Browsing Tag

self love

Addiction, Awe & Wonder, Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

Enough

October 7, 2015

By Holly Groome

I was four months pregnant and I just left my soon-to-be ex-husband’s house. He told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to reconcile from our separation. I couldn’t drink it away. I couldn’t cut it away. I couldn’t shove my fingers down my throat again. I couldn’t even think about suicide for the second time; not with this life my husband and I created squirming inside of me.

I drove through town, as if someone had injected a grey cloud into my brain. I stopped for a milkshake, simply because. Then I drove on auto-pilot to a tattoo shop. Yes, wretched of me to get a tattoo while pregnant. But the other options to handle my pain weren’t really options.

I sat in the car with a pen and a bank deposit slip, and started numbly scribbling single words to ink into my wrist. About three words in, I had it. ENOUGH.

Twenty minutes later, my 5’1” frame allowed me to softly dangle my feet on the tattoo chair, as I sipped my milkshake like a child, hiding my newly pregnant belly. I sat there as the sweet bliss of the needle dug into my skin. It wasn’t a sick kind of pleasure. It was a relief. These six letters etched into my flesh were telling me what I had to do.

Four years later, I still get asked what the tattoo means. My answer is never the same, for it speaks to me differently, at various shifts in my life.

I smile and say, ENOUGH of the Bullshit. ENOUGH to my bulimia. I am ENOUGH. Sometimes I say all three.

Most understand me. Some almost shudder at my honesty. And some seem completely confused as if I said it in Pig Latin.

I don’t mind the reactions. It’s mine. I own it. It saved my life; literally and more than once. Continue Reading…

beauty, courage, Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

This Space

October 5, 2015

By Sarah Miller Freehauf

I once filled this space, this body, this dispensable cavity with food—rows of black and white cookies & TV & bedtime. I once filled this space, this body, this dispensable cavity with pills & space where no food was allowed to touch. I once ran on a treadmill for three miles in this space, this body, this dispensable cavity. I moved 200 pounds of this space, that body. After—a man came to me with a smile and asked how many miles did you just run? A man came to me with disbelief and asked how many miles I just carried that big space, that big body, that big dispensable cavity.

My mother used to say you better watch it. My father used to tap and smack our bellies and call us belly-women and I hated him in that moment though loved him deeply every other. My brother used the toothbrush more often than I did. My brother used to feel the praise of coaches and mother and father on how he was trim and good and how that boy body was all Midwestern man. My brother was worse off than I. He ate salad, he dispensed it, he ate salad, he moved his large baby fat ridden teen body until some man at the gym said something to him in disbelief—something that sounded like you are good.

I kept running and moving that space of mine and eating things of the earth and everyone in disbelief said how many miles did you just run? How many pounds did you manage to rid? Everyone in disbelief including the man at the gym and our father and my brother—skinny and in shape and everyone proud of him—everyone in disbelief asked how many miles and pounds did that space, that body, that dispensable cavity rid?

And then because that space is dispensable, because of shame, because of fat stored in a place that it is supposed to be, because everyone in their disbelief—I cut my chest. I let a man cut my chest, I let a man remove, in his disbelief, eleven pounds of fat. I let everyone say in disbelief—your body looks better, looks good, looks healthy, looks small. And this body still has the anchor scars and the cookie scars and rotted esophagus to prove that all the disbelief was believable.

And now I run and men watch. And now I run and my mother says good. And now I eat things of the earth and others say how.

Now—I run. I move my body, my space, my figure, my form and most days it is still not enough. But my body moves and that is good. The moving is mostly enough.

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Sarah Miller Freehauf is the Founding Editor of Teenage Wasteland Review–a literary journal just for teens, Editorial Assistant for Divedapper, a reader for [PANK], former Managing Editor for Lunch Ticket, and recently received her MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles. More importantly, she teaches high school English and Creative Writing in the Midwest. Her most recent creative work can be found in Stone Highway Review & Poemeleon.

 

 

Join Jen Pastiloff at one of her Girl Power Workshops or On being Human Workshops by clicking here.

Join Jen Pastiloff at one of her Girl Power Workshops or On being Human Workshops by clicking here.

Ring in New Years 2016 with Jen Pastiloff at her annual Ojai retreat. It's magic! It sells out quickly so book early. No yoga experience required. Just be a human being. With a sense of humor. Email barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com with questions or click photo to book. NO yoga experience needed. Just be a human being.

Ring in New Years 2016 with Jen Pastiloff at her annual Ojai retreat. It’s magic! It sells out quickly so book early. No yoga experience required. Just be a human being. With a sense of humor. Email barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com with questions or click photo to book. NO yoga experience needed. Just be a human being.

