I’ve always eaten relatively well and been quasi-health conscious, but when I got adrenal fatigue, I realized I didn’t know how to truly take care of myself.
Forgetting to eat lunch happened more often than I'd like to admit, a wrist injury had removed yoga from the equation — in those days it was yoga or bust, and my sleep schedule was an absolute wreck.
After crashing, I didn’t bother going to a Western doctor because from what I understand they don’t believe adrenal fatigue is real. Anyway, I didn’t want pills.
Waiting and resting wasn't doing anything.
And I did try going to an integrative doctor but all she offered was a new supplement for each issue.
Deep down, I knew that to heal, I had to get back in balance, to learn how to truly take care of myself with a daily routine.
I trusted my intuition to guide me, just like it did to heal depression when I was younger, and just like it guided me to my life purpose.
Sure enough, my inner wisdom led me the right practices, ideas, and even people on Instagram who honestly helped me more than any doctor. (Shoutout to @empoweredautoimmune and @carnivoreaurelius.)
For some people there are emotional healing aspects to recovering from health issues, and my renowned shadow work process has helped many people heal deep emotional wounds, but I’d already done so much emotional healing.
I wasn't in pain about the past. I needed to heal my body in the present.
I needed to get grounded and find a daily, nurturing routine to relax my nervous system.
I used to be so resistant to daily routine, but now I crave it. It makes me feel safe and loved and nurtured.
If you want to transcend the past and create the future of your dreams, you need a nurturing daily rhythm with as many healing and supportive practices as you have time to include.
It can get a little boring, and sometimes I rebel against myself, but I’ve just had to build discipline, which has also been a good thing.
1. Morning sunlight in eyes, no sunglasses.
This helps reset your circadian rhythm, which promotes restful sleep. It's also an energizing way to start the day.
2. Morning meditation
Sometimes I do 5 minutes of alternate nostril breathing followed by 10 minutes of regular meditation. Lately I’ve been doing a Joe Dispenza morning visualization meditation that’s amazing.
3. Meals at regular times
I used to be really bad about eating lunch, or just throwing dinner together, often kinda late. Now I always plan what I'm eating for lunch the night before (usually leftovers), and meal plan dinners for the week. Getting so good at adulting!
4. Afternoon sun without sunscreen
I truly believe people wear way too much sunscreen (skin cancer rates continue to go UP despite record levels of sun avoidance and sunscreen application), and are way too afraid of the sun. Sun exposure has a host of incredible health benefits, and non-burning sun exposure has been linked to REDUCED melanoma risk.
In the late afternoon, the rays have more healing red light and less UVA/UVB so I like to soak it in without sunscreen. Sometimes by the pool when it’s too hot to walk, other times I habit stack and get sun on my walk.
I do protect my face, and have gotten a little sun damage, but I have scars all over my body so what are a few sun spots? At least they represent FUN.
5. Afternoon yoga nidra
This is a basically a guided body scan meditation that promotes deep rest. It relaxes your nervous system and helps you recover depleted energy. I love Ally Boothroyd on YouTube. It's an essential part of my daily routine.
6. Pilates
Strength or resistance training has been essential to my recovery. Looking back, it's probably been the most impactful thing in my daily routine although it's hard to separate any one thing from the effects of the whole.
Building muscle improves mitochondrial health, which promotes energy. Plus, not gonna lie, I really want a hot Pilates body. I usually do 30 minutes mat, 4 days a week, on YouTube. Working to more, and also want to add cardio.
7. Walk
Love my afternoon walks! They're so incredibly grounding. If I feel anxious or unsettled, a walk is like medicine to my soul. In the summer I usually go after dinner when it's cooler (still 112 degrees, but at least no sun), but now I like to go during golden hour. Absolutely beautiful. Favorite part of my day. This part of my daily routine changes depending upon the season.
8. Cook dinner
I've grown to love cooking even though I used to hate it. Eating a well prepared meal feels like love.
9. Bedtime routine
I could do a whole blog on this, but the most important part of my daily routine is yin yoga. I love to do 30 minutes, longer is amazing, some nights it's only 15 or 20 minutes, but it releases all the tension from my body and helps me sleep so much better. Insomnia was something I struggled with on my healing journey, and ensuring good sleep has been a top priority.
This is a lot, and I was thankfully able to stop working and just focus on my health.
It's definitely been an adjustment adding work back in, but going slow and constantly evaluating has been the key. Messing up is part of the process!
The good news is these things are all free. Combined, they've been an incredible way to reset my health, help me regain my energy, and to feel more balanced, grounded and happy. My daily routine has honestly changed my life.
If you’re in a space of wanting to improve your health, I recommend picking just one to three habits, anything you can incorporate into your daily routine, and focus o that before expanding.
Change happens in small, incremental shifts. It's taken YEARS to become consistent with my daily routine.
A note on time: These things give you time because they give you more energy, focus and creativity.
When you take the time to focus on your health, everything else gets better. Health is the foundation of everything.
I hope that resonated with you!
Let me know if you’re interested in hearing more about any of these habits, how to be consistent with a routine, or my more extra self-care / beauty and health rituals.
Respond and let me know - what’s your favorite healthy habit? I’d love to hear!
Till next time,
Suzanne
]]>Over the past few years I have truly dialed in my planning and tracking system for setting and achieving goals.
I wanted to share it today to help you achieve your goals in 2024.
If you’re like me and crave deep meaning and purpose in your life, you’re introspective and creative but sometimes feel pulled in a million directions with new ideas and desires, and you need help staying grounded and focused, you will love this system.
I’ve used this method to heal adrenal fatigue and improve my health, to publish self-help books/guided journals, to grow my blog, and now, to - hopefully grow my You Tube channel.
This whole method is about focusing on effort, not outcome because you can’t always control your results, but you can control your effort, and if you keep trying, keep iterating, you will find your way.
This is the system I’ve outlined for you in my new planner, goal journal and habit tracker, The Most Meaningful Year, but I’m going to guide you through the whole system today.
First, figure out what feels truly meaningful to you
What goals do you really want to achieve, not based on what you think the result will get you, or what you think you should want, or what a previous version of you wanted, but what is your heart is really calling out for you to create in life?
A good way to determine this is to ask yourself — will the process of achieving this goal be enjoyable or add something to your life, or develop you in some way?
It's also helpful to connect the underlying motivation for the goal to one of your core values. (I talk more about this in the video.)
Don’t worry right now about picking your top goals, but rather give yourself time and space to explore what you really want in all areas of life.
Do you want to improve your fitness? Maybe you want to advance in your career, deepen or create relationships, or make more money, which can be meaningful when approached the right way.
At this point, you probably have several goals across multiple areas of life.
Sometimes people will vow to create dramatic changes, and this is a great way to make zero progress toward your goals and feel defeated. And that’s when people give up. Maybe sad, but true.
Achieving your goals in 2024 is about making small, sustainable changes that add up over time.
Next, zero in and get focused if you want to achieve your goals.
Pick one to three goals at a time (less is better if you’re not strong with your ability to maintain habits— let me know if you want content on that).
You can always work on more later, but true change happens when you commit to small changes over a long period of time.
The nature of achieving goals is a very up and down process, rather than the linear. Because of this, focusing and developing an intimacy with your goals is critical to maintain and deepen progress.
Reneging on your commitments is part of the process, so you need to create an environment for yourself where that’s anticipated so you can just recommit rather than get overwhelmed or feel defeated. Fostering that sense of commitment requires focus.
Next, identify the next steps required, and boil it down into a habit.
This can be a daily habit, or it can be weekly or monthly depending upon the goal.
Let’s take improving your fitness.
You could set the goal of doing a 30-minute workout 4 days a week. Or taking a daily walk. Or hitting the gym a certain number of days a week.
Let’s say you want to make friends. (This is one of my goals.)
Maybe you set the habit to, once a month, attend a class or event or something that will put you in a position to meet new people.
What about if you want to eat healthier?
You could make it a habit to meal plan or meal prep - so that would be a weekly habit.
You can still do this with more nebulous habits.
Some of my December goals are to work on confidence and equanimity.
To feel more confident and even, I am journaling daily (I don’t always journal every day, more as needed) and doubling down on my usual healthy habits because sometimes things slide when I get busy.
It sounds maybe silly or obvious but these are things that help us achieve our goals, and that don’t get done if we don’t take the time to think about it, determine a course of action, and then track it.
The key, regardless of what you want to accomplish or achieve, is to create a habit around it because our habits create our day, and our days create our lives, and we all have habits and a schedule we stick to whether we’re aware of it or not, or whether it helps us or not, so the key is to become aware of it and consciously design it so all we have to do is show up to the day’s tasks.
Over time, our days build in a way that we achieve our goals in a way that feels manageable and not overwhelming.
Next, you want to track your habits.
If you’re doubting the power of tracking your habits to achieve your goals in 2024 — and I definitely used to be a doubter — let me share with you why it’s so effective.
First of all, you’ve probably heard statistics about how people who write their goals down are more likely to achieve them, and if you haven’t, yes, it’s true.
The same is true with writing down the goals for the habits you have. It’s a way of committing to it.
The little checkmark you put on the page after completing the habit feels victorious. It increases your self-esteem, sense of competency and self-trust, increasing your ability to feel like you can achieve your goal in the first place.
And when you skip a day, you realize you skip a day. You might feel a little disappointed, or commit even harder to do the habit the next day.
At the end of the week, you can clearly see which habits you need to spend a little extra time and effort to make sure they get completed.
