3 Signs We’ve Stopped Loving Ourselves As Moms
The day has the normal chill about it. Just enough to keep the snow frozen and our chins tucked in. I’m coaching an adult woman through a ski lesson. I’m saying, “Look up” so many times I’ve lost count.
And that’s ok.
I enjoy coaching and empowering women to learn to ski a mountain. This day I’m describing is a typical day. Sliding on the “bunny hill” even though my client is not be a beginner. I have my suspicions and want to discover one thing before we tackle a bigger hill: does my client look up.
When my mom clients come to me, they usually have in mind goals they would like to accomplish on snow. Time and again my mom clients verbalize the desire to become better skiers so that they can ski more with their husband or keep up with their kids. I love this opportunity not only to make a new gal pal but to introduce her to the simple empowering idea of looking up.
After I analyze her movement patterns, we stop sliding on the snow and chat a bit. I make a couple jokes, we laugh. Her shoulders and body release a bit of tension.
It is scary to slide on snow and look up at the same time. It’s even scarier to slide while looking down because you just don’t trust your legs to navigate you through everything. There are a lot of distractions. Others moving quickly past you on skis and snowboards. Bumps in the snow, trees we must go around. Our primal brain is also concerned with how we look compared to everyone else learning and sliding around. She might even have your family up on the ski hill and she’s concerned about how they are doing.
I have my client take notice of how her tension has released a little as we’ve on the side of the run, relaxed, breathing, and laughing. Then I ask her to take a couple more turns with me focusing on looking up. I remind her that her legs know what to do, just like in her everyday life off the snow. I remind her that she needs to trust her own legs, empowering her eyes to guide her entire being into safety by looking up.
We slide. She’s wobbly. She looks up and makes her turns on her own. We stop. We laugh. We repeat. She builds trust in herself on snow.
What Distracts Us And Causes Us To Look Down?
As women we often slide through life:
constantly looking at others
nurturing others before we love ourselves
pulled down in shame or even depression.
3 Signs We Mom’s Have Stopped Loving Ourselves
We stop loving ourselves, hitting tree after tree in life because:
we forget to look up or we’re so focused on others
we lose trust in our ability to navigate our life
we stop giving ourselves permission to move forward
On the “bunny hill” my new mom client begins to feel empowered. She’s not going to be able to keep up with her partner or her kids after just one lesson. She realizes this. But what she’s even more delighted to learn is that she can look up AND trust herself again. Simply by looking up while she slides and navigates herself through her new snowy world, trust in her abilities is established. As she starts to trust herself, she begins to love herself again. She is delighted in herself again.
A Backward Thought
Don’t you agree it is crazy and backward for our brain to allow us to look down while moving through life and in the process run into things that would hurt us?!
You may not be a snow skier and that is totally ok. But I’m willing to bet you have a few “bunny hills” in your life that make for good practicing ground. Look around you. On what “bunny hill” can you practice looking up, trusting yourself to be the navigator, loving yourself enough to give yourself permission to move forward?
It may be harder than you think so be prepared for your brain to be stubborn in giving yourself permission. Permission to look up and move forward in your life. One step at a time my friend!