 

Guest Posts, Inspiration

Enough Is Enough

October 4, 2015

By Elissa Cirignotta

I am enough. We are enough.

I am enough and I always have been. I am whole & I am part of your whole. I am complete. I am perfect.

I have experienced how easy it can be to forget this truth. Time and time again. I forget that I’m connected to the intelligent ebb & flow of life. I forget that my essence is pure. I forget that within me, God can be found.

I write it down, I recite it, I post in the bathroom… I surround myself in this truth and I plunge into this reality. Just as linguists claim it to easier to learn a language when you are fully immersed in the culture, the people, & the day-to-day living experience, so it is also true for your spiritual evolution. You could move to Italy to learn Italian and just as easily move within to learn… well everything.

I am whole. I am complete. I am everything. I am everything I need.

We live our lives in search. In pursuit. In hopes of a better… a better tomorrow, a better job, a better spouse… sometimes better children. And our prayers are for pleas of help and assistance to bring us that in which we truly believe will bring brilliant peace and happiness, if only we are able to obtain it.

Years of awareness and practice going within has taught me a new language with new vocabulary that is full of yesses and thank-yous. Instead of the plea to the great unknown to “take me there”, it has become, “bring me here”.

Bring me HERE. Now. To the stuff that is happening NOW! To the reality I created. To the reality I am creating. Bring me here. Be here now Elissa. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

Why I Make Time To Get Away

October 2, 2015

By Nina Carroll

I realize there are many facets to why I need time to get away. The most important is that my spirit calls me to a sacred safe space to breathe in the many possibilities life offers me. I become my true authentic self when I observe me in an environment living each present moment. The getting away helps me to balance the distractions of my daily hustles and bustles to work, obligations towards family, friends and my struggles with my monetary responsibilities to live a sustainable lifestyle within the everyday mundane stuff. I rather “let go” and surrender these attachments and/or entanglements. I realize they do not always serve me. Instead, I try to practice staying focus on my internal state I discover unravels and empowers an authenticity of my true self.

I recently had the privileged of a two weeks stay at a remote artist community. The best two weeks I had given myself for quite some time. A dream had come true for me. The setting was in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I felt more alive, free and open, being just where I was without any reservations or second thoughts. I was able to contemplate, reflect, meditate with being my true self with everything and everyone life introduced and offered me in this surroundings. I took nature walks, read and wrote poetry by a running creek, soothed my wounds in a natural hot springs that baptized my soul, which soared me further up into the majestic mountains. Until, alas I found myself one night sleeping under a bush thicket with bare necessities not making it back in time to my destination. I realize this became the catalyst catapulting the time needed to reveal what I was to experience during this getaway. My spirit had guided me to a place, where I had to recognize I must live life to its fullest no matter where I need to getaway.

However, I need time to getaway to a place that becomes a sacred space for me. Where my healing can begin to process in this space, so my spirit and I can connect. In this space my spirit helps me to facilitate and make an assessment of my spiritual, mental, emotional and physical state of well- being. I consciously make an effort not to resist my inner needs calling, but to go further, deeper within myself to alleviate whatever is pulling me away from hearing those needs. This getaway becomes the perfect time where I show-up, seek my truth; shine my light. I can relax, unwind, meditate as I take a deep inhale and breathe through my heart, mind and soul; exhale slowly to discern what entangled discords, distortions and defenses I have built around them. I practice releasing these blockages daily through meditation. A vital source that helps me to heal my heart, mind and soul, so I can easily, gently and openly flow with my spirit and life.

Continue Reading…

feminism, Girl Power: You Are Enough, Guest Posts, Young Voices

A 13 Year Old Girl On Her Experience at “Girl Power: You Are Enough.”

October 1, 2015

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station: This is a piece for my “Young Voices” series. It was written by Olivia Heimann who is thirteen years old and attended the launch of Girl Power. I am proud to announce that Olivia is an ambassador for Girl Power: You Are Enough. I am in the process of organizing the next Girl Power workshop so please stay tuned to this site and my social media.

I am looking for more young voices to publish so please submit if you have something to say. Please note, if you are under 18 you must have parental permission unless you are using a pseudonym. I am so excited to be working on the book Girl Power: You Are Enough, as well as the workshop for young women which has been a HUGE success so far. Please help me spread the word and sign up or sign your daughters/nieces/friends. I am also in the process of selecting ambassadors to represent #GirlPowerYouAreEnough. More information on this on my instagram at @jenpastiloff. Love, Jen

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A Life-Changing Experience
By Olivia Heimann

On Saturday September 19, I walked into YogaStream studio, which was full of girls about my age. Everyone was definitely nervous and that only grew once Jen told us that we needed to trust everyone else in the room. As the class went on and people understood that we were here to boost and stand by one another – that’s what girl power is all about.

