The Cycle of Vitality - Way 5: Cherish Your Gifts
A fifth way to your vitality highlights the gifts you bring to the world and how the act of honoring these gifts and talents can help harmonize your cycle of vitality.
What are things that you, and maybe no one else, think are pretty cool about you? Take a minute…sit and look at your life and write down things you appreciate about yourself. No one else has to think they are cool! What are things you have said, thought about, doodled, did, journaled about, created, sung, expressed, experienced, loved, discovered, etc. - those things that say something about you, that you really like? It could be as simple as how your laugh, or the way you look at birds in flight, or maybe how you think in poetry. Or it could be things you figured out, or accomplished. Bottom line - it only has to bring you some joy, or simply a smile or proud feeling. I have things I could write down as accomplishments, but they don’t bring me much joy - they were more accomplishments from a societal norm.
Juniper likes to imagine how it would feel to be an apple tree, one that simply gives apples without apology or drama come fall. It simply gives apples, even if apples aren't what everyone wants. When it is able to purely become what it is meant to be each spring, without deliberation, there is a palpable essence to what it gives. What would it feel like to live through parts of yourself that you love - not the parts that you think others would love? In other words, imagine how it would feel when you are doing / being / producing / sharing from your core or essence and not from societal expectations. The world needs what you bring, and when you share it, it is naturally rejuvenating.
So today take a moment to cherish yourself and what you have to offer. By cherishing and celebrating it, perhaps you will open up to the opportunity to find new ways to live it! If you are someone who is very humble, or has a hard time celebrating yourself, that’s OK. We invite you to just have a little fun with this if you can. Not serious, just a lightness of fun and celebration. Do it in a way that honors you, right where you are.
Take a moment, what about you do you like, cherish, or think is pretty cool?
Which one makes you giggle? Which ones make your chest get full and your spirit light? Which one brings you to tears?
Celebrate them all!
Now, how might you bring more of them into your life? Where in your life needs a little bit more of those special parts of you?