Ever feel like you’ve lost yourself or gotten disconnected to yourself? I found myself feeling this way several years ago. Thankfully, I have rediscovered me and today I am going to give you some practical things you can do to reconnect to your inner self. If you are like I was, you may sometimes feel disconnected from yourself, perhaps you’ve lost your sense of self in all the business of being a mom, wife/spouse/partner, work, and all the other things you have going on. I’ve spent years reconnecting with myself and today I am sharing with you some of the ways I do that. If you often find yourself wondering who you are or feeling like you’ve lost touch with your true self in the craziness of life, then get comfy and tune in to today’s episode. Let me help you rediscover yourself and connect with you again.
Perhaps it seems strange, but many years ago, I realized I didn’t feel like I knew who I was anymore. This realization was the catalyst that launched me into my pursuit of whole health, joy, and later to deepen my faith. I got so lost in all my responsibilities and obligations that I got completely disconnected from me. Over many years, after numerous programs and countless self-help books I learned some practices that helped me reconnect to myself. These practices are:
- Self love.
- Mirror work.
- Meditation.
- Connecting to nature.
- Finding the things you love.
I will never forget the day I was staring out the window of my patio, when it hit me: what happened to me? Where did I go? These two simple questions popping into my mind led me to burst into tears. I realized in that moment that I’d gotten lost in my day-to-day life. I felt like all I did was get up, sit in traffic for an hour, go to work, sit in traffic another hour or more to go home, make dinner, help kids with homework, get them ready for bed, go to bed. Rinse. Repeat. By the time the weekend came I was completely exhausted from the week. The energy I mustered up went to cleaning the house, doing the laundry, running errands. Every aspect of my life felt like “had to.”
I never really felt like doing anything. Sometimes I’d dust off my art supplies and try and paint or draw but I’d just stare at the paper, or if I did attempt something I’d stop because I would criticize it before I even got too far with it. I was uninspired. I was overwhelmed. Being a single mother going out wasn’t easy and was a rare occurrence. When I did go out or dated and I got that question: what do you like to do? What do you enjoy? I’d go back to the same hobbies I had in my younger years, but I rarely did any of those things anymore. Somewhere in all the things, my divorce, the failed relationship I had a few years after my divorce, a demanding job, raising my kids, I lost me. What was worse was I really had no idea how to get her back.
I was simply spread too thin. I wasn’t taking care of myself at all. I was battling depression daily. I felt tired all the time. I wasn’t happy with my weight. I cried almost every morning getting ready for work because I absolutely hated getting dressed. I felt like nothing looked good. I was miserable in my job due to some toxic relationship dynamics, among many other issues. At this time in my life, every single aspect of my waking existence felt obligatory. I had to force myself through everything. I was drinking at night to numb my feelings, which eventually led to a relapse of smoking. I started thinking this was the only “fun” or “me time” I could have; that one or two hours after the kids were in bed, depending on how late I decided I wanted to stay up. I wasn’t ok, yet, if someone asked, I told them I was fine. Most of the time I thought I was fine.
I knew I wanted so much more than what I was experiencing daily. I knew I had far more to offer the world than the job I was in at that time. The worst part was I felt like a shell of myself. I felt like a failure on every front: I was divorced, the boyfriend I had after my divorce left when I got pregnant with my youngest, I couldn’t be the mom I wanted to be at that time, I wasn’t being utilized or appreciated in my job at the time. But I pushed it all down. I told myself I was fine. I told myself this is just life and I have to suck it up. It all culminated that one day I was looking out the patio window and all that I had been pushing down came up, demanding attention, and I burst into tears, realizing I had completely lost myself and I needed to get her back fast. I needed to quit focusing on all that wasn’t working for me and I needed to focus on getting myself back.
As had always been the case for me, since I was a teenager, my attention went straight to my weight. If I could lose weight I’d feel better. But as I went down that path and found a coaching program to help with that, I quickly started to learn I had to focus on other things, like mindset and going inward, later I learned about inner healing, self-healing, and energy healing. This all happened over many years. I continue to do this work and that’s because it’s lifelong and these practices I am sharing with you are like any other aspect of being alive; you have to do them regularly and you have to adapt with each season you find yourself in. These five practices I am sharing with you here today have changed me and they have changed my life. I hope to save you years of trial and error and I hope to help you find your mojo again by sharing these practices with you today.
So, I’ve condensed all that I’ve learned over the past six plus years around reconnecting with your inner self into these five practices.
- Love yourself.
Now, this may not apply to everyone. Maybe you already love yourself, and that is great, but I have not. In fact I’ve spent far too much of my life either hating myself, or struggling to fully accept myself. But one thing my relationship with God has taught me as well as all this inner work I’ve done for all these years, is that you have got to love yourself unconditionally. You have to accept yourself completely; flaws and all. Are you doing this? Can you honestly say that you love yourself unconditionally? I know I didn’t always, and some days I still struggle with it, but I can say for the first time in my 40+ years on this earth, I do love myself and I accept and value myself in a way I never have.
