Have you ever heard the saying that we're not machines but rather a garden? Meaning that we aren't the same every day, and our needs are not the same either. 

It all starts with self-compassion. Let's preface this by saying - being hard on yourself will not keep you motivated in the long run. Only self-compassion and building a relationship with yourself can keep you going.

Self-compassion can be had in good times and bad, but it’s key difference is that in speaking to ourselves more kindly, we can embrace the imperfectness of being human and therefore grow from it. This means that when we have setbacks, we can bounce back much faster because we're not stuck on being hard on ourselves. It also means that our relationship with ourself is not compromised in the process.

By honoring your humanness, mistakes and setbacks aren't a reflection on your value. Setbacks are a sign of your humanness and the ever-evolving nature of life. 

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Acknowledge that not everyday will be the same. Give yourself the flexibility to do more on the high motivation days and less on the low motivation days. When you listen to the rhythm of your body, you sustain yourself. Not everyday will be the same, and that's okay. Affirmation: I am a garden that needs to be tended to differently on different days.

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Writing. If you haven't already tried it, writing as often as everyday can be a huge help in connecting with yourself and understanding what you need. Think of it as time to connect with yourself. It's a space to funnel out the noise in your head onto the page. With that extra space from busy thoughts, you can get the perspective to understand what you need to give yourself, what you may need to release, or what you may need to feel. ❤️ Pro tip: meditation after journalling can be a great combination as your mind will have had the chance to empty out the intrusive thoughts that like to pop in.

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​Connect with your passions, connect with your life force. When you have something to work towards that excites you, it shows. It's a force that ignites a fire in your being that can be harnessed to propel you in every aspect of your life. 

​We all have passions. If you struggle to know what it may be, think back to when you were a child. What were the things that excited you most. What made you excited to wake up in the morning and kept you up late at night past bedtime? A big part of healing is actually just getting back to the things we used to love and the kid that we used to be. 

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Some days we need a little bit more sun, water, or rest than other days. Don't expect yourself to operate like a computer. You are a beautiful garden that must be tended to differently each day. ☀️🌸

Beliefs are thoughts that we continue to think. If we can start to think new thoughts that are more conducive to acceptance, self-love, and ease, then we can begin to see the world, and ourselves within the world, differently.

For young people in the queer community, it can be difficult not knowing if family and friends will truly love them for them — never knowing if the love they get will be unconditional.

Folks in the LGBTQ+ community may wonder if they can expect that unconditional love from the people closest to them, and when it comes to self-talk, it can be difficult for LGBTQ+ identifying individuals to convince themselves that they not only *can* ask for what they need, but that they are more than allowed to do so. 

Affirmations are a great way to do this, and what better month than this to make them LGBTQ+ focused.

Whether you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community or not, try these affirmations to positively change your self-talk. You are worthy of joy, safety and acceptance. It's your birthright. ❤️

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It is a joy to get to know the true me.

My life has meaning beyond what others think of me.

The people who deserve to love me will be excited to accept the real me.

I deserve love without conditions.

I will give myself love without conditions.

Others discomfort with who I am says more about them than it says about me.

I will be patient with myself as I learn how to love myself without conditions.

There's a very common misconception out there that exercise needs to be vigorous or even painful to be considered worthwhile.

However, exercise can be so many things and serve many different purposes for the body.

Movement should be to make our bodies feel their best, and be done while appreciating what our body can do for us.

A shift from working out to force your body into what you think it should be doing, and instead exercising to help your body can be all the difference to moving in ways that support your overall health.

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Exercise doesn't have to be running or lifting weights.

Movement like walking, gardening, cleaning or stretching are just as valid.

​Does it benefit your overall health, and make your mind and body feel better? It's exercise.
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Above all, it's important to be able to listen to the body, and attune your choice of movement based on what your body is telling you. 

If you're tired and needing rest, recognizing and honouring that will help you to make decisions that support your health.

By shifting the perspective on exercising from needing to change your body, to wanting to feel good — you can shift your overall intention of exercise and allow room to be more mindful of what type of exercise is appropriate in the moment.

Self-love can mean having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness — taking care of your own needs and not sacrificing your well-being to please others.

You've probably heard the phrase a lot, "love yourself!" or "just love yourself more!" But do we actually know what it means, and how to do it?

It's okay if you said no, by the way.

