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1.27: How to Live with Intention Using Values + Presence
I’m a scholar through and through, so it’s no surprise that one of my central values is learning. If you asked me to describe my ideal method of learning in only two words, they would be slow and steady. I thrive when I can focus slowly and steadily on researching,...
1.26: Top Five Tending Tips
I can barely believe I’m halfway through The Tending Year! To celebrate, I reviewed all of the posts I’ve shared this year and I gathered five lessons that have had the biggest impact on my practices and perspectives. In no specific order, please enjoy my top five...
1.25: Embracing the Gray Area
June’s theme is BALANCE. What better way to seek balance than embracing the gray area between black and white thinking? I struggle a lot with Black and White thinking, which I believe is emphasized by my experience with Complex PTSD. According to this 2014 article in...
1.24: Regarding Self-Care
If you do a search for the hashtag “selfcare” on Instagram, you’ll find an amalgamation of “you are enough” written in calligraphy, heavily filtered pictures of skinny bikini-clad women on beaches, and…products. Marketing campaigns promote self-care as a product for...
1.23: Workaholic Tendencies
Most graduate students learn how to condense their dissertation projects into a one sentence “elevator pitch” when someone asks us, “So, what do you study?” We are also just as likely to field the question “Why do you work so much?” with a rehearsed answer. My own...
1.22: Negative Self Talk
For me, Negative Self Talk usually sounds like this: Why would anyone like me? I’ll never be good enough. I shouldn’t even try. I’m going to fail anyways. It feels cringingly horrible, and once I fall into the dark pit of a self loathing loop it can be very difficult...
1.21: Perfectionism and Pain
This image is by the artist Layla Durrani. You can see her artwork on Instagram and on her website. I love black and white thinking. I love rules, instructions, how-to guides, and most of all I love doing a “good job.” Sometimes, due to pain or illness or overlapping...
1.20: How to Schedule
May’s theme is Making Goal Setting Work for Me. Last week’s post taught me a lot about planning long-term goals, but right now I’m juggling multiple projects with deadlines in the next 2-4 weeks. Totally different animal! I use an amalgamation of scheduling tools: a...
1.19: How to Plan
Academics usually welcome the end of the school year: we tie bows on old projects and send them off marked “done” (or “grades submitted”), and we finally get to set personal goals for summer. However, as the Spring semester came to a close, old fears started to bubble...
1.18: Self-Validation
Every year during April I get the telltale symptoms of seasonal allergies, and every year I get nervous that I’m actually getting the flu. You’d think I would know this by now, but here’s a scene from two Saturdays ago that proves otherwise: I worry that my allergies...
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