# with love, sm > Just honest words from the journey so far. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About with love, sm URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T02:14:15.000Z I've been signing my journal entries "with love, sm" for as long as I can remember. Like I was writing to someone, even when it was for my eyes only. It didn't matter what I'd written that day. Sad, angry, happy, ten pages long and barely legible, half a page long and boring, whatever version of me showed up on the page, signing off that way was how I grounded myself again and again. It felt like moving forward. Like this is all written now, it's out of my head and onto the page, and what I do with it from here is up to me. Those four words that sealed every entry have always held a strange amount of power to me. 2022 was the first time they left my journal, closing out the lengthy captions on an Instagram account I made for close friends and family. It became a place for pieces of my journals, half formed thoughts, poetry, whatever I was working through as I started this whole soul searching journey. The thought crossed my mind a few times to grow the page, but it always felt a bit too personal, too vulnerable to hand over to strangers. Around the same time, I started signing my art, notes, and letters to friends the same way. "with love, sm" slowly became my signature, and wherever I used it, it held that same energy I felt sealing my journal entries. Somewhere in there I started wondering if the version of me my friends knew, the endlessly curious one who loves a deep convo and a good metaphor, might be worth sharing with people who didn't know me. This project is me deciding it is worth it. This project will be the first time "with love, sm" is closing something meant for whoever happens to find it, not just the people who already know me. Since you might not know me yet, I probably have some convincing to do. Why should you care what I have to say or believe any of it? If I'm being honest, that's part of why I kept putting this off. I'm not interested in performing certainty I don't have. For a long time, I didn't feel like I belonged as a voice in this space at all. In a world of oversaturated wellness and self-improvement content, I don't come to this with any kind of expertise. I'm not showing up with letters after my name, I'm not positive all the time or perfectly put together, I'm not healed and preaching from the other side of it. I'm just in it, same as anyone else. The articles, journal entries, moodboards, playlists, writing prompts, meditations, whatever you find here... they're all coming from a place of learning, unlearning, and staying curious, not from a place of already knowing anything. There aren't titles when you scroll, and that's on purpose. I didn't want people clicking based on a clever headline or deciding something isn't worth their time before they've even seen it. I wanted this to feel more like flipping through something, letting whatever you're drawn to pull you in, without knowing exactly what you're about to read. Sometimes that ends up being exactly what you needed. Sometimes it's just a collage of images. Either way, I like that it stays a little bit of a surprise. I used to write these words for no one but me. So if they reach you and mean something, that's more than I ever expected them to do. If anything here makes you pause, see things a little differently, or feel small in a way that makes you more connected, not less, that's the whole point. I'm not here to tell you to just be grateful, or that happiness is a choice, or that everything is fixable if you think about it right. From personal experience, I'd guess a lot of us live a little too in our heads, carrying more than we let on, and forgetting how much say we actually have in how we move through it all. I want this to be a place that says the quiet parts out loud, and interrupts the loop, even for a minute. *with love, sm* ### ## Posts ### Growing up without growing out of it URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/growing-up-without-growing-out-of-it/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T14:55:03.000Z Last week I took a trip home and left realizing I barely made time for the things that make going home feel like going home in the first place. I didn’t go for a walk at the canal. I didn’t go to Pete’s Polar Parlor for ice cream before it closed for the season. I didn't give my cat his daily treat. I didn’t spend nearly enough time just sitting around with my family. I didn’t make certain conversations a priority. I didn’t even do some of the smallest things I'd wanted to do, things that would have taken ten minutes and probably meant more to me than most of what I did instead. It made me think about how important priorities become as you get older. I’m incredibly thankful that I got to grow up in a safe, loving home surrounded by amazing people. My childhood gave me the kind of freedom to just be a kid, and there really wasn’t that much competing for my attention. If I got interested in something, I could follow that curiosity for however long I wanted. I could create entire fake businesses and pour everything into making sure they succeeded, design and write my own newsletters, or spend hours reading the Farmer’s Almanac and Guinness Book of World Records. I’d build mini golf courses in the backyard and attempt Rube Goldberg machines, make my brother play school with me, practice piano and then put on a concert, or venture into the backyard like Lewis and Clark and come back having created an entire village. I had so much time to follow an idea simply because it interested me. There wasn’t a constant running list in the back of my head reminding me of everything else I could or should be doing. Obviously, that’s not realistic anymore. And that’s not as sad as it sounds. A lot of the things competing for my attention now are there because my life has gotten bigger, and I’m also really grateful for that. There are more people I care about, more things I want for myself, more responsibilities, more decisions, and more maintenance required just to be a functioning human. I care about my family and my friends and my relationship. I care about my health. I care about my career and my future. I want to write and design and ski and learn things and travel and make things and meet people and also occasionally sit and do absolutely nothing. All of those things are real priorities that have to fit inside the same 24 hours. I’ve been having a hard time accepting that because I learned to associate caring about something with giving myself completely to it. If I’m interested in something and I have more energy, why wouldn’t I keep going? If I have another hour, why wouldn’t I use it? If I could do more, stopping feels lazy. Dedicating thirty minutes to something doesn’t feel like enough when I know what I’d be capable of doing in three hours. I know I can’t live every part of my life like that anymore. If I give three hours to every single thing I care about, there aren’t enough hours. And if I wait until I have three hours before I let myself do something, I end up not even doing it. I don't want to become less driven because of that. I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking I need to relax more, care less, stop putting so much pressure on everything, and just chill the hell out. There's definitely truth in that, but I also love how much I care! It's so me. I like wanting things. I like getting excited. I like having an idea and immediately wanting to know everything about it. I like being the person who asks a ton of questions. The solution to feeling overwhelmed by life cannot be becoming indifferent to it. It scares me how easily "I need to care less" could turn into "I don’t care." What do you want to do? I don’t care. Where do you want to go? Whatever. What do you want your life to look like? I don’t know. If you answer enough questions with "whatever," eventually you’re not really making many choices at all. Then you're just experiencing the default version of your life. The questions I'm asking now: how do I care deeply without letting every single thing I care about consume me? How do I have patience while still taking action? How do I keep wanting more without constantly feeling like what I did today wasn’t enough? Thirty minutes still counts. Thirty minutes spent writing counts even if I don't finish the article. Reading five pages still counts even if there are 300 pages left. A short walk counts. Calling a friend counts. Learning one completely random fact counts. The fact that I technically could keep going doesn’t mean I have to. The key is getting better at stopping while you still want more. That feels backwards to me because personally when I get into something, I want to ride that feeling until there’s nothing left. But I’ve done that enough times to know what happens. I go until I’m exhausted, another part of my life gets ignored, and the thing I was excited about starts feeling like another obligation. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing there is something nice about leaving with a little fuel still in the tank. I can come back tomorrow and actually be excited to come back tomorrow. I think learning might be a good place for me to practice this. I recently did a values exercise at work where I had to rank what mattered most to me, and my number one value was learning. The second I saw it there, it felt obvious. I've always been happiest when I’m learning. I love when some random thing catches my attention and then I’m reading about it at midnight even though it has absolutely nothing to do with my life. I love being able to actually see myself getting better at something, remembering an idea from a book weeks later, or realizing I know enough about something to have a conversation with someone about it. It's satisfying to notice that I know or can do something today that I couldn’t a month ago. Learning is also what I tend to think I need a ton of time for. I want to read and underline the whole book. I want to understand the whole thing. I want to keep going while I’m interested. So what would happen if I let thirty minutes be enough? Or ten? Or five? Instead of waiting for enough time to fully disappear into something, what if I just intentionally gave myself a little bit of time to be curious every day? Starting today, I'm gonna pick one thing to learn about each month. It can be anything. Something educational, hyper-specific, a physical skill, a time in history, a recipe I want to know by heart, a person, place, literally whatever. This past weekend, I went to an airshow and loved the way this one plane looked. Mainly just the colors and the vibe. I knew nothing about it, but now my one thing is this F7F Tigercat, a WWII Navy plane. There is no practical reason I need to know about the F7F Tigercat and that’s exactly what I like about it. The only real rule I want to give myself is that every day, I interact with that month’s thing somehow. I could have two hours and read a book about it. I could have five minutes and Google one question. I could go to the library. I could watch a YouTube video. I could find someone locally who knows about it and ask if I can buy them coffee. I could try something with my hands. I could write about what I’ve learned. It doesn’t really matter. And at the end of the month, I have to pick something new. That doesn’t mean I have to stop exploring last month's thing. If I fall in love with it, great, let it become part of my life. I just don’t want every interest to become another endless project I have to complete (bc there is no completion). I don’t need to become an expert. I can learn a bunch of stuff, leave with unanswered questions, and go be curious about something else. I like the idea of looking back after a year and having twelve completely different subjects woven into my life. Not even saying I mastered twelve things, more so that I spent a year deliberately interacting with things I didn’t know before. Maybe I met someone because of one of them or one changes what I believe or becomes a lifelong hobby. Maybe I learn about something for thirty days and never think about it again and that’s fine too. Zooming out, I'm trying to relearn how to let small things be enough. Growing up means I can’t give every wonder an entire day anymore. There are other things and people that deserve pieces of me too. I refuse to let the curious part of me disappear. She might only get thirty minutes today instead of five hours and that's okay she's still with me. I refuse to let the ambitious part of me disappear. I can always acknowledge I have fuel left in the tank and that's okay I just need to get comfortable leaving some of that fuel there. There are things I want to come home with energy for. There are people I want to be present with and conversations I don’t want to miss because something else felt more urgent. There are walks I want to take, questions I want to ask, places I want to go, things I want to learn, and plenty of nights where I want to do absolutely nothing. I have to leave room for all of it. *with love, sm* ### This is the part where you go. URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/this-is-the-part-where-you-go/ Last updated: 2026-08-20T06:11:09.000Z Please don't spend your life waiting for a version of yourself that has never existed. Life does not stop and start again when you finally feel ready and know what you're doing. Life doesn't wait around for you to not be afraid and stop caring what people think. So don't wait around for the version of yourself who finally believes they're enough to begin. Stop waiting to take the first step towards something in the far far distance. 