The majority of us may have memories of playing outside until dark, rolling and jumping in muck and dirt, splashing in puddles, having fingertips almost frost bitten from playing in the snow and a having a feeling of infinity and of having so much time and endless hours in every day!

If you pause and observe, you will notice how blissful, how peaceful, how playful most children are and how completely immersed they are in their moment.  You can see that they are almost on a different wavelength than us adults, something that many of us may be so envious of! That’s because they are.  They are high on theta brainwaves.

Until the age of eight years, children live in this beautiful brainwave of bliss! They can download their experiences from their environments at an incredible speed, they have the ability to learn multiple languages, they see and notice everything around them, they believe everything that they see and hear and what they tell themselves.  This is also the time where their core beliefs are formed. This is the lovely dreamy, hypnotic, meditative and subconscious frequency where anything is possible!

I find that by continuously checking in with my mind, body and emotions and by asking myself the question, “what would your 8-year-old-self do in this situation”?, I am better able to take myself less seriously, to immerse myself into the lighter and less stressful side of life. I am better able to enjoy the simple pleasures that brought me so much fun and laughter as a child, like riding a bike, spinning around on roller skates, splashing in puddles, bouncing on a trampoline, going on adventures in the woods, watching the clouds pass by…

All these precious little moments and elements that help us to feel truly alive, present and very peaceful in any moment.  In the words of Dharma Mittra:

“If you open your heart and become like a child, you will always be blissful, always content”.

For example, I was out walking one of the days last week with my little baby on a cool, bright, fresh winter morning. As I got hotter, my body was screaming to me “take your coat off and enjoy the fresh cool air on your arms!”. But, my conditioned adult mind, my ego, was fighting back saying, “you can’t do that, it’s too cold, you will get a chill and get sick”. Having asked my inner child, my 8-year-old-self, “what would you do?”, I threw off my coat and I can’t describe how alive and present I felt!

It really is possible to just let ourselves go, to move outside of our comfort zone, to unleash our inner child and to wholly live and experience any moment you are in. We just need to increase our awareness as we move through each moment. This way we can truly learn how to ‘show up’, ‘be present for’ and to ‘really experience our daily lives’ and not just coast through on auto-pilot or live at the mercy of our ego!

This week, make a commitment to yourself to try to live more presently. Use any or all of your 5 senses to help you to show up in your life. Embrace nature, kick a ball, ride a bike, splash in a puddle, find a frog, pet a bird, walk on a tree plank, do something, anything that will ignite that fun loving and playful inner child inside of you!!

As beautifully put by Deepak Chopra:

“Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real”.

HOW TO CONNECT WITH AND HEAR THE VOICE OF YOUR ‘8-YEAR-OLD-SELF’:

1. To connect with and to hear the voice of your inner child, your 8-year-old-self, create an awareness of the moment you are in by using your senses and by asking yourself “what would my 8-year-old-self do?”.
2. Envision the carefree, fun loving, blissful theta frequencies that you may have experienced in your own childhood and allow yourself to embrace these feelings, emotions and memories and to feel the excitement and opportunity in your moment.
3. Allow yourself to laugh and to see the lighter side of your moment, allow yourself to find the silliness in your day!
4. Fully and wholly immerse yourself into enjoying ‘just this moment’ and treating the harder and complicated moments with the pure, innocent and unconditional simplicity that an 8-year-old child would!

© Leona McDonnell Mindfulness and Wellness 2022

(tiannaleigh.com)

I love this and find it very empowering and motivating anytime but especially as we start the new year of 2021! One of the biggest turning points in my own life was when I learnt how to ‘stop’ trying to control every thought, every emotion, every response and every outcome in my life and just let ‘synchronicity’ and the ‘power of the universe’ guide me to what’s meant to be. Learning to loosen out the reigns of power and control and just ‘be present’ in whatever moment and experience I was in, really helped me to shape and carve a very positive, relaxed and at ease mindset in my everyday living!

I feel there’s a difference between setting personal goals to achieve and working towards them, as opposed to completely hi-jacking yourself and your life to make them a reality, when perhaps it becomes apparent that they may not be productive or realistic goals for you.

When we pause, take a step back and just watch as our lives unfold, accepting our experience, in the present moment, we can gain a realisation that:

“….. sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck”

(hqlines.tumblr.com)

We can all get frustrated when we end up on a different path than we imagined, when we feel that things are not working out the way we would have liked or imagined but “sometimes it takes a wrong turn to get you to the right place” (Mandy Hale). By adopting the mindset of ‘accepting’ your experience and knowing that ‘nothing is permanent, everything is temporary’, you can start to experience a greater flow of synchronicity in your life and start to notice subtle little signs and coincidences that are perhaps falling in front of you.

