Monday, March 17, 2014

A Year of Kindness - Challenge Week 11

I hope you all found an opportunity in the past week to just LISTEN. Deanna and I took turns just listening to each other as we caught up - we talk on the phone a LOT, so it can be surprising that we still have that much to say when we get together, but we clearly do! Hanging out with your best girlfriend and just chatting about anything, everything, and nothing at all is a really fun and healing thing to do. If you haven't had a girls night out in awhile, maybe you need to get one on your schedule soon!

This week I am turning the kindness back on ourselves. I'll revisit being kind to ourselves frequently this year. I feel strongly that being kind to ourselves is really necessary to enable us to be kind to others. So, this week I am asking you to be kind to yourself by LETTING YOUR LIGHT SHINE. But how?

This week's challenge is inspired by the March 16th essay in Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach, which I am reading again this year. In the March 16th essay, Breathnach asks "What do you like about yourself?" And then she challenges the reader to discover ten things you absolutely love about your body and ten things you love about your personality and record them in your gratitude journal. She says to keep going back to the mirror and really looking until you can find twenty things to love about yourself.

I'm challenging you specifically this week to do this exercise and then blog about your answers. Maybe even create a scrapbook page about it! You don't have to reveal it all. I know for me that it would be easy to tell you that I love the color of my hair and I love the way my eyes sparkle when I'm happy. But to get much further about my body might find me in uncomfortable territory for sharing. My personality? I love that I'm a devoted mother and have tried in my life to always put family first. I love that I'm creative and able to make beautiful things. I love that I am a believer in life-long learning and truly enjoy learning new things. I could go on, but I don't want your list to be overly influenced by my thoughts, so I'll leave you with those examples to go and create your own lists.

In a bit of cosmic synchronicity, this video appeared in my email this morning:


Be Your Own Light Meditation from Wild Divine on Vimeo.

It was this quote that really resonated with me:

So go - discover what you love about yourself. Celebrate it. Blog about it. Create a scrapbook page about it. LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE. Then come back here and share your light via a link to your blog post.
I'll leave the link open until the end of the month to give you all time to play along!

5 comments:

Karen said...

This is a great challenge, Cheri.

Melissa said...

I agree with Karen - this is a great challenge. I'm going to start my post now & come back to it over the next few days so I can blog it by the end of the week.

I have lots of phone conversations with my sister, too, and mostly I do the listening.

Barbara Eads said...

Oh, this is going to be HARD! I won't have trouble with the personality part, but the body part is going to be tough. I'll have to get creative, like---I love my legs because they get me from here to there. Yes, I'll have to think deeply on that and be grateful for what my body DOES for me rather than how it actually looks!

Miriam said...

I love this challenge Cheri but it's going to be hard for me. Listening I was fine with, but actually writing something down...a different story.

Sian said...

Your eyes really do sparkle when you are happy! I've noticed it in photos, even from this distance :)