some measure of humility and relinquishment of the ego.

The false self, the conditioned self, and the ego self cannot overcome addiction, but your true loving Self-nature, the part of you that is one with all of life, can.

We can approach sobriety in a million different ways, but if we live out of alignment with the nature of life, if we are overly selfish, egoic, and unloving towards ourselves or others, we’re heading for a relapse.

Prioritize living a positive, loving life that brings no harm to others, that does unto others as we would have them do unto us, and we are turned in the right direction (towards God, or whatever we want to call it).

3. Stay Connected With Your Recovery Community

It’s important to prioritize sobriety every day. One easy way to make this a strong habit is to make sure you stay connected with other positive recovering people. These people help you remember the sneaky dangers of addiction, to stay cautious and smart in the face of the very real dangers of relapse.

A suggestion for starting in 2024 is to complete a time-based recovery challenge, such as attending 30 meetings in 30 days. Alternatively, you can make goals related to recovery tasks, such as working through the 12 Steps with a sponsor this year (even if we’ve done them before).

4. Do Your Healing Work

Underlying traumatization are serious risk for relapse, so it’s important to make sure we get help. If you know you have struggles staying and being happy in your skin – as so many of us do, that’s why we were addicts in the first place, isn’t it? – make sure you’re actively involved in your healing.

This can take many forms. Perhaps you’re working on yourself in psychotherapy, in a therapy group, or receiving a series of treatments targeting your trauma. Maybe you’re taking a yoga teacher training or doing a healing art project. The important thing is to keep one foot in the waters of healing so that this stays alive and awake in you.

5. Socialize With Sober People

A lot of sobriety is just staying away from places and people who might offer us alcohol and drugs. The addict within will tell us this means we have to live a boring, isolated life, but that’s not true. Addiction leads us to that, not sobriety.

If you’re feeling a failure of imagination about this, see if you can come up with a list of 12 things that sound fun to try with others, that don’t involve any substances.

  1. take a gardening class
  2. go to a meet-up for hiking
  3. plan a board game night with my sober friends

Could you put something from your list on the calendar for early 2024?

6. Take Care of Your Physical Body and Health

Feeling good in the body is a large part of happiness.

Prioritize your physical health, by eating an abundance of healthy fresh, and ideally home-cooked foods in enough but still moderate amounts. Exercise, in a variety of ways, frequently. Stretch, go for long walks, do something for cardio, and something that builds your strength.

If it feels doable this year, stay away from screens, sugar, and caffeine. The body doesn’t like these things. The body likes moving, breathing fresh air, playing, and being in nature.

7. Get a Hobby

The human being loves to learn and loves to be creative. If you feel like you’re not sure what to do with yourself or you’re not too excited about anything these days, consider getting a hobby.

If there is something you’ve always wanted to try, or which you admire others for having the courage to learn how to do, give yourself a window of time, such as three months, just to explore, with no attachment to the outcome. You might not stick with it past the window of time, or you might.

Don’t do it for the results, per se, but for the experience itself, for the positive benefits of having a hobby. You might find that you get the bug for something, and surprise yourself. Allowing the human side of you to flourish, to be curious, exploratory, and experimental, does wonders for feeling meaning and connection in life. One exploration will lead to another, don’t decide everything in advance, but rather let yourself try it and see.

Here are some things we think sound fun to try out if you never have:

bellydancing

improv

cooking or baking class

learning a language, practicing it with a native speaker

crafting, such as sewing, quilting, flower arranging

ceramics, watercolors, life drawing

woodworking

learning an instrument

making up songs

8. Spend Time in Nature

Nature is a healer. If we can get out into nature, we will get all the benefits of our brains getting entrained to the flow state, which helps us learn, grow, regulate, move past our trauma, and become creative and peaceful.

If nature is a little scary to you, start with short visits, start small. But get to know nature. Outer nature reflects the vastness, beauty, and remarkable qualities we have inside ourselves too. We are nature, we come from nature, nature made us and is happy to have us back.

9. Celebrate Yourself

You are a lovely being, you deserve affirmation, recognition, support, and kindness. And celebration is one of the human needs we all have. If we celebrate ourselves in positive, smaller, life-affirming, generous ways in our ordinary lives, we won’t feel so much need to “celebrate” in the old way.