Put simply, at the root of a self-love practice is self-compassion — speaking kindly to yourself even if you make a mistake. 

It's also deeply rooted in prioritizing your needs, and taking care of yourself. That can look like many things for different people. Among a long list of self-care examples, the most common are setting boundaries with time, prioritizing health and mental well-being, and getting enough sleep.

With that summed up, here are a few tangible things you can do to work on your self-love practise:

1. Validate your own feelings.
This can be huge. If accepting your emotions is tough for you, take note. Often by giving into what we like to resist the most — uncomfortable emotions, you'll find that they actually pass a lot sooner. If we can start to validate ourselves, with internal language like "I'm feeling really scared and that's okay." or "I'm feeling tired today, and that's okay. It's been a busy week," we begin to see ourselves for the naturally flawed and real human-beings that we are.

​2. Build out your support network and surround yourself with good people.
Have you ever taken note of how you feel after visiting with a friend? Did you notice that you either may have felt uplifted and lighter, or heavy and discouraged? 

Be sensitive to the way people make you feel when you're around them. Take note and adjust accordingly. Energy is currency, and you want to make sure you only give it where you can get it back.

On top of that, try to build a network of trusted people who have your best intentions at heart. These are people who you feel safe to go to in a time of need. We all need a person to lean on when things feel tough.

3. Set healthy boundaries with yourself AND others.
This is a two-step process. Self-boundaries help to keep you on track. They can look like sticking to a consistent bed-time, not spending over budget, or cutting the screen time back in exchange for another activity like reading or walking.

And boundaries with others can help to preserve your energy, and actually enhance your relationships. Yes, if that's a new concept to you - they really can and are meant to enhance your relationships. Boundaries with loved ones help to make your interactions feel good and healthy to the both of you. 

4. Allow yourself to make mistakes.
We all make them. We're all imperfect. So try to reframe your mistakes when they happen. Self-compassion techniques would suggest speaking to yourself the way you would a friend, even if they (you) mess up. Self-compassion can be had in good times and bad, but it’s key difference is that in speaking to ourselves more kindly —  instead of running and screaming in the opposite direction, we can embrace the imperfectness of being human, and therefore grow from it rather than condemn ourselves.

5. Allow yourself to rest.
This goes with self-care practises. Make sure you're listening to your body, and giving it what it needs to function optimally. Our culture really praises high-functioning people and productivity, so this can be a tough one for most people. Do your best to acknowledge the feeling that you should be doing more, and kindly remind yourself that rest is productive, and rest is your birthright. Have that nap. ❤️

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Befriending the nervous system is acknowledging the powerful connection between body and mind.

As human beings we’re wired for survival and it’s built into our nervous systems, but where that protection mechanism can start to fail us is where we’re held in constant states of survival from a nervous system that never recovered from past traumas. So the danger may be long gone, but our nervous systems are always on the lookout and essentially stuck in states of fight/flight, freeze or shutdown — making daily life very difficult.

This is where we want to learn how to work with our nervous systems. The goal isn’t to get rid of its job, but to be able to regulate and come back to safety. That way, we can respond and address the situations that triggered our defences from a place of clarity.

There are different modes or stages so to speak of the nervous system states. They are:
​SAFE/SOCIAL - "I am okay. The world is safe and welcoming."
FIGHT/FLIGHT - "I am unstable. The world is dangerous and scary."
SHUTDOWN/FREEZE - "I am alone. The world is cold and desolate."
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Getting ourselves back to safety once in a state of nervous system activation can look like many different things. A few examples are taking constructive rest like meditation or a short nap, grounding your feet on the floor — outdoors on grass or sand is best, becoming mindful of your 5 senses and directing energy and awareness to your legs and feet — as if you were doing squats.

Remember that being regulated does not always mean being calm. Regulation means staying in the green zone where logic is still present and you have a sense of clarity and rationality.

This means that you can still be regulated and feel mad, anxious or sad.

 A great way to look at this is remembering that story follows state. The state of your nervous system dictates how you perceive the world and yourself in it. A simple way to look at this is learning more about the nervous system ladder, learning what you need to come back to safety (or the green zone), and taking more control over your emotional state.
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"What state am I in right now? What is my body trying to tell me? What story am I living?"
"What do I need right now?"
"What can I remember for the next time I feel dysregulated?"