You can become more attuned to the delicate vibrations and currents that the universe may be placing in your path and feel more liberated to be able to just let yourself ‘go with the flow’ and to experience whatever situation you are being presented with.

Think about what synchronicity is:

“synchronicity happens when you align with the flow of the universe rather than insisting the universe flow your way”

(spiritnest.com)

Isn’t this amazing, that by taking our foot off the pedal, by stopping to try and ‘make’ things happen the way we envisaged they would, we can actually experience the most powerful personal growth and embrace the ‘present moment’. By learning to identify, connect with and use our built-in skills and competencies to glide and coast through our life experience, we can experience ease, calmness, presence and grace, while allowing synchronicity and the power of the universe to guide us.

When we choose to allow ourselves to be guided and encouraged by means of synchronicity and really listen to, notice and see the signs or the coincidences that we may be receiving, it’s almost as if the universe is telling us that we are ‘getting warmer’, it’s providing us with these little signs that are leading us on a path to our best potential, if we allow it too.

A beautiful quote I love to illustrate this point is:

“The Universe is always speaking to us through little messages, coincidences and synchronicities that remind us to stop, look around and to be present”

(lonerwolf)

What better way to start off the new year and as a general approach to your daily living than to just allow yourself the mental, emotional and physical space to ‘stop’ trying to have everything planned to the ‘T’, to have everything worked out exactly how you think it should work out, to feel that you always have to be in ‘full control’ of your experiences and the cards you are dealt throughout your life.

How liberating to feel that we might not need to have all these stringent plans and processes in place to live by daily. We can achieve more than we can imagine by just being present in our moment, by using our breath and our senses to navigate us through each moment of our day and of our lives. We can become resilient in our own coping techniques and to how much of the ‘synchronicities, signs and coincidences’ that we are ‘open’ to receiving into our lives!

A thought to leave you with:

“Someday, everything will make perfect sense. So for now, laugh at the confusion, smile through the tears, be strong and keep reminding yourself that everything happens for a reason”

(John Mayer)

How to NOTICE synchronicities and coincidences in your everyday:

The following is a guide on how to NOTICE synchronicities and coincidences in your everyday:

1. Every morning, as you start your day ahead, ask the Universe: ‘How can I serve you today? How can I be of service and use to you today?

2. Then, ask the Universe to guide you with clear, accurate synchronicities, signs and coincidences that will help you to move through your day and your experiences more presently and that will guide you onto the correct path for you.

3. Commit to use any or all of your senses – your sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – to help you to clearly receive any guidance that the universe may be sending to you in any moment. Use your senses to connect to your present moment experience and to help you to become more accepting of that experience.

4. Engage with and use your natural breathing rhythm to anchor you to your body, your soul and your experience. Really focus on breathing in universal energy and breathing out anything that’s not serving you well.

5. Using your present moment awareness and breath as your connection to the universe, commit to yourself to place your full trust in whatever guidance, synchronicities, signs, coincidences that present themselves to you. Allow yourself to notice and experience these in a non-judgemental and non-critical manner.

6. Everyday, thank the Universe for its guidance and for everything that you have in your life.

Thank you as always to Brian O’Loughlin and his team at Celtic Media Group (https://www.anglocelt.ie/, https://www.con-telegraph.ie/, https://www.meathchronicle.ie/, https://www.offalyindependent.ie/, https://www.westmeathexaminer.ie/ and https://www.westmeathindependent.ie/ for all their wonderful help!

As published by The Celtic Media Group in The Anglo Celt, Connaught Telegraph, Meath Chronicle, Offaly Independent, Westmeath Examiner and Westmeath Independent newspapers w/c 18/01/2021

(Edith Lovejoy Pierce)

What a beautiful, empowering concept, that we are getting another ‘opportunity’ to open the pages of our own ‘Life Book’ and to start to visualise and to generate the very next chapter! A brand-new chapter, for a brand-new year! How amazing to have a blank page that you can fill with whatever you want to manifest into your life. Something that so many of us may take for granted, as so many people unfortunately don’t get this ‘opportunity’ to start another year of life.

So many people have sadly lost their lives or their loved ones prior to the start of this new year. This, making the ‘gift’ of another blank page in our Life Books for us to fill with whatever we want to even more precious and valuable.

I love that we can ‘decide’ what we wish to write into each chapter of our own ‘Life Book’. We have the power to make individual choices that can help to give ourselves general direction, support, guidance and motivation towards achieving our own pre-set standards and to living the kind of life that we want to.

