Activation Therapy, what spark will it take to Love Yourself?
The cool summer night breeze off of the ocean blows your hair around and into your face. As you slowly brush the hair from your eyes, you close your eyes for a moment to smell the salt air and the cool breeze on your face. Laughter swirls all around you, as your friends tell jokes and laughter fills the air. “Let’s do it” one of your friends yell and you get up. You look down to strategically place the pile of wood, ripe for a bonfire on the beach. In your hand is a long match. With a strike you light the match and begin the start of a fire. With some patience and time the flames take hold and a bonfire is in full swing.
It’s time for me the author to open my eyes and move away from this peaceful vision of a bonfire. This scenario is a form of something being “Activated.” The actions and moments that led up to the wood catching the flames. Lighting the match and taking the flame to the wood, causing flames to take flight, is a form of Activation. The match flame activated the wood to burn. The definition of Activation according to “Collins Dictionary”: to make active; cause to function. to induce radioactivity, excite a molecule, chemistry.” This little daydream that I gave you was a form of Scientific Activation.
Scratching your head right now and wondering how does Activation play a part in your personal Self-Care? Let’s take a deeper dive and look at the Psychological definition of Activation. Britannica.com states, “Activation , Psychology, the stimulation of the cerebral cortex into a state of general wakefulness, or attention. Activation proceeds from various portions of the brain, but primarily from the reticular formation, the nerve network in the midbrain that monitors ingoing and outgoing, sensory and motor impulses.” Wow, my friends, that was a lot to process. Let’s break this down and how YOU BECOMING ACTIVATED is related to these definitions.
Behavioral Activation is when you or a mental health professional encourages you to use behaviors to influence or impact your internal feelings. Emotional Activation is the same concept but using your emotions to impact your mental health and to cognitively acknowledge their feelings. Dear reader, I want you take these two forms of Activation and place the theories in your everyday lives. I WANT YOU TO GET ACTIVATED! Season 5 of this Blog and my Podcast are geared towards the concept of Loving Yourself. I believe becoming Activated is a great way to walk towards loving yourself more. l am a true Reality TV addict. In the Bravo show Summer House cast member Lindsay Hubbard often states when she is getting triggered, “Don’t Activate me, you don’t want to see me Activated.” I even believe there are shirts on Etsy that say. “don’t activate me.” Lindsay Hubbard usually would say this when someone was pushing her buttons and getting her to the point of letting her emotions take flight.
Take all of these definitions and even the Bravo example that I gave you and use it in the process of Activating Yourself. I want you to take these behaviors, emotions and actions, utilize them to create positive change in your life towards the way you see yourself. We are going to take this Activation Therapy as a method of positive change in your life and self-care. The passion behind anger, frustration and irritation can be harnessed into creating a healthy outlook on yourself. The energy that it takes to strike a match and light wood on fire is the metaphor we are going to use to Activate you to Loving Yourself. It takes a lot of skill and work to get a fire started and there is just as much effort needed to Love Yourself.
Loving Yourself, is a lifelong process that will evolve with you, if you keep a conscious effort on the skill. Activation Therapy to love ourselves, encourages us to connect with our emotions. I told you above that this will be my year focus for you. Maybe, you are even reading this blog and saying ,”I don’t even know how to start Loving Myself or Loving Myself more.” That is the perfect start for us, here and now. I would often give my clients self-knowledge tasks to ignite the spark of self-love and insight. Yes, I am going to give you a task as well. It is important to connect your perceptions of yourself, with emotionally how you feel about you.
PROCESSING HOW YOU LOVE YOURSELF JOURNEY
I would like you to find a quiet, peaceful place for you to work. For this Journey you will need a large piece of paper, colored pencils or markers. I know it sounds very basic or even juvenile. I am going to ask you to LET THAT SHIT GO and get in touch with your inner child here. Coloring and drawing is not specific to childhood. I mean why do you think thousands of people are getting rich on publishing Adult coloring books?????? There is a method to the madness.
Starting this Journey, please make sure you have undisturbed quiet time.
1. Pick a color that represents you
2. Draw the outline of your body, how you see it.
3. First pick colors that are pleasurable to you
4. Connect with the positive emotions that you are feeling about yourself and mark those areas with an X, heart, smiley face, whatever symbol helps you get in touch with these self-love emotions and feelings.
5. The next step is to pick colors that represent the areas that you feel the sad, angry and painful emotions about yourself.
6. Connect with these emotions for a moment, mark them with symbols or emojis that represent these feeling towards yourself.
7. Sit back and take a good look at your drawing.
8. What insights do you gain from what you have put on paper?
9. The bottom or back of the paper, please write down any observations, feelings or emotions this picture elicits in you.
This is your starting point of self-discovery and Loving Yourself. This image that you have created has drawn insight into the positive and negative views you have of yourself. We start here because it gives us a road map into your internal feelings of you. This is where the ACTIVATION THERAPY begins for you. Harness what you have drawn to motivate the change. Look at the positive and the hard parts that you have drawn. Take the energy from the positive perspectives and chose one of the darker images to begin to look at how you can change how you see this aspect of yourself. This blog is not a band aid or a quick Self-Love fix. I believe my friends, that you are here because you know that evolution and change in your life comes from the work you put in. I know that you are ready to do the work. This weeks Podcast Episode 156 delves deeper into this task and gets us moving in the right direction to, ACTIVATE THE LOVE YOU FEEL FOR YOURSELF. We all just need a spark ,like a fire, to get us to begin a change in perception.
I am here for you on this Journey of Loving Yourself and I believe it will be a beautiful road to travel. Evolving is always the goal and it must start with Loving Yourself more. I want you to say to yourself, “I WANT TO SEE MYSELF ACTIVATED, I WANT ACTIVATE MY INTERNAL VOICE TOWARDS POSITIVE SELF AFFIRMATIONS, OUTLOOK AND A MEANS OF POSITIVE CHANGE IN MY LIFE.” I believe in you my friends and you must begin to believe the power you have inside yourself for change. I would love for you to send me a message about how you are ACTIVATING yourself towards self-love. If you are a reader that already loves yourself, well, there never can be something as too much internal self-love. I mean unless you are extremely self-absorbed, selfish or a me, myself and I person. If that is the case, well then maybe you should ACTIVATE yourself into sharing that love and energy towards others. Honestly, that is a discussion for another blog in the future.
The drawing that you created, keep handy. so that you can refer back to it if you feel like you are losing your focus of loving yourself.
GO ON ACTIVATE ME, I AM READY TO LOVE MYSELF!
POSITIVE THOUGHTS CREATE POSITIVE ENERGY
EXPLORE THE WIDE OPEN SPACES IN YOUR WORLD AND JOIN THE FIERY REDHEAD IN A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY
CIAO,
ILISE