Think about New Year’s Resolutions and how many people give up because they skip a few days, feel like a failure, and let themselves off the hook from continuing to try.
What would happen if those same people just kept writing down the habit and kept trying again? If this is you, what if you kept trying to figure out how to achieve your goals in 2024?
Maybe the next week, you would exercise or do whatever habit you committed to one more day than if you had not recommitted.
And the next week, and the next week.
Eventually, no matter how recalcitrant you are when it comes to lifestyle change, and you’re anything like me, it can take years, but if you keep trying, you will succeed. That’s how to achieve your goals in 2024.
It’s okay if it takes years. If you give up, it’s not going to happen at all.
You need to track your habits and keep recommitting.
That's why the final step to achieving your goals in 2024 is to frequently evaluate and recommit.
Each week or month, or even at the end of each day, go back and ask yourself - how did I do? What can I do better? Do this in a journal, preferably. Writing it down is very powerful.
What I like to do is each day, mentally review how I did by reviewing the day’s tasks and the habits I did or didn’t do. Each week during a short journal session, I check in and reconnect with my goals and wellbeing while in pursuit of my goals and ask myself what I need.
And then each month, I set new goals or reaffirm my my existing goals by setting them again, in writing, adjusting as necessary, by either shifting the goal (maybe I used to work out 3x each week, and now I want to do 4x, or add in a different type of workout), or add completely new ones.
Honestly, each month my goals are mostly the exact same.
This can seem boring, but that’s because I’m working steadfastly on certain things and continuing to get better at them. And it’s funny how when you focus intently on improving one aspect of your life, it naturally improves other aspects of your life simply because everything is related.
You're probably not going to like this, but —
Achieving your goals is about consistency, repetition, and embracing being boring. That’s how you get results.
People often think creative lives are about constant change, but the truth is great artists and writers and other creatives traditionally maintain strict schedules. It helps the muse.
If you want this exact process laid out for you step by step, you will love The Most Meaningful Year.
MMY is the ultimate planner, goal journal and habit tracker. This is a book designed for people who long for deeper meaning and fulfillment in their lives, and who are devoted to the journey of becoming the best version of themselves.
It features space to review 2023, daydream a 2024 vision in all areas of life (spiritual connection, relationships, health, home, personal growth, career and finances), connect to an intention and goal each month, and track your habits so you actually realize your goals.
It also has reflection questions to begin and end the week so you stay on track and nurture your soul. It's the perfect system to help you achieve your goals in 2024.
I’m so excited to use this book, and if you think it could help you achieve your goals, check it out!
Till next time,
Suzanne
PS — The video contains some different points if you want to watch it. I tried to read a script, but it didn't really work out that way :)
PPS — Reply here or in the YouTube comments and let me know what your big goals are for 2024. I love connecting with you and would love to hear!
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Sometimes I feel overwhelmed, simultaneously pulled by work dreams and house things, and navigating that balance in a new and different way because over the past few years of healing from adrenal fatigue, I came to appreciate my role in making my house a home because it felt nurturing and soothing, but now that I feel better, I want to boss bitch it up again.
This intense conflict between wanting to take immaculate care of myself, finish renovations on my house (we had the most stressful tile job last week), prepare for the holidays, cook weeknight meals (I like to go all out because I hate boring food), and do my work stuff...
It drives me insane. And I don’t even have kids!
But then I realized that a lot of you can probably relate. This is the plight of being a woman.
This may make some people mad, and it honestly makes me mad sometimes, but the truth is that a woman's work is vital to the functioning of not only our homes, but of society.
It's easy to blame men for not picking up the slack, but (most) men are not biologically wired to do the homey things we do.
Men enjoy decorations but will not make mood boards of garlands and ornaments and Christmas cookies. My husband didn't even have a coffee table when I met him.
Women have internalized beliefs that cooking and cleaning are not meaningful activities, but when dinner time rolls around and you want a hot, delicious meal, or you go through the day annoyed at any clutter accumulating around you, you quickly realize how important these tasks are.
The bedrock of society.
Women have a lot to offer, beyond household activities, but women in particular are blessed with a special warmth, one that turns a house into a home.
It's in our best interests — and the best interest of society — to organize our lives in such a way to create time and space to care for ourselves so we have the capacity to exude that warmth and care for our homes, along with the million and one other worldly tasks we do.
This gets overwhelming. We can feel resentful. Especially around the holidays.
(If you have extenuating circumstances, do the best you can with what you have!)
The old me didn't make time for home activities.
My house was sparsely decorated. I threw together dinner each night without much thought. I excessively focused on work, and my amazing husband always stepped up to help, but the truth is that our home life was spiritually impoverished.
We ate frozen pizza way too many nights. Our house was not the respite from the world that it is today.
The truth is, I LOVE working. When I'm in the flow, stopping to do anything else feels like pulling away from a magnet.
Once I do manage to pull away, I notice how good it feels to attend to these other meaningful parts of my life.
Creating a vibrant home life fulfills me in ways work never could, but that doesn't make this balance any easier to find.
I'm realizing I need to change my expectations.
To live a balanced, meaningful, healthy life, I can't work as much as I used to, which means things will take much longer to get done, and some things won’t get done at all.
I need to be okay with work life slowing down, because like I wrote about last week, if you just keep showing up every day, things will happen, in the time and way they're meant to.
I don't have to worry or stress. It's my default, but I can question the assumptions my stress is built upon rather than feed into the worries those assumptions create.
When things are meant to be, they just flow, like this blog, which ended up taking no time at all to write.
While work life is about moving things forward, home life is about enjoying the stillness.
After a day of action, grounding down by walking, cooking dinner, doing skin care and bedtime yoga allows my nervous system to catch up with the day's movement.
The holidays in particular are a special time, one that deserves extra attention and love because ultimately, life is about family.
I don't want to be snappy or overwhelmed or too busy to make the holidays special.
(Full disclosure, we are going out to eat on Thanksgiving! But it's just three people, and really not worth cooking so much food. Our meal will be very special.)
If you too feel overwhelmed this holiday, know that overwhelm and stress are only signs of expansion.
They’re opportunities to remember what's important.
Sometimes arranging our lives around what's important requires us to go against our habitual nature. (Like my nature is to excessively work. Going against that is a growth opportunity.)
We truly don't have time for everything, but we do have time for everything that matters.
That means we have to make choices.
With those choices comes compromise.
However, with that compromise comes true happiness, meaning and fulfillment.
Maybe not where we thought we'd find it, but where our souls long to be.
Reply and let me know — how has your relationship with your home life evolved over the years? How do you balance career and home? Do you have a strict schedule? Focus on different things on different days? I'm very curious!
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
Till next time,
Suzanne
PS — If you are feeling lonely or sad this holiday season, know that you are not alone. Please consider reaching out to someone or volunteering or following whatever guidance your soul gives you to navigate this season. You are part of the whole, even if you don't always feel that way. <3
]]>"You have a career of 40 years, you don't have to burn it all out in five." Elliot Mintz to Paris Hilton in her memoir. (It's really good!)
Oops.
I wish a wise older person had told me these things before I allowed impatience to derail me from my true path in my 20s, and then burn it all out in five once I found it anyway in my 30s.
Oh well. The beautiful thing about life is there are infinite chances to begin again.
Two things can simultaneously be true:
As someone whose dad died at the ripe old age of 48, when I was 14, I felt an urgency from early on to LIVE.
To follow my heart, prioritize experiences and not care about gaps in my resume, knowing that tomorrow is never guaranteed.
I'm so grateful for that urge because without it, I wouldn't have left the cozy nest of my home state to have adventures after college, like working on a farm in Hawaii.
Your 20s are about exploring yourself and the world, but the world puts so much pressure on you — on everyone really — to have it all figured out when the truth is we never have it all figured out because we're always growing, changing and evolving.
Sidenote, a lot of famous or highly successful people end up really depressed, suicidal even, and my armchair opinion based on a deep understanding of both people and pain, is that this can sometimes come from a feeling of being trapped, like they can't evolve, because their entire life is based upon the fame character they created, or that was created around them.
It takes strength to evolve past the thing that pays your bills, especially when the whole world expects something of you, and that's the thing for which you're accustomed to receiving "love."
When I got cancer at 27, all I could think was: "I'm so incredibly glad I went to Hawaii.”
But some impulses eventually short-circuit the breaker.
Eventually my urge to LIVE made me short-sighted, pushed me to rush, rush rush, in an effort to quickly create results that realistically take a decade to build.
I don't think I'm alone in this, during this age of instant gratification.
When you're young, you think about what you'll do when you grow up.
Then you grow up and think, "Is this it?" That's when people have mid-life crises.
But that only happens if you're bored. Not if you keep building.
To stay inspired, I connect to my 80-year-old self (should I be blessed to live that long) and look backward to acknowledge how young I still am, how much opportunity still exists, and how grateful I am to be able to continue to create, grow and experience.
Instead of wondering how long it’ll take to achieve my goals, or if I can achieve them at all, I take pleasure in a daily rhythm filled with things that bring me joy. Writing. Reading. Creating. Working out. Cooking. Being outside.
Amid it all, it’s fun to ponder - I wonder what will happen over the next 10 or 20 years if I keep showing up? Keep building, creating, taking chances and trying new things?
I don’t know exactly what will happen, but that’s part of the fun. The adventure.
It gives me motivation to LIVE. But also — to take my time.
One thing that's helping me find that balance is the new planner I'm working on (so close to completion!) called The Most Meaningful Year.
