Today, we're talking about little lies. 

It is something that we do without even realizing it. We tell ourselves these little lies and it sounds something like “I always make that mistake” or “nothing ever goes my way”. “I'm always last”, “I don't have any energy”, or “I'm broke right now”.

I know that it can feel like that sometimes, but it's important to remember that absolutes like always and never are nearly always- and I'm using that word purposefully- ‘Always’ is just a lazy way of expressing ourselves. And we don't mean for it to be a little lie, but your body actually doesn't know the difference. It knows truth and it knows untruth, and it is strong in truth, and it is weaker in untruth.

So I invite you to get creative and more purposeful in how you talk to yourself and how you speak out loud about how you're feeling and what's happening in your life. 

If you're saying “you always make that same mistake”, try, “It looks like I made that mistake again. I'll pay better attent...

If you're reading this, you're the sort of person who signs up for a self-love course, and you're probably aware enough of your thoughts and emotions to know which ones lead to the places you want to go. And for the ones that drag you down. We often label these as “good or bad, or positive or negative”.

You might also be the kind of person that likes to go fast and get the results that you want more quickly and this actually creates a perfect storm for bypassing what's really going on inside of us. So in our heads, we might say something mean or something negative and then we catch ourselves and say something like, “well, I shouldn't feel that way”, or you just replace it with a “good thought” before we even acknowledge what our brains just did. 

In effect, we wind up fast-talking ourselves out of feeling how we're feeling or thinking what we're thinking and this does two things that are a bit problematic.

One, it sets up an inner conflict and if you go back to the peace treaty, it'...

Imagine that you were sitting in a movie theatre watching one of your favorite films and you are so entranced with what's happening on the screen, that you don't even notice what's going on around you.

Now, while you're watching, it triggers a memory and maybe you start thinking about work or the endless to-do list, or maybe you're just really focused on one of the details of the films or one of the nuances of it. You then disappear inside your own thoughts and forget entirely about the movie. 

This is something that we do where we get absorbed with the world or the screen in front of us, or we get completely absorbed with the screen inside of us, the thoughts, the emotions and the things that are going on inside of us.

Now imagine now is that you're sitting there in that same movie theatre and in walks an employee, they walk quietly into the side and they look at the scene, they see something interesting. They see the screen that you're watching and they see the projector coming o...

Ultimately everything that we're experiencing is a result of our decisions. These are decisions that we've made consciously and other decisions that we've made unconsciously. So changing our relationships with ourselves is ultimately about making different decisions.

Our thoughts, are decisions consciously or unconsciously. Our emotions are also decisions. Our energy is actually a result of our decisions. Our relationships are definitely a result of our decisions. Our income, and even our sense of spirituality and our connection to our sense of connection with a higher, higher order, higher entity higher intelligence. When it comes to self love, there are certain decisions that are going to be conducive to having and experiencing more self-love. And there are going to be decisions that aren't conducive for that.

When you take the drama of emotions, the noise, and that chatter of the voices in the head, the uncomfortable feelings, and simply set those aside for a moment and ask yourself,...

I was putting on one of my most comfortable pairs of sweatpants as I sat down to record today. I noticed that it had drawstrings and I thought, “Wow, how amazing are drawstrings?” 

Drawstrings are comfortable but what they do is they respect the fact that you change. 

You can change from day to day. Your body can change from day to day and they let you feel comfortable and snug within those changes. How cool is that?

All too often in our lives and in ourselves, we are shrinking and pushing ourselves into that box of perfection. And while that might be a nice idea or a really pretty package, it doesn't give us the chance to expand into a more fully expressed version of ourselves. 

It doesn't give us the chance to color outside the lines, to expand and to contract in a natural way in our lives. Expansion and contraction is a normal thing, and when we try to control it and we don't give ourselves the opportunity to move with it, we just wind up trapped, stuck.

It's like that pair of ...

When we were young, we needed permission. Depending on how you were raised, you needed more or less of this. But now, we look for permission from the authorities in our lives to say, “it's okay”.

Can I have another cookie? Can I watch a little bit more TV? Can I stay up a little bit later? And that's a habit that we often drag with us into our adult lives, where now you're the authority. 

Yet we still look for permission from outside sources, from parents, from authority figures, from family or friends, or whatever we may give that power to grant permission. 

Permission is interesting. I think one of the reasons that this becomes a habit is because permission feels safe. It gives us an out in case something goes wrong, and then we can say, well, so-and-so said it was okay. It kind of lets us off the hook from the decisions that we make for ourselves and it also adds that aspect of people-pleasing to us as well.

It feels safer to get permission to make sure that we're doing it the r...

One of my favorite movies is Shawshank Redemption. I loved the scene where they were working on a rooftop and Andy Dufrense got all of his inmate coworkers cold beers in exchange for tax advice. I especially loved when he played the Duet from Marriage of Figaro and the whole prison went silent- awestruck by the beautiful music echoing throughout.

But the moment that really hit me in the gut was when Andy and Red were sitting by the wall after a stint in solitary confinement, and Andy said, “I guess it comes down to a simple choice really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”

While others were cautioning him not to get his hopes too high. Not to dream about something beyond those prison walls, this was a mantra that kept him going.

There’s no shortage of people to heap doubt and criticism on dreams.

"That’s impossible," they’ll say.

"How are you ever going to accomplish that?"

"What will you do when it doesn’t work out?"

"What makes you so special?"

They do it out of love, just l...

I can't think of a better way to start this course than with this quote by Emerson. He says, "Each man is a divinity in disguise, a God playing the fool."

This speaks to the idea that we have forgotten or lost touch with the divine perfection that we were designed to be. So maybe that happened because we decided somewhere along the way, or we've been taught that we are inherently flawed, that we are inherently limited, that we are imperfect and need fixing or need changing in order to be worthy of love, be worthy of affection, be worthy of the success or the goodness that we want to have more of flowing in our lives.

And it also leaves us in this sort of false state of self. This false sense of self, where we're pretending not to know this beautiful divine and perfect spark. That is truly the essence, that core essence of a human being.

Today I invite you to consider the opposite end of that spectrum.

What if instead of trying to fix problems or correct flaws, that we instead shifted our f...