We discuss the story of how we met, the troubles with long distance relationships, the importance of vulnerability and learning how to show your scars for the benefit of the relationship.

Find Karolina’s real approach to life, spirituality, and womanhood on:

IG: http://www.instagram.com/mermaidandthecity/

www.rezenate.com.au

Do you have trouble asking for help, even when it comes to everyday situations? Are you somebody who would rather take the world on by their self than reaching out? Don’t worry, I know exactly how you feel. I know how it feels to overload yourself with things to do, sending messages to those around you that aren’t being received. I remember how it feels to be overwhelmed and stuck in your own life, but not being able to reach out because of the fear. If you stick with me for the next 30 minutes, I promise you that with everything you learn from the facts I share, the story I tell and by using the tools I will give towards the end, you will be one step closer to asking for the help that you desperately need. Do we have a deal? Good, let’s dive right in

Welcome

Episode number four! At the end of the last episode, From Doing Drugs to High on Life, I revealed many of my secrets from what I consider my former life. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend it – not just because it is me, but because I revealed parts of my past that many of you may not know. Toward the end of the episode, I shared my regret in not asking for help sooner and how my trying to take it all on myself, I made my journey more difficult than it needed to be. So, this week, I thought it would be wise to share what I have learned about asking for help since then and help you to be able to do the same.

Rejecting Help

“Do you need help honey?”

“NO! I can do it myself!”

“Can I give you a hand with anything?”

“It’s fine, I will do it all”

“Would you like help with..?”

“I DON’T NEED ANY HELP!”

Just a few examples of conversations you may have heard, or even had. Asking for help seems to be something that nearly all of us struggle with in some way or another. Whether we refuse help doing something physically, reject assistance with our mental state or hand back gifts of generosity – saying no to help is something that each of us have done and probably still do. There is nothing wrong with saying no to help, but how about when saying no is detrimental to our physical and mental health?

Why Do We Reject Help?

Why don’t we ask for help? Well, let me tell you what I know. I know that often my ego wants the feeling of doing accomplishing the task on its own. I know that having someone help me can make me feel not good enough because I couldn’t do the task on my own. I know that I enjoy the achievement of figuring something out on my own and I also know that I can take too much on as a justification for emotions or results. Do any of these sound like you?

Let’s take a look at these individually:

1) Wanting to do it yourself. There is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve something on your own, but sometimes it gets in the way of actually getting the task done. Is this something that you do? That even when you have no idea about how to do something, you would rather attempt to figure it out on your own than have someone else show you? I know it is something I am guilty of! I always wanted to be independent and have AAALLLLLLL the answers, so I could never admit that I needed help or didn’t know something – it would blow my cover!

2) Have you ever wanted to uphold your image so much that you have affected the end result? What I mean is that sometimes I would choose wanting to be seen as the “guy who knows everything”  or “who can handle things on his own” even though it then meant that I didn’t get the task done and looked like an idiot in the end anyway! I hated the feeling of asking people for help because I thought

Episode Overview

Warning: this episode will feature me being highly vulnerable and also has many drug references

Disclaimer: this episode contains general advice based on my own experience. It is not meant to discredit and advice from medical professionals or to be used as a sole treatment plan. I highly recommend seeking the help of qualified professionals if you are wanting to give up a drug addiction, or reach out for me for more personalised advice.

For this episode, I wanted to bring you something that has played a big part in my life. I wanted to share a part of my part that has impacted my life in such a big way and a topic that I know oh too well. I wanted to open up, break down and just let my heart pour out because many people see me as I am now, but very few of you may know the journey that I took here, so I thought I would share a part of it with you.

In today’s society, drugs are accessible, reasonably cheap and get you a quick result. The drugs are gaining intensity, highly addictive and extremely difficult to give up. Today I will tell you how I went from spending hundreds of dollars every weekend on drugs to the place I am now and show you WHY we shouldn’t just write people off if they are addicted to drugs.

Welcome

Welcome everybody to today’s episode. I am super excited, but also mega scared to bring you this show. My adventures with drugs are something that I am reasonably open about with most people and yet for some reason, sharing them online seems completely different and terrifying! Maybe it is because I am still yet to process everything, maybe I am scared of what is going to come out of my mouth as I talk, but either way, we can both be surprised by where we end up.

I didn’t Plan on Becoming an Addict…

For the better part of 5 years, drugs played an important role in my life. It started so innocently with some marijuana, then an ecstasy pill, but before long I found myself deeply entrenched in a life where I relied on drugs for many things and was constantly needing to feed my habit.

I didn’t plan on becoming a drug addict. I wasn’t sitting in class as a 6-year-old boy contemplating what I wanted to be when I grew up, then decided that “addict” would be a good job title and career path. The thing is, nobody does. No one plans for the life to go that way and it is the exploration of my own experience that has brought me to this realisation: desire and desperation lead to drugs. When you have an overwhelming desire and no other way to fulfill it, drugs can be the solution. If you want to fit in but don’t have the communication skills, drugs can help you. If you want to feel happier but lack the tools, drugs can help you. Don’t feel like anybody supports you? Drugs will…

Drugs will happily slot their self into many areas of your life and fill the voids that you have – if you allow them to.

A Problem With Drugs….