10 years ago I was on a hike through the narrows in Zion National Park with my fam. "The end is JUST around the next bend!!" My dad said it like 20 times. It's a joke we all reference on hikes now when we don't wanna keep going. If you've never done it, the narrows isn’t a typical hike where you get to a summit and turn around. You hike upstream through a river, there's landmarks and routes, but the experience is basically: keep going until you decide you’re done. I think I've spent a decent amount of my life convinced that the end, the final, ideal, healed version of Sasha is JUST around the next bend. One more achievement in my career. One more relationship. One more ten pounds lost grinding at the gym and not eating. One more year. One more this. One more that. One more sign that now is the right time. But what if like the narrows, that "end" doesn't exist? Well that's okay, at some point I'll be sooo content and decide I'm done! (I know myself, that day ain't coming) There will always be another bend I could convince myself I need to reach. I've gotta stop mistaking preparation for living. We often believe confidence is something we'll feel before taking action. Like maybe eventually we’ll think enough, heal enough, know enough, become enough, and then we’ll finally feel ready to go. If you believe this, I want you to truly look back on your life. Any amount confidence you do have right now was built through repeatedly showing yourself that you can survive uncertainty, disappointment, rejection, depression, loss, heartbreak, failure, all the hard things. Don't brush this evidence off. I'm sure you didn't plan for that shitty stuff to happen. I'm sure you didn't purposefully set yourself up for failure in order to survive and gain confidence. You probably would've avoided a lot of it if you could've known how things would play out. But it happened anyway and every time, you learned something you couldn’t have learned by preparing for it: what you actually do when life doesn’t go according to plan. The greatest tragedy isn’t that people don’t get what they want. It’s that many people never truly begin because they’re waiting to become someone else first. Or they're waiting for things to unravel according to plan. Or the things they’ve always wanted are right in front of them, but because they don’t look or feel the way they always imagined they would, they go unnoticed. We think we need to level up or become a different version of ourselves before we can fully receive or dive deeper into these beautiful opportunities and experiences that are made available to us. Big beautiful things can be so scary. We think we’re protecting ourselves. By preparing JUST a little more, we're being smart. We can avoid failure, we don't have to be embarrassed when something goes wrong, because it simply won't go wrong if we're prepared. We won't fuck up the beautiful thing. We'll take it and make sure it only brings us happiness. So we wait to take it. But every day you postpone your life is still a day of your life. Time doesn’t stop while you figure yourself out. This morning? Seems like just a few hours ago? Maybe you have similar mornings everyday and this one was nothing special? Well I'd say something is special when it's once in a lifetime. Time doesn't stop. There will never be another August 18th, 2026 where you are exactly this age, living exactly this life, knowing exactly what you know and not yet knowing everything that comes next in your day. This exact minute feels completely disposable because another one is coming right behind it. But this one isn’t. Another minute is coming. This one is leaving. Forever. The once in a lifetime minutes you've spent replaying conversations in your head that no one else remembers? The once in a lifetime minutes you've spent trying to predict how something would turn out before letting yourself enjoy how it was going? The once in a lifetime minutes you've spent worrying about something that never ended up happening? They add up, oh and also, they're gone. You don’t get extra years because you were too in your head during the ones you had. You don’t get extra years because you spent the past few waiting to feel ready. Please realize there was never a practice version of your life before the real thing started. It's not too late to understand you were never getting ready for your life, you've always been in it. I promise you life isn't hiding in some month down the road, where you're more confident, more successful, more attractive, or more certain. It's happening on the drive to work tomorrow morning, it's happening while you make dinner, while you're laughing with your friends, while you can look out your window or walk outside and watch the sunset every night. Ask yourself some uncomfortable things. How many decisions have you made because they were true to you? And how many have you made simply because they reduced your anxiety? Those are not the same thing. How much of your personality is actually yours? How much of it was built around avoiding rejection? How many dreams have you labeled “unrealistic” simply because they required becoming unfamiliar? Or because they required you to take a different, maybe more uncomfortable route than the one you wanted to take? How much of your life has been organized around staying emotionally safe instead of feeling fully alive? Audiobook #2 for me: The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. By a nurse named Bronnie Ware, who spent years working in palliative care with people at the end of their lives. One of the things that stuck with me most was how simple people's regrets were. > *"I thought I had more time."* > *"I wish I had lived a life that felt true to myself instead of one I believed others expected of me."* At the end of life, people rarely regret that they hoped too much. They rarely wish they had been more cautious, more guarded, or less vulnerable. Again and again and again, the regrets center around the conversations they didn’t have, the risks they didn’t take, the love they didn’t express, and the version of themselves they kept waiting to become. The life they postponed. That stopped me. That should stop all of us. What if the life you’re postponing isn’t waiting for you, but it's quietly becoming the life you never lived? This is a death. The kind of death that happens long before your heart stops beating. It happens when you become so afraid of choosing the wrong life that you stop fully participating in the one you’re living. When every decision needs to prove it was the right one. When every accomplishment immediately becomes the starting line for the next one. When rest feels like falling behind. When you need to be healed before you let yourself be happy, be certain before you choose, and be successful enough to finally feel proud. You're so busy asking all these things that you stop noticing the life happening right. in. front. of. you. Obviously no one believes they'll live forever. But you wanna know what, I think a lot of people believe that tomorrow is guaranteed. Yeah we’ve heard it a million times like “life is short!", “tomorrow isn’t promised!!!” blah blah blah we know. You can know that. Do you choose to know it AND let it change the way you live? I'm not saying throw your hands up and quit your job tomorrow, drain your savings, book a flight across the world, and start checking shit off some bucket list because you could die. I mean something much less dramatic and more realistic. You can implement this NOW. In this very moment. Say the thing, make the plan, wear the outfit, take the picture, tell someone you love them, let a good thing just be a good thing. Stop saving things for an occasion worthy of them. Stop waiting until you feel completely ready. Stop treating ordinary weekdays like they’re somehow less valuable than the big beautiful moments you’ll remember forever. We can't go around driven by fear that we'll die tomorrow. We can find truth in the fact that tomorrow seems to be the place we hide everything that scares us. "I’ll start tomorrow." "I’ll tell them tomorrow." "I’ll write the book someday." "I’ll do this when things settle down." "I’ll become that person later." Tomorrow has never made a single decision. Only today has. Life is so precious because there is an ending we all know is coming. It's the only certain thing we have. We really don't know how long we have til that ending. Every day we spend waiting is a day that we’ll never be able to reclaim. It's a day closer to our ending. Before you read this and immediately make a list of 47 things you need to start doing because LIFE IS SHORT!!!! That’s not the point. Trust me, I've done this. And that's not the mindset I'm writing this from. You don't have enough time to do the 47 things today. You don't have enough time to do everything. That’s the point. You have limited time. You have limited attention and energy. Some people, some Instagram reels will say the answer is squeezing more into your life. More out of each day. Personally, I think this is fun and exciting and intense and crazy for a bit, but it has ALWAYS set me up to crash and burn. Failure to live fully. Failure to check off boxes on my to do list. As I've been trial and erroring methods, reading stuff, scrolling psychology reels, etc. I've learned I have to constantly check in with myself and stay really honest about what's going on in my life. I just did a "time audit". Where are my hours actually going? Not where I THINK they go. Where do they REALLY go? What gets the best hours of my day? What gets the leftover? How much time am I spending doing things I care about vs thinking about doing them? How much disappears into worrying, scrolling, analyzing, preparing, waiting? This is EXPOSING. Then I did an energy audit. What makes me feel more like myself? What consistently drains me? What am I giving huge amounts of Sasha to because I genuinely care about it? And what am I giving huge amounts of Sasha to simply because I've never stopped to question why? I don't want to waste my life or waste time, but god I'm so over trying to become my highest self by Friday. Look at the finite amount of time and energy you have and ask:does the way i’m spending my life actually resemble what i keep saying matters to me? Living urgently, living now, doesn’t mean doing everything. We can't. We can just be much more intentional about what gets to have us. A time and energy audit only helps us if we do something about what it uncovers. It might be uncomfortable or feel like a ton of work. Sit and think about it, sure. But remember that sitting there reflecting can just become another form of waiting. You can journal about the life you want, you can \* manifest \*, you can print out and hang up your values on the wall above your desk. You can dig deep and understand your childhood and why you hold yourself back. You can can make a pretty aesthetic vision board and read the books and become incredibly self aware. All that and more and you can still not move. There are things you already know. The thing you need to start. The thing you need to stop. The boundary you need to set. The idea you keep saying "someday" about. The beliefs you hold so tightly