So, how does one love themselves? It takes some effort and practice at first. If it was as easy as just deciding you love yourself, many of us wouldn’t be where we are, right? This podcast wouldn’t exist if it was that easy! You do it day-by-day, step-by-step. You do this by taking care of yourself; nourishing your body, getting some exercise, getting enough sleep, resting when you’re tired, saying “no” when you want to say “no” instead of “yes” out of obligation or guilt, and speaking life to yourself. I have talked about this some in earlier episodes and I go more in-depth about this in my Foundations course (now available for pre-launch enrollment) but the key here is shutting down that inner critical voice. Be aware of how you are speaking to yourself and make an effort to change how you are speaking to yourself. Think of the things you do for your family and loved ones, think of how you speak to them when they’re feeling down on themselves; what are you saying to them? How do you show them you love them? Do those same things for yourself. - Mirror work.
There are a couple different practices around this. The first one, is an exercise to stop being critical of your body and start feeling appreciation for your body. We are bombarded with images and beauty standards from a very young age as women. Many of us fall into the comparison trap too. This leads to us being critical of our bodies. We look in the mirror and don’t think we measure up to these standards or don’t look the way we think we should. Then we pick ourselves apart, try to hide in our clothes, and maybe even avoid certain things because we are uncomfortable in our own skin. This is because along the way, we choose to subscribe to these standards; by holding ourselves to them, we are accepting them as something we must aspire to. But what if we decided to choose a different standard? What if we decided to love our bodies exactly as they are?
Of course this is not to say you can’t or shouldn’t work toward your goals. You are just recognizing that your beauty, worth, and value are not contingent on being a certain weight or size. You can be working to lose excess body weight, improve your health, and still love yourself and your body along the way. In other words, don’t wait until you weigh x or fit size x to love and accept your body. In fact, you shouldn’t wait, because you’re sending yourself a subconscious message that loving yourself is contingent on what you weigh or how you look.
Start making a practice as you get dressed in the morning and getting ready for bed at night of looking at your body in the mirror, in your underwear. Tell yourself you are beautiful. Allow yourself to see what is unique and beautiful about your shape. Thank your body part by part; your legs for carrying you through life, your feet for all they have walked you through, your arms for carrying your loved ones, your shoulders for their strength, etc. The idea is to practice seeing your body for all the wonderful things it does for you, for being the temple of your soul, for growing your babies, for it’s strength, for being your body. You have to shift away from beating yourself up for not looking like such and such celebrity or Instagram model and shift to realizing how beautiful and awesome you are right now, just as you are. Your body will start to meet you half way and you will start to genuinely love yourself and your body more and more each day.
The second practice with the mirror is called mirror gazing. You can google it and find more information about it. There’s all sorts of stuff about it, some of it may seem a little out there, but bear with me and give it a chance. It’s basically, just sitting in front of the mirror and staring into your eyes for several minutes. The idea is to see past what you normally see in looking at the mirror; breaking past glancing to check your appearance or to get ready to go somewhere. Here, you are trying to reconnect to yourself on a deeper level. You are gazing into your own eyes and just observing and allowing whatever comes through to come through. It doesn’t take long as you will likely only be able to do this for a few minutes at first. You may cry. You may have an emotional reaction. You may not. You only need to do this about once a week to start to feel some shift. It just helps you connect to your inner self, your soul. You may get messages from her; thoughts may just come in from her. For me, the first few times I did it, she just told me she wanted me to love her, just accept her. In time, as you continue to do this you will feel more connected to yourself as well as improve your level of self acceptance. It helps you to see past all that stuff you may be telling yourself when you look in the mirror, because you’re just looking at yourself as you might someone else sitting in front of you; you’re trying not to make any judgements or critiques or opinions. The idea is just to see yourself and connect with yourself. - Meditation.
If you’ve been listening to my podcast or following this blog for a while you know I am big on meditating. I often talk about it in the context of connecting to God or for self-care, but here it is in the context of connecting to yourself. Did you know you can connect to your soul and talk to her? But in order to hear her, you have to go inward and tune the rest of the world out for a bit. This is similar to other meditations. Start by finding somewhere comfortable to sit, be it on a pillow on the floor or in a chair with your feet on the floor. You can also lie down, but I tend to fall asleep when I meditate that way, so I advise sitting up. If you want, you can also light a candle or burn some incense. It is helpful to wake up your senses, but it is not essential for meditating.