We wrote in our little red notebooks that said “Own Your Awesome” (by Your Joyologist) about things that we need to do to be happy and also things we would do if we were not afraid. Some people stood up and read what they wrote. It was so empowering to hear everyone’s stories about bullying, coming out, eating disorders, and so much more. We learned so much and cared so much from listening to everyone.

This is the part where I started crying and feeling. I was not the only room. The whole room felt it!

Jen asked us to think of someone to thank. It could be a family member, a friend, a pet, anyone. I immediately thought of one of my best friends, who is now in 9th grade. She has always had an uncomfortable relationship with food; because of the stomachaches she has had her whole life. Around November and December of 2015, she started having serious anorexic symptoms. I was the first one who realized what was going on, around mid-January. Soon after I noticed, everyone else saw the difference in her limbs and stomach. Everyone wanted to try and stop or warn her, but didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Her boyfriend at the time only made things worse by saying she looked good the way she was while she was anorexic. About 4 or 5 months into it, she lost her period, and fainted several times. At the beginning of this summer, she lost feeling in her legs because lack of blood circulation. Sleeping was kind of her “survival mode,” which is what she did most of the time. Every morning, she would get up, feel dizzy and fall. Every morning. Above all, she still hated her body and thought she deserved to be punished. At her lowest weight, she was 79 pounds, and still thought she was fat. She had lost about 40 pounds in 8 or 9 months. About a week after she got home from a trip to England, she realized things were so bad that if she wanted to live, she had to go to the hospital. She was in bed rest for a month. The doctors said if she had waited for another week to come in, she would have died.

When I thanked her, I said thank you for realizing this has to stop, thank you for realizing you have to go to the hospital. Thank you for not waiting any longer. Because what would have broken my heart was attending her funeral. All these thoughts running through my head about my best friend left me bawling. As I continued to sob, we all stood up and sang ‘I will always love you.’ That was an even more emotional part for me because it was like I was singing to my best friend. While I hugged everyone with tears streaming down my face, I was so grateful for being able to have that catharsis.

The next writing activity really hit home. We wrote a letter from someone who loves us. Since I had already thought of a friend, I decided to write the letter from my mom to me. I wrote about how she loved me, how she was proud of me for following in her footsteps, and how she admired how independent and confidant I have become. When Jen asked me to read my letter, I started tearing up. As I tried to breathe, everyone said, “We are here for you.” Of course my mom being in the room made me cry even more, but as Jen repeated several times JB (just breathe), I was able to stumble through the letter. The saying Jen told us numerous times “how bold one gets when one is sure of being loved” completely came to life. I was so confident in myself, when I heard my mom say ‘I love you, baby, I love you to the moon and back.’

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Continue Reading…

Gender & Sexuality, Girl Power: You Are Enough, Guest Posts, Young Voices

In My Mother’s Bathroom

September 23, 2015

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station: This is a piece for my “Young Voices” series. I am looking for more young voices to publish so please submit if you have something to say. Please note, if you are under 18 you must have parental permission unless you are using a pseudonym. I am so excited to be working on the book Girl Power: You Are Enough, as well as the workshop for young women which has been a HUGE success so far. Please help me spread the word and sign up or sign your daughters/nieces/friends. I am also in the process of selecting ambassadors to represent #GirlPowerYouAreEnough. More information on this on my instagram at @jenpastiloff. Love, Jen

In My Mother’s Bathroom
By Emily Falkowski

Over the years I learned how to kiss girls without feeling like my abuser. This is one of the small ways in which my voice came knocking at my gut, demanding to be let in.

The first time I fooled around with a girl I was fourteen. I kissed Brianna up against the wall of the astronomy building at summer camp. I pushed my groin into hers and imagined Brianna pinned there against the brick, like moss.

“You’re so aggressive,” she said. “I didn’t expect this.”

“I’m sorry. I’m nervous. Should I stop?”

“No,” Brianna pushed her tits up at me when I grabbed her wrists with one hand and pinned them behind her back, “I like it. It’s like you’re a boy.”

When she said that I got intensely wet. I wanted to be a boy. I started to unzip her pants and imagined that I had a penis. How it would be hard and corporeal against her thigh, a real thing she could pull out of my pants. Then I would push Brianna onto the ground and make her fuck me with her mouth.

I pulled her left breast out off her bra and wrapped my mouth around the nipple. She said my name, and I felt my body go numb, I couldn’t feel anything below my belly button. This wasn’t surprising, I was used to this sort of thing happening when someone I was with said my name, or tried to touch me below the waist.