If you feel like you don’t have too much to celebrate at the moment, setting some small goals for yourself and then achieving them will help (see number 10 below!).

If you set a goal of completing a gardening class, and you do complete the gardening class, and come home knowing how to compost, celebrate the eff out of that, my friend. Celebrate it like it’s a really big thing. It is a big thing.

If it’s too big a thing, start with something little. I want to try a new recipe. I will do it tonight. Wow, I did it, I tried the new recipe! I am trying new things! Yay! I did something loving and positive, look at me! I love my cookies!

Does this feel childish? Good. We’re all children on the inside. When we care lovingly for the child inside, then we, paradoxically, finally behave like responsible adults. Responsible adults with twinkly, smiling eyes.

10. Get Some Goals

If you’re not yet familiar with how goals can help you feel good about being alive, try it out this year. Setting and meeting specific, doable goals is a confidence-builder and a bringer of joy to your life. It can completely change your sense of yourself.

If you need to prove it to yourself, start with something little and very achievable, and build up. If you’ve already got some goals, review, refresh, and reset them this year.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist You With Staying Sober This Year!

If you think you might like some help this year, help is here to be had. We at Villa Kali Ma are devoted to sobriety through and through, along with healing trauma and mental health struggles. Check out our offerings for inpatient and outpatient, and consider coming over to get to know us.

Categories
Mental Health

Mental Health and New Year’s Resolutions Can Impact Mental Health

Happy New Year, Dear Villa Kali Ma Readers!

Goodbye, 2023, thank you for all you brought. Hello 2024, nice to meet you!

Dear readers, on behalf of Villa Kali Ma, I wish you all the best in this new cycle. May you find yourself face to face with a year of brightness, saturation, and depth, of feeling real in your own body and present in your story.

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about the time of year when we release the last year and welcome in the new.

I like that the year ends with a bang of celebration, a culmination of what came before. I like lights, mystery, and presents. I like laughing around the fireplace with the people who’ve known me longer than I’ve known myself, even if there’s a little pain mixed in.

But sometimes, releasing into the openness of time, I can feel a little lost. An old familiar stab of dread or uncertainty, facing the unassigned, undefined wilds of a new episode of life.

Today I’m wondering if you, like me, face the yearly bugaboo of resolutions – whether or not this year will be the year we finally make that change? Will we finally get it together, will we master ourselves, and overcome our gift for self-defeat?

The Statistics of Change

New Year’s Resolutions are a dazzling failure for the majority of people who make them. Statistics indicate a rather bleak outlook, with only 8% of people who make resolutions for the year following up on them, and a staggering 80% of people relinquishing their vows through an unceremonious giving up by February.

This makes me sad, as it implies something half-hearted or incomplete in us, a failure of will.

For those with addiction, failed willpower is no surprise – we know this one inside and out. How can we will ourselves to make positive changes, when we fear in our hearts that we belong to our self-destruction?

Can we be serious about serving the life force within us, even in as small a way as to meet a personal fitness goal – when we have known ourselves in the past to serve another, uncannier element? Something that pulled us down into the dark?

This changes with recovery, of course. Through the ordinary but still awe-inspiring miracles of recovery, we can develop and embody the vulnerable, brave commitment to thrive, after all.

We learn that it is possible to live in an upward spiral that grows towards the sun. This takes place verifiably, despite the feeling about ourselves that persists in the beginning, sometimes quiet, sometimes shouting, that somehow we and the world would be better if we weren’t even here.

Tut, it is a lie of course! (And even we know it somewhere deep down). But still, with such an omnipresence of the voices of the forces of the inner enemy, how do we know for sure we will prevail? (We don’t. We surrender to the life inside us again, who prevails for us. Through us, on our behalf, out of love for us, keeping us together, after all. We ask for a miracle, and we say thank you when it comes).

In recovery, we break the statistics of our past behavior, showing to ourselves and others that there is, in fact, an eye of calm at the center of the hurricane of every person who once belonged to addiction. We can live a life that keeps to the eye, stays in the center, and wreaks no havoc. We can be the center of a bell, bringing harmonies and beauties through our vibration.

