2020 has been my 10th year of blogging here at Psych Central.

Wow.

This blog – Mentoring & Recovery – is 10 years old.

That’s not as old as I am, but still.

Being a part of the Psych Central blogging community has seen me from one milestone birthday to the next.

And that’s not a small thing.

Speaking of milestones, this past week I received some not totally unsurprising news.

Psych Central has been acquired by Healthline.

I was also told that, starting next month, all new Psych Central content is on pause for awhile.

I’m not 100 percent sure what that means for this blog, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that means this is my last official post here….at least for the foreseeable future.

So I wanted to leave you with this:

It has been my honor.

Truly.

I will miss you – and some of you in particular who have taken the time to share your own journeys along the way with comments and insights and wisdom. You know who you are. 🙂

I also wanted to be sure to let you know where you can find me if you’d like to keep in touch.

I would love that.

Pearl, Malti, Bruce and I blog nearly every single day over at Love & Feathers & Shells, our little flock’s official online home.

Each flock member takes a day and we rotate days.

So one day it’s Pearl’s turn. The next day it’s Malti’s turn. And the third day it’s Bruce’s turn. And so on.

If you are wondering when I get my turn…..well, it still could happen (probably on the same day I finally manage to grow some feathers of my very own).

In the meantime, we also send out a monthly action-packed flock ezine at the end of each month. It is free. You can totally sign up and we would love that.

And speaking of turns, we also show up daily across a wide variety of social feeds.

Instagram is the hands-down best place to find us – and there are turns galore going on there, as well as short films, interspecies story time, habitat tours, breaking news and LIVESTREAMS.

Yup. You can connect with us LIVE.

We usually do the livestreams mid-day towards the end of the week or on Saturdays, when everyone in the flock is wide awake and keen to claim their 15 minutes of weekly internet fame.

Speaking of livestreams, Mammalz is a new nature app we have partnered with and that is another great place to find us.

And you won’t just be able to connect with our little flock on Mammalz, but you will also meet a whole great wide world of some of the coolest nature-loving peeps on this small round blue and green planet.

They really care about conservation and wellness and helping people and nature partner for the greater good. It’s free and totally worth the five seconds it takes to create your login. They have an iOS app and an online browser-based platform.

Some other great places to find us are:

• Facebook
• TikTok
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Oh, and by the way, I am also a full-time professional freelance writer – have been so for the past 10 years now! I love it mostly because I get to work from home with the best officemates a gal could ever ask for.

But I also love it for so many other reasons – I’m good at it, I get to serve people and help them achieve their goals, I make new neural connections constantly and it keeps a roof over a certain set of very precious feathery and shelled heads. Need a writer? I’m your gal!

So please head on over to whichever little corner of our great wide online world most appeals to you and let’s stay in touch.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

Last week I didn’t leave my house one single time.

Not once.

I didn’t leave to go grocery shopping. Or to get gas. Or to visit the post office. Or to go thrifting (sob).

Believe it or not, I didn’t really notice at the time that I hadn’t left my casa for two, then four, then six, then (wow, count ’em) seven days.

I didn’t even miss my spectacular dream ride, the electric blue RAV4 waiting patiently for me out by the curb (and perfectly parallel-parked, I might add).

I didn’t notice because I was very busy Zooming.

I Zoomed every day. I Zoomed so much it almost felt like I had a social life at long last. At least if you count work-related virtual meetings as a “social life,” which mostly I do these days.

By day eight, I was finally starting to notice my confinement. I was noticing because the endless repetition of work and then sleep and then work and then sleep was beginning to wear on me. And I was noticing because, at long last, I finally did leave the house to make my weekly trek to visit my folks, who live a whopping 20 minutes away.

I have to say – I’d forgotten road trips could be so exciting.

Don’t get me wrong – I love working from home. I actually quite enjoy being alone (although “alone” is a relative term given that I share my casa and daily life with the three most wonderful beings on the planet, my 21-year-old soul bird, Pearl, and his two shelled siblings, Malti and Bruce).

But still, over the years I’ve grown accustomed to breaking up particularly long stretches of isolation with errands and similar small outings around town. Not anymore. Not since COVID. Not with elderly parents who rely on me.

So what keeps me sufficiently sane and grounded that it can take seven days before I notice I’ve spent the last seven days in a space the size of a two-car garage?

These three tools – that’s what.

1. Meditation.

I have been meditating since I learned how to do it from a library book at age 19. So that means I have nearly three full decades of practice under my belt.

I don’t meditate in any fancy or formal way, although I know how to do that.

But most of the time, I meditate in the mornings while lying flat on my back with a pillow over my head and a weighted blanket over the rest of me.

I like to meditate first thing in the morning after waking up. I use this time to decompress from the previous evening’s always-intense dreams, pray, clear my mind and consider my intentions for the new day.

If my mind wakes me up in the middle of the night, I often meditate then as well. This helps me calm down and fall back to sleep because it gives my bored and restless mind something to do.

2. Yoga.

After I meditate and get out of bed and care for my animals, I do yoga. I do yoga at least five to six days a week (on the days I don’t do yoga, I either swim or cycle).

Moving my body is every bit as important as moving my mind.

Not only does this keep my aching back from literally seceding from the union, so to speak, but it reminds me there is a whole wider world out there.

I prefer to do Yoga with Adriene online on YouTube because she is such a positive teacher, and I’ve been doing her videos for nearly three years now.

3. Animals and nature.

Throughout each day, I have multiple opportunities to stop and take what I call an “animals and nature break.”

Sometimes it is because my parrot, Pearl, wants a snack. Or his neck feathers scratched. Or he wants to play “I drop it and you pick it up” (“it” being the sparkly sequined parrot he pushes off the high work table we share so that I can get up from whatever I am doing, crawl under the chair and retrieve it off the floor for him).

Sometimes it is to go bring my redfoot tortoise, Malti, a snack or to take a lawn break to play with my rescued box turtle, Bruce.

When I take breaks to visit with my animals, I often notice other wonders, such as a marvelously huge and decorative butterfly pollinating some purple flowers or the petite yet fierce red-shouldered hawklets from the neighbor’s tree learning to hunt bugs on the lawn.

