get real

 

It’s so nice to get to the point where you can just be yourself, your authentic self.  Just be real.  After all these years I feel like I’m finally getting close.

I work with all women, and I work in a salon. . . full of mirrors.  Ye gads, that could be a recipe for disaster,  a bunch of women, competing with each other plus seeing every imagined flaw staring back at you for eight+ hours a day.  Sounds like it could put your ego to the test, huh?

Lucky for me I work with some of the most beautiful (inside and out) women I could ever hope to work with.  These girls are real, I have worked in a lot of salons,  and I have to tell you we have an amazing, enlightened group of women and I love them all.  No competition here, everyone is so supportive of each other.  I hope they all realize how rare it is and are as thankful as I am to be a part of such an amazing group.

There are days when I don’t feel so great about myself.  It happens less and less, but it still happens.  Growing older, body changes, sometimes it’s hard to love yourself. Hell, I had a hard time loving myself when I was 25 and everything was still where it was supposed to be.  It’s sad to think about that.

  I have decided that I don’t want to be hard on myself, looking at so -called  flaws that are so not who I am.  I want to look at who I really am, a great mom, a great friend, a great stylist, a great person, but even those thing are just a small part of who I am.

We all need to remember, we are not our bodies, we are not what we do for a living, how much money we have, where we live or who we’re married to.  I am  starting to feel like who I really am, the real me, is finally starting to emerge and  I’m looking forward to all the wonderful things life has in store for me.  xo-K

My two cents:  Learn to look in the mirror and see your soul.  There is so much more to you than meets the eye.

♥♥♥

I went to the coast the other day and visited a couple of glass blowing studios. It was amazing! In order to make beautiful, fragile, transparent bowls, vases, lamps, an artist takes a blob of silica, and shoves it into a two thousand degree furnace, and fires it up, red hot. And then after working with it a while, shaping it with tools, reinserting the transforming glass back into the blazing, white hot furnace, he pulls it out of the fire and lets it cool. In the end, all that heat and stress and creative energy results in an exquisitely strong, yet breathtakingly fragile work of art.

I think we are all like that. We’ve been talking lately about our stories, and this made me wonder: what if our stories, the “things that happen” are the fire that shapes our soul into  precious works of art that we can’t even see? Wow!

Every day, we have the chance to look at ourselves and see those extra pounds, the breasts that maybe aren’t as perfect as they were when we were 2o, a few lines that weren’t there yesterday, swear! These are the fires of our shaping.

One of the things I will be forever grateful to K for is encouraging me to study esthetics.  That education not only taught me the basics of great skin care, it taught me to understand beauty, real beauty.  Sometimes beauty is perfection. Sometimes, beauty is a collection of flaws so unique, they create something completely original and fabulous.

Those who work in the beauty business know a little secret that seems to elude about 99.999% of the rest of us: we are all beautiful in our own way. Hey! There is a reason  we women love our salon time. It’s because we get to spend time surrounded by goddess energy! You have to try really hard to walk away from your monthly salon treatment feeling bad about yourself. It’s not that it can’t be done, mind you, but you have to swim upstream against the mighty waters of innate goddess beauty perfection to get there.

We are all works of art in our own way and how we get there is 100 percent a gift from the universe and my mama always taught me that when someone gives you a gift, all you have to say is: thank you. Love, C

My two cents: Just for today, I will love and appreciate the fires that have formed me.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soioqrYorq4

get real

 

It’s so nice to get to the point where you can just be yourself, your authentic self.  Just be real.  After all these years I feel like I’m finally getting close.

I work with all women, and I work in a salon. . . full of mirrors.  Ye gads, that could be a recipe for disaster,  a bunch of women, competing with each other plus seeing every imagined flaw staring back at you for eight+ hours a day.  Sounds like it could put your ego to the test, huh?

Lucky for me I work with some of the most beautiful (inside and out) women I could ever hope to work with.  These girls are real, I have worked in a lot of salons,  and I have to tell you we have an amazing, enlightened group of women and I love them all.  No competition here, everyone is so supportive of each other.  I hope they all realize how rare it is and are as thankful as I am to be a part of such an amazing group.

There are days when I don’t feel so great about myself.  It happens less and less, but it still happens.  Growing older, body changes, sometimes it’s hard to love yourself. Hell, I had a hard time loving myself when I was 25 and everything was still where it was supposed to be.  It’s sad to think about that.

  I have decided that I don’t want to be hard on myself, looking at so -called  flaws that are so not who I am.  I want to look at who I really am, a great mom, a great friend, a great stylist, a great person, but even those thing are just a small part of who I am.

We all need to remember, we are not our bodies, we are not what we do for a living, how much money we have, where we live or who we’re married to.  I am  starting to feel like who I really am, the real me, is finally starting to emerge and  I’m looking forward to all the wonderful things life has in store for me.  xo-K

My two cents:  Learn to look in the mirror and see your soul.  There is so much more to you than meets the eye.

♥♥♥

I went to the coast the other day and visited a couple of glass blowing studios. It was amazing! In order to make beautiful, fragile, transparent bowls, vases, lamps, an artist takes a blob of silica, and shoves it into a two thousand degree furnace, and fires it up, red hot. And then after working with it a while, shaping it with tools, reinserting the transforming glass back into the blazing, white hot furnace, he pulls it out of the fire and lets it cool. In the end, all that heat and stress and creative energy results in an exquisitely strong, yet breathtakingly fragile work of art.