One of the biggest problems that I see with drugs is that we severely constrict what we consider drugs and we often allow others to do it for us and we just follow along. Most people allow the laws to dictate what they believe is okay and what is not when the reality is that we are all addicts, but that is a topic for another time. We view people that do the drugs that we consider “bad” in a negative light, whereas those who use the drugs that we determine to be okay escape our scope. We push some people to the side while we have sympathy for others and most of the time it is our own judgement that creates the difference, not the facts of the situation. Rather than focusing on the semantics of what is good and bad, maybe we should be asking questions into what leads somebody to take dru

Episode Overview

In today’s show, we will be shedding light on the topic of self-care. What is it? Why is it important? And most importantly, how can we care for our self? While I will tell you that lighting some candles and laying down to relax are a great place to start, throughout this episode I will take a different look on self-care and how we can prevent the need for reactive self-care by being more proactive in our approach to our physical and mental health. We dig deep into why caring for yourself is important especially when you want to help other people and we delve into the problem of self-worth when it comes down to putting yourself first. As light and lovely as caring for yourself sounds, it can actually be quite difficult and scary to do properly, because it means breaking through old beliefs and changing how we view both the world and our self, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Through my personal story I will tell you how I tried to care for myself for many years, but came to realise that the way I was doing it created more problems than it solved and towards the end we will cover my best advice to begin caring for yourself and a practical exercise to begin your journey of true self-care right now, so make sure you stick around until the end if this sounds like something you need.

Welcome

Good morning, good evening, good whatever it is wherever you are and welcome back for episode number two! The topic of today is very close to my heart because of my own personal experience with self-care, as well as witnessing SOO many people who want to care and love for their self, but are struggling to find the way how. I would love to give you the answer right away, but let’s first dive into the idea of self-care and gain a deeper perspective on what it means to care for yourself.

Self-Care Today

The theme of self-care and self-love has exploded over the internet. Slowing down, taking a bath, booking a massage and doing some Yoga – all actions that have their place in the world that we live in and necessary to combat the stresses of everyday life, but what if we could look at self-care from a different perspective?

Self-care for most people is REACTIVE. What this means is that most of us do is wait until things are falling apart before we take any action. We book a massage when our body is so stiff and tight that we can’t move. We go to the doctor once we are already sick and decided to start eating healthy when we see that our weight and/or health has gotten out of control.

Let’s take a moment to think about this. If you have been doing something long enough that it has begun to form serious or semi-serious problems in your life, just how much do you think that one hour of self-care is going to help you? This is not to take away from the strength it takes to take some time for you or depriving you of the satisfaction of caring for yourself in this way, but it is raising a serious, realistic problem that I believe we all have to face. That is, that if we spend 12 months beating up our body, one massage won’t change our life. If we have eaten crappy foods, not exercised and lived in negative thinking for five years, 1 week of diet and exercise probably won’t fix everything. You might call this pessimism or negative thinking, please, feel free to, but this is what I call realism. Looking at the reality of the situation because if we are not willing to look at what it really takes, how can we ever do what is required?

What Issues are there with Self-Care?

There are a number of issues that arise when we think about self-care: lack of time, lack of money, have to do things for other people, not looking at the problem, misguided information and acting reactively rather than proactively. Allow me to let you in on a littl

Today we will focus on how to take action when we are scared of what might happen. It is something that affects most of us.

Why is it that we don’t take action?

How can we take action despite the fear?

What steps must we take to ensure we keep taking action?

These, plus more, we will cover in today’s episode.

It is Hard to Take Action…

Taking action can be one of the hardest things to do, especially when we are plagued with doubts and insecurities. We will find every reason not to take action, but what about when not taking action is negatively contributing to our life?

Not being able to take the actions that we truly desire would have to be one of the biggest contributors, if not the biggest contributor to our unhappiness. If we could simply gain the ability to do and say what we want to in life, there wouldn’t be much else to need.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the reality we live in.

A high percentage of people are afraid to take action because they fear the consequences, or more specifically, they doubt their ability to handle what MIGHT happen if they take the action. As a result, they continue to self-sabotage and create justifications surrounding the choices that they make.

Please don’t take me wrong, I am empathetic towards the many barriers that may prevent a person from taking the next step, it is just that my own experience has shown me that the more I justify staying the same, the more the pain that I experience in the long run. and that’s the very reason that I wanted to focus on this topic in today’s episode. Even starting the podcast was something that I put off, I put off, I put off. I was scared of what people might think of what I had to say, I was terrified of making a mistake. But The more that I looked into it, the more I began to understand what the cause of the problem actually is. What I began to realise was that there are a few key issues that prevent us from taking the risk:

Reasons Why We Don’t Take Action

1) The first, is that We fear failing, which isn’t actually a fear of failure, but a fear that the external perception of failure will remind us of something that we are already holding onto. Maybe we have had an event in the past where we failed and that made us feel miserable. Maybe we feel that we are not good enough and we fear that failing in the external world will remind us of that on the inside, so we avoid taking the risk because if we take that risk and the worst case scenario actually does occur, we will take that personally and reflect it back on our self and we will feel those emotions that maybe we haven’t been conscious of in the recent times.

For example, We may not want to enter a competition because we fear failing, but failing isn’t anything bad unless we have some negative attachment to failing. It is the emotion that we have associated with the perception of failing that creates the fear. If you think about it, if you didn’t believe that failing is bad and if you didn’t have the belief that failing means that you are worthless or not good enough or whatever belief you may have, failing is just failing and in fact, it isn’t actually failing. What you perceive as failure is just the circumstances or just the result of what is happening. It is just a feedback mechanism to show you the result, and then what you do with that result is completely up to you. So, because we have so many associations with what we believe to be failure, that is the thing that creates the fear. That is what arises and makes us feel so scared to take action in the external world because of everything we are holding onto.

2) The reasons we tell our self in regards to not being able to take action are true, at least partially