I will be honest. Without meditation, yoga (and biking and swimming) and my animals and nature, I wouldn’t be faring so well in life, especially during this pandemic.

What three things (or two things, or four things, or one thing) do you absolutely rely on to help you feel like you no matter what?

With great respect and love,

Shannon

I will admit that when I first heard the news about the pandemic outbreak, I didn’t think it would really impact me all that much.

(I mean, as long as I didn’t get COVID. And as long as no one I cared about got COVID.)

What I’m really getting at is that I already work from home and have for many years now. I am comfortable and fairly self-contained and I stay very, very busy.

So I wasn’t worried about outside changes due to sheltering in place, quarantine, even restricted travel (although I was quite bummed when my usual spring camping trip got cancelled).

What I didn’t foresee, however, is how much the pandemic was about to change me on the inside.

It was like this electrifying wake-up call to start taking my relationship with me very, very seriously.

Suddenly, when me spending time with me became my primary source of companionship, it was no longer good enough to tolerate my own company. I wanted to really like – heck, love – myself.

That desire, that drive, sent me back to school.

Since February I have started working with not one but two different life and business coaches. I have signed up for not one, not two, but three membership communities that I visit nearly daily to study and learn and connect.

My willingness to show up for myself in every way – physically, mentally, emotionally, in spirit – has deepened and solidified.

And while it is challenging to put it into practice right at the moment, I believe my willingness to show up for others in those same ways is deepening as well.

I have also noticed I am putting my daily allotment of energy to much better use, working on heart projects as well as rent-earning projects and shocking myself by saying “yes” to new creative challenges and opportunities that scare me at least as much as they excite me.

(For the record, normally I prefer a ratio where the excitement factor far outweighs the fear factor.)

The reason I share all of this here is because a lot of the credit for this goes to one of my teachers and mentors, Sonia Choquette.

She has this wonderful, oh-so-simple teaching for how to navigate through times of uncertainty, stress, change, opportunity and unknowns.

She teaches this in the form of a little game called “What Does Your Heart Say?”

I will do my best to explain it here, because since we are all going through some really changeable, uncertain times, maybe this tool will help you too.

Here is how “What Does Your Heart Say?” works (or at least how I like to use it).

1. Identify the issue you need guidance or direction about.

Maybe you have two options and don’t know which one to choose. Or perhaps you wake up and don’t know what to do first.

Or it could be you get an opportunity or invitation and you feel like you are “on the fence” about whether it is a good fit for you right now.

Another scenario could be that you are feeling a certain way – perhaps sad or angry or anxious – and you don’t know what to do about it.

Whatever it is, the first step is to get clear about what is bugging you or what life is presenting to you that you aren’t sure what to do with.

2. Take a few big deep breaths.

This is very helpful to do even in step 1 above if you are having trouble putting the issue or question or uncertainty into words.

3. Get grounded in whatever way works for you.

This might mean sitting in a chair and placing both feet on the floor. Or it could mean laying down and closing your eyes. Or you might prefer to go for a walk and let the energy move inside you.

4. Place your hand on your heart and think of the question/issue/uncertainty.

It can help to say it out loud or form a very clear mental picture of what is going on with you.

5. Ask yourself “What Does My Heart Say?” then quietly wait and observe for a moment or few.

Try not to get fidgety here. If you are very anxious you may feel your mind jumping in to try to provide you with a ready answer that “makes sense.”

But as Sonia teaches, “What Does My Heart Say?” is not about what makes sense, per se.

Rather, it is about what feels right in your heart or gut or throat or wherever you get your personal “gut feelings” (I get them in my gut most of the time which is why I call them that).

When you ask yourself “What Does My Heart Say?” wait until you feel a little lightness, a lift, a bright burst of joy, a release of anything that feels like a “should” and this is likely your heart replying to your question.

6. If you are still not sure or your head is fighting for control, do this next.

Sometimes my head will step in and really start lobbying for its point of view. The truth is, my head actually loves me very much, at least in the sense that it wants to stay alive and connected to my body and survive.

This is usually why my head will start arguing with me if my heart/gut disagrees with its guidance.

And sometimes I am soooooo attached to seeing a situation or opportunity or obstacle from the head’s point of view that I side with it against my heart.

So this is when you want to stop and let your head speak its truth.

You want to stop and ask “What Does My Head Say?”

Put your hand on your head and speak those words and then say what your head has to say. Let it be heard.

7. Repeat steps 4 and 5 again.

Once your head has had its say and feels heard (and perhaps even supported or backed up by you), it is time to ask your heart to weigh in one more time.

So just quietly place your hand back on your heart again and ask “What Does My Heart Say?”

Then wait again to hear your heart’s reply.

Again, often I can feel my heart’s reply when I feel a sense of relief – like what it feels like to be honest at last after lying, lying, lying, lying, lying to myself.

Most of us know that feeling pretty well.

It feels like becoming willing to let the chips fall where they may, let the consequences be whatever they are, because we can’t stand to lie to ourselves or strong-arm ourselves to settle for what “makes sense” for one more second.

When you feel that level of truth-telling brave rise up inside you, you will know you just got a heart-reply.

Well, I hope this exercise is helpful for you. I promise Sonia teaches it a lot better than I do, but perhaps you don’t know Sonia and you know me and you are reading this right now and maybe you are needing some help with a thorny issue or question you are facing.

If you try this and it helps you, I’d love to hear from you. If you have other things that help you when you are trying to “get right” with yourself so to speak, please feel free to post those here as well.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

“Wouldn’t it be nice if….” is an interesting place my mind likes to go sometimes.

But what is really interesting is what it decides to do once it gets there.

This is a phrase that contains a sort of well-hidden fork in the road.

To find the fork, we first have to deconstruct the phrase.

“Wouldn’t it be nice” is a nice, wide, well-paved road. It is easy on the feet or the tires. It has good scenery. It is well-lit and safe.

“If” is a whole different neighborhood. In fact, “if” is the proverbial fork in the road. When my mind gets to “if,” it gets to a choice.

