I’m designing our retreat this week! What a delight: devising ways to use collage to help us see how we are creators of our own lives, playing with laughter yoga to help us loosen up, and anticipating the heart-expanding conversations we will be sharing.

Loving kindness, being in our bodies, resourcing, time in nature, oh my, oh my!

The dorm option makes it a very affordable retreat!

“Look at what has held you back from doing other things you’ve wanted to do, take a deep breath, let out a full-bodied sigh, and listen to what your heart and spirit are telling you. You know why you want to. Just go.” Lisa, Kripalu 2008

What Helps us Truly Love Ourselves?

I’ve been thinking about this question for, oh, about 20 years, and through writing my six books. Lately, watching the women at the Comfort Cafe thrive, seeing how they are actually loving themselves more in this amazing, gorgeous way, made me realize yet again how important community is for cultivating self-love.

We need to be around like-minded people who accept us and who love us for who we are, warts, dents and cranky bits included.

We need to be around people who resonate with health, good will and creative ju-ju.

We need this as much as we need oxygen. Truly. Yet modern life conspires to isolate us. If there is one major hunger we all have, it is to connect with others.

Connecting eases so many of our inner conflicts! As the Buddha taught, “Our fear is great but greater still is the truth of our connectedness.” When we feel connected, we gain courage, energy and confidence.

Your limbic brain, the emotional center of your brain, cannot think its way to self-love and confidence. You can say “I love myself” a million times a day, but if your brain isn’t feeling love and being fed love, your positive thoughts do nothing but perhaps make you feel like a failure.

The sweet love spot of your brain learns, instead, by immersion. You know from experience that moods are contagious. Look, for example, at how quickly a crowd can get “out of control” or how fear has swept the world in the last six months.

When you feed your limbic brain by being around loving people, you create the environment to build new neural pathways so you can, over time, begin to feel and believe you are lovable and capable.

And don’t forget your heart brain, the 40,000 plus neurons in your heart, and how spending time being accepted and being shown acceptance and love smoothes out the rhythms of your heart, promoting greater health throughout your body and brain.

Are you getting the support, validation, and like-minded community you need these days?

Are you spending enough time with people who mirror back to you how wholly complete and wonderful you are, warts, dents and cranky bits included?

I talked to a young woman who has attended several of my retreats and she spoke about the life-long friendships she and the women with whom she connected made. She even used this phrase “mirroring”:

“We email and talk regularly, encouraging and supporting, even arguing in the earlier years, learning and mirroring all the way.

“But I needed to tell you that you are the first one who, unbeknownst to me at the time, SHOWED me what it was that I wanted to seek, so THANK YOU for providing not only that, but for the space you created for me to find these friends.”

How to Get Some Limbic Brain Juice:

• Attend a retreat or make one of your own with friends.
• Find like-minded people online and then meet up with one or two of them regularly in person — we need physical contact as well as virtual. Even we introverts!
• Use Meet-Up to find like-minded people or Twitter.com.
• Walk instead of drive to do your errands; talk to the shopkeepers, and get to know the people who support you.
• Host a monthly soup night for your neighbors. Check out the Loveliness of Soup Night blog post for ideas.
• Start or find a mastermind group, book group or knitting circle. (See what a member of my brain trust is up to below.)

The most important thing? When the busyness of life tells you there is no time, use that as a prompt to reach out, in even the smallest way, to be around others in heartfelt ways.

And remember, when you do this, you bring the same gift of acceptance and love to others that they do to you!

MY BRAIN TRUST BUDDY

I love love love Michael Bungay Stainer. He amazes me at least once a week, and my limbic brain is loved into greater self-acceptance almost every day by his support… not to mention how often he makes me laugh hard enough to blow tea out my nose.

He’s been working on this book and all the goodies that go with it for a long time and let me tell you right here right now this book is going to be huge.

It is going to rock the business world.

It could rock your world.

This is a truly amazing book.

It is going to be a classic business book for years to come.

“If I had to pick a person to have dinner with, when I need to be prodded and challenged and inspired to think about the things I really am committed to think about for myself and what I’m doing, I’d pick Michael Bungay Stanier.” — David Allen, Getting Things Done

Find Your Great Work: napkin-size solutions to stop the busywork and start the work that matters.

Check it out

Lots of love and gratitude,

Jen

P.S. I hope you will join me at Kripalu for some limbic-brain-juice-ups!

P.P.S. The five day retreat will be an intimate group with plenty of time for coaching and creating — a truly unique opportunity to work with me.

Related posts:

1. The New Feminine Brain
2. Ah, Kripalu
3. At Kripalu
4. Come Retreat With Me at Kripalu April 10-12th or 12th-17th
5. Not Quite Daily Dollop