onto, that you know damn well aren't serving you. You know the hard things that you should do. You know they'll take extra time and patience and maybe cause a little discomfort. You don't need another sign (if you really think you do, let this be it). You don’t need to feel less scared first. You don't need to feel ready. Scared and unprepared are coming with ya. This whole time we’ve been talking about waiting for the version of yourself around the next bend. Yeah that person is not coming. I'm sorry but there is no future version of you who shows up one morning completely healed, completely confident, completely certain and finally gives you permission to begin. It's just you. Figure out what matters, what needs to change. Then do it. Not all at once. Just stop making later and tomorrow responsible for all of it. You're gonna meet the future version of yourself you keep talking about. Are you excited? Which version of current you will be harder for them to forgive? The one who tried and got some of it terribly wrong? Or the one who knew what mattered, knew time was passing, and still spent decades waiting for the go? That's hard to answer because every choice has an opposite you didn’t choose. Action doesn't protect you from regret. Stay and you’ll never know exactly what would’ve happened if you left. Leave and you’ll never know exactly what would’ve happened if you stayed. Take the job and there’s another path you didn’t take. Move away and you miss things at home. Stay home and wonder who you would’ve become somewhere else. Choose one person and you give up every hypothetical person you could’ve met. Spend five years building something and you give up five years you could’ve spent building something else. This is the cost of choosing at all.As thankful as I should probably be to have so many options and so much say in my life, sometimes I really wish I didn't have any of it. It pains me to think about the fact that choosing anything means letting another possibility die. But waiting is a choice too and it also has an opposite. You can easily spend another year trying to guarantee you won’t regret your decision, or another year deciding whether to start or not. That year itself will become a decision you made. Time is still choosing for you. It is quite literally impossible to build a life your future self couldn’t possibly regret. When I look back on my college years, and even younger, I do give myself grace. I don't think I have regrets. I understand that everything has played out the way it has for a very important reason. It feels good when I can say"I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. But I was there for it, I chose, I participated, I changed my mind when I knew more. I fucked things up and I tried again. I let myself love things and people and experiences without knowing how they’d end." I want to be able to say that about this version of me someday too. And I want you to be able to say it about you. If you're in a season where that feels harder than it has before, I hear you. I feel you. I'm there too. I feel like I'm older and the stakes feel higher. I have more to lose and a wrong choice can cost years that I don't have. Starting over sounds a lot different when you’ve already spent years building something. Fucking up and trying again doesn’t feel as harmless as it used to. You can be scared. At the same time, it's true that being scared of wasting time doesn’t give you the ability to predict the future. It literally just gives you another way to waste time. If you wanna continue being alive (??? lol) you're gonna have to make choices without knowing how they end. You'll misunderstand yourself. You will think back and say shit I wish I did that differently. You can't think your way out of being a human who only gets to know what happens after they choose. You don’t need to make a decision today that 40 year old you will approve of. You need to make the best decision you can with what you know right now and trust that when you know more, you’ll still be there. You'll be okay. You'll have your own back. You are allowed to keep responding to your own life as it plays out. No one's telling you when to go. No one's pausing the clock and waiting for you to say "ok start it I'm good!!". You're so good right now. This is the time. This is the moment. This is the part where you go. *with love, sm* ### The science behind overwhelm, overreacting, stress, and burnout: your brain has a limit, and it's probably lower than you thought URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/the-science-behind-overwhelm/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T01:50:45.000Z I'm not an audiobook gal, I like to hold a book in my hands and reread the same paragraph 5 times. I like to fold over the pages I wanna come back to, scribble my notes in the margins, and highlight until there's more color than white space. So pressing play on my first audiobook last week was a big deal. Long story short, I'm holding myself to 1 walk outside a day. It's hard to actually get up from a flowstate at work and go, but usually I can put on headphones and use music as my motivator. That's another reason I never listen to audiobooks, because if I was gonna put something on, why wouldn't it just be one of the hundreds of curated playlists I spend hours making? Rare... but nothing was hittin right last week, so I decided to scroll Spotify's audiobook page (ofc I auto piloted and clicked the "self-improvement" category). A few days later, here I am 3 hours and 44 min into "Stop Letting Everything Affect You" by Daniel Chidiac (linked at end of this article) \[1\]. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/34/81/34819328-4f18-4378-909b-2a66141df7bf/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-5.06.46---PM.png) I will say, the amount of times I've had to use the 15 second rewind button, or open my notes app and write something down is absurd. But I guess that just means the book is good. I chose this audiobook because for a lot of my life I've felt like I react way bigger than a situation actually calls for, then I spiral about my reaction. And most of this is internal, but naturally, it doesn't always stay internal. It shows up in how I treat the people around me and in how I move through my own life. In those moments I don't really recognize myself. My actions become out of alignment with my values and the self work I've done. I know it's human to get frustrated and annoyed and it's more than okay to express that. But the version of me who knows better also knows how much time and energy gets wasted staying stuck in it, and giving everything the opportunity to affect me so deeply. This book has already presented me with sooo much real research and science on why this happens. It's been eye opening and really a reminder to zoom out. To stop looking at everything from such a narrow, self centered lens and basically go touch grass. That sounds harsh. But I think the best "self-improvement" books are gonna challenge you and make you want to argue back or come up with an excuse. That's when you know you've gotta keep reading. If anything piece of writing or art makes you irritated like that, there's your reason to dive into it even deeper. This thing called "cognitive load theory" was briefly mentioned in one of the early chapters and I had noted to look more into it. So here's me doing that. It was developed by psychologist John Sweller \[2\] in the late 1980s, originally to study how people learn. His research kept pointing to the same conclusion = our working memory has a hard limit. Working memory is your brain actively handling whatever you're doing right now. We're too weak to hold more, the system itself is just literally built with a ceiling. Based on older research from the 1950s, that ceiling was seven things \[3\]. A 2001 study revisited that number and found it was actually smaller. FOUR \[4\]. That's the actual room you're working with before your brain starts struggling to process anything well. Working memory doesn't only hold facts and tasks, it holds unprocessed emotions too. Every unresolved conversation, every feeling you didn't have time to sit with in your crazy busy day, every thing you added to your mental to do list... it's all competing for that same small amount of space. So if you're already carrying a full plate of that stuff, there's very little room left for whatever new thing life throws at you. Which is exactly why the same exact situation can barely affect you one day and completely wreck you another day. Example: something as small as spilling your coffee on yourself can be a "that sucks but whatever" one morning, and it can be the reason you're crying in your car next week. Same coffee, same spill. That never changed, how much room you had left when it happened did. There's also a stress piece to this that I think explains a lot. A researcher named Amy Arnsten \[5\] studies what stress actually does to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking, planning, and regulating emotion. She's found that under stress, your brain essentially shifts power away from that rational part and toward more primitive systems, like the ones responsible for fight or flight. So when you're already stressed and something small happens, you're not reacting from your most clear headed self. You're reacting from a brain that's temporarily handed control over to its most reactive parts. I feel like everyone knows this on some level, maybe just not the actual science behind it. Personally, learning that made me feel better. Like alllllright this is literally neurochemistry and I've been calling it a detrimental character flaw. So now I feel like there's something I can actually work with here. Buuuutttt knowing the science doesn't mean it instantly changes. These reactive patterns are actual neural pathways that have been getting reinforced for so long. I wish undoing them was a switch I could flip now that I understand it a bit more intellectually. I know it'll take actually practicing a different response, over and over until it becomes the pathway that fires first instead. Story of my life (re: my last article). A few standouts from the solutions chapter of the book. **Naming what you're feeling as it comes.** It's not just a vibes thing, this actually does something measurable in your brain. Matthew Lieberman \[6\] ran a study out of UCLA using brain scans and found that when people put a specific word to an emotion they were experiencing, activity in the amygdala, which is the brain's alarm system, actually calmed down. At the same time, activity increased in the part of the prefrontal cortex. Which means naming a feeling shifts some of the control back to the calmer, more capable part of your brain. Not "I feel bad." It's gotta be something more specific. Disappointed. On edge. Overstimulated. Since the specificity of the feeling is doing the real work, [here's this feelings wheel ](https://www.calm.com/blog/the-feelings-wheel?ref=withlovesm.com)I used in therapy a few months ago. A few standouts from the solutions chapter of the book. **Attention restoration theory.** Not all rest is created equal, and there's actually research behind that. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan \[7\] found that certain kinds of rest restore your ability to focus, while others barely do anything. I'm gonna guess that scrolling reels "still demands your directed attention", so it doesn't give your brain the break it actually needs (rip). What does help is time in low stimulation environments where your attention isn't being pulled anywhere in particular. As someone who's very go go go, grind mode, especially at work, taking breaks scare me. But multiple studies show that with breaks, even as short as 5 minutes (spent actually restoring), come significant boosts in productivity and creativity \[9\], along with a reduction in stress hormones \[8\]. I guess my outdoor walks are a W. "Even brief periods of complete attentional rest, done regularly, can prevent the cognitive depletion that leads to emotional reactivity and mental exhaustion. This isn't indulgence. It's necessary maintenance for your most precious resource, your capacity for focused attention and emotional regulation." **Thought containment practice.