This is taken from a video I posted on my Instagram @theauthenticselfcoach

I get asked all the time by clients if doing the work, “works.” Does anything change? Does it get better?

I was laughing with a best friend of mine recently, asking ourselves the same question: does the work ever end?! Because it feels like a bottomless, never ending, pit sometimes.

I can say that yes, the work is so worth it because the true liberation we’re seeking, the “happiness,” the peace, only comes from the inside out.

So if you’ve been doing the work, take a moment to reflect and see how far you’ve come. And if you’re in the midst of it (because, truly, it is forever evolving) than know that it is worth it. It may be hard. It may be scary. But it is so, damn, worth it.

With love,

Corinne

‘The power of the mind’ might sound like a cliche but our thoughts have a profound affect on us. We can imagine a situation that isn’t even real and it can trigger an entire emotional and physical reaction in our body. I give an example of just this, in this episode.

We’ve all heard of ‘be careful of what you think/wish for because you might just attract that,’ and many schools of thought like law of attraction would encourage you to stay positive because negativity attracts negativity. But I would describe it less as what we attract and more of what we see.

If we only see that life is crap, then life will be crap 24/7. Of course there is crap in the world, but it’s not ALL crap. We can acknowledge its existence and we can also choose to see the beauty in the world as well.

My point is our perspective paints our reality. What we believe is what we see and when we get to know the language of ourselves more deeply, we recognise when we’re going into imagination. Into a projection rather than what is actually real, here in this moment.

This and more in this episode on the power of the mind and how our thoughts affect our emotions and physical body.

Take it or leave it as always.

Loving you from afar,

Corinne

Ps. Sorry for all the funny mic noises. I also want to correct the word “weird” for “interesting” when relaying the story at the beginning. The word “weird” can hold judgment and I had no judgment but intrigue, instead. I just wanted to clarify that. Thanks.

Being the expression of You.

Living in an Instagram society lends itself to comparison and competition. We’re measuring ourselves and our lives to something that often isn’t even real or true to life (with filters) or we’re only getting a snapshot of a moment which we weren’t even physically present for (sans filters) which means that however we feel about that snapshot, is a complete projection.

What if we were to celebrate our uniqueness? That even though we could say we all come from the same source, we are a unique expression of that source.

What if it was ok to be you? To stop focusing on what you’re lacking by comparison, by an external measure, and focus instead on your unique expression of existence.

What is it that you want to experience?

What do you have to offer?

How can you be of service? Contribute?

Maybe our homogenised culture isn’t really serving us. Maybe celebrating diversity would bring back a greater sense of collaboration rather than competition. Maybe we’d stop pointing the finger, telling others how they “should” live their lives and come back home to ourselves instead, and see what we want to give to the whole.

It’s an invitation to ask ourselves:

Who am I?

What has meaning to me?

It’s an opportunity to just be you.

What is it about loss and grief, about death, that makes us feel alone?

It’s the loss of the love we felt. The physical form we attached that love to. It triggers our fear of being alone. Our wounds. Our need for healthy attachment amidst a world that has told us to be independent from the moment we popped out of the womb.

We’ve been taught and told to not feel, don’t cry, be strong, toughen up. And yet we feel more lonely. More co-dependent. More insecure.

Today I invite you to stay. Just stay with your pain. Your loss. Your grief. Because we’re all going through a huge death right now. We’re losing our reality, our normal, the way life once was. We’re losing those we love be it through death or differing opinions. The polarisation is extreme.

But what if you could stay with the ache of it all. Stay. Breathe. Feel. And return to love.

Because love is who we are. It’s what we’re made of and when we tap into all that we believe to be empty, the space around us, we recognise that it is full. That it is holding us. That we are never truly alone.

With love,

Corinne

We all have a story. We all have experienced a version of suffering, pain, trauma yet we don’t often talk about it because we’ve been taught that all those “negative” things are something to be ashamed of. And too, it’s vulnerable. We live in a culture that has conditioned us to believe that all hard emotions are negative and that pain or trauma is something to be ashamed of. We’ve been taught to always be happy and positive and successful. But are we really happy? Are we really free? It’s my belief and experience that when we learn to own our experiences with love and full acceptance, naming the shame and actually coming towards ourselves rather than trying to “get rid” of parts of ourselves, pretending they don’t exist (which only deepens our shame), we feel fully liberated. Because when we own our entire experience and humanity within ourselves, we feel relief, empowerment, wholeness and safety. And when we feel safe within ourselves, sharing our vulnerability—or just our humanity, to be honest—becomes an empowering act. It becomes liberating. I share a bit of my story today just to open the door for you to perhaps know that there is no shame in your story either. That all things can be healed and transformed if we hold them with love. There’s nothing wrong with you. There never was. Life happens and sometimes it hurts. However, it offers us the opportunity to discover who we truly are beneath the many layers of who we think we should be. May this be an invitation for you to begin the conversation with yourself, someone you love, someone you trust. *I want to add that in doing the healing work, I’m not insinuating that we need to relive our trauma. I’m sayinginstead that the act of holding our wounded parts with love, without getting into the story of it, is what I’ve found to be the fastest route to healing. It’s about giving ourselves loving attention. It’s about holding ourselves instead of rejecting or abandoning these parts of ourselves that maybe we don’t like. It’s about walking towards rather than away. The simple act of showing up for ourselves with love vs judgment, is life changing.

I think we all have an idea of what our life “should” be like. We get asked the question, “What will you do when you grow up?” when we’re, like, 4 years old. And so we learn to measure ourselves by what we do and we feel like failures if what we “do,” isn’t hugely successful. Somewhere along the way we create this expectation that we need to have it all figured out by the time we’re 25 and that the path there should be linear and easy. And then Life happens...The only thing is, nobody prepared us for what life is REALLY like.

What I see most working with both couples and individuals, is that we take things personal. We get triggered. We react. We argue. We get hurt. And then we repeat and repeat again. Today I talk about what it looks like to not take things personal and the positive affects that arise when we tend to our own stuff first, so that we can meet each other at the table and show up from our vulnerable, authentic selves. When we don’t take things personal, and when we can drop into a more transparent, vulnerable state of being and get to the real stuff beneath the surface, we are able to build a bridge between each other and create connection and deeply fulfilling love.

Today I’m diving into the topic of fear and how if we can embrace it, it acts as a catalyst for growth and as a pathway that brings us closer towards ourselves. Fear isn’t the enemy, it’s the messenger often coming from the little girl or boy within us that is simply needing our loving attention.

In this intro episode, I’m diving into the deep end and putting out a rough cut of my new podcast series: Raw Conversations. Today I’m just touching the surface on perfection, being human, being in relationship and softening into our vulnerability. I’ll dive deeper into these topics and more. If you want to ask a question or suggest a topic for me to talk about in this series, please leave a comment. My desire is for this to be an ongoing conversation on what it’s really like to be human. Not what we should look like, how we should act, or “should” anything...but what it’s really like to be in this strange and beautiful experience of being human.