Author: VKM

Categories
Bipolar disorder treatment

7 Reasons Why World Bipolar Day is Important

Villa Kali Ma Helps Women with Bipolar Disorder

At Villa Kali Ma, we help women with mental health struggles recover lives of meaning and freedom. When trauma and addiction are a factor too, we help address all three things.

We support women to heal using a combination of the Western scientific medical model and alternative, holistic modalities like Ayurveda, yoga, and breathwork. We are fully equipped with the latest in cutting-edge trauma treatments, methods like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and brainspotting, to help each woman unravel the imprints of the past and get a fresh start at living.

Our facilities are dedicated to women who are currently under the thumb of addiction, trauma, or some variant of psychological disorder. We guide each woman we treat to ignite the fire of self-love in her heart, so that she can find the strength to undergo the transformations that are necessary when any of us want to experience deeper happiness and connection.

What is Bipolar Disorder?

Bipolar disorder is the label given to a specific kind of experience had by a portion of the population. Bipolar is a notoriously painful condition that’s associated with a heavy load of mental and emotional suffering. It is also noted for being linked to people with very bright gifts of creativity, invention, and vision.

Bipolar disorder used to be called manic-depressive disorder. It is the umbrella term for a group of psychological conditions entered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5).

There are three types of bipolar disorder listed in the manual: Bipolar I, Bipolar II, and Cyclothymia.

Bipolar disorders feature manic episodes or periods of amplified energy. The eventual mood crashes following a manic episode are called depressive episodes. As the name suggests, people with bipolar disorder experience both ends of the pole – extremely elevated moods and extremely low moods.

The different kinds of bipolar disorder are distinguished by how intense the manic episodes are.

Bipolar I may be diagnosed when someone experiences an extreme manic phase lasting for at least one week. A depressive episode may or may not follow, but the mania could be so acute that the person ends up in the hospital.

Bipolar II is diagnosed when someone has a hypomanic episode of several consecutive days, paired with a very serious depressive episode. Hypomania is like mania, but not as pronounced or dramatic.

Cyclothymic Disorder is diagnosed for people experiencing recurring mood shifts between hypomania and depression over a minimum of two years.

What are the Symptoms of Bipolar Disorder?

What is unique about bipolar disorder, among all the mental health disorders, is the presence of mania.

Mania is an extremely elevated mood, or feeling “up”, with high energy and intensity. During times of mania, we can have a lot of inspiration and ideas and may speak very quickly or feel we can’t keep up with the influx of energy into our minds. We may have a lot to say on many different topics and feel a need to speak rapidly in a ceaseless verbal outpouring, to try to capture or express all we are witnessing in our thoughts.

We also will likely behave impulsively, becoming more reckless, and doing things we wouldn’t normally do if we felt calm and grounded. We may take actions that are dangerous because we are experiencing unusual levels of optimism.

Mania is usually coupled with grandiose thoughts and fantasies about our abilities, as though our egos have suddenly inflated, and we can lose touch with reality and the limits of our human bodies.

It’s important to understand that all human beings experience ups and downs in our energy, inflations, and deflations of our self-image, and rises and falls in our moods. For people who have mania to a disordered degree, though, it can be quite dangerous for them. Spending sprees, gambling, sudden big life decisions, acting inappropriately at work, drugs and alcohol, and risky sexual behavior often go along with a period of mania.

It is a key part of the bipolar experience to suffer intensely during the depressive stage of the cycle, when all that went up, comes down again. The plummeting energy and mood, along with the loss of good feelings about oneself and one’s abilities, is devastating and rough to endure. Suicide is a lure in these times, against which our bipolar loved ones need to be protected, as the depths of darkness are truly harrowing.

7 Reasons Bipolar Day is Important

Every year on March 30th, World Bipolar Day is honored, as a way to raise awareness about the needs of people with bipolar disorder. By expanding our collective understanding of what bipolar disorder is and how it is experienced from within, we can help sufferers and loved ones get the support they need.

