You finally have a minute to yourself... What do you do? QUICK -- GRAB the phone? Touch up your nails? Clean your room?!!!
All those thing are fine ways to use your time. It's definitely a good idea to keep your mom from going ballistic over the state of your room, cool to have nails that make you smile, and of course it's wonderful to keep in touch with your friends, BUT...
What about keeping in touch with yourself?
Feeding (We're NOT talking about chocolate here), finding, and expressing yourself are just as important if not MORE important than spending time doing other kinds of stuff.
So what's all this finding-yourself-hoopla about anyway?
It's about discovering how YOU feel about life right now. It's about doing things that help you to feel good about YOU. It's about letting others or even just yourself know how YOU feel about anything AND everything. Basically, if you haven't caught on yet -- it's about YOU. The you that you carry inside. The you that makes you who you are. How can you feed, find, and express this you? Check it out girl...
Feeding
Yourself
Go ahead, order anything you want on the menu.
Finding
Yourself
Do it with your eyes open OR with your eyes closed!
Expressing
Yourself
You have a mouth; use it, or your hands, or your legs -- just use something!
Feeding Yourself
Go ahead, order anything you want on the menu because life has SO MUCH to offer. AND all of it can nurture your feelings about YOU and about your-place-in-the-world.
The first step is to expose yourself to beautiful, amazing books, movies, music, or even places in nature, or the conversation of people that you consider wise and wonderful.
MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL is to LET YOURSELF feel whatever you feel, question whatever you question, and think -- you guessed it -- whatever you think as you experience those things.
It's cool to always do this in your life, maybe somewhere in the back of your head, no matter what you are doing. Eventually, you'll be able to feed yourself from EVERYTHING you experience in life, but doing an activity for the purpose of feeding yourself is the first place to start.
Once you have all those feelings and thoughts bubbling inside, you need to pull them out and examine them so that you can hold on to them. AND don't throw out the negative feelings; they are important too.
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Finding Yourself
Do it with your eyes open OR with your eyes closed! BUT do it with YOURSELF. Finding yourself sounds kind of Sixties, kind of touchie-feely, kind of out-there, doesn't it?
But finding yourself IS important. It simply means that YOU get in touch with how YOU feel inside. Take all those feelings you felt when you exposed yourself to what life has to offer and sit, stretch out comfortably, or take a quiet walk with yourself and GET INTO YOURSELF! Think, talk to yourself, and most of all... LISTEN to yourself. Pay attention to what your heart and your mind are telling you. Discover how you feel about life. Find out how you want your life to be.
What is important to YOU? What kind of person do you want to become? What do you want to focus on? How do all the information and emotions that you've been exposed to change or confirm your views. Check out if your past behavior matches what you FEEL and THINK!
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Expressing Yourself
You have a mouth; use it, or your hands, or your legs -- just use something! It's cool to share your views with yourself, but sharing them with others is a very powerful thing to do. No matter how you do it, expressing yourself helps you to cement your feelings, then again, you might find yourself disagreeing with yourself as you speak or write about your feelings.
Remember, don't argue with people who feel differently than you do. They are entitled to their own view of the world. Your view doesn't have to be any less strong just because someone doesn't feel or think the same way you do. Then again, you might change their mind or they might change yours!
Take those emotions and thoughts and paint, write, dance, or act them out. Do it for fun. Do it for discovering how strongly you really do feel. OR do it to help change things to the way you wish the world could be.
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