“Mmm, please don’t say my name right now.”

“Okay,” She giggled, “What do you want to be called?”

 

My earliest idea of womanhood is limited, defined by the sexual anatomy of a female. I’m four in my mother’s bathroom watching her dry off after a shower, wrapping her hair in a green towel and propping one leg up on the bath-tub. Continue Reading…

Binders, Guest Posts, motherhood

Unravelling

September 4, 2015

By Jennifer Meer

Whenever my husband travels for business, I have the same thing for dinner almost every night. I will own that it is so disgusting that I will not eat it in front of him or my children. It is always post bedtime when I sink into that delicious and rare moment in time that is uniquely my own space. I take a bag of pretzels and dump them out on a plate and then I cover them with a slice of American cheese which I then microwave.

Everything about it is wrong.

It tastes amazing.

I suspect that the actual taste of microwaved processed cheese melted on top of pretzels has little to do with gastronomic pleasure and everything to do with the taste of freedom, the taste of what it feels like to not be wanted or needed or touched. It tastes like the freedom to unravel.

Mentally, sometimes I picture that this is what is happening at the end of these days that are both centuries and mere moments long. That after a day of logistics and questions and to dos and toys and tasks and dishes and laundry and diapers and none of which are bad, I literally imagine myself wrapped in their love and tasks, like gauze slowly winding and tightening itself around me all day long. I wear it proudly, like a corset. It keeps me cinched in, and from instinctively pursuing things that are hard and emotionally complex. I am not sure this is bad. But at night, in the dark when no one is around and the cheese is still bubbling on the pretzels, I literally unravel myself. Layer after layer. I am scared that if I unwind too much too far or too fast, I will reveal what I fear to be true. That there is nothing underneath my corset of loving. That the process of loving and doing has become so all consuming, that I am losing the person at the center of it.

The next day, pre-dawn, I smuggle myself out of the house much like a cat burglar to go for a sorely needed yet far too rare early morning jog. It strikes me as strange how much I feel like I am getting away with something, escaping while they are all still asleep. Why does love always come with this requisite push and pull? I need them close, I need more, I need myself, I need escape.

As I run, the sounds of Bon Jovi and vintage Sambora fill my ears. I think of the lost art of the guitar solo in all of its faded glory and perfection: equal parts embellishment and improvisation. Another bygone relic of my 80s youth, it gave that band member used to working so hard to blend in, a rare moment to give everything to just the opposite: standing out. It is so easy to love them. It is so hard to turn in and up. Am I using my loving them as an excuse to avoid the hard work of learning me? Is this season of mothering an opportunity to love or hide? Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, feminism, Guest Posts

You Really Should Be Skinnier

August 18, 2015

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By Jen Pastiloff.

There was this guy who came in the Newsroom, where I worked. Damn girl, they been feeding you. He actually said that as he reached for my stomach. He tried to touch me as he hurled that insult at me like I was some animal in a cage. Like I was someone he felt he actually had a right to touch. It was all I could hear for days: Damn girl, they been feeding you. As I put food in my mouth: Damn girl, they been feeding you. As I waited on customers: Damn Girl, they been feeding you.

This morning, a beautiful woman who attended my New Year’s Retreat in Ojai posted on our secret page. Yes, we have secret pages. We are super secret spies.

She posted this:

I had a man tell me last night as a “well intentioned tip” that if I wanted to get serious about making a living selling healthy food, I would need to lose weight.
I was once a size 16. Now, I’m a size 4.
When does the insanity stop???

Then this:

And I know I should get over it and move on. But see, I don’t fucking want to. I want to harness this pain and shame and embarrassment and create a safe haven for people who just want to be WELL. Who just want to be ENOUGH. Thank you again, Jen, for providing this little tiny safe haven in this big bad ugly world. It’s so hard to do all of this alone.

That is all I ever want to do, create a safe haven so someone, maybe one person, does not feel so alone. Watch the video below and post your thoughts on this topic, if you would. I am so passionate about us embracing our beauty no matter what. Those last words are key.

No.

Matter.

What.

This work I am doing with Girl Power is so important. It’s important for all of us, but my God, I want to start in on them young. A couple years ago I was having lunch with a guy friend and he said, “With a few tweaks, your body would be perfect.”

Another guy, “You only have a little layer of sweetness on you.”

A manager, from my “acting” years, “Lose ten pounds. You have nothing right now but how you look and so you need to look as perfect as you can be.”

These things have gotten stuck. I get it. I do an exercise that you know of if you have attended my workshops. The one and the one hundred. If you have a hundred people in a room and they all love you except one, who do you focus on?