It can take one side of the fork and continue into an even nicer, safer, brighter neighborhood filled with all good things, good dreams and good possibilities.

Or it can take the other side of the fork and wind up who-knows-where.

Who-knows-where won’t be safe, well-lit or welcoming. And anyone my mind might be tempted to ask for directions back out of there will probably be pretty pissed off.

The reason I bring this is up is because 2020 has been a particularly challenging year for consistently choosing the safe, brightly-lit fork in that road.

COVID-19, after all. Recession. Global warming. Vanishing species. Toxic planet.

Any one of these things could easily contribute to a mind that decides to dive under the deep, dark covers and never ever come back out again.

But that is also why it is more important than ever that we learn to use our minds for good. And by that I mean that we learn to use our minds to envision, to visualize, good things.

At this point you might be wondering how a visualization that starts with “wouldn’t it be nice if…” could ever take your mind to a bad neighborhood.

The way it ends up there depends on the way the journey begins.

When the journey begins with your mind’s high intentions to fill the world with light, love, goodness, healing, hope, empowerment, brave, then there is very little chance you will find yourself in a place where the sun don’t shine.

But when the journey begins with your mind’s ruminations on how messed up everything is right now or how scary and dark life has become or how much better it used to be back in the “good old days” or when the other political party was in power or before some body type or personality type or skin color you don’t have was in vogue, then the doom and gloom in these thoughts will send you into a very bad neighborhood indeed.

This means there are important pros and cons to consider before letting your mind start down that wide, well-paved open road in the first place.

Why are you headed that way?

Is it to complain from a place of powerlessness-feeling or to reimagine from a place of inner power?

Envy, anger, hate, fear, grief – these are viable and very real emotions that need to be felt. They need to come up and out. Every single being on this planet feels these emotions at times and feels absolutely miserable while they are feeling them.

The thing is, the only way these types of emotions will go away is if we stop, notice, sit down and really feel what we are feeling. We must acknowledge ourselves for having the courage to feel sad, or weary, or angry, or even hatred. Then we must remove the scary disguise off the top of that e-motion, that energy, and let it dissipate.

Then it will lift at least for a little bit and we can get back to the business at hand of envisioning a better, safer, brighter, more equal and inclusive world than the one we are living in at present.

Otherwise, what begins with anger culminates in anger. What begins with hate culminates in hate. What begins with sadness culminates in utter grief.

This reminds me of a phrase “healer, heal thyself.” I’m not sure who said it. It also reminds me of all the times various coaches and mentors have told me to fill my own cup (or put on my own mask) before even thinking about assisting the fellow being in need sitting or standing beside me.

We need to tend to ourselves first before dreaming of a better life for us all.

But then, once we have tended to ourselves, we will be that much more powerful, em-powered if you will, to tend to the good of the whole in turn.

This is where “wouldn’t it be nice if….”becomes a very powerful tool in our mental hands.

We can take that good-feeling energy inside us and direct it for good through visualizing cleaner air and water, safe haven for all species, equality for all beings, health and wellness for the planet, love and connection for all who live on this planet together.

It is the good energy inside us that makes the most difference, not the specific type of visualization we send that energy towards.

Just having such generosity and goodwill inside us will deliver its own benefits, even if we don’t direct that energy towards any specific vision at all.

The planet can feel the state of our heart. The person standing next to us as well as the person on the other side of the world can also feel it. The birds and bees in the trees outside and the pets running around at our feet can feel it. Our houseplants can feel it. The water in our pipes and in our oceans and the air above and even the planets and stars can feel it.

All of these beings will reflect and amplify our good intentions so they can do the most good and have the best effect possible.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

When I was little and my still-developing brain could only think using black or white thinking, I didn’t think to question the concept of “happily ever after.”

So I truly believed that if I wasn’t happy yet, this meant I would be happy forever later.

I think this is why I spent the first three and a half decades becoming such a connoisseur of sadness.

Happiness wasn’t supposed to ebb and flow or come and go.

If I had it, it was supposed to last.

So when I would wake up and feel happy, I had all these expectations. And I had a really strong attachment to that happy-feeling. I didn’t want anyone or anything to take it from me.

Ergo, every time the happy-feeling would come, I would feel both happy (that it was there at all) and fearful (that it would go away, which it would always do of course).

It didn’t take long before I stopped paying any attention to the happy part and got fixated on the fearful going-away part.

You can probably already figure out what happened next.

Yup, I started to associate feeling happy with feeling afraid.

Suck.

Soon, happily ever after became one of those enviable stretch goals that only really grown-up people ever pulled off. And even in my best of times (which these definitely weren’t) I have never viewed myself as a really grown-up person.

Then, after I passed my third and a half decade of life on this small round blue and green planet, something shifted and I started to revisit some of this.

Reason being, it suddenly dawned on me I was getting older and happily ever after was starting to feel both potentially much closer and mythically, tragically, ever further away.

So you could say I first started getting interested in happy right now because I became willing to settle. Some happiness was better than no happiness. Partial happiness was better than all-or-nothing happiness.

At some point I ran across the (at the time) esoteric-sounding work of Abraham Hicks, and specifically a book that was packed with techniques for how to feel less awful right away.

Since I felt awful so much of the time and I was getting (er) awfully tired of that, I decided to try some of the techniques out to see if they might work on me. While some of the techniques I never did really understand, there was one I just loved.

(I don’t know what happened to that book so I will paraphrase as best I can remember it.)

The technique focused on finding one thought, any thought, that felt even slightly less awful than the current thought. Once I had that new less-awful thought in mind and my state of feeling truly awful began to ease even slightly, I could then locate the next less-awful-feeling thought and focus in on that.

And so forth and so on.

If you are more of a visual person, you might envision this as climbing up a staircase where the lowest step is labeled “total misery” and the highest step is labeled “so happy.”

I still use this technique even today when I want or need to feel a little or a lot better as soon as possible. And it still works.

The reason I bring this up – other than simply wanting to share it in case it helps you too – is because I think this is the moment when my brain began to become less afraid of and more interested in happy right now.