I love this planner because each weekly spread has space for a monthly intention, weekly goals and an affirmation. They're right in front of me all the time so I never forget.
These goals and intentions come directly from included journal prompts, so they're deeply meaningful - not randomly selected out of thin air like with most planners.
Using this planner gives me the feeling that I'm a ship slicing through the choppy waters of life directly toward my goals, desires and intentions, making steady progress, rather than chaotic, ungrounded and unsure.
I'm so excited to share this planner with you!
Would love to hear from you! Respond and let me know: What's something you're grateful you did, or something you still want to do?
Either way, I hope this week's blog inspires you to LIVE, but also to take your time.
Till next time,
Suzanne
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Despite the myriad cliches about trusting the timing of your life, the reality of living such wisdom feels much more difficult.
How can we be patient with ourselves amid the infinite scroll of smiling, happy, perfect people (“influencers” whose sole purpose is to persuade us to be like them rather than evolve as ourselves), and who seem much more successful and fulfilled than we are now, or perhaps ever will be?
We know social media is a big fat illusion, and you know you need to stop comparing yourself to others — otherwise you wouldn't be reading this — but why does it feel so hard?
These comparisons seem to "make us think" we should be further along or have something we currently don't, but the reason we latch onto these painful comparisons is because of our own doubts, fears and insecurities.
These insecurities already existed, it's just that a few specific illusions — which I'll get to in a moment — bring these subconscious fears to the surface.
Identifying this problem as an inner one rather than an outer one is important because it allows us to take our power back. This is essential if you want to stop comparing yourself to others.
Now we descend into the heart of the matter —
Ask yourself: What are you really reacting to? What are you afraid of in this moment? What do you feel you are lacking, and what is the story you're telling yourself about that?
When you are at peace internally, you know in your core that you are at the right place, in the right time, doing the right things. You feel that and that feeling makes you less susceptible to comparison.
Earlier I mentioned illusions that trigger our deeper fears, inciting comparison. One of those illusions is that of continual increase. We see people who never seem to encounter setbacks, which makes us fight against our own, which ironically prevents us from rising above them.
Continual increase does not exist. Life is a series of ebbs and flows, endings and beginnings — for everyone.
Even the people who seem to have it together the most have failures and sadnesses they don't necessarily share with the world.
Experiencing setbacks triggers a fear of being unable to overcome them while also highlighting fears that we're not worthy of or capable of creating what we want.
When we see other people who have what we want, we tell ourselves they must never have dealt with the problems we're dealing with.
This only makes us feel sorry for ourselves. And it's fueled by a deeper fear that what we want isn't possible. That it may be possible for THEM, but not for US.
And even if you believe that you're capable of creating what you want, a lot of times it's this deeper uncertainty of being able to successfully navigate obstacles, setbacks and momentary failures that causes us to give up, or waste energy focusing on other people rather than creating solutions to our problems.
Many of us have low self-esteem, and we don't believe in our capacity to succeed or see the value in our self-expression. When we compare ourselves to others, there is an element of wishing we were them, because we see them as valuable and capable, and ourselves as not valuable and not capable.
In the moment of comparison, we dismiss our own value, along with our capacity to overcome.
When you stop comparing yourself to others, you are also taking responsibility for how you show up in life, choosing to navigate ups and downs with more strength, resilience and grace.
People with high self-esteem have greater resilience and an ability to respond to life's setbacks in healthy ways, making it so difficulties don't last as long or affect them as drastically.
People with high self-esteem consider their success inevitable because they focus on core traits like their ability to adapt rather than surface things like momentary difficulties.
When you increase your confidence and spiritual connection, continue developing practical skills and stay connected to your own creative impulse, you'll be less vulnerable to comparison attacks.
That's the best way to stop comparing yourself to others.
It'll still happen, but it won't affect you as much or for as long.
We're all so unique. The more you value your uniqueness, you'll understand on a deep inner level that we all have unique journeys.
This inner appreciation allows you to appreciate others and feel inspired by them — without comparing yourself to them.
That's why I created Soul Scroll Journals. I wanted everyone to have the tools to feel confident and be resilient.
To release the past pain causing you to doubt your value, to increase your self-esteem so you can live in alignment with your highest self.
If you're ready to get started, I recommend either our best-selling Self-Love guided journal — with nearly 170 five-star reviews on Amazon — or the Listen to Your Heart guided journal.
The Self-Love journal is for people who have a lot of past pain to work through and need help understanding their emotions.
Listen to Your Heart is for people who feel unsure about their next chapter in life and want to ask themselves the big questions about who they are and what they want.
Aligning with your highest self is about believing in your highest possibility and releasing anything that isn't that.
We're so grateful to guide your journey.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
We make guided journals to help you know, love and trust yourself so you can create a life as unique as you are.
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When something I want seems totally out of my control, I turn to the Universe.
Sometimes you have to rely on miracles!
To manifest the perfect house, I'm doing a few spiritual and manifestation practices.
First, even though you could say manifesting IS a spiritual practice, I like to think of spiritual practices as ones that help me release attachment, find peace with what is, and connect to source while manifesting is about how to best use the energy of desire.
I’ve always had a difficult time manifesting because I can get attached to my desire or freak out that it's not happening. Manic manifesting can definitely be effective, but it’s not the way I want to live my life.
So I spend my energy in equal ways: aligning to my goal, staying positive, and also chilling out.
This practice involves writing a positive affirmation around your desire 55 times in a row for five days.
The affirmation needs to be in the present tense, for example:
I am so happy and grateful that…
Thank you for...
X happened so easily and effortlessly.
My affirmation happens to be kinda long and it takes me about 40 minutes to write it all down!
Every day, I felt lazy and didn’t feel like doing it, but then I rationalized to myself — Suzanne, if you could manifest the house of your dreams and all you had to do was spend 40 minutes a day for five days writing out affirmations, what a special gift that is.
If you're having trouble believing you can have what you want, check out the Listen to Your Heart journal, which will help you release self-doubt related to manifesting your dreams.
If you rush through writing just to get it done, it won't work. Take your time and let it become a meditation / visualization of aligning to your desire.
How it helps:
Repeating affirmations so many times helps it sink into your brain. Before starting this, I was freaking out about the market. It’s SO tight right now. We lost three houses last weekend, and one of them had 15 offers in 48 hours.
I could make up so many negative stories in my head, and for a while I was.
Now, when negative thoughts come, my affirmation automatically overrides them. The practice helped me feel full of faith that the perfect house will come to us at the perfect time.
40-day practices are my jam. A few years ago when I was feeling stuck and unfulfilled in my life, a 40-day yoga practice helped me find my true path. It’s the whole reason I started my blog. Many of you have done my program The Big Shift, which is modeled after that transformational experience.
So to add some spiritual connection to my 555 practice, I'm doing the adi shakti mantra for 40 days.
40 days is a powerfully symbolic spiritual number of renewal and faith. Kundalini yoga says it’s also the amount of time required to clear old patterns and create new habits.
The adi shakti mantra specifically increases your personal power by helping you connect to primordial feminine energy, the energy of creation and manifestation.
How it helps:
This is an awesome practice for feeling more peaceful and positive. After chanting, I literally feel my body buzzing with energy. Try it even just once!
My September intention was to ground down, better manage my nervous system, and tune into my body throughout the day to notice when I feel tense or anxious.
Have you ever struggled with feeling tired all the time, or tired but wired? Maybe you'ved experienced feeling tons of energy, but then crashed.
One possible cause of this is an overtaxed nervous system. (This is just what I've figured out for me, using my intuition and self-awareness. We're all different.)
Searching for a house has exacerbated this because it's thrown off my routine.
I end up having difficulty focusing, feeling restless. Ultimately I realized this is what it means to feel spacey, and I also realized it's happening because I'm not grounded.
So I've been practicing a lot of yin yoga.
Yin yoga involves holding poses for three to five minutes. The intention is to get deep into the connective tissue to increase flexibility and promote joint health.
My FAVORITE YouTube teacher is Yoga with Kassandra. She’s amazing and has yin classes focusing on the chakras, the elements, different body parts, and so much more.
How it helps:
On a spiritual / emotional level, it’s incredibly healing. It allows you to process things, and because it requires you to slow down, is very grounding. It's amazing for restoring your energy if you've burned out.
On the manifesting front, yin is all about surrender, so the practice helps me let go of attachment and trust that everything is happening exactly as it should.
If you want to track your manifestation practices, check out the Play with the Day yearly goal journal.
All the love,
Suzanne
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Shadow work refers to the process of understanding (and loving) the rejected pieces of ourselves, our darkness.
This includes emotions viewed as negative like hatred, anger, jealousy, greed and neediness.
It also includes the most pained, injured parts of ourselves, the parts most vulnerable, those we wish didn’t exist and that we often pave over with facades of toughness that often end up sabotaging our happiness.
As a love-related example, think of a woman who longs for a very masculine man to love, but interacts with men from a place of masculine energy because of unhealed trauma.
Unhealed trauma increases a woman’s masculine energy because she feels she has to protect herself. She doesn’t feel safe.
In this example with love, the woman would lead from her masculine energy, therefore repelling masculine men while attracting more feminine men, (or pulling feminine energy out of a man she's already with).
Attraction requires polarity, and a masculine woman will always attract a more feminine male.
(I realize there’s a lot of gender descriptions in here that may offend some people, but that’s not my intention. I’m speaking very specifically to one type of relationship, understanding that not everyone desires that type of relationship.)
