❤❤❤ 100 Ways to Love Yourself ❤❤❤
(Brought to you by: Edwina Peterson Cross)
1. Reread passages of books and poems that have moved you, that you love, that make you cry, that make you hurt, that make you laugh, that make you fill like a balloon with happiness. Read them out loud and taste the words as they come out of your mouth.
2. Spend even a few minutes beside a river or stream. There is magic in the sound of running water. Let it’s wet magnetism spill into your heart.
3. Lie on the ground face down. Smell the earth. Try this in every season. Lying face down in the snow, is a very interesting feeling. What does frozen earth smell like, when the grass is rimed with ice and it crunches when you lay down? Why do rotting leaves smell sweet?
4. Sit on the porch shelling peas, snapping beans, pealing potatoes. thinking of . . . nothing
5. Knit, or crochet, do anything that uses your hands. Did you ever make one of those “looms” out of an empty spool and “knit” long lengths of useless weaving with a nut pick? Did you ever braid “boondoggle” in long, flat, also useless plastic ropes? Consider how bringing the thread together in knitting, crocheting, weaving is like life. Threads coming together, making something new . . .
6. Peel a fresh fruit or vegetable - very slowly - really feeling the textures. Eat it the same way. Thank the fruit for it’s sustenance. Think of it becoming part of your cells, making you stronger and healthier. With a good imagination, mindful eating can be a real trip!
7. Walk or drive for an hour, any direction, then return
8. Dance when there is no one watching. That way, you can dance like there is no one watching. Dance naked. Dance slowly feeling all your muscles. Dance fast and let everything go. Dance to your favorite music. Dance to something new (have you heard Ocean’s music?)
9. Greet the sunrise. Do you live where you get a slow pink and pearl painting in the sky before sunrise, or does it suddenly appear in a splash of golden glory?
10. Sit on a bridge with legs dangling over. Play Pooh Sticks: drop a stick in the water on one side of the bridge and run to the other side to watch it appear.
11. Stand in a circle of trees. Hold the branches and bend backwards until you can see the tops of the trees. Watch the dance of the leaves.
12. Dry your hair in the sun. Have you ever actually washed your hair in rainwater? It is worth the trouble to catch the rain, at least once in your life.
13. Pot plants, being sure to get hands muddy.
14. I took my Kindergarten children on walks constantly to feel, see and experience something particular. Do you ever take time to do that as an adult? Find everything soft that you can. Or rough. Search out everything green. Or red. Take a smell walk through the country side or through town. Do you know what you own town smells like? What is the most beautiful thing - to you? How to natural things and man made things feel different? Take a walk and experience something new.
15. Feel the grass between your toes. Or Sand. Or mud. Or snow. What surface would you dance on if you had a choice?
16. Smell the rain on the wind. Wait for it. Watch it come. Stand in it with your face turned up.
17. Pet a purring cat or a loving dog. Did you know that playing a cello feels like holding a purring cat on your lap? Say the letter M for a long time and feel it. Does it feel like a purring cat to you?
18. Rock a baby to sleep. There isn’t a feeling like it anywhere in the world.
19. Dive in the ocean and crying out loud "Heil Atlantis!"
20. Climb a mountain from one side and then go down the other side (it amazes you how different things look. You know why the bear went over the mountain . . .)
21. Write in your journal with crayons or markers.
22. Blow bubbles. Do this with children if you can find some, if not do it alone. Here is a trick. Put a few drops of glycerin in the bubbles. It makes them last longer, land on things and sit there shining. Look closely at a bubble when it has landed. They are Iris’s brief, bright children and they carry the most miraculous, shimmering rainbows, for seconds . . . flying, luminous seconds.
23. Go out very early and look for dew. It is like pearls on the grass and if you can catch it on a cobweb, it is magic.
24. Smell bacon cooking and coffee brewing over an open fire.
25. Wake up and listen closely to a chorus of birds outside your window. They may have been there for months and you didn’t really ever here them before.
26. Get out your favorite childhood toy and hug it. Make yourself an “Inner Child” altar, using your stuffed friend as the center.
27. Pay attention to miracles - the deer or bird that stays to watch you instead of flying or running away. Remember there are miracles everywhere. A peach is just as miraculous as Mount Everest (and more accessible.)
28. Have high tea with cucumber sandwiches, petits fours and trifle. Wear hats.
29. Think of a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. If they are close, go and visit them. Or write. Find their email. Find a way to make contact again.