Most say “the one.”

This is why I created this quote:

It's a huge honor to have another card up at Emily McDowell Studio. Click to order.

It’s a huge honor to have another card up at Emily McDowell Studio. Click to order.

Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Life

Step By Step

August 14, 2015

By Ginger Sullivan

It is hard to believe over 30 years have passed. I was a spry young thing. The mysterious underdog. Everyone worried if I ate enough. And why on earth would anyone be up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning, dressed and out the door regardless of the weather?

Sometimes, I look back on those days and question my own sanity. What was I running from? Was I that intolerant of my own feelings? Was I masochistic to my own burgeoning body as a young woman? Was I trying to prove something to someone? Reflecting on those days, I often feel sadness and regret for all that I missed out on. The normalcy of adolescence. The girly-girl stuff. The endless giggling about sissy stuff that I passed up as superficial or uninteresting. And yet, there are the moments when I look back on that time with gratitude. I appreciate the life lessons that those experiences have embedded in me. After all these years later, I often find myself tapping into whatever it was that kept me going mile after mile.

As a nationally ranked, award-winning long-distance runner, I was a force to be reckoned with. When I started out, I just ran as long and as fast as my legs would carry me. It wasn’t until later that I learned that even the boys had a hard time keeping up with me. I moved through the system – elementary school track team, summer Junior Olympics, middle school cross-country. I was voted most valuable runner as a freshman on the varsity high school cross-country team. I was ranked nationally as a top miler, hitting sub-five minutes time and time again. I was awarded trips to national meets in California. The mailbox was filled with college scholarship interest. I won enough medals, trophies and ribbons to wallpaper a good-sized room.

But then, I grew up and in running years, I grew old. My knees creaked and cracked and could no longer bear the weight of the repetitive pounding. There were no more trophies to earn or newspaper reporters interested in talking to me. It was just me … facing life, without the constant pressure to perform and the corresponding glory of another race won. I had to find normalcy in the everyday that was not timed, recorded, applauded and rewarded.

The trophies are now packed away, gathering dust in a box in the basement. And I certainly have good stories to tell my children. However, the best showing I have for all that hard work are the internalized experiences that provide a constant supply of resources and reflections as my mid-life has taken on a different race – one that needs just as much stamina and strength. My life these days is like strapping on a backpack loaded with bricks, day in and day out. Some of those bricks are long-term challenges that need daily tending and care, with no immediate outcome or relief in sight. Others are shameful mistakes I have made and represent one step, one day at a time, climbing out of a hole I dug myself. Yet, just like that ten-mile training run, I start. One foot in front of the other. And then another. And then the next one. There is no end insight. You just do what you know to be right, mile after mile, day after day.

Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Young Voices

Becoming

July 21, 2015

By Melissa Black

You can find out a lot about yourself when you pay attention to what makes you cry.

Sometimes I’ll see something or hear someone say something that literally hits me so hard I break down right there, with no warning and no immediate explanation. I just start to heave, tears pouring down faster than I can make them. I start sobbing because something in me has been recognized, something that I’ve probably been ignoring or swishing away with my hand.

I watch and listen to a lot of interviews. There’s something almost addictive about listening to other people talk about life and how they live it; I want to know how people overcome themselves and learn to be alive without driving themselves crazy. Other people, particularly older and wiser women, seem to be infinitely capable of handing me pieces of myself that I didn’t know I’d lost. During one interview, the first I can remember that made me sob fiercely and unexpectedly, a phenomenally successful women shared with the audience what she would’ve shared with her sixteen-year-old-self if she had had the chance: Don’t worry, I’ve got this. You’re too young to be worrying about how it’s all going to pan out. Go have fun, go live, be carefree. I’ve got you. A powerful sadness erupted from me. I’d wished in that moment that someone would say that to me and mean it.

In a different interview, another woman expressed the most significant thing she had yet learned, she shared with us what she would have shared with her younger self in all of those years of searching: That voice in your head that tells you you’ve not done enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not enough of this or that, isn’t God. It isn’t Divine. It’s the critic in your head that never can tell when things are good and when a possibility of peace and self-compassion exists. I covered my eyes with my hands and I wept.

The most recent incident regarding this intense and sudden emotional outburst wasn’t from an interview, but from a lecture. This woman is so inspiring to me that she’s become intimidating – she’s like a phantom of a personal guru, always there to kick my ass into shape when I’m off chasing the tails of my fears. She spoke about forgiveness, belonging, home. My eyes are welling up at the mere thought of these words, the inner movement upon me before my fingers finished typing them out. Continue Reading…