** Also known as "the container method". Researcher Thomas Borkovec \[10\] studied this back in the early 1980s while looking into chronic worry and generalized anxiety. He found that trying to just suppress a worry usually backfires and tends to come back louder and more frequent. The opposite approach actually helped. Giving the worry a designated time instead of trying to make it disappear completely. The idea is you pick a specific time each day and treat that as designated worry time. When something pops into your head outside that window, you tell yourself "I hear you, I see you, I'll deal with ya later", and write it down instead of engaging with it right then. Then when worry time comes around, you go through whatever you wrote and ask, "is there anything I can actually do about this right now?" If yes, you take the most baby step possible. If no, you let yourself sit with the uncertainty instead of forcing an answer that isn't there. The theory is that over time your brain starts to trust that the thought will get its turn, just not immediately, which takes a lot of the urgency out of it. This whole instant rumination and needing answers NOW thing is something I definitely struggle with so I am 100% down to try this and report back. Also with this practice came the idea of a "counter narrative journal". It's writing down evidence that contradicts the more deeply ingrained thought patterns that show up on your worry list often. Then everyday, you're gradually building a case for a new perspective. "What you focus on expands, so by deliberately giving attention to these things that contradict the worries or negative beliefs you hold so closely, you are breaking neural pathways that don't serve you." I'm excited to try all this stuff. I still have days that feel impossible and I know they aren't gonna stop coming around. But this made me remember how much I love learning about self-improvement in research and science backed ways. And it's making me think about my last article too, about rewriting who we tell ourselves we are/what the voice in our head says. This stuff keeps helping me realize I'm not too sensitive, I just have a brain with limits like everyone else. You're really watching me piece things together article by article here lol. Understanding the science behind this doesn't excuse how you treat yourself and other people when you're overloaded, that part's still on you. But it does change what you do with a less than ideal moment as it comes and once it passes. Earlier I said this book felt like a reminder to zoom out. Chidiac uses the metaphor of how you can't see your hand clearly when it's pressed right up against your face. You have to move it back before it actually comes into focus. That's actually the whole point of all of this. The four items, the naming, the worry time, the counter narrative journal. No it's not that you have to "fix yourself". You just have to get enough space back to see past your own nose again. You can't see your life clearly when you're pressed that close to every single thing that happens in it. Now go touch grass and also read (or listen to!!) the actual book. I know it seems like I gave you a lot of it already (I do hope you're feeling intrigued and equipped w some new tools to try out), but genuinely, I barely scratched the surface of the first four chapters in this article. Dive deeper, learn how to free up some space in ya head. *with love, sm* --- **The actual sources, if you wanna go down the rabbit hole too** - **\[1\]** Chidiac, D. (2025). *Stop Letting Everything Affect You: How to Break Free from Overthinking, Emotional Chaos and Self-Sabotage.* Undercover Publishing House. [https://www.danielchidiac.com/](https://www.danielchidiac.com/?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[2\]** Sweller, J. (1988). *Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning.* Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. [https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202\_4](https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202%5F4?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[3\]** Miller, G. A. (1956). *The magical number seven, plus or minus two.* Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. [https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158](https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[4\]** Cowan, N. (2001). *The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity.* Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[5\]** Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). *Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function.* Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 410–422. [https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648](https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[6\]** Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). *Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli.* Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[7\]** Kaplan, S. (1995). *The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework.* Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. [https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2](https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944%2895%2990001-2?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[8\]** Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., & Tulbure, B. T. (2022). *"Give me a break!" A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance.* PLOS ONE, 17(8). [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[9\]** Pencavel, J. (2014). *The productivity of working hours.* IZA Discussion Paper No. 8129. [https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf](https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[10\]** Borkovec, T. D., Wilkinson, L., Folensbee, R., & Lerman, C. (1983). *Stimulus control applications to the treatment of worry.* Behaviour Research and Therapy, 21(3), 247–251. [https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(83)90206-1](https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967%2883%2990206-1?ref=withlovesm.com) ### The voice that raised me URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/the-voice-that-raised-me/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T01:19:45.000Z A moment can be described two completely different ways, using the same facts, and land in totally different places depending on which voice is narrating it. Same event, same reaction, same person feeling it. The only thing that changes is the tone doing the interpreting. I think most people assume their inner critic is just being accurate. Blunt, maybe harsh, but accurate. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make the voice in my head kinder, but it honestly feels like cheating. Like if I soften it, I’m just softening reality. I've always believed compassion is something you could add after the truth. I find it very hard to believe the quieter/kinder voice could actually get *closer* to the truth. I’ve heard the other one for so long that I stopped experiencing it as a perspective at all. It became the lens I saw myself through. The voice in my head is and always has been me, changing it would be like changing the core of who I am. So the problem is that the harsh voice doesn’t feel like just another perspective, it feels like me. That voice has called me weak for crying about something small, it's told me I'm extremely needy for wanting a little reassurance, that I have to overthink literally everything, that I'm exhausting to be around when I feel and think so deeply. And I've just been believing it as it's grown throughout my life. It's built itself up little by little, and I never questioned it. By the time I noticed how loud it was, it had already become the background noise of my mind. And here's where it gets confusing for me. That same voice is also the one that's gotten me through everything I've been through. It's helped me survive things I wasn't sure I'd survive. Some part of me has to believe that voice actually served me at some point or I wouldn't have made it this far. How can the same thing that’s carried me so far be the thing that’s holding me back and hurting me most? Now I have no idea the answer to that, this is just train of thought, but I think that voice was built in response to the life I was living at the time. I think it was useful and I needed it at times, even if it wasn't right. Letting go of it feels so scary because my brain naturally assumes I need it to live. But the thing is I'm not that version of myself anymore. I'm not scared of vulnerability anymore, I've spent years learning how to be open. I did my work and it was very hard and exposing. I truly know crying over something small doesn't make me weak. I truly believe everything happens for a reason. And I’m \~ on my way \~ to truly believing that things don’t have to look exactly the way I always imagined, for them to still be exactly what I need. I’ve spent years undoing the things this voice taught me. So why the hell am I still holding onto it!?? Shouldn't changing my beliefs automatically change the voice? I've torn down the whole foundation it was built on, but the voice itself has been speaking for sooo many years that it doesn’t know the conversation has changed. It keeps repeating lines from a story I no longer believe because that’s all it’s ever known how to do. I’ve mistaken its consistency for truth. I don't agree with the voice in my head anymore. (I first typed out "I think I don't agree...", but I *know* I don't agree with it.) I know my worth now. That’s what makes this so confusing. The things this voice says about me don’t line up with everything I’ve spent years learning. It makes no sense. Here I am in this strange and very uncomfortable in between. Lowkey for the first time, I just admitted I don’t believe what the voice in my head is saying anymore. And this actually feels like betrayal, like I'm having a convo between 2 parts of myself, one is saying "after everything I’ve done to get us here, you’re telling me I was wrong?" I respond with "yeah you're right, I still hear it, right now, all the time, that voice is still there and it's still the loudest one there! I guess it has gotten me what would've been my dream life years ago sooo I'll keep listening in. my bad." If that voice isn’t the truth about who I am, then what is? It has commented on literally everything to ever happen to me. Every mistake, every choice, every relationship, every fear, every success. It knows me better than anyone else does. So yeah, part of me feels guilty for wanting it to go away. Again, it's like I’d be abandoning something that’s only been trying to protect me this whole time. It's on my team right? It wants the best for me right? And there it goes, that's the harsh voice justifying and disguising itself as the kind voice. Omg this is getting too twisted. Overall, I can't just drop this part of me. What about the next time I need it?? I know life isn’t done asking me to survive and there will be more times I don't know how I'll possibly get through what's in front of me. Smart me says it's not gonna be by listening to that voice again, and that the root here is probably about changing my perspective on surviving. And believing that insanely critical voice is not my identity. As I change, that voice can change too. But it clearly takes some more work, patience and focus. Looking back, I didn’t survive because I was mean to myself, I survived *while* I was mean to myself. I need to understand: surviving doesn't have to come at the expense of myself, just because that voice was present during the hardest parts of my life so far, it's not what got me through them, and self abandonment and criticism are not the same thing as resilience. I always say I'm a curious person, I say I love to learn. So I'm going to try to reframe it from letting go of my identity/a part of myself to just getting curious about what else could be true. But of course there's still some grief in the current voice getting quieter. Will I recognize myself? Will this new version of me actually feel right?? We spend so much of our lives trying to become ourselves that when we finally start changing, it can feel like we’re becoming someone else. I've heard people say they don’t feel like themselves during times of growth. And my mom sent me a quote recently: "I haven't felt like myself lately; I must be growing. What a wonderful f\*cking way to look at uncomfortable seasons. The grass is being watered and the garden will come back." I feel this. I’ve tried to change this internal voice, and I've been hoping and waiting for the kinder