Here at Villa Kali Ma, as always, we have a holistic way of thinking about how we can enfold, heal, and celebrate the women among us who have these traits and patterns. We want every woman with bipolar patterning to know of our deep, fond compassion and our willingness to share in the experiences and burdens these brave women carry for the collective.

Here are our thoughts, on why an annual day of reflection on bipolar disorder may be a good practice for us all.

1.Compassion

Compassion is healing. Compassion gently erodes the build-up in the heart that keeps us in separate streams of life, not touching each other’s experiences.

For the person who has compassion in her heart and the person who is able to be lovingly seen, understood, and accepted, compassion is a boon. Compassion dissolves the walls of separation. People with bipolar disorder stir my compassion, what about yours?


2.Understanding the Bipolar in us All

We are all mirrors of each other. We are made in different forms, with different purposes and missions here on earth, and no one is completely the same as another. Still, what we carry, we carry for all.

People who carry the bipolar experience are doing so on our behalf. Rather than turn away from suffering that is hard for us to bear, let us stay connected, stay present, and see the bipolar in our own nature as well.

Don’t we all move through life on a path with peaks and valleys? Don’t we all know the burning intensity of the light and the chill of a deep shadow falling on the soul? We are all part of the whole, and when we embrace those who seem to be on the extreme edges of human experience, all benefit from the reunion.


3.Heal our Bipolar Collective

As a collective psyche, we are clearly disordered. We are split into factions, sections of privilege or pain. The light and the shade duel in our body politic, in our species, in our cultural identities. We are pressured by the booms and busts, inflations of fancied superiority, and the heavy pains of being made to be less than.

Why? And how can we, as a group, soften the extremes, come into balance, come to the center place that seeks no overpowering nor fears the soft underbelly? In remembering we are all, all sides, all things, and all qualities, we can unite the polarities of our collective.


4.Save lives

People with bipolar disorder are at a higher risk of suicide. The tragedy of suicide hurts the tissues of human connection for generations, and we need to do everything we can to prevent it! Through greater awareness and understanding that some of us humans will feel that dark call, we can help hold each other safe.

Each person considering suicide has fallen prey to the illusion that their individual life doesn’t matter to the rest of life, but it does. We can help such a person remember that she is our kin, kin to all of life, and needed by all. We can help them feel less alone, and understand that we are willing to share in the pain they feel is theirs alone.


5.Reduce Stigma and Marginalization of the Mentally Ill Among Us

The stigma around mental illness is supremely unfair and widespread. How is it that people who are already suffering more intensely than the rest of us, also have to be blamed, scapegoated, pathologized, misunderstood, and treated as a problem that should go away?

It is incredibly cruel to marginalize those whose suffering makes them feel alone and unworthy, already. Let’s just stop that, and instead get on board with loving all humans as we are right now. It will be uncomfortable for us some of the time, yes, as it is for them almost all of the time.


6.Acknowledge Pain

Many people just don’t know what it’s like to suffer as intensely and unremittingly as people with bipolar disorder often do. Without the experience, it’s easy to judge or not engage.

Let’s raise awareness and understanding, to bring the truth of the presence of pain in our world out into the light.

We as a collective species clearly need to change our ways, yet we will never change in the ways that would truly help our world evolve if we deny the presence of pain.

Pain is the call to heal. Through pain, we find out what’s wrong that hurts all of us, where we have erred, where we left nature, and what we need to do to return.


7.Celebrate the Bright Fires Among Us

Let’s remember to see and say thank you for the gifts brought by those who live with intensity, passion, and pain.

Not only when they bring creative gifts into the world, but also through their insights, the transformation, and deepening of the collective consciousness, our brothers and sisters with bipolar disorder burn bright, warming and illuminating all of us with their fire.

Categories
World Happiness Day

International Day of Happiness

What is the International Day of Happiness?

International Day of Happiness is celebrated annually on March 20th. A day of honoring happiness was established in 2013 by the United Nations as part of an initiative to include the concept of happiness in how we think of human rights and liberties.