30. Eat Spotted Dick pudding smothered in Bird's Custard. (Our local English Pub gives it free to everyone there on Tuesdays! Come to Ashland and I’ll take you to the Black Sheep!)
31. Nap: (with someone you love spooned behind you; or with a two year old tucked in front of you with freshly baby-shampooed hair under your nose; or in a big recliner in front of the fire when you’ve just finished a perfect novel; or under a big puffy comforter on a rainy day when you really ought to be outside running errands.)
32. Pay attention to the seasons. Use all your senses to experience things like: the first smell of autumn. Walking outside and finding that in the night the air has changed and there is a subtle tiny chill and smell of crispness that means autumn is beginning. Now, if you search the green, green of the mountain you will find that, sure enough, there are tracings of gold brushed through the emerald and olive and jade that you didn’t notice yesterday. And then! sometimes in the middle of a perfectly warm fall day you will suddenly smell new snow on the wind. What does new snow smell like? I know, but I can’t tell you. The next day you will wake to everything covered with silverwhite marshmallows. Do you know what the earth smells like when it comes out of snow for the first time in months? When the first crocus blades poke bravely through the snow - that fantastic courage of green!, and suddenly through the smell of old snow, you will smell once again the rich, deep smell of earth. Spring is coming again. And when does spring turn to summer? When one day the cool breeze is suddenly hot and you know it will be warm enough to stay out that night and watch the stars. Seasons. Wonder of Wonders, Miracle of Miracles.
33. Spend a day in bed with your favorite book. Spend a day in bed with your favorite person.
34. Experience expectancy. Waiting for the house lights to dim, the curtain to go up, the trumpet to sound, the flag to fly. (The anticipatory feeling before a play, a dance or music concert to begin. I’ve been on both sides of the curtain, both are enchanted. It is the sharing that is magic.)
35. Ride a Roller coaster! :-) Pay special attention to that half second at the top before you go down.
36. Write. Write anything, a poem, a sentence, a list of words. Notice the joy when you’ve found the right words. (You write a sentence that is almost. It kind of goes around a corner, but doesn’t quite make it. It is halting, it is frozen, it is wobbly, faltering, broken, fragmented. Then you look at it again, you think it, you taste it, you wiggle it, you smooth it, you do who knows what to it, you change a few words, you move a comma, a erase something, you add something, you move something and suddenly it flows, it fits, it harmonizes, it tallies, it lines up, it WORKS. Eureka! Banzai! Hallelujah! Magic.)
37. Listen to the laughter of Children. (The laughter of my circle of daughters coming from the other room. For years it was a daily occurrence, now I must wait for special occasions. They are women now, not little girls, but they laugh just as hard and it is just as beautiful.)
38. Hug someone or something you love, then close your eyes and don't talk just let the feelings seep right in. Decide to do it much more often.
39. Light a scented candle. Smell the fragrance. Smell the fire. Send a prayer on it’s bright, eternal energy. Blow out the candle and watch the dance of the smoke.
40. Enjoy the sound of laughter. Enjoy the feeling. Revel in the way people’s eyes light up and the way a good giggle feels.
41. Listen to older people. Get them to describe their memories of days gone by. Don’t mind if they tell the same story again and again. This is the way stories are kept. Make a list of your own memories. Mail them to yourself.
42. Search for pictures that remind you of ‘home.’ Think of the smells and tastes and textures that go with the visual stimuli.
43. Bake something and take it to someone. Take cookies to work. Take a cake to your neighbor. Make those sticky-buns that you and your best friend tried not to eat when you were in high school. Take them to your best friends house and eat them all together.
44. Join with friends to paint each other's faces with face paint and dance down the street barefoot. (You can do this without getting arrested in my town. I don’t know about yours!)
45. Visit to the Japanese Bath-house or spa with a friend.
46. Make a list of your memories of magical childhood places. Picture them vividly in your mind. Do you remember your best hiding place when you played hide and seek?
47. Publicly hugging a tree. Call up some friends and have a group hugging. A group hugging does wonders for the soul.
48. Listen to your favorite musician. Go on-line and look at all the work of your favorite artist. Which painting would you choose if you got to own one?
49. Have a child’s “theme” birthday party when it isn’t anyone’s birthday. Invite your adult friends to a Pretty Pony Party, or a Spiderman Luncheon.