version of it to feel like me before I let myself trust it. It feels unfamiliar and quite inauthentic right now. When it speaks, I feel like I'm losing who I am or I'm giving myself too much slack. It feels off. But let's be real, the mean voice has had decades of practice. The compassionate one is just learning how to speak. Of course one feels like home and the other feels like a stranger. That doesn’t mean the stranger isn’t me. Healing has probably felt so uncomfortable lately because I’m trying to close the gap between what I consciously know to be true and the voice that automatically comments on my life. I’m changing the narrator now, and that feels like a much slower & harder project. The kind voice. Even as I type that, I think of it as the baby voice. The one that's coddling me, too soft too be trusted with real life. What's wild is that this kinder voice isn't any of that most of the time. It's usually just as accurate, sometimes more accurate, because it accounts for context the harsh version conveniently skips. The kinder voice just asks what else could be true, it doesn't reject the story. Example: I’ve gotten to a place where I truly believe being sensitive isn’t a flaw. But I don’t think I ever stopped to ask myself what it actually is then. If it isn’t a flaw, a weakness, then what does it mean? I spent so many years proving the old story wrong that I never realized I also had to write a new one! I forgot healing also asks you to build something in its place. No wonder the kinder voice still feels unfamiliar. I never gave it a story to tell. As I'm writing this, my view of healing is expanding. I'm realizing it's less about disproving old stories and more about telling different ones. The voice I know: “I’m not weak". And then you have the kind voice. It doesn’t even acknowledge the accusation, it doesn’t need to: "I’m deeply sensitive, and that sensitivity allows me to love, create, connect and care.” So it's kinda hitting me now. The kinder voice isn’t more compassionate because it ignores reality, it’s more compassionate because it tells more of it!!! It *is* closer to the truth. The harsh version is wrong because it's incomplete and it leaves out the half of the story that makes me human instead of messed up. It only tells the parts of the story that support its conclusion. It notices my sensitivity, but forgets to mention my capacity to love. It sees my need for reassurance, but skips over how deeply I care about the people I let close. It calls me emotional without acknowledging that my emotions are also where my creativity, empathy, and joy come from. It tells the story like it’s presenting evidence, when really it’s just leaving out half the facts. Facts I’ve finally come to believe over years of self work and reflection. I never realized they belonged to the same story. These facts are me, they aren't separate, they're all pieces of the same person. And together they tell a completely different story, but one that does not support the conclusion of this voice I've listened to for so long. Pretty contradicting. The goal isn't replacing that voice with a nicer one and forcing myself to trust it. That would just be another performance and another way of trying to control the narrative. The goal is realizing that the voice in my head is exactly that. A narrator. Yeah we all know there's a voice in our heads, but damn after hearing the same one repeated all your life, it can start to sound like reality. It becomes your reality. It becomes your identity instead of an interpretation. That's just how it is. That's my belief, that ladders up to my values, to who I am, and that will never change because it's who I really am at my foundation. I should trust this voice because it’s been shaped by every experience I’ve ever had. No. I am slowly separating who I am from the voice that’s been introducing me to myself all these years. I don’t know if it’ll ever completely go away, but I don’t think I need it to anymore. Because for the first time, I'm starting to see it for what it is. Not my foundation or identity, literally just *one* perspective that usually arrives in my head first because it has decades of practice. Speedy mfer. The kind voice doesn't have to be the loudest to be the truest. I just has to be the one I get curious about, and ultimately choose. I'm at a point in life where I'm trying to believe that nothing ends with certainty, it ends with curiosity. Who I might I grow into when I stop confusing familiarity with truth? What does my life and my head sound like when it’s narrated by a voice that tells the whole story? If the old voice taught me how to survive, maybe this one will teach me how to live. This has all got me curious. And excited and scared. I started writing this talking about survival and now I'm ending it talking about living. I started writing this believing that the voice got me here, and now I'm realizing wait no, *I* got me here. The voice just came with me. I was never the voice trying to protect me, I was always the person it was trying to protect. It did the best it could with what it knew and I’ll always be grateful for that. At the same time, I know this voice that kept me alive can't be the one that defines my life forever. There’s a big shift happening in my mind. I don’t know exactly what it sounds like yet, but I know it’s going to ask me to question parts of myself I’ve believed for a very long time. I know it’ll take time before it feels like home. Until then, I’m going to keep listening, and reminding myself that every single story has another side. I’ll keep ya updated. *with love, sm* ### Welcome URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/welcome/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T01:16:49.000Z I've been signing my journal entries "with love, sm" for as long as I can remember. Even though it's always been just for me, for nobody else to read. It never matters what's actually on the page that day. Sad, angry, happy, barely legible, doesn't matter. Signing off that way is how I ground myself after writing it. Like okay, it's all out of my head now, it's on the page, and what I do with it from here is up to me. Those four words have always held more power for me than they probably should, but they do. For a long time that felt like enough. The signing off part was mine, it didn't need anyone else attached to it. But I think I always knew, somewhere in the back of my head, that I wanted this to be more than pages in a notebook eventually. I just didn't feel like I had any right to make that happen yet. That's the real reason this took so long to start. I didn't feel like I belonged as a voice in this space (now I feel maybe 10% like I do so we're getting somewhere). Wellness and self improvement content is so saturated right now, and a lot of it comes from people who sound like they've already arrived somewhere. Like they have the certificate, the framework, the years of hindsight, the neat little lesson at the end of the story. I don't really have any of that. I'm not healed and preaching from the other side of it. I've read the books. I've studied the strategies, the routines, the things that are supposed to fix you. I've curated the "perfect" environments to heal in. I've had the aha moments where I genuinely thought I cracked the code forever. I've built a life that looks good and feels good, aesthetically, intentionally, all of it. And still nothing stays fixed. Nothing lasts the way I think it's supposed to. Life doesn't hold still long enough to let it. It's always changing, so I'm always adjusting. Which is funny, because probably more so than anything out of my control, I think I'm the lead cause of that. I'm goal oriented to a fault, chasing one thing and then the second I hit it, already onto the next. I struggle to just sit in something long enough to notice what happened. And the basic things I know make me feel good somehow still end up being the hardest things to actually do. I'm trying to understand why that is. Why knowing something is good for you isn't the same as being able to do it. That's a lot of what I actually want to get into here, not just what works, but why it's so hard to stick with even when you know. So yeah I don't have answers for you and I let that be the reason to wait. I really thought I needed to get somewhere first, feel more finished, more qualified, before I was allowed to say anything out loud. But I think that idea was never actually true for anyone. I think most people who sound like they've figured it all out are either performing certainty they don't really have, or they're describing one good week and calling it permanent (I've done both). What I actually have is a lot of practice writing my way through things while I'm still inside of them. That's what this is gonna be too. Not me looking back on something I've already worked out, but me making sense of it as it's happening, in real time, out loud. The articles, the moodboards, the playlists, the prompts, whatever ends up here, they're all coming from a place of learning and unlearning and staying curious, while I'm actually in it, not after I've figured it out and can look back at it safely. Not from a place of overediting my writing and changing the lessons to sound more life changing. Most posts on here will literally be my personal, handwritten journals, typed out. It's gonna be hard not to cringe and edit stuff out, but I'm holding myself to that because it's real, and it's telling a whole story rather than a pretty little one where I'm so woke and strong and solved all my problems effortlessly. I'm not interested in telling you to just be grateful, or that happiness is a choice, or that everything sorts itself out if you think about it the right way. I don't think you need to hear it from one more person pretending it is. I will say the quiet parts out loud. Those sentences that have forever stayed in my head or in my journal, I'll say em here. Maybe there will be something that resonates with you. But I've gotta warn you, some days I feel like the most grounded version of myself I've ever been. Other days I'm right back in old patterns, wondering how I ended up here again. My writing reflects that. It'll probably feel like there are 10 different authors over here. But I'm trying to convince myself it's still worth sharing. Long story short I've wanted to build this for years. And I kept putting it off because I was waiting to feel ready in a way I know was never going to happen. So this is me not waiting anymore. Just creating, and sharing it while I'm in it. Same as you probably are too. *with love, sm* ### Worth noting / July URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/july-moodboard/ Last updated: 2026-09-23T19:39:12.000Z ![](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/48/cd/64/48cd6415a8ddd7b32005574ef616868b.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/0e/e8/33/0ee8337f0d68a0012e0479e1f77f1f27.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/7b/5a/28/7b5a287e088b8c6bd2ffc892ee875548.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e5/70/44/e5704434cc9e347e90375a3269cd89a4.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/f9/e8/ca/f9e8ca15fa2d8007b9c1b9ccb3c6630c.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ca/ca/cb/cacacb8f7702e631bd46ee61c1e55cfb.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/d1/b7/25/d1b725175f80e1f5eefea6af2e43d0d1.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/85/77/f8/8577f84d2c247a77726b5eba1a36e55c.