I love this quote and finds it always gives great clarity and direction:

“Every new day is another chance to be a better person than you were the day before”

(See Pinterest.com)

Being able to focus our energy on building the new and not fighting the old is something that we often forget as we wade through the high and low tides of life. We each have the option and power to ‘start over, to start afresh in any moment’.

I always keep this focus in my mind, particularly on the harder, tougher days when I may be struggling with an anxious thought, emotion or feeling. I encourage myself that I can learn and experience personal growth and enhancement from all of my experiences, whether pleasant or unpleasant, from how I respond to them and this in turn helps me to continuously grow and develop into the person I ‘want’ to be and to portray the ‘values’ that I find important in life.

A new year can be the perfect time to implement change or enhancement into your life. It can be a time to accept any flaws, mistakes, errors that you feel are a part of you or that you may have made in your life to this point. It can be an ‘opportunity’ to take the ‘learning’ from these experiences and to turn them into something magical and positive for moving forward in your life, instead of carrying the negatives or traumas from them forward with you.

Another quote I love to illustrate this point is:

“Packaged inside of every mistake there lays a great lesson. And while I don’t want to take the mistake into the New Year, I most certainly want to take the lesson that’s packaged inside of it”

(Craig D. Lounsbrough)

So, to think a little deeper about your ‘opportunity’ to design and create the next chapter in your own ‘Life Book’, what are your priorities for the new year ahead? What are your hopes, your dreams, your plans, your expectations? How do you think that you can change, enhance or grow personally in the new year, do you want to? If you could see yourself as being 80 years of age and having the opportunity to look back on the written and lived chapters in your own ‘Life Book’, what would you like to see and read in them? What choices do you think that you could make now, make today, that would help you to feel fulfilled, content and honoured to have lived your life the way you would want to re-read it if you had the ‘opportunity’?

A few beautiful words to leave you with:

“Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets.
So, love the people who treat your right and forget about the ones who don’t.
And believe that everything happens for a reason ….
If you get a chance – take it
If it changes your life – let it
Nobody said that it would be easy ….
They just promised it would be worth it”

(See medium.com)

HOW to write your new ‘opportunity’ chapter in your own ‘Life Book’:

The following is a guide on how to write your new ‘Opportunity’ chapter in your own ‘Life Book’:

1. Firstly, take some time alone to gain clarity, focus and direction of where you would like to make changes in your life and how you would like to enhance yourself or if there is anything that you wish to change at all.

2. Write these points down, as when you see these goals or dreams written in reality, they soon become your vision.

3. Evaluate what the biggest learning experiences from your past / your past year were and which ones you wish to integrate into your new ‘opportunity’ chapter in your own ‘Life Book’ for moving forward.

4. Commit to yourself that you will use only the learnings from these experiences and that you will not be self-critical, self-judging or self-destructing towards yourself with words or by carrying the physical and emotional hurts, pains, confusion and perhaps trauma from these experiences with you into your new year.

5. Each month, take some time out to reflect on your new year dreams, goals and ambitions. Again, non-judgementally, analyse where you feel you are in the writing of your new ‘opportunity’ chapter in your Life Book and if you need to make any adjustments in your current life-style choices to get you to your desired destination.

6. Affirm to yourself that you are creating the path you wish to unfold in your life by carefully planning, reflecting and empowering yourself in your choosing of living more mindfully and in more present moment awareness.

Thank you as always to Brian O’Loughlin and his team at Celtic Media Group (https://www.anglocelt.ie/, https://www.con-telegraph.ie/, https://www.meathchronicle.ie/, https://www.offalyindependent.ie/, https://www.westmeathexaminer.ie/ and https://www.westmeathindependent.ie/ for all their wonderful help!

As published by The Celtic Media Group in The Anglo Celt, Connaught Telegraph, Meath Chronicle, Offaly Independent, Westmeath Examiner and Westmeath Independent newspapers w/c 04/01/2021)

Having personally experienced fertility challenges over 13 years, from hormonal imbalances, structural problems, miscarriages to numerous fertility treatment cycles and all the despair, the loss of connection to yourself, to your partner, to your body, to your life, the loss of identity as a person that comes with explained or unexplained fertility difficulties, I can truly say that my own formal and informal Mindfulness practice has been a saviour in my ability to cope.

So much so, that through my lifestyle overhaul, implementing a more mindful way of living my everyday life and learning to love my body, I am currently expecting my third baby, which is a naturally conceived little miracle. Despite the medical findings, the diagnosis of a natural conception being ‘medically and structurally impossibly’, I feel that this pregnancy has been achieved because of the balance, the present moment living and awareness, self-compassion and empathy that I have introduced to myself and to my relationships through Mindfulness and Self-Compassion.