50. Listen to the audio book version of one of your favorite books. Take a drive and listen in the car. Listen in the bathtub. Listen in the garden. Listen in your favorite chair or tucked up in bed.
51. Make a Gratitude Journal. This doesn’t have to be stuffy. I write all kinds of wild things in mine like: “I love SHADES OF GREY” - or “Blessing on Leonard Cohen’s inspired head, wherever he is at this moment.”
52. Take a Yoga class. Remember the words that occur to you during the class. Balance? Breath? Stretch? Ouch? Write them down and compare them to what you think after taking six or eight Yoga classes. After a year. Are they different words?
53. Begin a journal and then send it to a friend. Have them write for a while and send it back. It’s a terrific way to share.
54. Call your best friend from High School or College.
55. Taste delicious words: Soothing, Lengthen, Liquid, Lyric, Mellow, Moon, Cello, Whisper, Soft, Bliss. (Those are some of mine!)
56 Feel the damp dew on the grass on your bare feet in the moonlight. Lay on your back and just gaze at the moon. Drinking moonlight is extremely good for the soul. If the moon is full make “Moon-tea.” This is just like Sun-tea, but is brewed by the light of the full moon. Exceptionally Magical.
57. Seek out and listen to singers whose voices are old trusted friends that smooth and sooth, a sweet sail to the past, a balm with which to face the future. (I love you Gordon Lightfoot!)
58. Go in search of waterfalls, fountains, rushing streams: there is magic in air and water joined in joy.
59. Practice and maintain traditions: the cultural traditions that we do because they have always been done, the old traditions that go back several generations, the family traditions we have done our entire lives, the blending traditions where two newly weds knit two families together, the new traditions that we just made up last year. The brand-new traditions that we made up just now!
60. Enjoy smells. The smell of a new doll, an old book, newly cut grass, fresh snow, cinnamon, hot bread, leather . . . what are your favorites?
61. Dancing. Remember how you have danced in the past . . . as a very young child, before anyone tells you what dancing is or isn’t, what is right or wrong, what you can or can’t do; when you choreograph your own dance to the music that plays in your head and you don’t care at all who was watching. At four years old, standing on your Daddy’s shoes. In rooms full of flashing lights and pulsing music that beat in your blood, where other moving bodies became extensions of an experience. At a bar on a hardwood floor where the clean, classic notes of Chopin stretch you to the peace of precision. With children on a summer lawn while sprinklers rain and the music is laughter. In the moonlight, in the dark, anywhere at all, in arms of someone you love. With other women in celebration, mourning, exploration, fellowship. Barefoot in a mountain meadow where the air is so thin you practically fly. On a stage, sending the experience of your joy of movement into hearts through eyes and ears. Alone in a room lit by a one candle, finding that, after all, you can still hold all of the above in the center of your own single flame.
62. Dance again.
63. Get a juicer and make yourself fresh juice and healthful smoothies. Make a list of healthful foods you really enjoy and go on a buying spree. Go out to an expensive Health Food Restaurant.
64. Get a notebook and make a list of all the things you would like to do before you die.
65. Plan pretend vacations for all the places you wish you could visit.
66. Have a henna party. Hire a body painter or Mehndi Artist to do everyone’s hands or feet, or tummies or backs.
67. Go for an old fashioned swim in an old fashioned swimming hole with a swing made of vines. Take an inner-tube and float around with a straw hat over your face. Lemonade is mandatory.
68. Walk to the closest grocery store. Buy a popsicle. Walk home.
69. Have a Wine and Cheese Party with a difference. For the Wine and Cheese Party, each guest brings a different kind of Wine and Cheese and everyone samples all the different brands. Following the same procedure, the combinations are endless. My children went wild with ideas, some of which were just too wild, such as the infamous Moonshine and Coon party. Here are a few other ideas: Beer and Pizza Soda and Chips Tea and Cakes Whiskey and Cigars Champagne and Fruit/Chocolate/Chocolated-fruit Coffee and Doughnuts Milk and Cookies.
70. This is the Cross Family U.S. Government End of Fiscal Year Party. It could also easily be adapted to be a Pay Day Party. Before midnight the refreshments consist of saltine crackers, a can of pork and beans and water. After midnight we serve a huge full course meal including filet minion, champagne and caviar. Yes, it is not subtle. Yes, it is too true.