Because suddenly I no longer saw happiness as something that was an all-or-nothing deal – something that once obtained was supposed to stay forever and once lost would stay lost forever. Thanks to my success using the stair step feel slightly better technique, I started to realize my emotional state was much more in my control than I had previously believed it to be.

This was pretty exciting, I have to tell you.

I decided my new goal would be to be happy right now.

Around the time I discovered the Abraham Hicks book and the stair step exercise, I had also started learning to meditate. And one day around this time my meditation teacher said something that has stayed with me ever since.

She said that while it did certainly take a lot of strength to hold sadness, what most people never realized is that it takes even more strength to hold joy.

She shared that even though there is always something in this world we can focus on that will make the sadness last and deepen, there is also always something in this world we can focus on that will make gratitude and happiness grow instead.

Her point wasn’t to imply that really strong people should never feel sad. Not even! But she wanted to teach us that if we desired to feel happier, we needed to work at it and make it a priority rather than expecting it to “just happen” to us, like good luck or something like that.

We needed to challenge ourselves to not just get stuck in sadness or other miserable-feeling emotions out of habit or peer pressure or whatever might be re-triggering those old auto-pilot neural pathways inside our mind.

She wanted us to start developing new neural pathways that would seek out joy with equal or greater ease and habit.

What a goal to have!

Suddenly “happy” was no longer a distant dream dependent on some specific set of circumstances (such as meeting “the one” or building the perfect business or reaching my ideal body shape or getting out of debt, etc, etc).

Rather, “happy” was a daily habit to cultivate – a new set of muscles to strengthen – a new path to explore during my next hike – an experience I could have any time I decided I wanted to have it.

The upshot of this practice has been profound, to the point where I can safely say it changed my life.

Today, my interest in happily ever after is kind of like my interest in unicorns.

If there happened to be a sighting and I happened to be in the area when this sighting occurred, I would probably pop on over to have a look.

But if I was halfway around the world, productively (and happily) doing whatever I was doing wherever I was doing it, I probably wouldn’t give a unicorn sighting, however rare, a second thought.

And I certainly wouldn’t drop my current activities to book a ticket to some far-away land where I might (or might not) be able to experience happily ever after.

I wouldn’t do it, because I would already be experiencing happy right now.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

Every day I wake up and check my weather app.

And every day it tells me the same thing. It is going to be very very hot again today.

But I keep checking it anyway.

Why? Habit.

This morning, right after I checked it yet again (and it told me yet again that it is going to be 101F and feel like 112F) I had the thought that maybe tomorrow morning I won’t check it.

After all, it wasn’t so long ago I didn’t even have a weather app to check. Which was because I didn’t have a smart phone to check it on. Which was because smart phones hadn’t been invented yet.

Back in this days, if I wanted to know what the weather was that day, I had to turn on the news and wait for the “weather report” to come on. Alternately, I could open up the door and walk outside.

The reason I share this example is because it involves me doing something repetitively that is really rather neutral and also rather recent but is already kind of a hard habit to break.

Even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense and I don’t need to do it, I have gotten into the habit of doing it. It is comfortable. Or comforting. Or at least time-filling for a split second or two. And breaking the habit takes energy and effort and I don’t feel like mustering up either right now.

But let’s take a less neutral, less recent mental habit of mine and see how this might play out.

Ever since my long-time love and I split up more than a year and a half ago now, I have gotten into a habit of worrying that I will be single for the rest of my life.

As long as I am very busy during the day with work and creative projects and caring for my animals and doing yoga and cooking and all the things that I do each day, this thought-habit may pop up here and there, but it isn’t all that bothersome.

My brain basically whomps it down because it is busy thinking about something else instead.

But just let a national holiday or a slow weekend day or a rainy morning or a lovely quiet evening pop up and all I have to do is wait.

The thought pops up. “Oh wouldn’t it be nice to have a partner right now.”

This then spirals me into more thoughts about how I am just sure all the partnered people out there are having the time of their lives right now and are soooo much happier than me and I bet my ex is so much happier than me too and I bet everyone is happier than me and what is wrong with me and I won’t even bore you with more of that rabbit-hole perspective.

You get it. I’m sure you do – even if being partnered vs. not-partnered isn’t your particular brand of unwanted and extra-clingy mental habit, you probably have another thought that likes to sneak up on you and pounce in certain moments when you are more vulnerable.

The reason I’m even blogging about it right now is because my wonderful life and business coach, Christine Kane, has taught me a great new way to look at these habitual and unproductive thought-habits.

She calls them mental junk food.

She says they are just something to fill up the mind with to keep it busy.

As someone who has recovered from an eating disorder and has basically wrestled with food and eating all my life, this so hit home for me!

(Christine Kane is also recovered from an eating disorder, by the way, which is one of many reasons why she is such a perfect mentor for me – she often helps me see older, deeper patterns in my life using food metaphors so I can see how recovery is recovery – it doesn’t really matter how the pattern is manifesting in the moment or if it is physical or mental or emotional or relational or some other type of pattern.)

Anyway, when I think of this distressing thought-habit of worrying about being partnered vs. not-partnered as a BIG. LIFE. ISSUE. it can easily take over my morning or my evening or my whole day and my mood and my self-esteem and all the rest.

But when I think of this same distressing thought-habit is nothing more than mental junk food, I remember to just focus on the energy of it, notice where I feel it in my body, breathe into it, let it dissipate (more on this awesome technique that Christine taught me in this blog post).

Sometimes I actually visualize my mind heading to the frig – not because it is particularly hungry or thirsty – but just because it is bored or restless or just feeling sort of peckish in an “I don’t feel like analyzing what I really want or need to be thinking about” kind of way.

I see my mind open the frig and just pull out something fast and easy and not-that-healthy – a thought-pattern that feels familiar and comfortable, even if it is not at all comforting or healthy for it or the rest of me.

When I visualize the thought-pattern this way, it really helps me see that it is just a thought-pattern. And I can put it back. I can let it go. I can change it into something healthier that feels better and is actually productive and positive.

But first I have to catch my mind in the act of grazing mindlessly on its favorite mental junk food.