Here in the United States, we’re accustomed to the idea that happiness is something that we have a right to pursue. Happiness is believed to be a birthright, protected alongside our lives and liberty. According to the Declaration of Independence, these are our inalienable rights as Americans.

There is a lot of discussion about the imperfections of our nation’s foundations, and deservedly so. Nevertheless, it has meant that happiness was called out by name as a human right that should never be taken away, and which has to be nourished and looked out for.

As International Day of Happiness raises consciousness about the notion of a human right to happiness worldwide, as individuals we are invited to reflect on what happiness means to us.

What are the Traditions of the International Day of Happiness?

International Day of Happiness is young in years, and like most UN Initiatives, is celebrated largely through joint initiatives by action groups and organizations.

For any of us who are not involved directly in governmental and inter-governmental efforts, we can nevertheless use the day to consider what personal traditions, rituals, and activities foster happiness in our own lives and local communities.

But what is happiness? What’s your definition?

At Villa Kali Ma, we favor consideration of the multidimensionality of women. Each of us is much more than our physical bodies. We are much more than the identity that the ego tells us we are.

We are the subtle flows of emotion, the lifting fires of creativity, and the ephemera of spirit. We are our relationships, including our love and our pain. We are also nature, the planet, and the cosmos.

Given the many ways we can conceptualize a human life, what is human happiness? One way to answer this question is to consider happiness from different perspectives of being.

Journal to Expand Happiness

Take a moment to journal on any of the following questions that spark your curiosity.

What is happiness from the point of view of the physical body?

What is happiness for the ego, the part that wants to have a positive self-image?

What is happiness from the point of view of your emotions? What’s happiness for the inner child?

What is happiness for the wise mind, the inner neutral observer?

What is happiness for the soul, for the spirit?

What is happiness for the human heart, the part of us who loves others, ourselves, and all creation?

What is happiness for the creative spark inside us?

What is happiness for the part of us that wants to work, to accomplish, to deliver?

What is happiness for the part of us who is one with all nature, the planet, and the cosmos?

If these questions don’t fully resonate, what are the right questions to ask about happiness, as you see it?

International Happiness Statistics

Statistics about happiness are collected by many different projects around the world. In studies like these, we can look at how different people and cultures relate to the idea of happiness.

Statistics are always connected to the intentions of those framing the questions and to the parameters of the investigation. That doesn’t mean we can’t explore data, just that it’s probably wise to keep in mind that there will always be many ways of asking and many ways of answering questions.

If you’re interested in the data of happiness, you can explore many resources on the web that will give you different pictures of happiness and its distribution around the globe, the what and the why of it.

Our invitation today, from us at Villa Kali Ma, is to make your happiness survey and start asking people around you, start collecting qualitative or even quantitative data that will help you get answers to the questions you have about happiness.

What are you genuinely curious to know about happiness, your own and other people’s? See if you can come up with 12 questions that you genuinely want to know the answer to, and interview 12 people.

Here are sample questions to get you started thinking about your happiness survey questions:

Sample Happiness Survey

  1. When in the day are you happiest?
  2. In what circumstances do you tend to feel happiest?
  3. When you’re happy, how can people around you tell?
  4. If your only goal in life was to be happy, would you change anything about your life?
  5. What is the biggest barrier to your happiness, as you see it?
  6. Now, what are your happiness survey questions? Who will you interview?

Activities for Celebrating International Day of Happiness

The best way to celebrate International Day of Happiness is to practice happiness ourselves.

How can we cultivate happiness for other people and ourselves?

Make a list right of 12 activities that could be done to promote happiness. Let this happiness be shiny and big, whether it’s the happiness we give to ourselves (often the hardest task!) or the happiness we can give to others.