71. The simplest is often the best. Watch a sunset. Smell the roses. Lay on your back and watch cloud formations. Hold completely still and feel the wind on your face. Kiss your own palm and say, “I love you.”
72. Write a research paper just like you had to do in High School, except write this one on something that fascinates you, about which you want to find out as much as possible.
73. Have a beauty pageant with paper dolls. You can cut out the swimming suit competition and keep the talent section if you want! Your paper dolls can also have a rodeo, be involved in a corporate spy ring, government coup and insurrection, travel on a flying carpet to far off lands, perish in a volcano, be preserved behind glass, be carried off by huge birds of prey in a vast primeval jungle, keep their faces in jars by the door like Eleanor Rigby, clone themselves in the scanner and wear Band-Aids to the office. After you are through playing, put the paper dolls in a book where, hopefully, you will forget about them until the next time you read the book when you will have a fun surprise and want to play again.
74. Write your favorite quotations on the wall. Always include this one of mine: “Go that way, real fast. If something gets in your way, turn. (Savage Steve Holland) It is profound.
75. Try to remember the nasty rhymes and sayings that children said when you were little, especially ones that made you feel bad. Turn them into nice rhymes and sayings. “Pink, pink, you stink.” “Pink, pink, think, think, you are as bright as indelible ink!”
76. Say to yourself in the mirror: “The Force will be with you, always.” Call up someone who will understand and say it to them on the telephone or go to their house and tell them to their face when they open the door.
78. Read A.A. Milne out loud, paying special attention to Pooh’s “hums.”
79. Simply ‘count your blessings.’ This is a great way to fall asleep at night.
80. Eat dinner by candle light. Have a candle-lit blanket-picnic outside under the stars, or inside under the ceiling. Have a candlelight picnic bubble-bath. Champagne and foods from the whipped cream category are appropriate bubble-bath picnic fare. Do you know that they make EDIBLE blowing bubbles that taste like candy? It’s true. Have a candle-lit pizza-picnic at midnight sitting crossed-legged on the kitchen table. Have a full candle light dinner with china, crystal, silver and linen - all set up on a card table in the back of a pick up truck parked underneath the stars. Have a candle light picnic in the snow: start by scooping out an round indentation of snow and lining it with at least two space blankets. Put regular blankets on top of these and it is plenty warm to sit on. Picnic’s on the snow, under the stars are quite magic. Igloos are much harder to make than you would ever imagine. Have a floating candle light picnic in a swimming pool or lake using floating candles. Mellon is the perfect food for a wet candle-lit picnic. Cut the top off of a cantaloupe, honeydew or small round watermelon. (You’ll want to cut it a little more than half.) Scoop out the melon with a melon-baller until the rind is empty. The empty half rind will float. Put the melon balls back in, being careful not to overload. If you don’t fill it too full it will still float. It is fun to mix the three kinds of melon in each rind so the colors are pretty. You can buy plastic glasses that float when you put them down in water without spilling the liquid inside which are fun for wet picnics. Always remember: a romantic candlelit dinner is always as close as the small scented candle, bic lighter and package of M&M’s that you put in your pocket before you went out for that walk.
81. Find life quotations that are important to you: “This above all else: To thine own self be true.” (William Shakespeare) “Go Slowly, Breathe and Smile” (Thich Nhat Hanh) “Follow your bliss” (Joseph Campbell)
82. Invite a friend over to drink champagne, wear hats and bake.
83. Go into the night with several friends and a camera. Take pictures of each other all over town. Get them developed and Make identical place mats, collages, or wall hangings for everyone.
84. Start a progressive or circle letter with friends and/or family through snail-mail. With a progressive letter each person adds to a long letter which keeps growing and getting bigger. With a circle letter, each person writes a one page letter and when the envelope comes, they remove their last letter and add a new one.
85. Eat a rainbow. Everyone knows that you are supposed to eat five fruits and vegetables a day, but a fun way to approach the whole thing is to think of “Eating a Rainbow.” Colorful fruits and vegetables provide the wide range of vitamins, minerals, fiber and phytochemicals that the body uses to stay healthy, energetic, maintain a healthy weight, protect against the effects of aging and reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease. Besides, rainbows are luscious. Read the book “The Rainbow Goblins” by Ul De Rico. Check out my painting!
86. Do something seasonally backwards. Play tennis in the snow. Bake Christmas cookies in July. Have an Easter Egg hunt in November. There are places where you can ice skate outside in the summer now and even ski on synth-snow during warm weather. Many former Olympic sites have summer activities on site. OR, you could go visit a friend on the other side of the world where they are doing the other season anyway!