Another reason I love working with Christine is because she helps me break down these big challenges into bite-size (whether physical or mental) portions. So my job one week might be to simply catch my mind in the act of heading to the thought-frig yet again for a mindless junky mental snack.

Then the next week I will get the job of changing that thought-habit into a more positive one using my mental creativity to do it. This is like taking that crinkly baggy of salty, crunchy negative thought-habit chips out of my mind’s greedy little hand and replacing it with a bag of healthy, crunchy carrot sticks instead.

So let’s say my mind has managed to make it to the thought-frig and is about to rip open a snack-size bag of I-have-no-partner chips yet again.

I somehow manage to catch it in the act.

I then get to choose what it snacks on.

But there is still one problem. My mind won’t want to give up its favorite snack at first.

So then I have to convince my mind it will like the new mental snack better than the old one.

I can do this by finding a thought that feels better and giving that thought to my mind instead.

My particular mind might not be the brightest lightbulb in the chandelier, so to speak, but it likes to feel better just like the rest of me does.

So when I can show it how switching to thinking – daydreaming instead of worrying, as Christine Kane calls it – about how happy I will be when I am with my perfect-for-me love will make it feel so much better, it is usually very happy to make the switch.

This has really helped me in the past few months in particular, when the long summer days remind me of how last summer my former partner and I were always heading to the beach to watch the sunset and were talking about our plans for the future and looking at properties out in the country and all that partnery kind of stuff.

It helps me respectfully remind myself there is a reason we are not doing that this year and that the reason is a good one. A respectful one. A loving one for both parties.

I can still go to the beach (and I do, as COVID issues here in Texas have permitted). I can still look at land and dream about the future. I can still watch the sunset and marvel at how I’ve never seen a sunset I didn’t love and want to give a standing ovation for.

But now my mind is happy so it is not making the rest of me miserable.

I am learning that when any part of me – body, mind, heart or spirit – tries to sneak away for a junk food break, the whole me is going to be the worse for it.

But now I have a great way to get back to feeling better quick.

With COVID-19 closures still raging on and nearly everything about this year not going as planned, I just thought I would share this here in case your mind has also been tempted to tiptoe away and try to sneak some mental junk food that makes the rest of you feel awful.

If so, maybe Christine’s techniques will help you the way they are helping me.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

Depending on who you ask, it can take anywhere from 1 day to 254 days to create a new habit.

Some of the trouble deciding starts with how you define the word “habit.”

The dictionary definition refers to a habit as “a regular tendency or practice…that is hard to give up.”

This makes sense to me. Everything I am trying to change right now is very hard to give up.

And the reason I still want to give these things up is because the pain of keeping them has now officially become greater than the fear of letting them go.

For this realization, I must give full credit to a certain set of very unwelcome microscopic viral visitors.

As the global pandemic has continued to unfold and evolve (or devolve depending on where you are located and how well your local community is abiding by social distancing guidelines, which in my local community is not well, to put it mildly), it has become easier and easier to recognize the old patterns and habits that are no longer serving me well.

Some of these habits have been relatively easy to change. I suspect this is because this is not the first time in my life I have seen these particular habits crop back up and so I am getting easier at catching myself when I start doing them again.

Some of these habits have been a lot harder to change. And I think that this is because these habits are ones I’ve never really carved out the space and time to tackle head-on. They are more ingrained. Deeper. Older. More a part of my definition of “me.”

And just like COVID-19 has given me more space and time to notice these, a lot of the credit for my newfound ability to tackle these deeper, older habits has to go to two of my most important mentors right now, intuitive author and teacher Sonia Choquette and author and business coach Christine Kane.

I started working with Sonia’s courses about a year and a half ago. I started working with Christine Kane, my life and business coach, about five months ago.

In choosing to do this, I have invested more time and money into my own self-development than I have in years. The money part in particular required a big departure from my habitual attitude towards spending money on myself – not my animals, not my casa, not my bills, not even thrifting, but on me, just me.

It has paid off. I have to say it.

But still, there is this natural impatience to see the pay-off from the self-investment RIGHT. NOW.

When will I stop being the old me and start being the new me? Today? Tomorrow? Perhaps by the weekend?

Like you, probably, I have heard those stories of people who kicked a seriously bad habit, such as a decades-long nicotine or alcohol habit (I actually know someone who did this), overnight.

This is admirable and amazing. It is also why, in the introduction here, I mentioned that some people are able to kick a habit in as little as one day.

Although I must say, the habits I am trying to kick are a little less…tangible.

Complaining. Self-hate. Body insecurity. Blaming outside forces for inside misery. Low self-esteem. Depression. Anxiety.

The reason I say they are less tangible is because they have many disguises. It is easy to know which habit I am trying to kick if I am holding a glass of wine in my hand after vowing to never drink again.

It is a little less easy when my creative and determined mind is trying to convince me that the anxiety I feel is because of COVID or income stream rather than perpetual self-doubt and self-criticism dragging me down yet again.

I blogged last week about how Christine Kane is helping me step back from naming, blaming complaining about or judging emotions (e-motions) I might be feeling that might then translate into any of the above.

This tool has been very helpful.

It gives me a breath or two’s worth of space in between the habit itself and having the option to pursue it or not pursue it.

Some other research says breaking a habit can take up to 254 days of effort. This research focused on tangible new habits such as eating more healthy or exercising every day. The researchers studied 96 volunteers, allowing each one to choose the new habit they wanted to pursue as long as it was within the study parameters of drinking or eating healthily or exercising or something similar like starting a meditation practice.

The study lasted 84 days. Some of the participants were able to achieve what the researchers called a good rate of “automaticity” within 18 days. For others, it took up to 254 days – far beyond when the study itself was scheduled to conclude.

Then the researchers did some complicated math and decided 66 days is a good round average number for how long it takes to automatically turn to the new habit rather than an older habit that is no longer desired.

When I was in college, I often heard professors talk about the “40 day rule,” which was that it took 40 days to establish a new habit. There are other schools of thought that say 21 days is the optimal number of days you must do something new before it gets encoded into your brain.

While my particular brain likes having such hard data to support its continued effort – “okay fine we will do this for 21/40/66/254 days, but if we don’t see results by then, forget it” – I am now finding that hinging my efforts on any particular number can be counterproductive.