Here are teeny tiny activities I could do to create a little more happiness, right here, right now:

  1. Make pancakes for my husband tomorrow morning as a surprise and for no reason
  2. Have a 4-minute dance break in the middle of my working day
  3. Call my sister back to hear about her big news and celebrate her lovingly
  4. Go for a walk in the neighborhood without my phone and listen to the birds
  5. Collage a homemade card for my mother’s birthday and spend time writing her sincere heartfelt wishes

What about you? What are 12 tiny ways you can practice the art of creating happiness for yourself and others?

The Facts of Happiness

Facts about happiness are constantly being collected and cataloged, and a short dive into the research can surface many interesting tidbits.

It’s also worthwhile to research your happiness, to surface the surprising facts of your own life’s happiness.

Here is one way of investigating your happiness with curiosity which you can try out right now:

Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, breathe 3 very long, deep breaths, and relax the body. Gently softening your mind, letting it melt like butter in the sun, see if you can reach back in your memory to a moment or period in your life when you were very, very happy. Shoot for any memory of being gloriously, glowingly, luminously happy (or the closest you ever got to this). Make the memory or image as concrete and vivid as you can, recalling all the sensory details you can. Where were you, when was this, what time of day was it, what was the temperature like, were you inside or outside, what kind of an environment were you in, what were you doing, what was happening around you and inside you, who were you with?

Using this image as a reference, open your eyes to journal on the following questions:

What did this happiness feel like to your body? What qualities of sensation does this recalled happiness have? Is it warm, fizzy, or fluid? How does the feeling of happiness affect you from the hips down, in the heart and core of your body, in your head and face?

Consider for a moment that this memory is a clue to what happiness is for you. What can you learn from this clue?

Villa Kali Ma Helps Women Be Happy

Villa Kali Ma’s mission is to help women free themselves from the burdens of mental illness, trauma, and addiction. We are dedicated to helping women recover lives of meaning, purpose, and true, deep happiness.

Categories
International Women’s Day 2024

International Women’s Day 2024

What is International Women’s Day?

International Women’s Day celebrates women and girls, and all we bring to the world.

Celebrated once a year, International Women’s Day is dedicated to all the people in our lives who are living in female bodies. For all who experience life from the point of view and role of “woman”, this is our day.

Ever since the extinction of matriarchal societies, history has tended to favor men, reserving appreciation and recognition primarily for accomplishments and energies brought by people in male bodies.

There have been exceptions, of course, big-spirited women with sizable spheres of influence. Many women, from Joan of Arc to Harriet Tubman, are household names and history book legends.

Still, other women from history are less well-known but no less remarkable to ponder once we learn of their lives. In the arts, there have been many women who burned brightly enough to shine in a man’s world, defying the odds of their time to birth their contributions to culture.

Some personal favorites of history and culture are the Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola, the Christian mystic, herbalist, and composer Hildegard of Bingen, and the Pharaoh Hatshepsut who ruled Egypt for many peaceful and culturally rich decades.

More importantly, perhaps, the ordinary women of our lives have a soft force of power, even if our emotions, experiences, and life stories fall outside the narrow definitions of what deserves acclaim (according to the bias we all are conditioned with).

We women are here, bringing our gifts, whether we are seen and appreciated, or not. And though we might not be publicly celebrated, nor valued in our essential natures in the same overt ways as men have been historically, there has always been love for women, too. This is a day to remember our collective love for women.

When is International Women’s Day 2024?

March 8th is the official day every year for focusing celebration energies towards the females in our lives, past, present, and future. This year, we celebrate women on Friday, March 8th, 2024.

The purpose of International Women’s Day is to open up the lens of collective awareness to value the feminine more. We have all been almost single-mindedly focused on the value of the masculine pole of experience.

With awareness softened and opened to a broader perspective, we can recognize the facts of women’s role in shaping society, the arts, families, and history. We can also consider the world more from the point of view of female-bodied beings.

Patriarchy hurts both men and women with toxic ideas about what is valuable and what isn’t. We all have male and female energies in us, independent of gender, so it’s in all of our interests to love both sides fully. Men and women both can be freed and supported by shining a light on the unconscious assumption and expectation that what men do is what’s interesting and important.