These unhealed wounds would ultimately compel this hypothetical woman to continue protecting herself or mothering the man, which results in her never receiving the kind of love she so deeply desires.
This is one example, but unhealed inner pains and the ways we have adapted in response in order to feel safe affect every area of our lives, including love and romance, work, money, friendships and health.
Another example, one common reason that people struggle to lose weight is because they are protecting themselves from past painful experiences. A sexual assault survivor may pack on pounds in a subconscious effort to feel unattractive and less targeted.
Of course sometimes people eat to avoid feeling, but I’ve often heard of people who can’t lose weight even if they’re ‘doing everything right.’
If a part of you feels unsafe in receiving the thing you most desire, your subconscious will not, under any circumstances, let yourself create it.
Science has discovered the our decisions are mostly made by our subconscious minds and rationalized by our logical minds.
This is how unconscious, unhealed pains affect our decision making, behaviors, attitudes, and ultimately our lives. This is also why shadow work is in my view non-negotiable, not only so you can feel happy, but also so you can achieve your goals.
When you were young and felt shame, fear, anger or sadness, you didn’t have the tools to process that pain.
We idolized our parents and saw them as the source of everything. When bad things happened, or we felt painful emotions, our natural response was to blame ourselves.
Unfortunately, when pain isn’t processed, it stays in your nervous system. (This is why some people cannot relax. They're constantly guarding themselves against unhealed past pain.)
I’ve heard it said that we continue re-creating similar experiences in an effort to close the loop, that is to properly process the emotion and release it.
Either way, unhealed pain causes us to spend our lives stuck in trauma responses disguised as seemingly unsolvable problems. The problems become solvable once we heal the original pain.
For example, in high school I feel very isolated after my dad and sister died. This opened the door to a very toxic friendship my senior year during which I allowed a woman to isolate me from my other friends. She eventually hurt me very deeply.
In my adult life, I often veer toward solitude. I’ve also had problems making female friends, mostly because I’ve turned into a hermit.
And I am introverted...
But not too long ago I realized that I’m continuing to act out the trauma of my youth by staying home so much. A part of me was still that teenage girl, shut inside, feeling alone and unworthy of friendships.
After doing shadow work around this, I found the courage to contact one of my old friends, and the conversation was so healing!
Healing the original pain through the shadow work processes I’m going to teach you was DEEPLY painful.
These are pains I’ve avoided for 20 years. But it was also incredibly freeing.
Aftewards, I felt weightless and connected to my worthiness in a whole new way.
I know that as things calm down with the pandemic, I will be really excited to go out and meet new people because unhealed past pains are no longer keeping a part of me stuck in the past, subconsciously replaying it.
This is one reason why talk therapy isn’t always effective. Talking about our problems doesn’t necessarily solve them.
Feeling the pain at the root of our problems is what solves them.
Exploring your inner mysteries, working to unravel them and understand yourself, is the adventure of a lifetime. Which brings me to the next reason why shadow work is so powerful —
It just so happens the brain stores memory and emotion in the same place in our brain, the amygdala.
Part of the reason the painful past sticks around so long is because emotion has literally encoded it into our brains.
But this is a good thing, too.
The shadow work process I’ll teach you rides this association so you can identify (and heal) the true source of your suffering.
This is powerful because as mentioned earlier, the soul speaks to us in symbols rather than logic.
You may be experiencing a problem that’s a symbolic representation of an earlier pain that you cannot, for the life of you, ‘figure out.’
With shadow work, you don’t have to. There’s nothing to figure out, only to feel. If you can follow the trail of emotion and work with your original pain, you can heal.
During this process, you'll discover a lot about yourself. As you do shadow work, the reasons why you're experiencing suffering or roadblock after roadblock while trying to acheive your goals will become obvious.
Our addictions, bad habits and other frustrating patterns all exist on some level to keep us safe.
As you discover your inner self's reason for keeping you safe in this way, you give yourself the freedom to find that safety in other ways, freeing you from being held back by things that don't make any logical sense.
As soon as you release a past pain, you will feel so weightless and at peace. Your energy changes, how you move and hold yourself changes. What you do changes. And then your results change.
Because everything is related in the deep, symbolic recesses of our inner worlds, healing one thing often creates positive changes in unrelated areas.
For example, I've been doing a lot of shadow work on self-worth, especially related to friendships, and it's helped me own the value of my gifts more.
It’s not always this effortless of course, but the true hard work is in excavating deep in your soul and feeling very painful things. It will not be fun.
Some people avoid it, but that's no good because then you never expand beyond your current problems. You can either face your pain or allow it to control you forever. Either way it's painful, so you may as well face it head on.
Shadow work is the true work that will change your life.
(Sometimes simply feeling your feelings is enough to create healing.)
This is SO powerful. Sensitive people in particular NEED to have a daily feeling practice.
In the Shadow work workshop, you'll receive extras including a 20-minute Feeling Awareness meditation to process your emotions. I recommend doing this daily if you're processing a lot, or as needed whenever you feel emotional.
Just like you need to sweep the floors often, you also need to clear emotional debris from your being. The FA meditation is the technique I recommend to do this.
Within the workshop extras, I also share my favorite yin yoga practice to move painful emotional energy through your body, based on the chakra system. This is SO healing.
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This higher self is our connection to the source of all that is, a personal expression of infinity, a microcosm of the entire universe within ourselves.
Yet throughout our busy, sometimes stressful daily lives, this connection to our higher self can feel hard to find.
We may feel lost and confused, triggered and overwhelmed, sometimes anxious, sad, guilty, ashamed or angry.
We get caught up in the moment and say or do things we don’t mean. We make mistakes, handle things in less than ideal ways and struggle with creating good habits.
The entire point of the human experience is for our souls to experience life through our bodies. We aren’t meant to be perfect, holy creatures all the time. We are here to make mistakes, learn, grow and simply feel it all. As I like to say, the good, the bad, the bliss and the broken.
Yet deepening your connection to your higher self makes the human experience more joyful.
It's like there's a world of secrets within you, a special place containing all the wisdom you could ever need to live your life to the fullest, happiest version you could ever imagine, but you're cut off from it.
We all get weighed down by the darker elements of human life sometimes, unable to hear the deeper truths in our souls.
Your higher self is always guiding you forward through life's trials and tribulations, but you may not always be able to hear the messages.
That's why today I want to share with you a few ways to connect to your higher self.
Before we get started, know that this is a daily ongoing practice. The more time you spend connecting, the more connected you will be.
The other thing to know is that no matter how disconnected you may feel at the moment, your higher self is always with you.
It's the deepest part of you, a direct link to your soul. Your connection can never ever be severed. It may feel dim or faraway, but no matter how separate you feel, know that you can always find your way back using the tips I'm sharing with you today.
Intention determines focus, and therefore influences your results.
Take journaling, for example. With it, you can process the past, sort through your problems and find inspired solutions, identify your dreams and manifest your desires.
Every Soul Scroll Journal includes exercises and prompts allowing you to experience all these fabulous benefits.
However to connect to your higher self and recieve its valuable contributions, first you must set that intention.
Before I knew how to use journaling to actually solve my problems, I mostly ranted on paper. Releasing that emotional energy did help, but didn't offer as many solutions as invoking my higher self and asking the questions I know to ask today.
This is one reason why Soul Scroll Journals are so effective. The time-tested questions and techniques inside help you process the past and create new outcomes very quickly.
Many people aren't sure what to write about in journals in the first place, let alone what questions to ask themselves to solve their problems and heal their pains.
One simple way you can create shifts right now is to consciously invoke the guidance of your higher self to help you move through areas where you feel stuck.
You don't even need to write it down.
Simply think to yourself, "Higher self, please guide me. What do I need to know about this?"
Then, begin writing and see what comes out.
Your higher self is always available to guide you, but we have free will. You must ask. You can ask by setting the intention.
If you want help digging deep into your soul, you'll love the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
Meditation is the most effective way to connect to your higher self because it quiets all the other voices drowning it out.
Meditation connects you to the stillness within. In this stillness, you're able to hear the messages of your heart and soul. You're able to release pent up, repressed emotions weighing you down and creating conflict in your life.
As you do this regularly, your higher self becomes a steady, constant companion. It's not something you have to try so hard to hear, but a wise guide always ready with support when asked.
I'm very depression-prone and have struggled a lot over the years with intense sadness.
Connecting with my higher self through meditation changed everything because I began to realize the voices in my head that led me into destructive, self-defeating behaviors or that told me I didn't deserve certain things weren't the truest voices.
Meditation taught me how to heal the pain creating those voices in the first place, and then it helped me connect deeper to find the path in life that makes me happy.
The spiritual healing tools I've learned to heal that pain and hear my inner voice are all included inside the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
I'm so proud because this is the only meditation guide I know of that talks specifically about how to use meditation to heal emotional pain.
The techniques for healing I share with you in the journal will help you find peace with who you are, creating space to connect with your higher self.
These healing techniques will change your life because unhealed traumas keep us stuck in the past. There's a lot that goes into it, but when you release the repressed emotion, you free yourself from the past while giving yourself the opportunity to create new patterns, opening yourself up to new potentials.
As a note, I don't recommend relying on guided meditations.
Guided meditations are wonderful for relaxation. I often listen to them before falling asleep. However, they have limitations.
When you rely on guided meditations to connect to yourself, it’s like using an interpreter to speak to a friend. You miss a deep connection. You miss the true voice, the true wisdom.
Many people are afraid to face themselves or resist stillness, but that’s exactly why it’s so important.