Next, find some calming music. This can be classical music, or other calming instrumental music. One of my favorites is Enya for meditation. I also use 528 hz music quite a bit and recommend it for this meditation in particular. It is the frequency of love and is used for healing. Simply google 528 hz music and all sorts of options will come up. So, if you are using music, get it started.
The next thing you do is start to breathe deeply. Breathe in for a count of four, hold for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four. Do this for several breaths as it may take you a little bit to relax completely. With each breath focus on relaxing your muscles, let the tension out of your neck, your shoulders, all the muscles in your body. Once you’ve relaxed, continue breathing deeply as you start to ask your soul questions. You can simply tell your soul you want to connect with her, you want to get attuned to her. You can ask your soul what she wants in this life, what did she come here to do. Continue breathing and allow whatever comes through to come through. This may be colors, it might be images, or it may be answers in your mind. Don’t worry if you don’t get anything the first time, especially if meditation is new to you. It takes some time. Remember you are reconnecting or maybe establishing this connection for the first time, so give yourself grace and give it time. If nothing else it will help you relax and tune into yourself more. - Connect to nature.
This may not be something that jumps out at you when you think about reconnecting to yourself, but it is such an important practice for doing that. This is as simple as getting outside and in nature, whether it is your back or front yard, the patio outside your apartment, a park, whatever, get outside and get some fresh air. Ideally, take a walk outside. I have found when I get outside and take a walk it puts things in perspective and it just helps me connect to myself.
There is something meditative about taking a walk or sitting outside by yourself, but you have to quiet the mind; unplug and just be present. Don’t put on music or headphones. Take in the scenery around you, the sky, the grass, the plants, the sunshine. It is amazing how much this can help you can clear your mind and whatever you are in the midst of processing in your mind will start to become clearer. Answers and insights will start to come through. It helps you to recharge and ground yourself to be outside in nature - Do or find the things you love.
So, at the beginning of this post, I mentioned how I had gotten disconnected from myself. If you have as well, then it may be that you don’t even know what you love anymore; so, you may need to rediscover that. One initial step is to think back before you got lost in the business of your life, perhaps this is before you got married or with your spouse, or maybe it was after you had your first child or children, whenever it was, think back on that time. What did you enjoy doing? What did you find fun? How did you spend your time to yourself? Start doing some of those things. Meet yourself where you are and start with one thing each month or week.
If you can’t recall or nothing comes up, start exploring. For example, what interests you? What do you scroll on social media or your phone? What are you looking at? What inspires you? Take a step toward one of those things. For example, I was seeing this ad in my feed constantly for something called Body Groove, perhaps you’ve seen those ads too. It just looked like so much fun, yet I never clicked the link. Finally one day I did and I got a special monthly price that was great and now I do it a couple times a week, just to move my body and unwind a bit. I have also always been artistic and used to draw and paint constantly when I was younger; so when I first started trying to reconnect to myself, I started doing a painting class once a month. It reignited my creativity and got me going a little bit. I also use tutorials on You Tube as I’ve been teaching myself watercolor. There are so many things you can find out there, but you have to follow your inspiration and what intrigues you; it’s telling you what you may really love. Once you find some of these things, do them more often, at least weekly.
The more you do the things you truly love and enjoy, the lighter you will feel. You will reconnect with the inner you that you’ve gotten disconnected from over the years. You will find your passions and light yourself up again and life won’t feel so heavy or obligatory. There has to be some joy in there! I used to hear people at work joking about how they’d do what they love when they retire and that’s I think when another big shift started happening in me. Who says it’s guaranteed you make it to retirement? Each day is truly a blessing. Plus, what kind of existence is that? What’s the point of making a certain income if you can’t actually enjoy it until you retire? It’s absolutely ludicrous when you really think about it. So don’t wait until next year, or ten years from now, or until you retire for goodness sakes; do what you love now!
So, those are some of the ways I have learned to use to reconnect with myself. As I have done this consistently, I have found myself happier overall and I have found more courage to pursue the life I truly want to live. As I became more aligned to who I am and what I am passionate about and what I love, I found myself feeling more disconnected from all the things I had allowed to replace that over the years. I suddenly felt ok, determined even to set boundaries for myself. I was no longer willing to give my life, my health, every ounce of my being to my job or to fulfill other people’s expectations.
I hope you find these practices helpful and I really hope you will start incorporating this into your life. Connect to your inner self again and find what lights you up and fills you with joy.
Please share your thoughts in the comments. What resonates? What do you want to start doing to reconnect to yourself? Also, check out my socials for information on my new course, Foundations. You can enroll here at the pre-launch price of $97, if you get in before May 17, 2023: https://courses.faithfitnessjoy.com/offers/xbACCffx. It is incredible and I am so excited about it.
If you find this helpful and want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also follow Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram or check out the podcast at: https://faithfitnessjoy.podbean.com. I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!