Rather than being against the masculine, however, International Women’s Day is an invitation to open up to the feminine too, whatever that means to us. We can celebrate public figures and inspirational women of history who show us what’s possible, and also everyday women we know who have a positive impact on our day-to-day lives. We can take extra time to love the “yin”, or feminine pole of consciousness, that lives in us all.

What is the theme of International Women’s Day?

The official theme of International Women’s Day in 2024 is digitalization and gender. Here at Villa Kali Ma, we have our take on what about women needs attention and celebration, and we favor a holistic look at how we can bring women’s thriving to the surface.

Women are hurt in digital domains and also in the physical world. The larger question is how can we bring the energies of violence and harm towards the feminine to a conclusion, and move forward in balance with love for all.

Because as much harm as exists, there is a greater force of love and health longing to surface everywhere and within. How can we be part of a planet-wide bloom of love for women?

How did International Women’s Day get Started?

The date of March 8th was anchored into the yearly calendar in 1910 by a group of British Suffragettes, those determined women who fought to secure women the right to vote.

Why is International Women’s Day celebrated?

International Women’s Day is celebrated in part to spread awareness of the contributions of women to our world. It is also an invitation to think about the needs of women, and how we might support each other better to be strong and free ourselves in this world. When women are supported to thrive, the world is a more balanced and feeling place.

Which Women can I celebrate on this day?

International Women’s Day is an opportunity for each of us to personally reflect on the value brought to us by specific women, and also the woman we are. We can make our lists and think about who matters to us.

Each woman we admire mirroring something to us, about our nature, our longings, and our dormant courage.

Journal Prompt for Celebrating Women

Who can you celebrate from your sphere – a grandmother, mother, sister, aunt, best friend, or daughter? What about teachers, professors, therapists, healers?

Who can you celebrate from history? Which figures have inspired and encouraged you with their dashing, aesthetic, or powerful lives? Which leaders, community organizers, rebels, or peacemakers?

Who can you celebrate from the arts, humanities, or science and technology? Which female authors wove stories you could find your own experience within? Whose passionate or angelic singing voice touched your heart? Which painters, filmmakers, actresses, comedians, and performers have brought luminance to your life? Whose inventive or explorative spirit of discovery inspires your scientific curiosity?  

How can I celebrate International Women’s Day?

Gratitude Exercise to Celebrate International Women’s Day

Write a list of women who are in your life now, whom you appreciate for whatever reason. Take a moment to reflect: what do you love about them, what do you see about them that makes them special and wonderful? What do you maybe want to thank or recognize them for?

Now find a way to let them know of your appreciation and recognition of them. Feel free to get creative – a live phone call means a lot these days, and so do handmade cards, snail mail letters, poems, and home-cooked meals. All women need support, and we women have the power to give it to each other.

Villa Kali Ma celebrates International Women’s Day

For Villa Kali Ma, every day is Women’s Day! Come celebrate with us, sister. Any day.

Categories
Women’s Health Awareness Month

Women’s Health Awareness Month

A Month for Celebrating Women’s Health

This March, let’s celebrate women’s health. We at Villa Kali Ma extend to you all an invitation to contemplate what we feel health is, and how we value the health of our sisters, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and friends.

What is women’s health? And what is women’s health in the context of addiction, madness, and trauma, those troubles that bear down on women’s souls so painfully? These are questions to ponder this month, as we consider how to protect and support the health of women everywhere.

What Does Women’s Health Mean to You?

When I think of women’s health, I think of how my sisters looked when they were pregnant. The phrase that comes to my lips is “They glowed”. They were like lanterns, bulbs of warm light, suffused with soft incandescence. They were extra beautiful!

When people say pregnant women are beautiful, in my opinion, it’s because pregnant women are so full of life and vitality that they beam out of every pore. The glow that’s in all of us living beings is turned up to the max, in a way that is hard to miss. Women’s health is beautiful.