Author Steven Pressfield has said, “The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it."
I still resist meditation to this day, but when I sit down and breathe and keep breathing until everything quiets, eventually I touch down into this still, peaceful, authentic place inside the deepest part of me. I never fail to sigh in relief. “There it is.”
That's something you need to find on your own.
I created the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal to help you along your way.
It’s different than most meditation books because it’s focused on empowering you to create a practice unique to you, based on what you need in that moment.
It also helps you apply your meditation practice to real life with daily thoughtful journal prompts based on the day’s meditation exercise.
Journaling is a wonderful way to allow the voice of your higher self to come through. As you set the intention, you’ll receive guidance for solving problems, understanding frustrating patterns, or shifting your mindset to better navigate through rough patches.
After my dad and sister died when I was an early teen, I felt lonely, sad and abandoned. Countless therapists failed to help me make sense of my pain.
The only thing that helped was journaling. Over the years, I’ve learned how to use my journal to understand myself, why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling, and how to solve my problems.
Journaling has allowed me to get clear on my deepest desires and life purpose. It's helped me find the most aligned path to achieving my goals based on the true desires of my soul — not what other people are doing or tell me I should be doing.
My true purpose is helping people understand themselves through inner work. It's giving them the guidance to face their true selves without judgment and with compassion, which is the most difficult thing for many to do because we've been conditioned to repress our true feelings.
Soul Scroll Journals offer a way to do this gently, completely and honestly so you can create real, lasting change in your life.
Journaling and meditation are the two most powerful things you can do for life-long growth and development.
If you’re feeling disconnected from yourself, unsure of who you are or what you want, or would simply like to create a stronger connection with your higher self, check out the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
It will help you find peace with who you really are.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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A lot of the ways we’ve been taught to think about emotions like anxiety are unhelpful if not downright destructive.
One of the most egregious examples of this happened the other day. A woman struggling with healing anxiety during this beyond extra 2020 we’re all experiencing said she was in therapy and learning about “living with my anxiety next to me.”
I’m guessing this woman got that wording in therapy since no one ever talks about their feelings like that, and thank goodness. It's an incredibly destructive statement for two reasons.
Disassociation is the practice of separating yourself from your emotions and / or environment to protect yourself when you feel unsafe.
This is why some people feel like they're watching a movie, rather than living their actual life.
Ironically, anxiety comes from feeling unsafe, so this shotgun approach could intensify the feeling — the exact opposite of healing anxiety.
This is damaging because emotions don't go away when ignored. They burrow deeper into your energetic and physical bodies, eventually causing things like panic attacks or health problems since chronic stress is incredibly destructive to the body.
Anxiety is not some stranger that's hopped in the passenger seat of a life, uninvited and without reason.
This approach denies that anxiety is a messenger. It contains very important messages that once listened to, will help you find peace.
Without finding the root, peace will never come. This is the most important thing to know about healing anxiety.
That's why the methods you'll learn inside the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal are so essential.
Few people in our society know how to deal with painful emotions from a spiritual perspective. That's exactly why I created this book.
On Day 8 of the journal, The Antidote to Anxiety, we go into great detail about this specific emotion. You'll learn about the spiritual meaning of anxiety, how to discover and heal the root cause, and how to release feelings of panic from your body so you can feel calm.
Calling an emotion yours is destructive because it causes people to create identities around them, or a "disorder" they've been labeled with.
"I am an anxious person."
"I have anxiety."
If you are an anxious person, or if you have anxiety, who would you be if you weren't those things?
Moving beyond something is hard if you think it's part of who you are.
A lot of times people subconsciously hold on to labels because they don't know who they'd be without them. (There are other reasons, too, but that's a long conversation for another time.)
This is why meditation is so important. It helps you connect to who you really are, underneath all the labels that limit you.
It helps you formulate new perceptions and responses to old problems.
It frees you to live a life without anxiety, even if it's something you now think you'll always experience.
Learning how to feel is important, and of course there are specific practices you can do — including breathing techniques to regulate your nervous system. You'll learn my favorite, go-to practices in the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
But recurring, deeply felt anxiety always has a root cause. This deeper cause must be identified for healing anxiety in a lasting way.
The apparent cause might seem obvious enough — work or financial stress, caring for a sick loved one, or the tremendous uncertainty we're facing in the world — but there are always deeper, more existential fears at play.
The good news is that once you discover those fears, you can figure out how to find peace.
Other times unhealed childhood traumas trigger anxiety, even if the apparent cause seems totally unrelated.
The truth is, the soul speaks in symbols so nothing is unrelated. There's always a unifying thread, a reason why anxiety or other painful emotions appear.
Once you know how to identify that unifying thread and follow it to the answers you seek, you know how to find peace in any situation.
If you want to know how to do this important inner work, you will love the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
This 30-day program will help you start or deepen a meditation practice.
It includes short daily readings that will teach you tools to heal anxiety. Each reading ends with a mindfulness journal prompt to help you apply the day's focus to the rest of your life.
The most important part in the journal is Week 3, Heart & Soul. During this week, you'll learn how to use my potent shadow work techniques to heal the root of anxiety so you can find peace.
The unhealed past will continue creating painful emotions and ongoing problems until you release it.
When you want to unlock the door to growth, happiness and healing, it's time to go within, sit with yourself, and face your pain. So much wisdom and healing is inside of you.
The Mindfulness & meditation guided journal is for you if you want to learn about healing anxiety, connect to your heart, and find peace within yourself.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Sadness, anxiety, depression, anger. These emotions are part of being human, but we all want to feel happier and more at peace!
Unfortunately, most people strive for peace by denying how they feel. This leads to resistance and unhappiness. It causes an internal war — the exact opposite of peace.
Emotions are simply energy — energy in motion.
The beautiful thing about emotions is that they're designed to stay in motion. They were never meant to linger, causing you ongoing pain or suffering. When you allow them, emotions flow freely through, leaving peace in their wake.
The purpose of emotions is to give us specific information about how we feel about our lives. Emotions are the soul's response to how the ego, the small self, is interacting with the world.
For example, if you speed through life, never taking care of yourself, always prioritizing others, you naturally become anxious or sad. People commonly think the anxiety or sadness is the problem when in fact these feelings are pointing to the actual problem.
If you never stop to listen to yourself, instead waging war against the messenger, you'll never hear the deeper wisdom of your feelings which have only arrived to help you take better care of yourself.
Of course, often emotions have deeper, more important messages. I show you exactly how to identify these messages and deal with emotions in the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
This is the path to true peace and unlocking your inner wisdom. Honoring how you feel and allowing strong emotions to flow through you creates space for beautiful life changes to bring more joy.
However on the path of ignoring strong emotions, you continue to demonize feeling emotional, intensifying the war within, wondering what's wrong with you or why you can't find peace when the truth is the entire approach is wrong.
Sadly, some people waste years or decades of their lives fighting themselves, never finding the will or knowledge to look within.
Few people in our society know how to deal with feeling emotional from a spiritual perspective, and that's exactly why Soul Scroll Journals exists: to help people understand their thoughts and feelings through so they can understand themselves.
Journaling and meditation are the two simplest, most powerful tools you can use to heal yourself and create shifts in your life.
The guru era is over. It's time to know yourself, love yourself and trust yourself.
Painful, strong emotions let us know we're out of alignment with who we really are. This means every ounce of pain we feel a gift.
Feelings are our most powerful guidance system directing us to our happiest, most alive lives rather than obstacles intended to steal your joy or stop you from getting what you want.
Every emotion has a specific message, and inside the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal, I show you exactly how to identify what those messages are so you can listen to your soul and find peace.
Unfortunately, our society has medicalized strong emotions. Doctors see emotions as brain chemicals and not messages from your soul, problems to be fixed with prescriptions rather than love and understanding.
Most therapists are not trauma informed and lack understanding of how to deal with past pain that influences current problems. Most meditation teachers don't understand how to work specifically with emotions and instead focus on the breath.
When you learn how to use meditation when feeling emotional, you gain the gift of knowing how to approach your deepest, darkest, most private pains with love, compassion, understanding, and ultimately healing.
This is exactly what you'll learn how to do in the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal. This isn't therapy. This book teaches you how to understand your emotions so you can understand yourself and create a life perfectly designed for you.
The guided journal also teaches you simple but profund healing tools that you can use to identify the source of your deepest pains so you can heal them. This allows you to let the past go and walk into the future feeling lighter, freer, and more deserving of the goodness life wants to send your way.
These are tools you'll use for the rest of your life when feeling emotional.
The most common thing blocking people from releasing their pain is that they resist it. Resistance acts as a wall blocking the energy from flowing through as it's meant to.
This is inevitable, but not natural. We've been conditioned to think feeling emotional is negative, weak, or wrong. This causes us to repress strong emotions, not allowing the emotional energy to properly flow through us, leaving it stuck inside our bodies and hearts, creating suffering.
The consequences are vast. People in pain don't follow their dreams, they stay in jobs and relationships that aren't satisfying, and move through life blaming how they feel on the circumstances of their lives when in fact we have so much power over our circumstances, and power over how we feel regardless of what's happening around us.
Shifting your relationship with feeling emotional is very important because when you repress or deny how you feel, it intensifies the pain while placing you at war with yourself.
Think of how people say they're "battling" anxiety or depression. Fighting your emotions is the same as fighting yourself. It creates more suffering, not less.
Not wanting your emotions is not wanting parts of yourself. Judging how you feel is judging parts of yourself.