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/99/c2/12/99c212b224e7de0c51a8401b12718c9f.jpg) ![](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/30/a9/9c/30a99cd8e64cd80ba083b72fc24ab6fa.jpg) July's my birthday month and I want it to feel light. I've been so deep in the self improvement, read another book, journal about it, overanalyze it train that I kind of forgot you're allowed to just enjoy things without turning them into a lesson. So this month I want to get back to basics. Cherries (my fav), sitting by water with no agenda, the way the sun shines through the trees, the stuff that doesn't need a caption explaining what it means. That quote, "as long as I'm alive I can begin again and again and again," is basically what I want to carry into it. Less overthinking, more just starting fresh whenever I feel like it, no big dramatic reset required. ### A few words on the quiet power of gratitude URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/a-few-words-on-the-quiet-power-of-gratitude/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T23:11:51.000Z Honestly I haven’t written anything in 3 months. Not in my journal, not here, not anywhere. But there’s a softness to Thanksgiving that got me thinking. Gratitude has carried me through so much of this year. And today gratitude isn’t held silently in our minds- it’s spoken out loud, posted on Instagram stories, sent in wholesome texts, and that makes me feel so happy. Today we all pause long enough to notice the good. Which I think is the most powerful thing we can do. Every single day. Gratitude is true medicine, the quiet language of our souls. But life speaks loud. There’s always the pressure to be more, to do more, the what-ifs, the comparisons. Some days the weight of everything- loss, stress, uncertainty, or the constant push to keep going, can feel like too much. Hustle culture is shoved in our faces, social media pulls us in every direction, and the next best thing is always around the corner. We chase huge wins and achievements, and think that’s when we can finally feel grateful. But it’s the opposite. Turn your attention inward, to the pauses, the breath before the next thought, the stillness between emotions. Notice and listen without responding or judging. You’ll start to understand why you’re exactly where you need to be. Everything becomes a small thank you. Gratitude is the quiet shift that lets you loosen your grip on what’s missing, long enough to notice what’s actually holding you together. Enough-ness replaces the heaviness. It’s not perfection. Not constant happiness. Just enough peace to breathe. Enough clarity to move forward. Enough trust to let go of what’s out of your control. Enough kindness to meet yourself where you’re at. The more you practice shifting from “what I lack” to “what I have”, the more spacious the present becomes. And remember that joy doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives in the small moments. The smile from a stranger, the sunlight through a window, the song that brings someone you love to mind. Gratitude grows and life feels a bit lighter when you choose to notice these things. By sharing that energy with your family, friends, the people you cross paths with throughout your day…that’s how you change the world. So let go for a second- not just today, but everyday. Appreciate what makes you smile, cherish the people who uplift you, and let them know you love them. Know that your happiness isn’t borrowed from someone else’s approval, and your worth isn’t hanging on to what you achieve next. Return to the things that remind you who you truly are when life isn’t so loud. This is where gratitude lives. It won’t fix everything, but it will steady you and invite more beautiful moments and peace into your life. *with love, sm* ### End of Feb journal prompts URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/prompt-1-test/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T03:43:38.000Z Another month down, however it went for you. I like sitting down at the end of one before jumping into the next, even if it's just for ten minutes. It's easy to just keep moving and let the days blur together without actually checking in with what happened, what stood out, what you're carrying into whatever's next. So here's a few prompts I go back to, broken into a few different lenses. Take what feels useful, skip what doesn't. ### **Gratitude** - Write down your favorite memory from this month. What made it special - What are you most proud of this month? - List five things you are grateful for this month. How did they contribute to your well-being? ### **People + things** - Who or what surprised you the most this month? - Who stood out the most to you this month? Why? - What or who occupied your mind the most this month? Why? ### **Reflect** - What was this month's primary energy? Would you like to carry it into next month? Why or why not? - Who stood out the most to you this month? Why? - If you could change one thing about this month, what would it be? Why? ### **Wrap it up** - Write a short letter to your self from thirty days ago. What message would you have for them? - Which area of your life received the most attention this month? Which received the least? Is there an imbalance? - On a scale of one to ten (ten being the highest), how would you rate this month? ### Training and trusting your intuition, divine timing, living your ideal life now, + more URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/training-and-trusting/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T19:50:47.000Z Whatever lens you read this post through (relationships, work, big decisions, etc), let it resonate in the way you need right now. How can we first reach a place where our intuition can flow freely, and then how can we effortlessly trust it and let it guide us? When you know, you definitely know. And until you experience that feeling, you may not believe that statement. You may wish you could, but it feels so out of reach, whether that’s because seemingly nothing has been working out for you, or you’re just a \~slightly skeptical person who’s always going to have those “what if’s”, or the tendency to plan and think realistically- which are all very normal, healthy feelings and thoughts to have. Up until you have a true “when you know you know” experience. The analytical, fight-or-flight, “protect my peace” mind goes on a walk. Leaves the chat. Is put on mute. You’re not ignoring the practical questions, you’re not pushing away gut feelings (honestly, you’re doing the opposite), and you’re not rushing or getting ahead of yourself. You just whole-heartedly know the answers already. That’s why training and learning how to utilize our gift of intuition is so efficient- you skip that whole overthinking step! Everyone has the power to be intuitive, it’s been instilled in us since the earliest forms of human life. Something a lot of us can struggle with is questioning if our internal directions are 100% right. Is it intuition or are we just impatient? Are we just excited? Are we using it as an excuse? Are we not thinking of all the implications following the feeling could have? This is especially present if we’ve been through a situation where we have trusted ourselves and ended up getting hurt. I think once you go through something like that (especially with another human) you have your guard up for a while after. There is no shot that you’ll let that happen to you again. It’s hard to re-ignite that trust in yourself. So when something really good comes along, and you do get that knowing feeling in your body and mind, it’s natural to sink into the familiarity of slowing down and thinking. Are you rushing by going with your gut, or are you spending too much time by thinking it through? Who sets the pace? The correct answer is you. I think the pace can be set for us by family, friends, societal norms- things and people outside of ourselves. When you’re making a decision it should be for you. Only you know if something is right or wrong for yourself. Lean into the feelings and into the direction you want to go. Don’t even begin to worry about what others might think. They don’t have insider knowledge of your journey with your intuition or your relationship with your thoughts, even if you’ve shared some of it. Now let me remind you, I’m talking about these true “when you know you know” situations. As I wrote before, there are times we think we’re having an experience like that, but it turns out we’re just convincing ourselves it’s right because there is probably some void we’re trying to fill, or we’re wishing for things to improve or be resolved instantly. We’re not being honest with ourselves. For some, intuition comes quite naturally. For others, there’s some training to do. If you want strong arms, you go to the gym and lift weights. After a few weeks of doing this, you have stronger arms. The same goes for your intuition. And you must start with a clean slate, you must set a foundation for this intuition to flourish. The key is just being with yourself. Doing the self work, preferably on your own, and really understanding your wants and needs before you start exploring adding something or someone to the mix. I feel like it’s our responsibility to do this. In most cases you’ll find that by consistently doing that self work, you’ll become the best, purest version of yourself, who will ultimately attract the people, opportunities, and experiences at that same level. Without looking. **They. Will. Come.** They will flow into your life. Once they do happen and begin to show up, they’ll feel right. Making decisions and channeling your intuition will become easier, because you’re so sure of who you are and what you want. At first you’ll have the “I’m so lucky”, “what did I do to deserve this”, “this feels too good to be true” moments. A bit down the road when you can be more reflective, you’ll see why it was obvious those things started happening for you, why those people began showing up in your life. Divine timing? Maybe. Because you put the (very difficult) self work in? Because you consciously decided to recognize and focus in on the fact that you had self work to do? Because you admitted that, and took the step to do something about it? For sure. It’s the epitome of “your thoughts control your life”. We obviously can’t control everything, but we can make sure we have the most control possible. And I don’t mean controlling exactly what happens. That's where divine timing and leaving it up to the universe comes in. I mean having control over the **types** of opportunities, people, and things that come into our lives. We can create an environment in our bodies and minds that either welcomes the good we desire, or one that brings unwanted experiences. A lot of the time we don’t realize the state of our internal environment, which is why meditation, journaling, therapy, and other self care practices are so beneficial. In the craziness of daily life, it’s very possible (and common) we could be telling ourselves a completely different story from the truth, from the story we’re living. It could be because we don’t think we have time to do the work and are occupied with other things, or because we are too scared to acknowledge that things aren't actually as they seem. That’s a big step. Again, we could be too heavily influenced by things outside of ourselves. We could feel like we have to maintain this version of ourselves everyone knows, and any change would cause everything to fall apart. What we must do, is sit down with ourselves and just be. Be with our thoughts, feelings, and deeply examine the types of experiences we've been having, the thoughts that have been circling our minds, the kind of people we’re surrounded by, the kind of people we’re attracting or keep seeing in our lives. You will quickly notice patterns. You might be surprised. This will open a whole new inner dialogue that could be uncomfortable. Do you like these people, opportunities, and experiences that are currently in your life? Do they feel in alignment with that ideal life you picture yourself living years down the road? Do they feel in alignment with who you are at your core, your values, your beliefs, the way you want to feel, physically and mentally? Do you even know who you are at your core, do you know how you want to feel? It is a lot to think about, and you need to be prepared to embark on this endless, yet beautiful journey. Now this is where planning and an analytical approach can make a positive impact. The people, places, things, and experiences you're having now are setting the foundation for that life. So are they aligned, will they get you there? Because yes, while we’re young, while we want to live in the present moment and don’t want to rush, we don’t have minutes to waste. Why wait for the perfect conditions (which will never exist), and why wait to begin that ideal life? Why wait to feel good and thrive? It’s not some future end goal, it’s the here and now. *with love, sm* ### The true essence of escape: return URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/fake-post-2/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T23:12:29.000Z Why do people take vacations? That was the question asked in a meeting at work the other day. The question that initiated a conversation around vacation trends, and a deep dive into the motivations of our vacation audience. What drives people to take a vacation? What do they