When we learn how to practise Mindfulness, how to live in more present moment awareness and how to become more ‘compassionate’ towards ourselves, our partner and in our relationships, we gain a greater understanding of common humanity. I soon realised that my husband and I were not the only couple experiencing fertility difficulties. Millions of other couples around the world experience similar complexities every day. I learned how to accept that this ‘horrible’, ‘painful’, ‘hurtful’, ‘overwhelming’, ‘invasive’ experience of struggling with fertility challenges was my experience and my husband’s experience. I learned various coping tools and techniques to help myself to start to live in this experience, to stop questioning why it was my experience and not someone else’s experience, why my friends could progress forward and start or expand their families and I couldn’t. I learned to have immense gratitude and appreciation for all the incredible functions that did work in my body and that keep me alive every second of every day.

I learned to recognise when my mind was getting pulled into deliberating thoughts of past mental, emotional and physical pains and trauma in relation to my fertility challenges and also when my mind was swirling in a thought storm of ‘you are not good enough’ and ‘nothing will ever change’, about myself and my future on this fertility path.

I started overhauling my whole life step by step. I used mindfulness, wellness, meditation, yoga, gratitude journaling, a consistent healing and empowering morning routine, a complete diet overhaul, consistent early bed times at night and early morning rising times, using essential oils and a cultivation of respect, care and nurture towards myself, my mind, my body and my emotions.

Over time I started to feel so much more balanced in my everyday living and I started to realise that I was ‘healing’ and ‘repairing’ myself from ‘the inside out’. I for the first time in my life started to feel ‘love’ and ‘warmth’ towards myself and it felt amazing!

This combination of Mindfulness and Self-Compassion helped me to recognise how much I had been and was pushing my physical body and in turn my mental and emotional systems through excessive and invasive fertility treatments and medications. I learned to gently console myself and my partner and this helped us both to make peace with our fertility experience.

By adopting a mindful and self-compassionate way of living our lives, myself and my husband learned how to laugh again. We learned how to feel alive, how to disconnect from the painful highs and lows of fertility challenges, the pains and trauma of the previous 13 years. We learned how to enjoy our lives again, to feel alive in the moment, in our present moment.

Just like choosing to nurture, care for and encourage a plant, flower or tree from seed to full bloom, I chose to be respectful to myself and my fertility experiences. I chose to nurture and care for my mental, emotional and physical health from despair to bloom. I chose to release myself from the never-ending self-critic, from the thoughts of failure and despair. I chose to create and become the ‘very best version’ of myself that I could be in each moment while living alongside my fertility challenges and for my husband and I, this has truly transformed our lives in unimaginable ways.

A beautiful empowering quote I love:

“Perhaps the butterfly is proof that you can go through a great deal of darkness and still become something beautiful”

(Source: tinybuddha.com)

HOW to be Self-Compassionate during Fertility Challenges:

The following is a step by step guide on how to be Self-Compassionate during Fertility Challenges:

1. Sitting with a straight spine or lying down, gently close your eyes, release any tension from your temples and jaws and begin by taking 3 regulating breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth.

2. Now bring to your awareness the difficult fertility challenges you have been struggling with. Notice any emotions, feelings or sensations in your body as they arise. Notice what this feels like and realise that this is a moment of stress and suffering.

3. Soothe yourself with reassurance that stress and suffering are part of human life and that you are not alone in your suffering, it is ok for you to feel like you do.

4. Now gently place one or two hands on your heart and soothe yourself with kindness and compassion. Feel the warmth, love, care and compassion beaming through your hands into your heart.

5. On your next 3 breaths, breathe in kindness and compassion towards yourself and breathe out gentleness and acceptance for yourself and your fertility challenges (you can say these phrases to yourself as you do so).

6. Speaking to yourself like you would to your very best friend, say the following to yourself: ‘May I love myself in this moment, May I be a friend to myself right now, May I give myself kindness and compassion, May I accept myself as I am.

7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for as long as you wish. When you are ready, bring your awareness to how you are feeling now, remembering to ‘allow’ and ‘accept’ whatever it is you are feeling in this moment and gently open your eyes when you are ready.

Leona has recorded a full ‘Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Fertility Challenges’ programme, which is available to purchase on her website, by clicking the following link:

Thank you so much to Deirdre Rusk for her amazing images! Check out more amazing images from Deirdre Rusk Photography at https://www.deirdrerusk.com/

Thank you also to Brian O’Loughlin and his team at https://www.westmeathexaminer.ie/ for all their wonderful help!

As published by The Celtic Media Group in The Anglo Celt, Connaught Telegraph, Meath Chronicle, Offaly Independent, Westmeath Examiner and Westmeath Independent newspapers w/c 16/11/2020)