87. Drop Pennies. Most people know about “See a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.” If you leave a penny on the ground every once in a while, it will bring someone luck sooner or later, if only from your thought.
88. Celebrate Trees and the Earth. Celebrate Arbor Day and Earth Day with the zeal that you do other holidays of the year. Have a huge dinner dedicated to the trees of our world and to our mother earth. Exchange gifts with earth and woodland themes or give gift certificates to charities that support ecology and protection of resources. National Arbor Day is the last Friday in April, but many states observe Arbor Day on different dates according to their best tree-planting times. International Earth Day will be March 20, 2005. Plant trees. When you plant a tree in your yard, plant another one for the world - in your neighborhood, on the side of a highway, on a green way, in a reforestation project for example.
89. Run through the sprinklers. This can be a simple afternoon diversion in a hot back yard paddling in your small rainbird sprinkler with a popsicle or two or a wild midnight adventure with a group of daring friends to charging across vast athletic fields or golf courses where huge sprays send fast sweeping arches of water cascading into the moonlight. (I’m not sure if you can actually get arrested for midnight sprinkler running, we never have, but then we live in a strange town. If you are concerned, you could check with your local authorities!)
90. Swing. Go to different elementary schools and playgrounds and swing on all the swings. Decide which ones are the best. Watch Kenneth Branaugh’s version of “Much Ado About Nothing.” It has a beautiful example of an adult swing in it . . . as well as a really luscious picnic in the beginning and an enchanting shower of rose petals being strewn from the castle windows over the heads of the dancers at the end . . . it also has the added benefit of being a total delight all the way in between. Delicious.
91. Did you know that the olfactory tissue with which you smell is identical to the tissue in your brain where memory is stored? Make a list of smells that bring memories and vice-versa. What memories are brought to you by the smell of: Nutmeg? Pine? Baby powder? Newly cut hay? Old Leather? Violets? Cookies Baking? The sea? Watermelon? Floor Wax? New Crayons? Sawdust? Dogs? Cats? Farmyards? Glycerine and Rosewater? Garlic cooking in olive oil? Fingernail polish? Cotton Candy? Fresh Paint? Lilacs? French Fried Potatoes? Lemons? Dill? Peaches? Make a list of yours.
92. Make a Sidewalk Chalk Painting. Sidewalk chalk is therapeutic because it is colorful, huge and temporary. You know that what you paint will not last which is a great exercise in the here and how. You can also actually feel the chalk transfer from the piece in your hand to the rough surface of the sidewalk. It’s a very tangible kind of painting. I recommend viewing “Mary Poppins” as an accompaniment to a good day of Sidewalk Chalk Painting.
93. Indulge yourself. Take a hot bath with mounds of bubbles. Have your nails done. Have you toes done. Do a friends nails. Have them do yours.
94. Buy your self a new CD.
95. Have a stimulating conversation with a stranger
96. Rent a movie just for yourself.
97. Take a dance class, a kick-boxing class, a karate class. Take a long walk and practice deep breathing.
98. Get a massage, facial, or spa wrap. Go dancing. Practice progressive relaxation. Meditate.
99. Go for a bike ride with a friend. Rent or buy roller blades and remember what it was to fly. (Anybody besides me old enough to remember skate keys?!)
100. Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty. Donate to a charity you don’t usually support, put your shopping trolley back in its appointed place in the parking lot, place a coin in an expired parking meter, as you go about your day, pick up the litter you find on the pavement, give another driver your parking spot, send a letter to a teacher you once had letting her know about the difference she made in your life, order a mail-order gift, anonymously, for a friend or someone at work who needs to be cheered up, go to an AIDS hospice or hospital ward and see what you can do for one person, slip a $10 note into the pocketbook of a needy friend (or stranger), next time you go over a toll bridge pay the toll for the car behind you and don't forget to thank the toll taker, laugh out loud often and share your smile generously, if you are the boss, bring your secretary a cup of coffee in the morning, if you have a person with an infirmity living near you, offer to do the grocery shopping for him or her. Make a list of more of these and post it here!
(Now. I do know that have a lot of dancing in here. That’s just me. And I seem to have a thing about smelling as well. Whatever! Dance and Smell! Smell and Dance! It’s all good.)
©Edwina Peterson Cross