My coach Christine Kane has given me a new model of effort for changing old habits into new better habits: “as long as it takes.”

I resonate with this because it really helps me decide which habits are worth pouring my all into.

For example, even though I have thyroid disease and eating gluten causes my joints to hurt, I might not be seriously motivated to give up all gluten forevermore. This is mainly because my mom is a master chef and when she puts out a freshly made batch of gluten-rich blueberry muffins or a homemade lemon meringue pie, I often discover right away that a little day-after joint aching is a small price to pay for such deliciousness.

If I had celiac disease like a dear friend of mine has just been diagnosed with, however, it wouldn’t matter how delicious that pie looked. I wouldn’t eat it.

But let’s say, for example, that I am battling a dip back into depression, something I haven’t had to face to any serious degree for some years now. I have traced the start of it back to an increase in self-criticism and body insecurity. I hate feeling depressed and it also scares me. Although it is easy to forget how bad depression feels when I am not depressed, it doesn’t take very long at all after realizing I am depressed to become willing to do anything to get out of it.

So if self-criticizing thoughts are the equivalent of a glutinous blueberry muffin, my motivation to not eat it is equivalent to what it would be if I had celiac disease. I simply cannot go there. I won’t go there. It is nearly instantaneous once I make the connection between the two.

Nope. Not for me.

But then the depression might lift and – as some of my favorite mentors have often shared – that reveals a deeper layer of work underneath, sort of like peeling back an onion’s layers.

And so inevitably, the depression will return again and seem even more stubborn than it was before.

For these sorts of new habits, where (I suspect) the old neural grooves cut right down to the core inside my brain circuitry, I might literally have to devote the whole rest of my life to truly root them out and replace them with new more productive, better-feeling, life-affirming habits.

So be it.

Here in the deep South in Texas, we have lots of mosquitos. Every spring as temperatures warm a little more each day and humidity inches up incrementally until it is hard to tell the daily temperature reading apart from the daily humidity reading, the colonies of mosquitoes get denser and denser, hungrier and hungrier.

When it rains, which it does often, they travel in packs. The whole pack will descend down over my head and buzz-swarm me looking for the best places to dig in.

This year, for the first time ever, I ordered two mosquito buckets from my pest company. In two days, the mosquito population in my tiny yard has diminished by 95 percent. I can spend 10 minutes outside and the heat and humidity is more bothersome than the skeeters.

And I have to say – I am SO PROUD of myself.

It takes the time it takes. Point being, I realize the mosquitoes may never entirely go away. That is a deep groove in the planet’s own neural pathways that even our best and brightest minds have yet to fully eradicate. Some of my own habits are this deep, too.

But when I absolutely, positively, refuse to ever give up hope, when I have officially declared war on a habit and will not let up, ever, it is just amazing how creative I can become about finding my way to my goal.

What do you think? How long does it take to create a new habit? 1 day? 18 days? 21 days? 40 days? 66 days? 254 days? As long as it takes?

With great respect and love,

Shannon

When I think of the word “detox,” what typically springs to mind is either drinking or dieting.

For example, let’s say I may have thought that third shot of scotch was a great idea last night around 9pm when I was worn out from my day, work, the news, all things pandemic.

But then this morning I realize it wasn’t as great an idea as it seemed at the time.

This is a very minor level of detox, I realize.

On a more major level, I have more than 20 years of recovery from anorexia and bulimia under my belt, and another decade helping others in recovery from similarly life-threatening eating patterns.

This is a much more major level of detox.

Very recently, after what honestly feels like the greater part of a life steeping in all things recovery, I learned something new about the process of detox.

It can happen with emotions and emotional patterns too.

Every time I get to a point in my life where I start thinking “I got this,” that is usually about the same moment another layer of my personal onion gets peeled back.

Perhaps this is also why I’ve never much cared for onions.

And given that I’ll be reaching my 50th birthday at the end of this year (O.M.G. how did I get so old so fast?!?), I suppose I should have seen this particular layer coming.

But I didn’t. It pounced just like all the other layers and over the last few weeks I have just started feeling worse and worse and worse, like I just swallowed a bunch of heavy bricks.

When people say depression hurts – physically – they deserve to be taken seriously.

So I decided to share some of this stuck-ness with my life and business coach, Christine Kane, during our group call this week.

Christine is a fellow eating disorder survivor, a fellow singer-songwriter and a fellow student of life who has also become my mentor and teacher. So when she told me that re-routing old negative emotional-mental (brain-based) patterns is a type of detox, I took her seriously.

I take her seriously. I know that when it comes to all things detox and recovery, Christine has the street credit – the personal life experience – to speak with authority.

In one of her talks, Christine describes her own process of attempting to shift her traditional negative thought patterns towards new, healthier, more positive thought patterns like having to wake up each day and – all by herself mind you – power-lift a huge steel door, move it from one section of her house to another, reinstall it in the new location and then open it up to see a new fresh vista.

This is how it feels to me too.

It feels like detox. Like jonesing for a fix – anything to put off doing the hard work or even thinking about doing the hard work for just a little bit longer. Like thinking a third scotch (or even a second or first scotch) is a great idea even though you’ve tried that same great idea about a zillion times now and it never works out like you expect it to.

It feels like that time last summer when I was driving up to Dallas to meet my friend for a camping trip. I missed my exit and got caught in a lot of construction. So I decided to pull out of the line of cars onto the unpaved grassy area next to the road and try to back my way up to the exit.

You can probably already sense where this story is headed.

We had just recently endured torrential rains. That innocent-looking patch of ground turned out to be a mud wallow of immense proportions. So right in front of an endless line of impatient, grumpy fellow drivers, I got my Toyota thoroughly stuck in the mud.

No matter what I tried, backing up, reversing, shifting into overdrive, jumping up and down in the seat while screaming at my tires to MOVE ALREADY, I just stayed stuck (while turning about 40 shades of reddish-purple in total embarrassment and self-hate).

Finally, not one but two other motorists pulled up beside me and helped me pull my car out of the mud.