This is not the way to healing! This is exactly why some people continue to suffer and never find peace.
The key to ending this war lies within. It requires first accepting yourself fully — including all the things you feel.
Trust that your feelings are there for a reason, and once you understand that reason, you will find peace.
Also — when it comes to healing or forgiving the past, learning how to deal with emotions is essential because accepting your feelings about a situation is part of accepting the situation itself.
As you release the strong emotions related to an experience, you release the experience itself. Accepting, forgiving and releasing the past is the first step to creating a better future.
The Mindfulness & meditation guided journal will help show you how to deal with emotions and create a better life.
True positivity isn't about ignoring pain or darkness, but opening our hearts to it, and fully accepting it without wallowing. When we do that, the energy shifts. Solutions appear. Change happens. Hearts heal. Peace descends.
We create our lives from the inside out. People who know how to tap into the source of power within, and who stay close to their higher selves and God / the Universe through practices like meditation and journaling, feel more joyful, which creates more opportunities in their lives.
The content of your thoughts and energy creates your life, so nothing is more important than knowing how to deal with emotions and move through the world from a place of peaceful power. It's from this place that everything flows, and that you create the life you're meant to.
The Mindfulness & meditation guided journal will teach you exactly how to feel your feelings so you can heal, ultimately finding the peace and happiness you deserve.
The journal also tells you exactly what to do if you feel numb or full of resistance when you go within. There are very simple tools you can use to overcome this obstacle standing in your way of peace, and it's all inside the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal.
This is the most common reason why some people's bodies feel like factories for sadness and anxiety.
You might find a moment of peace, but then soon find yourself feeling more of the same, wondering why nothing is working.
If you want to help a flower grow strong and healthy, you must nurture the soil it grows in, and the same is true for humans.
All too often, we put ourselves in extreme conditions and get angry with ourselves for not thriving.
This is especially common for people with a lot of unhealed trauma who are used to making the most of what they have, living in survival mode, or who are so used to a certain amount of suffering and pain that they feel guilty adding in more pleasure to their lives.
When it feels weird to not suffer, or your identity centers around one who suffers, you will always find reasons to feel pain.
That's why the most important part in the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal is Week 3, Heart & soul. In this week, you'll learn how to hear the messages of your emotions and your inner wisdom.
You'll also learn how to use my potent shadow work techniques to heal the root of any pain or fear keeping you trapped in survival-mode living.
The unhealed past will continue creating painful, strong emotions and ongoing problems until you release it.
When you want to unlock the door to growth, happiness and healing, it's time to go within, sit with yourself, and face your pain. So much wisdom and healing is inside of you.
The amount of joy you experience directly correlates to the amount of spirit in your life.
If you're feeling emotional, anxious or depressed, you need more soul. You need more spirit. You need to let the messages inside of you come to light and stop running away from yourself and how you feel.
There's nothing wrong with you. Inside of every problem lies a solution, but you must honestly face your problems to find it.
When you finally sit with yourself, you'll wonder why you waited so long.
The Mindfulness & meditation guided journal is for you if you want to learn how to deal with emotions, heal your heart, and find peace within yourself.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Flat out, the thing that stops most people from living for themselves and finding true happiness is the fear of what other people think.
Other fears exist too — fears of being unsafe, which include running out of money, or the fear of failure, but the fear of other people judging you for being yourself is hands down the biggest thing stopping people from doing what makes them happy.
You could even argue that fears of failure or running out of money are secondary fears, with the deeper fear being what other people will think of you for failing or going broke.
First, you must have a daily practice to connect to the real you underneath the doubt, fear and confusion.
The part of you identifying with these fears isn't the real you. Somewhere within, is a place of boldness, courage and indefatigable will.
Second, you must connect to a vision for your life. We're always saying yes to something. Most people say yes to doubt, fear and confusion.
But when you create space to connect to yourself and receive the vision the universe intends for your life, at some point you will be so pulled forward by your vision that the fear of what other people think will no longer have such a strong hold on you.
The more you connect to yourself and live in a way where you're fueled by the greater source of all that is, and fill your life with the things that bring you joy and resonate with your highest, most aligned good, the less you will tolerate anything that isn't that.
A lot of articles on how to be yourself give a series of action steps to know yourself, and these things are very important.
I've already written about these topics.
Asking yourself key questions to know your values and desires, and creating a positive, confident mindset are important steps along the journey.
That's why all of these steps are covered in every single Soul Scroll Journal.
But there’s something even more basic, more foundational, more essential than asking these questions if you want to live for yourself.
Your mind isn't the source of your true self. Your soul is. Thinking too much creates confusion. Being is what creates clarity.
The mind is a tool, but it must always bow to the heart's wisdom and guidance, and the soul's strength. These things are always guiding you to just be yourself.
The moment you try to figure out how to be you, you’ve already blocked the most natural expression of your true self. You've already created confusion and made things more difficult.
When you are being yourself totally, you lose all sense of self-consciousness. You’re no longer painfully self-aware, as you may be with a new group of people or in an important meeting.
Instead, it’s that sense of comfortable familiarity, that sense of freedom when you’re not concerned with being good / cool / funny / smart / pretty / sexy / classy / adventurous ENOUGH.
You're totally in the moment. Wild and free.
It’s when you’re you, unapologetically, in all your quirks and chaos, and you know without a doubt, you're enough.
But how do you shift from a place of constantly worrying and doubting to that place of effortlessly being yourself all the time?
When you meditate, you spend time connecting to the eternal part of you, the part underneath the conditioning that says you must get this person’s love and approval to be good enough, but in order to get their approval, you must act a certain way or be a certain type of person.
Other people judging you says something about who THEY are, not who YOU are.
The only thing that matters is what you think of yourself. Meditation gives you the clarity and connection to stay rooted in this truth.
When you're connected to yourself, you may hear others' judgments, criticism, or limiting beliefs, but they don't sway you. You know who you are, and that's enough.
The more time you spend connecting to the real you, the easier it is to live for yourself.
You receive guidance on how to move forward, how to solve your problems and realize your dreams.
Conversely, the more time you spend focused on your doubts, fears and insecurities, the more you feel trapped by limitations and fears — including the fear of what others think.
As you meditate, each sweet breath clears away layers of stress, pain, doubt and confusion, allowing your soul to shine through and clearly guide you forward.
This is how to allow your life to expand, when everything feels guided by an unseen holy hand.
Meditation turns confusion into clarity, sadness into peace, anxiety into certainty.
That’s why I created the Mindfulness and meditation guided journal, to show you how to go within and experience this deep peace for yourself.
I firmly believe everyone needs a meditation practice, but a lot of people say they don't know how to meditate or have trouble starting and keeping the habit. If that's you, you'll love this journal.
Many regular meditators have also gone through this material. They say it's deepened their practice and guided them into greater peace.
This incredible journal features 30 quick lessons guiding you step-by-step to create a meditation practice — even if you've tried and failed before.
Each daily lesson ends with a meditation focus for the day and mindfulness journal prompt to help you apply the lesson to your daily life.
For example, on Day 4, Love your crazy mind, you’ll learn how to sort through all your thoughts to find peace. After your session, you’re invited to journal about your relationship to your thoughts and explore how you can shift that to create more peace in your life.
In other lessons, you'll learn breathing techniques to regulate your nervous system and reduce anxiety, mantras and visualizations for spiritual power, and — my favorite — an entire week focused on meditating for emotional healing.
The thing is, other people's opinions and judgments don't have to affect you. Anything you attach to or focus on is because at some level you believe it about yourself.
From a manifestation perspective, when you have doubts and insecurities about yourself, these tend to reflect in how others treat you. When you feel confident about something, other people feel your energy and question you less.
Being yourself requires you to heal those things keeping you stuck in old conditioning.
You can't just stop believing something. It doesn't work that way.
We all have emotional attachments that cause us to identify with judgments or fears. These emotional attachments come from unhealed wounds.
Sometimes unhealed wounds bind us to people in unhealthy ways because we change who we are to gain their love and approval. This causes a deep sense of pain, including depression, anxiety or addictions that manifest as a way to cope with the pain.
Other times unhealed wounds cause us to take on other's limiting beliefs because we feel this way about ourselves. Maybe you feel like you're stupid, or not talented, or not smart enough, or things never work out for you, or any other cruel thing we tell ourselves.
Unhealed past pain emotionally attaches us to these limiting, negative beliefs about ourselves, creating self-fulfilling prophecies. As long as we stay emotionally attached to these beliefs, they will limit us. We will emotionally believe them as true, even if we intellectually disbelieve them.
Fully being yourself requires you to heal these deeper pains to release the emotional attachment so you can change your beliefs. Once you do, your confidence and self-belief will soar. This is the deeper work that allows you to manifest your desires.
You'll learn exactly how to heal your deepest pains so you can live for yourself in the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal. No other meditation book teaches you how to meditate to heal.
“Experts” have told me that meditation can be used to bypass emotion, or that healing trauma is not a “DIY” project.
"Facilitators" have told me that I shouldn’t teach people how to do the meditation-based shadow work methods you'll learn inside the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal because it’s not safe or advisable to do this work without a trained guide.
To be frank, these people have no idea what they’re talking about.
Meditation is one of THE most powerful ways to release repressed emotions so you can live for yourself, at least the way I teach it. (Unless a voice within says you need help. That's fine. It's smart to get help if you need it. But most people reading this will be totally fine doing this work on their own.)
Learning the tools to heal yourself is the most empowering thing you will ever do.
