What If Understanding Our Bodies Is Part of Learning to Be Kinder to Ourselves? 🧠🌿❤️ I've been doing quite a bit of thinking and researching lately, and something Charlene has been sharing about mindfulness, mindset, kindness, and self-compassion is finally connecting for me on a deeper level. Charlene, I want to thank you because sometimes I read your posts and sit with them for a while before I fully understand what they're teaching me. Not because the message is complicated, but because I'm learning to connect it to my own experiences and the things I'm studying. Between my biology and psychology classes, I've found myself going down some fascinating research rabbit holes about how the human body actually works. It started with the gut–brain axis, but my curiosity didn't stop there. I began exploring the nervous system, hormones, inflammation, cellular energy, healing, and something called interoception, which is how our nervous system senses and interprets what's happening inside our bodies. And that's where something really clicked for me. Our bodies are constantly communicating with us. Hunger, fatigue, discomfort, stress, and even changes in our heartbeat are all pieces of information. But here's what I found fascinating: the sensations we experience and the meanings we give those sensations aren't always the same thing. For example, when I'm exhausted, my first thought might be that I haven't accomplished enough or that I should be doing more. But what if I approached that feeling with curiosity instead of criticism? What if I asked myself what my body might need rather than immediately judging myself for feeling tired? That doesn't mean every sensation has a simple explanation or that positive thinking fixes physical problems. Our bodies are far more complicated than that. What I'm beginning to understand is that self-compassion isn't necessarily about making uncomfortable feelings disappear. Sometimes it's about changing how we respond to those feelings.

So, I've always had an issue with insomnia all my life. However, now it seems I only sleep maybe four hours a day! Over the years, I have tried pretty much everything you can, prescription (hates the side effects), supplements, and old wives tales (home remedies). It haven't found anything that works yet. It just seems the older I become the worse my insomnia is. Does anyone have any advice? I have an overnight schedule, and so we go to bed between 8-9am. We have blackout curtains up through the house to help keep it dark. I have the hardest time falling asleep, even tho I'm exhausted. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed, I seem to be up between 1-2pm. The only prescription medicine I'm on is progesterone. I've been on prescriptions off and on since I was 3 days old, and I would prefer to not add anymore prescriptions. I appreciate any and all suggestions! I hope all you beautiful ladies have a day as amazing and beautiful as you!!!

I'm home alone today, sore, and taking it easy. I took my meds, heated up a sausage-gravy pot pie, grabbed my orange juice and water, and settled into my chair. Then Snapchat reminded me that filters exist. Well…challenge accepted. 😂 Somewhere between ridiculous hair, giant eyeballs, glamorous makeup, a screaming egg 🍳, and eventually becoming a golden queen 👑, I realized I was genuinely having fun. And throughout my self-care journey, I learned something valuable today. ❤️ Maybe I don't have to polish everything before I let people see it. I didn't plan this moment. I didn't research it. I didn't turn it into something productive first. I wasn't trying to teach anybody anything. I was sitting in my chair being an absolute goofball because it made me laugh. And maybe that counts too. I've been learning that self-care isn't always another task to complete or something I need to do "correctly." Sometimes it's eating something, drinking enough, resting when I'm sore, taking my medication, laughing at myself, playing with ridiculous filters, and allowing myself to simply enjoy being alive in that moment. The lesson didn't come before the play. The lesson came because I let myself play. Maybe everything doesn't need to be polished before I share it either. Maybe sometimes being authentic, messy, goofy, thoughtful, serious, ridiculous—and completely myself—is enough. So here's today's highly scientific self-care progression: 😌 → 😂 → 👁️👄👁️ → 🍳 BLULULUL → 👑 Apparently enlightenment comes in mysterious forms. 🤣❤️

Oddly enough, my homework helped me get there. I've been learning about how our minds work—how our thoughts, attention, perceptions, and past experiences can influence how we interpret what's happening around us. At the same time, I've been thinking about something Charlene said about mindset. Then the two finally collided for me. I've realized that I spend a lot of time waking up already thinking about everything that's overwhelming. What needs done? What am I behind on? Who needs something from me? How am I going to manage all of this? I've even found myself thinking about giving up on some of my own dreams because everything feels like too much. But then I started wondering: What if changing my mindset doesn't mean pretending those difficult things aren't there? What if it means learning to notice what else is also true? Life IS hard sometimes. I don't want to deny that. I just don't want to spend every waking moment dreading it. I can be overwhelmed and interested in what I'm learning. I can struggle with school and remember that my education is connected to dreams I chose for myself. I can have responsibilities to other people and still make room for the life I'm trying to build. I can have a difficult day and still notice something that makes me laugh, something beautiful, something interesting, or something I genuinely enjoy. Maybe a more positive mindset isn't about forcing myself to think positively at all. Maybe it's about widening my view. Instead of telling myself, “Don't think negatively,” maybe I can practice asking: “What else is also true?” So that's my knowledgeable question for everyone: How can we practice noticing and enjoying the good things that are genuinely present in our lives without using positivity to dismiss the difficult things that are equally real? And what might change if we practiced asking ourselves “What else is also true?” when our minds become focused on everything that's wrong or overwhelming?

I’ve been thinking about baking, perfectionism, experimentation, and what it actually means to trust ourselves. And strangely enough, I keep coming back to a Great Depression water pie I made. I had never made one before. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. You literally pour water into a pie crust, sprinkle the dry ingredients over the water, and the directions very clearly tell you: DO NOT STIR. Every instinct says, Surely I should mix this together. But I didn’t. I put those dry ingredients over the water, slid the whole strange-looking experiment into the oven, and basically hoped for the best. 😂 And you know what? It worked. The finished pie reminded me of a different kind of custard pie, and it was genuinely delicious. But I've realized there was another lesson hiding in that pie. I had to let something look unfinished, strange, and uncertain without immediately trying to “fix” it. And that made me wonder: How often do we interfere with something because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable—not because anything is actually wrong? Sometimes we may be evaluating ourselves while we're still in the middle of the process. This isn't working. I'm doing this wrong. I'm not good at this. I should be further along. So we stir. We change the plan. We compare ourselves to someone else. We abandon the experiment. Or we decide the outcome before we've even given ourselves enough time to discover it. Maybe self-trust isn't always knowing exactly what to do. Maybe sometimes self-trust sounds more like: “I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I can tolerate not knowing long enough to find out.” There's an important difference between patiently observing a process and ignoring evidence that something really does need changing. Eventually, we look at the result, learn from it, and adjust. But an unfamiliar middle isn't automatically a bad ending. Sometimes the ingredients are still sitting on top of the water because the damn pie hasn't baked yet. 😂🥧