That is what it has felt like lately trying to get un-stuck from the mud wallow of negativity I’ve been trapped in for the last few weeks.

And it isn’t lost on me that I probably need (yet another) reminder that it is hard to get un-stuck all by myself, especially when the pattern I am now trying to get un-stuck from started long before I was aware I was even starting a pattern.

Some people call those patterns “grooves in the brain.” Others call them “neural connections.” I call them the “mud wallow.” It doesn’t really matter what you call them, I suppose.

What matters is that when it feels like you are trying to powerlift a steel door or un-stick muddy tires and you are sure it is impossible, that probably means you are doing it right. And it probably means that whatever you are trying to lift or shift or un-stick really needs to be lifted or shifted or un-stuck.

Right now, with the ongoing stuck-ness so many of us feel as our 2020 continues to get hijacked by the unexpected here, there and everywhere, in a way it also feels like our planet and our collective consciousness is somehow striving to un-stick us – to help us pull ourselves up and out of the mud we didn’t realize we had gotten trapped in.

Which is why I’m posting this.

Not just so anyone who wants to can write to me and tell me I’m not the only one who feels like this right at this particular moment (although that would be most welcome). But also so if anyone happens across this post and is feeling like this and thinks they are alone or doing something wrong or attempting something impossible, that reader will know they are not alone too.

You are not alone. Trust me. You are NOT alone.

Trying to get un-stuck from old emotional patterns doesn’t just feel like detox. It is detox. It is a detox from the hormonal patterns that kick in when we head down that old familiar neural highway yet again. It is a detox from habitual anxiety and depression when we give up on ourselves again and again. It is a detox from the self-distraction that feels awful but at least keeps us from having to venture out into a process that might feel even worse.

It is a detox from the perpetual fear that “so hard” will end up being “too hard” and we will just stay stuck forever.

I, for one, don’t plan to stay stuck forever, no matter how many steel doors I have to lift or how many muddy tires I have to un-stick.

But for now, just for the record, and just in case I am thoroughly, totally, un-stickably stuck, emotional detox sucks.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

Well, this first year in a whole new decade sure hasn’t unfolded in any way like what I expected.

(Can I get a hell yeah?!)

And yet it has delivered useful new lessons and tools I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on.

This tool I am about to share with you is currently sitting right at the tippy-top of that list.

Reason being, all the twists and turns of 2020 thus far sure have brought up lots of emotions (e-motions) and emotional stuff.

Not saying I love that part – not one little bit – but I do honestly love this tool and it really works!

CREDIT NOTE: My life and business coach, Christine Kane, gets all the credit for this one, by the way. A few weeks ago I was working through a particularly thorny issue and arrived for our weekly group call toting an extra portion of weepy grief and a whole box of tissues.

Christine gave me this tool to use anytime I feel strong emotions rising up within me. It is really helping me not feel like I’m going insane as I keep making day by day progress through that issue and a bunch of others that decided they, too, want in on the action.

So here is what you do.

And by the way, I am going to be really detailed in these instructions just like Christine was with me, because if you are feeling anything like what I was feeling like when you read these instructions, every little detail really does matter.

So here goes.

1. Notice strong unwelcome emotion.

It might be grief. Or sadness. Or anxiety. Or fear. Or anger. Or depression. Or whatever-it-is.

Obviously I’m excluding strong emotions like joy, love, excitement, et al, although you don’t have to unless they bother you. But mostly those aren’t the strong emotions we tend to want to explain away or tamp down on or avoid feeling or just plain get rid of.

2. Resist the urge to tell a story about that emotion or label it in any way.

Maybe you don’t do this – I don’t want to assume. But I sure do which is why I mention it.

When I feel the anxiety of abandonment, for instance, I start with labeling the emotion. “Oh, abandonment. I feel so anxious.”

Then I remind myself of the story around why I am feeling that way. If I’m not sure why, my mind gets to work finding an explanation it feels sure has at least some truth to it.

The reason you want to try your best not to even label the emotion at all is because the label tends to be what triggers the story-telling.

And the story-telling just makes the emotion itself feel even worse. And when you are already feeling just awful, the last thing you want or need is to feel even worse.

Plus, it distracts you away from any hope of working constructively with the energy of that emotion right there in that moment, which is key for this tool.

So just notice. If it helps, you can say to yourself “I am feeling something.” At least then you know it is a feeling and your mind knows it is a feeling you are having, and not a thought or an experience or something else.

3. Breathe in and out deeply.

If I haven’t already forgotten to breathe by this point, this is usually when it happens for me. I start to hold my breath or at least conserve my oxygen intake, for what possible evolutionary survival purpose I have no idea.

It’s not like I can store it to use it up later. And it makes me feel even worse when I am already feeling bad and then I forget to breathe on top of that.

So you want to remember to breathe. Just breathe in and out deeply a few times.

4. Notice the energy of the emotion and point to where you feel it in your body.

In the example I mentioned earlier from my coaching call with Christine, after a few deep breaths and a moment of conscious attentiveness, I noticed that the particular emotion I was feeling seemed to be located in my throat and upper chest. So I pointed to that area.

So yours might be there, or in your gut, or in your heart, or in your lower back, or anywhere else in your body.

You can just notice or briefly touch that area to acknowledge it to yourself, but then move your hand away and just sit quietly, noticing it.

5. Sit with the emotion and just notice if it starts to shift or transform in any way.

This was the most interesting part for me.

At first I was all snot and blubbery mess. I was sooooo tempted to just jump into the story behind it, how miserable I was, the awfulness of what I was feeling, how I didn’t want to be feeling that way, self-criticisms about how I shouldn’t be feeling that way and how it was all my fault….you get the idea.

Christine stopped me and really encouraged me to just sit with the emotion and notice it. Feel its energy. Feel it AS ENERGY.

Notice if it started to move or shift in any way.

Which it did.

It really did.

As I just sat with it, like two friends sharing a park bench, the energy of that emotion began to break up just a little.

When Christine asked me what that felt like, I described a thick cloud and how it breaks up into smaller wispy pieces and then just dissolves in the sky.