In the Mindfulness & meditation guided journal, you will learn my powerful shadow work methods that use the connection between emotion and memory (neuroscience shows that emotion turns events into memories) to free yourself from your deepest pains.
The methods you'll learn in the journal show you exactly how to identify the source of your biggest problems and heal it. These potent methods have worked for 100s of my clients, course members, and now SSJ customers.
I'm committed to teaching all those who are willing to do the work exactly how to free themselves from negative thinking to create a future defined by their dreams, not their problems.
The Mindfulness & meditation guided journal isn't just about learning how to meditate. It's a total guide to reclaiming your freedom to live for yourself.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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For a long time, I judged myself for all the things I thought made me weird, hiding them or trying to fit myself into a mold of who I thought I needed to be to fit in.
Meanwhile, I felt stuck, unsure how to find my unique path, my purpose, or a place in the world that felt like home.
At the time, I didn’t connect the dots — that I couldn’t find a place that felt like home in the world because I hadn’t yet connected a place that felt like home within myself.
I didn’t yet understand that my outer world was a reflection of my inner world, and that to change what my life looked like, I had to change what I felt like.
A lot of self-development and spirituality talks about changing your thoughts and feelings — or vibration — to change your life, but often this causes people to fight against themselves even more, blaming any sad or angry feelings they feel for creating a life they’re not happy with.
Of course this causes more inner resentment, frustration and anger, not less.
It intensifies the war within rather than pacifies it.
Finding your unique place in life is really about accepting how you feel instead of fighting it or wishing the feelings weren't there.
Pain has a message for you. It exists because of some past hurtful experience that created limiting beliefs or self-criticism blocking you from being who you really are.
As you totally accept how you feel, letting the pain guide you on a pathway of healing, you receive the wisdom inside these emotions. This wisdom then guides you forward on your path.
Space has been cleared for your natural, irrepressible creative impulse to rise up and carry you toward the life you are meant to be living.
But connecting with that impulse in the first place requires you to learn how to accept yourself exactly as you are.
Because it’s only when you stop judging yourself and start loving yourself that you find your true gifts (that are often hidden inside your so-called flaws) and start interacting with life from a place of play and experimentation rather than heavy-handed neediness to get somewhere else because you’re not happy where you are.
Thanks to the three simple ideas I’m about to share with you, I now really love the woman I’ve become. I love how unique and independent and free spirited I am.
I love that I’m following my unique path in life, have found my life purpose, and wake up each day grateful and happy to keep growing and exploring the wonderful being I am.
If you want to learn how to accept yourself so you can find your path in life, you'll love the Self-Love guided journal.
Nothing is all good or all bad, and many times the things society tells are are unworthy or unacceptable are actually the coolest, most interesting parts of us.
For example, I'm a hardcore introvert, pretty much a hermit. When I was younger, I'd literally sit on the couch all day with a stack of books by my side. (I could rattle off all the titles of The Babysitter's Club, in order. I was obsessed.)
Oh how people (including my family) have loved to comment on this over the years.
I judged myself for this for SO long. As a result, I spent my young adult years drinking, trying to be outgoing, still not really fitting in, and feeling at war with myself because of it!
If I could go back in time, I'd tell myself, "Suzanne, don't focus on what you think the world wants from you. Focus on doing what you love to do."
I found my unique path in life only when I began to accept myself unconditionally.
I realized my deep introspectiveness and introversion held my greatest gifts — my ability to think about life, articulate those realizations and ask myself the perfect questions to evolve past my problems and toward my desires.
That's why I created the Self-Love guided journal.
It's a mix of self-help book and guided journal with 30 insightful daily readings and incredible prompts to help you accept yourself unconditionally — including finding the gifts inside the things you think are weird.
One thing that really changed my life was holding myself accountable for moving forward on all the ideas I had.
As an introverted dreamer, I can spend all my time lost in thought if I'm not careful.
I thought about starting projects, but they languished in notebooks.
Not moving forward on your dreams or breaking promises to yourself — these things are toxic to your self-confidence. Don't do this if you want to learn how to accept yourself.
Not pursuing your own goals leaves you focused outward on what other people are doing, comparing your life to theirs, finding reasons why your life is unfair or you have it worse.
As soon as you focus inward on loving, accepting and understanding yourself, connecting to the force of creative potential within and expressing that into the world, your life will change — fast.
That's why one of the most empowering things you can do is follow through on your creative impulses.
Don't be a flaky creative — give yourself projects and goals and deadlines.
If you've had trouble following through in the past, you'll love Week 4 of the Self-Love guided journal, where we talk about overcoming perfectionism, creating new habits and finding your flow.
People often wait to feel good enough to follow their dreams or start a new creative project, but ironically it's starting the project and following your dreams that helps you feel empowered and in love with yourself. This is how to accept yourself.
Self-understanding and self-acceptance go hand in hand. So many people spend their entire lives trying to get things from other people — love, validation, acceptance and approval.
When we do this, we see ourselves through their eyes, doing anything to make ourselves look important, impressive or worthy.
Unfortunately, the more we try to appear a certain way, the more likely we are to fall out of alignment with our true self.
Trouble is, by the time most people realize this, they're so disconnected from their souls they have no idea who they are anymore.
A lot of times the ways you judge yourself start way back in your childhood. (I know. It's annoying. But it's important to do the work.)
The Self-Love guided journal starts out really deep to help you examine how things from your past have affected you.
During Week 3, which is all about reclaiming your inner power, you'll explore how you want to relate to the world based on who you really are, rather than who you think you should be.
This includes identifying the pieces of yourself you've lost over the years trying to fit in (and accepting them so you can reintegrate what's true back into your personality), along with creating a greater sense of yourself.
This includes identifying your values, setting appropropriate boundaries, and digging into the all-important difference between being nice versus being kind.
All told, the Self-Love guided journal will help you live more authentically by while finding your unique path in life.
It will show you exactly how to accept yourself unconditionally not by telling you what to do, but by asking you important, powerful questions — the same you'd be asked in expensive coaching or drawn-out therapy sessions.
It will help you learn how to accept yourself.
You are powerful. You have all the answers within you. Journaling is the best way to find them.
Shop the Self-Love guided journal here.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Over the past few blogs I’ve written a lot about how overcoming self-doubt is about knowing who you are and focusing on yourself rather than other people and things.
But finding your unique path through life requires another essential ingredient: Learning how to trust yourself.
This means trusting your desires, your feelings and your intuition.
These are your headlamps to peer into the unknown, allowing you to navigate through the uncertainty that is life to find your unique path.
Yet we’ve been told throughout history not to trust things we can’t see.
We’ve been told our desires are selfish and slanderous, our feelings weak and burdensome, and our intuition flaky and illogical.
No wonder so many people have trouble trusting themselves, not to mention finding their unique path in life.
Without trusting themselves, people feel confused, lost and uncertain. At war with themselves, wanting something else while feeling guilty for having that desire in the first place.
That isn’t why you are here.
You're not alive to feel guilty for being who you are.
You are here to discover the infinite potential within you and play with it. You are here to dig deep inside of yourself and find your unique magic and give that magic to the world in only the way you can.
You are here to express unique perspectives and gifts, infusing them with a unique energy the world has never seen before and will never see again because we are all unique in our own special way.
To become the unique, radiant person that you truly are requires learning how to trust yourself.
But that can feel hard.
I remember a few years ago when I was freelancing, I had a really good month and planned a trip to Costa Rica.
All I’d ever wanted to do was create a location-free business so I could travel, and here I was, finally doing it!
But my husband was really freaked out. He was supportive, but freaked out. He’s not a big traveler and felt terrified someone would mug or kill me.
Before I knew it, I was so scared I almost canceled the trip.
I felt terrified even though I wanted to go so badly, and had traveled extensively alone before I got married. (It’s like after getting married, the “I am a wife,” identity kicks in and so many women lose essential parts of themselves!)
So many emotions mixed in my body, heart and mind left me wildly confused and uncertain.
All the times in the past I thought I was following my heart but things didn’t work out ran through my mind.
This seemed like a life or death situation. What should I do?
Finally I had a few major realizations, found my confidence, went on the trip and had an amazing time.
It was one of the most memorable times of my life, as are most times when we feel afraid but do it anyway.
Ultimately I went because I trusted myself.
I trusted my intuition and senses to keep me safe.
I trusted that most people are good and kind and not out to get me.
Trusting ourselves is everything.
It's not just about the occasional, awesome experiences, but our every day lives.
Because I’ve learned how to trust myself, I've been able to go from feeling lost and confused about my direction in life to finding my perfect, unique self-expression and building a business — Soul Scroll Journals — around those gifts and my lifestyle desires.
I've had to leave behind so many lucrative jobs and creative endeavors, including my course and coaching business, to find this. Without knowing, loving, and trusting yourself, none of this other stuff works.
On a personal level, whenever a situation or friendship didn't work out before, I'd always blame myself, never feeling good enough.
I used to be so self-conscious, always questioning every little thing I said and wondering if I was cool or interesting enough for people to like me.
I tried to be the perfect friend, the perfect daughter, the perfect wife, and it left me feeling so depressed and disconnected from who I was and what I wanted.
Finding my true self has been a long road, but I created the Self-Love guided journal to help you get there much faster than I did.
Knowing I’m exactly who I’m meant to be, doing what I am meant to be doing, walking the path I am meant to be walking is priceless.
Trusting yourself is an important part of this foundation.
This is what I want to talk about today.
First, let’s talk about why so many people doubt themselves.