hope to get out of it? A statistic that brought this article to being: 56% of Americans value “escapism” in a vacation. They take a vacation to “escape for a bit”. This is a bump up from 52% in 2019\. I found it a bit hard to concentrate after hearing this. As my coworkers were nodding and beginning to think of ways we could tap into this valued escapism through marketing strategies, I was on some philosophical journey in my head. What does it mean to escape? What feelings come along with escaping? Beneath the surface perception lies a deeper truth. It’s not as much of an escape as it is a voyage of return - a return to oneself, to Mother Earth, to the simple joys of life, and to a sense of natural mindfulness we unfortunately rarely experience in our day to day lives. I say “natural” mindfulness, because it is something that we were all brought into this world with. A pure, clear, understanding of our 5 senses at all times, a strong grounding to the where, what, when, who, and how of the moment we were in, and not any other moment prior or beyond it. So can we say that an escape is really a return to the present moment? And an escape from re-thinking the past and setting expectations for the future? You’re pulling your roots from “what was” and “what might be”, and planting them in “what is”. A lot can happen in the “what is”. We have much more control over what happens here than what happens in the past and in the future. When we think we’re escaping, getting out, or running away, we are returning, going in, and coming back. Think of the last vacation you took, does it bring a smile to your face? I think we can all agree a good vacation can do that. A good vacation feels like a recharge. A good vacation will give you joyful memories and things to express gratitude towards. You may have experienced a new or strengthened connection to nature, to another human, or to yourself. You may have rediscovered an appreciation for simplicity. You may have felt relief- knowing the vacation is something you needed deeply. Then comes time to return to the “real world”- to a flooded email inbox, responsibilities that feel like they’re a heavier weight than you can carry, your to-do list that’s a seemingly never ending column of boxes waiting to be checked off. Suddenly, you’re back. You’re immersed back into all of these things like you never left. The vacation, along with the beautiful feelings that you embraced, the version of yourself that you embodied, and the realizations you came to just slipped from your hands. Yeah, it was a great time, but back to the grind. That’s how the real world works right? It can feel impossible to carry the elevated emotions we experience on a vacation into our everyday lives. We must understand that it’s not impossible to bring glimpses of this into our everyday, and even more that it’s extremely important and beneficial that we do so. We must return to ourselves daily. Instead of escaping with the help of unhealthy distractions and coping mechanisms, we have to return, with effort directed towards cultivating love and kindness within and outside ourselves. Imagine if everyone took time to return each day, imagine how much more love and kindness would be flowing throughout the world, from human to human. Why do people take vacations? My question is why aren’t people taking vacations every day? *with love, sm* ### The space in between, the art of manifestation, + creating core memories URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/the-space-in-between-the-art-of-manifestation-creating-core-memories/ Last updated: 2026-07-31T23:12:46.000Z “Enjoy the space between where you are and where you are going”. It’s easy to focus on what’s next. It’s fun to daydream about how you’ll feel next week, next month, five years from now- when you have everything you want, when all your goals have been met and surpassed, when everything has been figured out. Whether you have a multi-step plan on how you’re going to get there, you embrace the “leave it up to the universe” mindset, or you’re somewhere in between, we all are human. We are wired to seek out safety, comfort, and inner peace. Most of all, we want to feel we have a purpose in this great big world. We set our own standards for how these feelings are experienced. Comfort to some might mean familiarity in a routine, purpose might mean contributing to a project at work. For others, comfort means exploring and trying something new every week, purpose means meditating everyday so they can show up in the best way possible for the people in their lives. These feelings are what we naturally seek in each moment, but usually on a subconscious level. How can we make sure we’re fully acknowledging them, or acknowledge they’re not there and we have some changes to make? How can we understand ourselves a bit better, and make those changes now if we need to? Why is it easier to create checklists and plans that’ll get us somewhere in five years than to understand how to feel better in this very moment? “Once I have this new job, I’ll be content and everything else in my life will fall into place. Once I find my soulmate, I’ll be able to truly live with happiness and feel loved. Once I move away from this town, opportunities will effortlessly present themselves to me.” All of that could be true! It also could be false. Realistically, it’ll be a mix of both. Manifesting and believing in yourself is one thing. Waiting and wishing is another. The true technique of manifesting is rooted in the present-self. Contrary to popular belief, manifesting has all to do with who you’re showing up as in your daily life, and not creating this version of yourself that only exists in the future. It’s about embodying the outlook on life, the personality, and the habits that the desired future self will possess, now. It’s not easy. Writing “I will get my dream job” ten times on a piece of paper isn’t where it ends. It begins there, with that realization you’d like a change. Then the hard part starts, where you have to walk into your current job every morning fully convinced you’re walking into your dream one. You have to speak to your least favorite co-worker how you’d speak to the CEO of your dream company. This will be difficult not only on your mind, but your physical body. While you’re attempting to change your mindset, your body may not follow as easily. When something happens that would usually trigger an emotional reaction and your mind doesn’t react, your body might be like “wait, why are we acting like everything is okay?”. Ignored mental distress can literally get stuck in the body. It might present itself as headaches, stomach pain, or trouble sleeping. You may be thinking “at what cost do I keep convincing myself things are great when they’re not?”. When you feel an old-wired emotional response coming on, document it. “This just happened, usually it would make me feel this way, but I’m choosing not to let it have control over me, because this is where I want to go”. That way you’re reminding yourself of three things: 1. The fact something happened and it potentially has the power to alter your current state 2. That you’re aware there’s a difference between your old patterns and what you’re actively trying to curate 3. Why you’re doing this hard work- the ideal experience you’re manifesting This could take 10 seconds, or it could take 20 minutes. Whatever capacity you have available for this exercise, it will be beneficial. This is where I’ll say again- manifestation is not easy work. There will be times you want to sink back into your old mindset because it’s easy and your emotions are just too overwhelming. I’m not asking you to ignore, mask, or push aside your emotions. I’m asking you to get through them differently than usual. The only way out is through. I am the type of person who \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. I am the type of person who feels \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. I am the type of person who confronts tough emotions and situations by \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. Embody your ideal self, then fill in those blanks. Keep those answers close by. Reference them when you need a reminder that where you are now, the between, directly impacts where you’ll be in the future. The between. The only place your breath exists, the only place your nose, eyes, and ears work. The only place you can reach out and touch what’s in front of you. The in between is the only place we can utilize our gift of the five senses. What a gift it is to feel the sun on your skin, to walk into the house and smell freshly baked cookies, to shuffle your playlist and hear your favorite song come on first. The in between is the most important place to be. If you find yourself in other places more often than the present moment, odds are you’re not going to be happy, or as happy as you could be. Being in the future, or even the past, usually comes with the feeling of worry. “I shouldn’t have said that”, “I wonder what will happen”, “how will things play out?”. A healthy curiosity is always good, but the line between that and needing control or answers is a very fine one. It’s easy to spiral from an exciting, inspiring thought of the future to listing out the “what if’s”. Go back to where your feet are. Remind yourself you’re depriving yourself of life’s greatest gift, the gift that will never stop giving as long as you’re there to receive it- the present moment. When it gets difficult to do this, send your roots even deeper, let them soak up all the fresh rain and nutrients in the soil. Step out of your hyper-analytical mind and just feel everything your senses are providing your body with. When you have a fond memory of something, one where when you think about it you feel like you’re right back in that moment- it’s usually because your entire being **was** fully, completely \*\*\*\*in that moment. You can vividly remember how things felt, how you responded to those feelings, you recall who you were surrounded by, what your environment was. All the little details that seemingly don’t matter to someone you’re telling the story to are actually the most important ones. You want to make your future self happy? Create more of these core memories. Give yourself these soul fulfilling experiences to relive and stories to tell in their wholeness. Especially when you’re struggling with thinking in the past or future, hold it to yourself to make every moment a fond memory, no matter how big or small. I promise you will thank yourself. To wrap this up, I hope you have a few things floating around in your brain. I hope you know you are exactly where you need to be right now. I hope you know your current circumstances aren’t the only thing defining who you are at your core. I hope you know there is always room for change. That you have the power to make that change, and it might not feel as groundbreaking as you want it to at first. Keep going, be in the present moment. Meet yourself where you are. When you’re there, you know exactly what you need. *with love, sm* ### My first breathwork experience URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/fake-post/ Last updated: 2026-08-07T00:00:14.000Z I’m writing this the morning after my very first Cacao and breathwork ceremony. Mood: elated, motivated, refreshed, determined. My longtime friend mentioned this ceremony to me a few weeks ago, and with some hesitation, I signed up. Hesitation because WTF is Cacao (boujee hot chocolate?) and breathwork is just deep breathing right? Cacao ceremonies date back to 1900 B.C. and were conducted by the Maya and Ancient Aztec civilizations. Ceremonial grade-Cacao is the raw, unrefined version of cocoa or chocolate, usually sourced from farms in South America. Cacao's heart-opening properties are often attributed to its high levels of [theobromine, a mild stimulant](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4696435/?ref=withlovesm.com) that's believed to temporarily boost mood. The ceremony was held in a beautiful, refurbished barn in the middle of flowing, green fields. The sun was preparing to sink into the horizon and there was a consistent, light rainfall. It was totally a vibe. After rolling out my yoga mat and setting up my space in the circle with 15 others, the ceremony leader poured cacao into each of our mugs. We whispered our intention into the warm, thick Guatemalan drink and called on the spirit of cacao to join us in ceremony. The flavor profile: bitter, sweet and spicy. I pretty quickly felt grounded and open. ![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62ae5607dad0d46250415e75/b5653421-6b76-4c7b-845d-c0e1d983e03e/IMG_5974.jpg) We completed a series of deep visualization meditations on connecting with our inner child. We were guided to meeting and observing our ourselves as children. I felt emotions of both happiness and sadness (in a nostalgic way) come up, as the carefree, innocent little me looked up at me now. Following this was a session of journaling, answering the questions “when you were little, what came easily to you, what got you excited, what did you often do that you rarely do now, how did adults describe you?” We went back into a guided meditation on the now. The to-do list’s, the anxieties, the overthinking… everything that wasn’t there when we were children. Obviously, we can’t let go of *all* our responsibilities, but the second journal entry was surrounding the areas in our lives we can change. “In what life areas or relationships do you find yourself lying, telling half-truths, withholding thoughts and opinions and being inauthentic, where do you feel what you do is never enough, what drains vs fuels your energy?” This was really eye-opening to me. The journal entry and meditation that wrapped everything up was on **action**. Nothing can change unless we take new action. “Can you give yourself permission to do what’s right for you, what is one thing you could do or boundary you can set this week to honor your child self and create more ease and peace in your life?” The alignment workshop was over, and it was time for breathwork. Breathwork: intentionally changing your breathing pattern. Breathing in a conscious and systematic way, which influences your mental, emotional and physical state. The breathwork coach taught us the pattern- all belly breathing, through the mouth, two quick inhales, one exhale. It was fast paced- one in-in-out sequence was done in about a second. This pattern was said to be the same way our body breathes and feels when it’s in fight or flight response. When we feel we are in danger and we need to protect ourselves. We were following this breathing pattern for thirty minutes. Laying on my back, I stared at the ceiling, not knowing what this next half-hour would bring. Would I actually feel something? Would I feel super relaxed? We went around the circle and shouted an intention we had for this session. Mine was “release”. Justin Bieber started playing on the speaker. “Start breathing!” I was totally expecting some mediation bells and bowls music, so the playlist of Biebs, Muse and other high energy music came as a surprise to me. A good surprise! Everyone was breathing loud, exaggerating the breath in, it sounded like gasps. The leaders came around and made sure we were using our belly to breathe more than our chest. They were shouting encouragements and positive words. Halfway through the first song, it hit me. Justin Bieber faded to the background and it felt like I was going into full panic attack mode. I’ve been here before- this terrible, scary feeling where I begin to lose control of my body. I wondered if I should just resort to some deep breaths and take a break. “Keep going, you’ve done harder things.” My arms curled up against my sides, my hands under my chin. The second song was playing, we were five minutes in and my body was tingling and numb. My hands resembled crab claws, which we were told before was a normal thing that happens during breathwork. This phenomenon is called Tetany, and it’s caused by a deficiency of Carbon Dioxide in the blood (from the shallow breathing). Carbon Dioxide keeps your veins open, so when your CO2 levels drop, your veins contract. On a spiritual level, this represents some sh\*t you’re holding onto and need to let go. “Just let it go!” The third song started: I was laughing, and my face was twisting into weird expressions. Laughing quickly turned into crying, yes, completely bawling my eyes out. At this point, I was letting go. Of what? I don’t know, but I was surrendering to my breath and my body. The barn was filled with cries, shouts, gasps, and just pure emotion expressed physically. My ego went out the door, I gave myself permission to let out whatever felt right. The numbness and tingling turned into a feeling of being full of bright light and warmth. My hands un-tensed and I was floating. I was still following the breathing pattern, and I was comfortable in it. “You are about to experience the best energy release you’ve ever experienced.” After thirty minutes, we were told to scream as loud as we could. Yell and let that sh\*t OUT! Three, two, one… I’m just gonna say my throat still hurts after what I released in that screaming session. It was surreal. We finished the night with a mediation to bring us back to earth- I cried through the entire thing, along with many others. An oracle card was pulled from a pile and one of the leaders read it aloud. This made me smile because it resonated so much with me. I needed that card, it grounded me and made me so incredibly grateful to be in the circle with everyone that night. The fifteen others in the circle were strangers to me (besides my friend who introduced me to the event), but I left feeling connected with each person, for we just went through that powerful experience together, and each one of us contributed to the power it held. Through sharing personal stories, emotions and being completely vulnerable with each other, I felt I made some amazing connections. There are so many details I just can’t describe through this article, but I hope it makes you want to try breathwork. Intense breathwork is doing the deep, scary work. The work that needs to be done, that you consciously might not realize. Facing my fears in the beginning of the session and continuing with the breath pattern was extremely difficult, but I knew I came for a reason and that I needed to fully surrender to see results. You cannot expect change without action. Thank you to Porta Alchemica Healing Arts @[porta\_alchemica\_skan](https://www.instagram.com/porta%5Falchemica%5Fskan/?ref=withlovesm.com) for hosting this event! Also to [The Kester Homestead](https://www.thekesterhomestead.com/?ref=withlovesm.com) for letting us use this beautiful space, Tess Teater [@tessteater\_breathwork](https://www.instagram.com/tessteater%5Fbreathwork/?ref=withlovesm.com) for introducing me to breathwork, Morgan Noble [@soulrememberer](https://www.instagram.com/soulrememberer/?ref=withlovesm.com) for being an amazing leader and coach. And shoutout to every brave, beautiful soul who sat in that circle with me. ![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62ae5607dad0d46250415e75/5ebfa3cd-950b-49b5-80aa-bb00a8af4159/B4937460-B77A-4D23-8A54-2BABE4EDA56C.jpg) *with love, sm* ### You are a vibe URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/you-are-a-vibe/ Last updated: 2026-08-01T00:55:09.000Z The reason you have not already gotten what you desire is because you are holding yourself in a vibrational pattern that doesn't match the vibration of your desire. Pause. If you read that and are starting to contemplate the science behind that statement (like I once did), I want you to read or skim through this article before continuing with mine. [The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man!](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-all-about-vibrations-man/?ref=withlovesm.com) If you're choosing to just continue on here, that article I linked discusses how all things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating- even objects that appear to be stationary. It states, “an interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating things/processes come into proximity: they will often start, after a little time, to vibrate together at the same frequency.” The framework behind studies on vibration, resonance and frequency is the study of human consciousness, neurobiology and biophysics. So, if we begin to understand our thoughts are vibrations, we can put ourselves in a vibrational place of receiving all that we are asking for. You just have to feel a desire to do so in your being, and this desire is the beginning of all attraction. There is a current of energy that runs through the Universe and everything and everyone is affected by it. It's key to be aware that this current exists and understand that we can mold this energy through our power of focus by thinking, remembering, imagining, speaking, writing, listening, and so on. This directly ties in with the Law of Attraction, which says, “that which is like unto itself is drawn”, meaning that every thought attracts a matching signal back. Nothing is going to occur in your life experience without your invitation of it through thought. One thing that I learned after reading “Ask and It Is Given" by Esther and Jerry Hicks, was that “if there is something that you desire that you currently do not have, and you put your attention upon your current state of not having it, then law of attraction will continue to match that not having it vibration”. When we are manifesting, we can't be coming from the place of anger, sadness or jealousy because we lack this thing we are manifesting. We cannot wait for our condition to change to then start aligning our vibration to what we really desire, we need to begin there, then watch our condition change. The stream of well-being and source energy is always flowing within us, we either allow it, or resist it. When you are feeling blessed and expecting good things to come to you, it indicates you have a high level of allowing. Whether or not you believe it, you are a vibrational being. You are a transmitter and receiver, and your present and future circumstances begin to change in response to the signals you put out every moment. It is impossible to exclude anything you give your attention to from your vibration. In this attraction-based Universe, saying yes to something is included just as much as saying no is. If you are giving any bit of attention to a subject, it affects your vibration. This is why we must learn to observe and understand what vibrations make us feel in harmony with our true selves. Your emotions act as a navigational system. Apple Maps never asks you "where have you been?” or “why have you been there so long?” when you put in an address. Its only mission is to assist you in getting from where you are to where you want to be. As your emotions are giving you specific feedback about your vibration, you can proceed with any deliberate and gradual adjustments. You should always try to reach for the best-feeling thought that you have access to. Any intensifying negative emotions mean that you are going in the wrong direction. ![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62ae5607dad0d46250415e75/492b48d4-3287-445f-92b9-1d815358c8d7/107632282_10216352144546204_3549277295748359891_n.jpg) We can feel confused sometimes because we are flowing our energy in opposing directions. We are experiencing extreme vibrational disharmony. We are easily influenced by vibrations of those who surround us, circumstances that we are under and the desire for instant gratification. One practice of raising your vibration is appreciation. When we are appreciating ourselves and others, we are the closest vibrational matches to our source energy. When we are focused on something or someone we appreciate, that choice of thought is so similar to who we really are, and there is no contradiction in our energy. It makes us feel good. In opposition, the vibration of criticism is very different from that of your source. If you do not do something that causes a different vibrational offering, then nothing in your experience can change. The most important thing you can do for yourself, is write down or notice how you are feeling right now and how you would like to feel. Masking your emotions and who you truly are does nothing to change your vibration, it just causes confusion. Deliberate creation is the goal. Deliberately guiding your thoughts in good-feeling directions. After a while, the Law of Attraction will give you the feeling of control, which we all like. The more often you visit a thought, the more familiar the vibration becomes. It's about repetition and allowing yourself to fully trust and believe in this thought. Your life experience is unfolding in response to the vibrations that radiate as a result of your thoughts, so reach for the good ones! *with love, sm*