That is what it felt like inside my throat and upper chest as the energy of the emotion I was feeling kind of wiggled around a little, shifted itself, rearranged things, drifted away.

Almost like if I wasn’t going to jump into my story and amp it up, then it had better things to do than just hang around in my throat all afternoon.

Thank goodness.

Without having any idea why it worked or how it had happened, I noticed I was feeling better. And when I say “better” I mean slightly less weepy, slightly less self-critical, slightly less hopeless about the whole thing, and slightly less interested in the back story behind it all.

I also felt strangely empowered. Like – I DID that. I did something. I pulled myself back from the brink. I expended no amount of effort whatsoever other than my focused attention and it actually helped.

6. Any time the emotion returns, or any unwelcome emotion returns, do this process again.

As Christine explained to me, it would likely take several sessions before I would really start to get the hang of it and would help all that stuck, held, backed-up energy come up and out and get free.

I was holding it down with all that pain and all those stories and explanations and labels. So each time I can just sit with it, not labeling, not judging, not explaining, it gets another chance to come up and OUT and just dissipate, (hopefully) never to return again.

She told me that my work for the coming week (weeks) would be to simply stop whenever I felt a big tough emotion brewing inside me and to take a few minutes to go through these steps.

Then I should gently ask myself what felt right to do next.

Since I work full-time from home, I am lucky to be able to take these micro-breaks when I need to, but then I have to get back to work, and I nearly always have lots of to-do list tasks on the list, so with this direction I can use my intuition or my gut to pick the next task and just proceed that way through the next portion of my day.

I hope this helps you. It is helping me a lot, especially as the world continues to tip and turn and jostle us all (and all our carefully-made plans) around and create a lot of unexpected stress.

With great respect and love,

Shannon

Recently a treasured friend from social media sent me a link to an article about a woman in Manhattan who just happens to be the enormous area’s only (as in, sole, solo) turtle rehabilitator.

Now that sounds like a big job.

Not surprisingly, at 72, Lori Cramer says she has saved hundreds upon hundreds of turtles and tortoises over her many decades to date as Manhattan’s official “turtle triage specialist” and now as the director of the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society.

She does her work out of a tiny apartment she shares with her husband, with the agreement that the bathroom and (ideally) their bedroom will stay turtle-free at all times.

After following a link or two in that first article, I found myself reading about Brooklyn’s “turtle lady,” an amazing woman named Sara Ramos who is to Williamsburg what Lori Cramer is to Manhattan. Like Cramer, Ramos blows me away. She shares her tiny Brooklyn pad with 60 tortoises and several other interspecies flock mates. To hear her tell it, 100 percent of the turtles are potty-trained.

For the record, that is 100 percent more than the number of turtles that are potty trained in our little flock.

I am so moved by these women’s stories I can hardly find the words. Truly. I cannot think of a better use of a life. Period.

Reason being, when you help a turtle (or any wild creature), it is nearly impossible to do so with strings attached. It is a gift of pure compassion, pure love, pure kindness. It is spending time with the best part of yourself – the part you will never not love, not even for a minute.

This last feels especially relevant right now, today, as our country and our planet continues to grapple with the impact of a raging pandemic coupled with raging racial tensions coupled with a raging recession and all the raging uncertainty, anxiety and fearfulness that comes along with it.

As Lori Cramer tells the New York Post, when the news of what is going on in the world feels just too horrible, she can spend time with her animals.

She calls her work rehabilitating turtles “a saving grace.”

Sara Ramos tells the Brooklyn Eagle that “you can tell when a turtle is comfortable.” She says it is easy to see that turtles are capable of loving and being loved. They mourn and grieve when owners die or they get rehired.

As a lifelong turtle lover and surrogate mama to two shells, a redfoot tortoise named Malti and a rescued box turtle named Bruce, I wholeheartedly concur with all of the above. Just because Malti, Bruce and I are different species doesn’t mean we can’t communicate. We find a way and it becomes even more meaningful in the challenge it presents. The same holds true for me and my 21-year-old soul bird, Pearl.

My animals and even simply the sight of wild turtles sunning themselves along the banks of our local bayou has kept me going over the long and often lonely and confusing months of this year thus far.

When I get all knotted up inside myself with what is missing from my life and all the experiences I cannot have due to the pandemic, my finances, my age, my general level of life ineptitude, etc, etc, my animals and nature snaps me back to the basics.

I have oxygen. Water. Food. Climate control. A car with a full tank of gas when I want to go somewhere. Parents I love who love me back. No obvious predators who are scoping me out for their dinner plate. And I have my animals.

I have my precious, perfect animals who give me so much more than I could ever possibly give to them.

I feel sure that if you are reading this post right now, you care deeply about nature, our planet, the animals and plants and other beings that rely on it just like I do.

Why else would you devote a few minutes of your time to these words when there are so many other words to be read?

Perhaps, like me, you have found yourself retreating again and again and again to nature, to your own animals and plants, to news about the natural world, as the unexpected events of these last several months have continued to unfurl and evolve.

It is a hard truth to take in that the world itself may be both our greatest refuge and also the resource that is most in danger from our own hand.

Happily, just before the pandemic started, I discovered a community of activist souls who share my absolute love and passion for nature.

Many in this community are biologists, herpetologists, naturalists, zookeepers, wildlife rehabilitators, animal trainers and – for lack of a better description – “nature whisperers” who spend any and all free time immersed in nature conservation at many different levels.

Many more are nature lovers who seek a community of like-hearted homo sapiens with which to share the joy, wonder and hope that is the natural world.

This community is called Mammalz.

It is a free platform, similar in many ways to Instagram, but focused on one topic and one topic only: nature. The ultimate goal for participating in Mammalz is to offer anyone and everyone who cares about nature a chance to share what the natural world looks like through their eyes.

It’s a pretty cool place to hang out during a pandemic and anytime.

Anyone can join in and participate either through the website or the iOS app.

For anyone reading this who deeply cares about what happens to this shared planet of ours and wants to make a difference – even if all you have is a handful of seconds or minutes each day – you are invited to be a part.

Our little flock can’t wait to see you there!

With great respect and love,

Shannon