True health flows in a woman’s being the way life exists or withers in an ecosystem, such as an alpine forest or a river valley. Health means aliveness, being flush with the flow of the life force. When life energy flows unobstructed, thriving vitality is evident everywhere, and a place feels, looks, and fairly sings of healthy energy. So too in our portion of nature, the bodies we are.

When there are poisons, blocks to the natural flow, burdens of toxicity, or stagnation placed upon our life force, health suffers in one way or another. Harmed ecosystems can be restored by removing poisons and obstructions to life’s energetic flows. It is the same with women’s bodies.

How Can We Celebrate Women’s Health Holistically this March?

At Villa Kali Ma, we relate to health as holistic, which means that it is about a kind of wholeness, or unity of being, a symphonic coordination of parts in harmony. This is in contrast with what might be called an overly compartmentalized approach, which treats health as existing in different chambers of being, without many connecting passageways.

In the West, as everyone knows, we tend to focus on the body as the site of health, which makes sense of course, since that’s where symptoms manifest most visibly. When the body fails, we are forced to change our ways.

There is chemistry and materiality to health, but in Villa Kali Ma’s opinion, health isn’t contained within chemistry and materiality. Rather it is more the way that Verdi’s beautiful arias are transmitted by, but not exactly contained within, a tenor’s throat. All we can ever be are vessels of the spirit of health. We can invite health in, or we can shut it out, through our thoughts, actions, emotional habits, and choices.

These beautiful, complex living organisms, our bodies, are only the outermost manifestations, material evidence of what lies deep within the secret hearts of our true natures. We can be in the flow and expression of great blooms of other kinds of wellness, too: emotional health, mental health, relationship health, spiritual health, and even creative health. When we are healthy at all levels and layers, we are happy.

Cultivate Women’s Health in Your Sphere this March 2024

At Villa Kali Ma, we humbly endeavor to teach women what we know about how to live in harmony with what the life force within asks of us to thrive, and therefore be happy at last. We specialize in how women can free themselves from addiction, madness, and the life-force-stopping patterns of trauma.

More than that, we show the path to living as the spirit of natural health inside us directs us. What health likes, what it doesn’t like.

What do you know about your health and what it like or don’t like? Here are some things we’ve observed that might or might not fit for you: women’s health like movement, connection, transformation, fluidity, and other things that are alive. Women’s health like authenticity, freedom, expression, and love. Women’s health like individuality, with each of us having our unique nature. Women’s health also loves bonds of unification, connection, and sharing.

Knowing what we know, we at Villa Kali Ma share how it is that each woman can live in harmony from within her personal experience, to connect directly with the spirit of health inside her. So she can bring more health to the surface of the world, and share it also with other women.

To learn how to let health fill us up to the brim, we need to change a lot. Each facet of a woman’s diamond-like nature has a role to play in the symphony of health. Our thoughts must be tuned to the high frequencies of health. Our emotions must flow the joyful, loving tones of health. The compass of our intention must be aligned to the north star of health.

Our creative, generative, working spirit must be devoted to birthing forms and structures that resound health. We must eat and drink health, laugh and play, and breathe health. We must love the health of others with our healthy hearts.

Villa Kali Ma Shows Women the Way to Health

How would you recognize a healthy woman if you saw one? What would a healthy woman look like, how would she feel? How would her presence in the room impact you? How might such a woman speak, emote, and connect with you? How would you recognize it, if the spirit of health surged to the surface in the collective body of all of all women, everywhere?

Placing my awareness on the topic of women’s thriving helps me appreciate the health of women, and makes me want to help us be as healthy as we can. As for those burdens that sit heavy on the hearts, minds, and bodies of women, I want to help dispel them.

Because women are important. When we bloom, we bring joy, radiance, and support to this world. We are soft strength, enduring power, unbreakable yielding. Just as children bring a fully unpredictable and specific joy when they are free to be their child nature, women bring a special gift to this world when we are free and well enough to bring our womanhood, too. A healthy woman, who brims with the songs of life’s wholeness, is a gift to all.

Categories
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!

Categories
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.

Categories
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!

Exit mobile version
Skip to content