Still interested in learning more? You may want to check out a few of these books that go more into depth on this topic:

• Befriending The Nervous System by Deb Dana

• In An Unspoken Voice by Peter A. Levine

• Healing Trauma, A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body by Peter A. Levine

• The Body Keeps the Score:  Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

Thanks for reading!

We usually think of personal boundaries as a way to communicate our needs to others; a way to tell them how we want to be treated.⁠
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But we also need boundaries with ourselves.⁠
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Part of being a healthy adult is making decisions for ourselves that may not always be fun, but are for our overall wellbeing.

These boundaries help keep us from staying up until 2am each night or scrolling on our phones until our eyes go blurry. When we set that boundary, it may sound like "I know this isn't good for me, and I now know the line between what's okay and what isn't. This is the point where I won't push it."

Some examples may be:
"I can online shop but I'm going to stick to my budget this month."
"I'm going to limit my time on social media to 1 hour."
"I won't bring my phone into the bedroom."
"I'm going to go to sleep by 11pm so that I can feel rested for tomorrow."

The most effective and healing self-care practise lies somewhere between setting boundaries with self and radical self-compassion work.

Self-compassion is defined as speaking to yourself with the same kind of kindness, care, and compassion as you would with a close friend going through a hard time.

So where boundaries come in to create structure and hold ourselves accountable, self-compassion comes in and says "what do I need?". This practise can help us to become more curious about our habits, and look into what the need is that underlies the behaviour that we don't like.

So, an example may be that you don't like the fact that you can't seem to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Where self-judgement would say "what's wrong with me?", self-compassion would say "what do I need?" In this case, you may uncover that you have a need to have more unstructured time to yourself during the day, so that you don't postpone your bedtime to gain back that time for yourself. 

By identifying the need behind the undesirable habit, you'll find that it will probably be a lot easier to keep that boundary because you are satisfying the root cause of the thing that you are trying to stop.

​With that combination, self-love grows and so does our ability to take care ourselves.

Body neutrality, the philosophy of focusing on what your body can do for you rather than how it looks, may be the best way to combat unsustainable body image ideals and eating disorders.

For people who find loving their appearance 24/7 is impossible, body neutrality could be a more helpful mindset. Ultimately, the goal of body neutrality is to feel at peace with your body.

So what can this look like when put into practise? How does this compare to the popular body positive movement? Let's use some examples.

​Body positive says "I feel good about myself because I know I'm beautiful." Body neutral says "How I feel about myself has nothing to do with my appearance."

Body positive says "Feeling attractive is a prerequisite to happiness." Body neutral says "Being preoccupied with what I see in the mirror leads to unhappiness."

Body positive says "My body is beautiful, flaws and all." Body neutral says "My body is just my vehicle, and the most interesting parts about me are within."

That said, you can still alter your appearance and practise body neutrality, and It means that you can do so without deriving happiness from your appearance. If someone who practises body neutrality does decide to make a change to their physical appearance, they can make the decision knowing that it won't instantly make them happier — giving them peace before and after they change their body.

Anuschka Rees, author of Beyond Beautiful Book and writer on body neutrality says, 
"Body neutrality is a feminist social movement whose goal is to dial down the enormous significance that's being given to physical appearance in our society. It goes beyond body positivity in that it emphasizes pushing back not just on the specific beauty ideals of our time, but on all aspects of society that continue to promote beauty as essential, consequential and the ultimate accomplishment, and a person's appearance as indicative of their worth."

Not everyone with an eating disorder struggles with negative body image, but it is a defining factor of several types of eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. And while it's common to see in either men or women, disproportionately higher rates of disordered eating behaviours are found in people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming (from Using body neutrality to inform eating disorder management in a gender diverse world.)

For those in eating disorder recovery, having a treatment plan with a therapist and dietitian that includes body neutral practises can be incredibly beneficial. This can be done through learning about body diversity and being exposed to more types of bodies (particularly the ones that aren't commonly portrayed in our culture). As well, body appreciation can go a long way, which is done by appreciating the skills and capabilities of the body — like how it helps us move through the world.

At the end of the day, there is nothing wrong with body love, and if we can sit there for a period of time — great. It's more important however to understand that love for our bodies can't always be the end goal, especially for those who have experienced trauma, stigma or gender dysphoria. 

Body neutrality can help to see our bodies as vessels that need to be taken care of, and with anything that is taken care of — we are more likely to appreciate it.