I think we are all like that. We’ve been talking lately about our stories, and this made me wonder: what if our stories, the “things that happen” are the fire that shapes our soul into  precious works of art that we can’t even see? Wow!

Every day, we have the chance to look at ourselves and see those extra pounds, the breasts that maybe aren’t as perfect as they were when we were 2o, a few lines that weren’t there yesterday, swear! These are the fires of our shaping.

One of the things I will be forever grateful to K for is encouraging me to study esthetics.  That education not only taught me the basics of great skin care, it taught me to understand beauty, real beauty.  Sometimes beauty is perfection. Sometimes, beauty is a collection of flaws so unique, they create something completely original and fabulous.

Those who work in the beauty business know a little secret that seems to elude about 99.999% of the rest of us: we are all beautiful in our own way. Hey! There is a reason  we women love our salon time. It’s because we get to spend time surrounded by goddess energy! You have to try really hard to walk away from your monthly salon treatment feeling bad about yourself. It’s not that it can’t be done, mind you, but you have to swim upstream against the mighty waters of innate goddess beauty perfection to get there.

We are all works of art in our own way and how we get there is 100 percent a gift from the universe and my mama always taught me that when someone gives you a gift, all you have to say is: thank you. Love, C

My two cents: Just for today, I will love and appreciate the fires that have formed me.

chasing approval

I just got back from an Abraham-Hicks workshop and I swear, I’m still dancing on clouds.  If you’re an Abraham fan, you know what I mean: Esther Hicks is a rock star! So anyway, I got there early because K and I have developed a plan for the Abraham show: get there early, stake out a good seat close enough to the front to have an unobstructed view of the unfolding program, dash out for a coffee or CD, return in time for the main event.

So I got there early, saved a seat, then went out to cruise the bookstore goodies before settling in. When I got back , I discovered someone in my chair. “Hey,” I said. You’re in my seat.” He’d even moved the bag I’d left to mark my spot.  Well, he swore it was his seat, even though when I staked it out, it was just a naked chair. Whatever. While he went into a long story about how his partner had saved the seat and had put a book down on one chair (not both, mind you) apologizing, justifying, etc., I could have got into it with him, but the room was starting to fill up now, and good spots were getting snapped up. I started looking for around. Hey! I’ve “saved” plenty of lecture seats, and never had one swiped out from under me and I wasn’t about to let it spoil the mood. And what do you know? There was a seat in the very next row, which I took. Meanwhile, the seat thief was trying to convince me to give him forgiveness, love and approval. Yeah, I wasn’t in the mood.

So it makes it even more interesting that my row-mate and I started talking about Byron Katie. I explained to her the situation at my work that had me off-center, and I was really glad to be at the workshop. She casually mentioned, “There are three things people chase and can never have if they are chasing them: love, appreciation, approval.” This really stopped me in my tracks.

Approval was what I was trying to elicit from my co-worker, and the more I tried to prove I was worth it, the more unwilling to give it he became.  In turn, I had done something similar to the seat thief.  A mistake was made, and even though he wasn’t about to give up his seat to me, he still kept talking, wanting my forgiveness, my approval. How many times have you known someone who had a difficult relationship with their mom or dad, and did everything they could, including building careers, having babies, chasing fame, just to please a parent who was never going to offer their approval, no matter what happened? They could spin on their head in a sequined tutu, and it would never be good enough. We’ve all known someone desperate for love: it puts off a vibe so unpleasant, it actually pushes people away. So sad! It all comes down to energy and what you will do to get it. Love, C

My two cents: approve of yourself; it’s all the approval you need!

♥♥♥

I talked to C when she returned from the Abraham workshop and she really was dancing on clouds.  If you have never been to a workshop I highly recommend it.  I am going to see them in SF next weekend and I can hardly wait, there really is nothing like it.  Being in a room with 400+ like-minded people is such a high.  It’s like having front row tickets to your favorite concert, the energy in the room is that big.

Approval has been something that has been coming up a lot lately. Why do we worry so much about what others think of us?  Does everyone really need to love us and think we are great?  Really?  Why do we go out of our minds when someone is mad at us?  Why do we feel the need to change someone’s mind if they don’t agree with us?  Does someone always have to be wrong so we can be right?  Just askin’. . . .

I used to be such a people pleaser, I really would be out of my mind if someone didn’t like me.  Not a healthy place to be.  I used to worry a lot, run conversations over and over in my head until I would come up with the perfect way to say something to someone where I could get my point across without giving them any reason to be mad at me.  And we all know how that goes, it’s nearly impossible.  If there was any way I could avoid confrontation, I would do it, even if it was detrimental to me.

I think things really started to change when I became a mother.  The only thing that really mattered to me was my daughter.  If I needed to stand up to a teacher or someone who had something to do with my kid, I had no problem doing it.  The more I practiced  the better I got at it.  It didn’t need to be dramatic, I just started to speak my peace without worrying what others thought of me.  Wow, it felt so good, I wondered, what took me so long to get to this place and what was I so afraid of?

I think growing up with a critical and judgmental parent has a big part in wanting approval, but like C said earlier, there are some people who are never going to approve of you.  I finally got that, as much as I hope people like me and think I am a good person.  I know that the only thing that is really important is that I live my life with integrity, do what I think is best for me and approve of myself. xo-K

My two cents:  There is no way you will ever get everyone’s approval, and even if you could it doesn’t matter.