What Are Some Reasons That Lead People to Quit Their New Year Resolutions?

Statistics say almost half of the people making resolutions already know while resolving that they will fail. What an idea! My heart goes out to the person, writing down, saying to themselves, declaring to others, “I will!”, already knowing that they will not.

Why is it that we fail in our resolutions? How is our resolve so weak? Here are some possibilities that could be affecting us.

1. Forced Timing

The timing of the New Year may or may not coincide with a personal cycle or readiness for change. Personal change has its season. We need to listen to ourselves and not always join in the collective for a once-a-year change, but ask ourselves – what do I want to change, when is a good time to make this change, how can I support this change?


2. Shoulds Versus Desires

Sometimes resolutions fail because they’re not desired changes, but rather a sense of “should”. Perhaps we feel that we should quit drinking because other people want us to, or because we judge ourselves. That is not the same thing as having decided to enter the transformational liberating fires of a new life.


3. Realistic Cost and Benefit Analysis

Some resolutions fail because they do not take into account the existing system and its homeostatic advantages. Whatever we do, we do because it works for us, one way or another.

We cannot decide to go all in on a change before we have answered these questions:

What are all the advantages of staying the same, of not making this particular change?

What, on the other hand, does it cost me to stay the same, not making this particular change?

What benefit will come to me from making this change?

What might be difficult for me about making this change?

Am I willing to undergo this difficulty for the sake of positive change? Does the potential benefit of making this change outweigh the potential cost?

How Can a Person Create Healthy Resolutions?

If we have lined up our will and we are committed to a change, the rest is relatively easy in comparison.

The key to how we can support ourselves to succeed lies in recasting resolutions as goals.

Goals are smaller, more targeted, and more time-based. As the SMART acronym reminds us, helpful goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant (to your values and what you want to achieve), and time-based.

Try this format for setting a new kind of resolution:

WHAT – Desired Outcome – written in the present tense, as if already fulfilled: eg, I speak Spanish fluently.

WHY – Reason for Outcome – written in terms of your values, again as if already fulfilled: eg, I speak Spanish fluently because I value foreign languages, learning, other cultures, reading Pablo Neruda in the original, etc.

SMART GOAL:

For January, I will spend 15 minutes a day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, on my Spanish language learning app. I will reevaluate and set a new frame for continuing at the end of January. If I miss a day, that’s okay, but then I need to make it up to myself on one of the other days.

Then ask yourself – is this a SMART goal? Is it:

Specific enough?

Measurable enough?

Attainable enough?

Relevant enough to my WHAT and my WHY?

Time-based enough?

Villa Kali Ma Can Help You With Your Goals

A mile is walked one step at a time. What if you want to walk very many miles?

Goals can be laid out like a map of a walk across the country. Perhaps there is a very long way to go. But if we are realistic with ourselves, about how much can reasonably, sustainably be walked in each walking session, how many breaks we need, and when and where to rest, we could quite believably achieve it. As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Goals build on themselves. Those who set reasonable, realistic goals for themselves are more likely to achieve success. To achieve success at smaller goals, we build confidence in ourselves. Our confidence then comes from our own experience.  Of course I can do this challenging thing. I have done challenging things before.

If you have trauma, addiction, or mental illness of any kind, the chance that you are dealing with inner ambivalence about making a positive change is pretty high. This is because everything inside of our psyches is balanced carefully to cope with the symptoms of our pain.

The traumatized among us are scared to change because we haven’t yet learned how to cope with our overwhelming inner worlds. We know, consciously or unconsciously, that any behavior change, even deciding to meditate for 15 minutes a day, could bring up difficult material which we will then need to figure out a way to deal with. Dread and agitation have us captive.

If this is you – have compassion for yourself. Traumatization is very, very challenging in ways the average person does not recognize. You deserve all the gentleness in the world for recovering your simple right, ability, and confidence to change and grow.

Take it slow, get help if you can. Make just feeling okay inside your skin without substances and other self-destructive behaviors your primary goal, perhaps your only resolution. Everything else will come with time.

As always, we at Villa Kali Ma are here to help, sister.

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