We’ve been trained to believe that we’re not powerful. That we’re helpless against the influences of the world.
We're conditioned to believe we must dress, act, think and work in certain ways to be accepted, and that outside authorities know what's best for us.
There's good reason we believe this: Centuries ago, people were literally burned at the stake for being too different.
Having a connection to your inner knowing or the universe used to be considered sacriligous because religious authorities were the only ones with that power.
We dimmed our true power to stay safe.
Collective, inherited trauma and past life experiences held in the emotional body have many people still afraid to stand out too much.
And for good reason: We're as polarized as ever today, and society, depending upon which group you identify with, has established 'right' and 'wrong' ways to think about life.
People still get ostracized and made fun of for being too different.
These fears are real.
But the risk of buying into them is that we stay stuck in the chains of others' expectations, never finding the courage to be truly free.
This is why we have to love and accept ourselves in order to find our true path in life.
When you love and trust yourself, you gain the courage to be who you really are, and stand proudly in that until you attract the right people and situations to you.
This is why the work in the Self-Love guided journal is so important.
Knowing yourself is really important when it comes to trusting your feelings.
While all feelings give you important messages about what’s going on beneath the surface, and all are valid, feelings don’t always reflect the truth.
This may seem contradictory, so let me explain.
Emotions are your soul’s response to how your ego, your personality, is interacting in the world.
Let’s say you feel angry about a certain situation. Anger relates to feelings of powerlessness and is often a call to resurrect boundaries. It’s also often a protective mechanism to protect a deeper hurt.
With the Costa Rica trip, for example, there was a part of me that felt angry at my husband for being afraid. I took on his fear as my own fear, and it almost made me miss out on an awesome experience.
In reality, I was making his fear my fear, giving my power away in search of his approval, and that anger was a sign for me to reclaim my power through being true to myself.
Because I was aware of my emotions and have over the years created an amazing relationship with them, I was able to understand what was happening.
I'm not special with this knowing. I've simply done the work. Your inner wisdom has messages for you, too.
The Self-Love guided journal shows you exactly how to tap into them.
We’ve been trained for eons to trust outside authorities over ourselves, and that's why it can feel so scary to walk an unconventional path.
It's not the path itself that feels so scary, but the fear that walking it will make you unlovable.
Yet the unconventional path is where your unique purpose and authentic self-expression lies.
This is why it's so important to love and trust yourself.
I would never have created my purpose-driven business if I hadn’t followed my intuition down a long, circuitous path that started with freelance writing and yoga teacher training and somehow ended up here.
Most people never find their unique path, but walk the almost path (which really does not feel any better than the totally wrong path!) because they don’t trust themselves or know how to find the answers within.
My intention in creating the Self-Love guided journal was to help you feel good enough exactly as you are and find your unique path to fulfill your potential.
So many people, but women especially, worry that they’re selfish or bad people, and this creates horrible, soul-destroying situations.
People don’t set the boundaries they want to set, which leaves them overwhelmed and without the time, energy or money to please themselves.
And even when they do have the time, energy or money to spend on themselves, they feel incredibly guilty about it, ruining all chances of fun.
(Sometimes this guilt manifests as finding stupid things to complain about or starting fights about nothing.)
They war with their thoughts and emotions, worrying if they were nice enough or said the wrong thing or were wrong because they set a boundary and someone got mad.
Trusting your innate goodness, and healing the past pains perpetuating these struggles that keep too many women locked in lives that don’t reflect their true, unique magic, is essential to create the life you’re meant for.
When you understand yourself, you gain the ability to look at all situations more objectively. Not just through the eyes of past conditioning, or whatever pain or fear you’re feeling in the moment, but through the eyes of your higher self.
But first you must create a relationship with your higher self.
You must learn to feel good enough exactly as you are.
This is what you’ll develop in the Self-Love guided journal.
It's 30 daily readings that will help you understand the many beautiful layers of you coupled with 30 days of thought-provoking journaling prompts to connect you more deeply to your true self than you ever have before.
This is my calling to offer these journals to the world. This book contains some of my best work, and I know you'll love it!
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
PS — "Better than therapy!"
Amy H. was kind enough to leave a review, and that was the title of her incredible testimonial.
Here's what she wrote:
"I have both Play With The Day and Self Love guided journals.
I just hopped on Amazon and bought Listen to Your Heart! Play with the Day is exactly how I look at things each year to plan and guide me however it’s all there in print and I can now look back at it to make sure I’m staying the course daily, monthly and annually. I loved it so much, I bought it for my co-worker!
I am 1/2 way through Self-love and feel lighter, more centered and my energy has changed! I am so excited to have Listen to your heart when I complete this course ❤️."
Thank you, Amy!
I love hearing about your experiences as you work with the journals! Thank you all so much for your support!
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Knowing your dreams and fears, strengths and weaknesses, areas of confidence and insecurity help you create what you want in life, but also help you avoid potential roadblocks.
Without knowing yourself, you're more likely to be influenced by things beneath conscious perception.
For example, if you're not aware of an inner wound of feeling abandoned, rejected or unwanted, that could cause you to try and get those needs met in the external world in ways that cause you to sacrifice your authenticity.
This means you're not really free, but controlled by things of which you're unaware.
You have to know yourself to be yourself. That's why the key to self-actualization is self-awareness. It's focusing on yourself.
In getting to know myself in the following seven areas, I was able to shift from feeling depressed and totally off track to finding inner peace, knowing my purpose and walking my unique life path.
The emotions you feel relay important messages about what is and isn’t for you in this life.
Emotional pain signals you're out of alignment with your true self. One layer deeper, we often fall out of alignment with who we really are because of some pain or insecurity that says it's not safe to be ourselves.
Dominant feelings or patterns, by which I mean recurring, often indicate deeper pains from earlier in childhood when your needs weren't met or you were rejected for who you are.
This is true even if your feelings are triggered by something seemingly random.
Because we tend to view everything in our lives through the lens of our past traumas and dramas, a random, high-emotion reaction OR a place where we feel numb or disconnected offers us rich insight about our deeper pains.
Learning to work with our emotions or identify where we numb out helps us understand our insecurities, heal the related emotional pain, and in turn reclaim our authenticity.
This allows you to be yourself and walk your unique path in life.
I guide you through this process step-by-step in the Self-Love guided journal.
Everything is very clearly spelled out for you, and you get daily journaling prompts to sift through all the layers of you in a very gentle, compassionate way.
There’s two sides to this issue, both of which we explore in the Self-Love guided journal.
First, people learn how to care for themselves by how they were cared for.
Discrepancies between our needs and how those needs were responded to can create significant life-long impacts that affect how we care for ourselves, the quality of our relationships and even how competent we feel in pursuing our goals.
Second, it’s important to explore how to care for youself in a way that makes you feel totally safe and nourished. Something I talk about in the journal is alignment, which means organizing your life around your soul’s needs and desires.
Alignment is about noticing the energy of things. As you go through your day, notice what expands and elevates you. Do more of that. Also notice what feels heavy or draining. Do less of that.
Caring for your energy is the most important thing in life because your life-force is literally your currency. The quality of your energy determines the quality of our life.
Unfortunately, many people feel guilty for taking care of themselves this way.
The Self-Love guided journal will help you release feelings of guilt so you can give from a place of love rather than obligation.
One of my favorite — and unconventional — exercises is on Day 10 of the Self-Love guided journal.
I have you write out everything you like about yourself. Then, you’ll write down everything you’re not so fond of.
Finally, I invite you to look at the second list through the lens of love.
Like I share in the journal, I really hate my feet. I’m super self-conscious about them, but I still take time to appreciate them. They take me places. I HAVE two feet, which means I have two legs, which is something really amazing to be grateful for!
I was cautious to give this exercise because it can easily turn into self-criticism, but this is the essence of unconditional love — knowing yourself fully and loving yourself for exactly who you are.
Without boundaries, you will give and give until you’re full of resentment with nothing left for you.
So many of us are taught it’s wrong to say no, or shove self-care in some fantasy box left over for the fairytale time when nobody needs us for anything and we have time free from obligation.
This is never going to happen. There’s always a demand on your time and attention, and if you want to know yourself, love yourself and create a life as unique as you are, you need to have boundaries on your time, energy and attention.
In the Self-Love journal I guide you through a simple four step process to help you set and enforce boundaries — even if you feel guilty every time you say no.
We all have a connection to our higher selves, the knowing beyond knowing that’s always there to guide our lives forward along the highest and best possible path.
Intuition speaks to us through thoughts and emotions. Learning to trust these inner nudges, and know when that voice is intuition and when it’s fear, is so important if you want to know yourself and navigate through life based on that connection.
In the Self-Love guided journal, I offer four powerful tips to help you strengthen this connection and reveal the single biggest difference between the voice of fear and the voice of your inner knowing.
Getting clear on what you want to create and do in your life is the difference between a meaningful life and one spent feeling lost and unhappy.
While those thunderous-voice-of-God moments do happen occasionally, you can’t rely on them to live the life that’s unique to you.
It’s your intuition that will guide you forward, step by step. Taking time in my journal every few days to reconnect to my desires, allowing them to evolve as I do, is one of my most important spiritual practices.
You have within you unique talents, gifts and perspectives the world needs. Your soul came to this Earth with desires to see, smell, taste and explore things.
Honor that! When we live a life out of alignment with our true selves, the natural result is unhappiness and stress.
Take any uncomfortable emotions you feel as a sign that it’s time to dig in and do some inner work.
The Self-Love guided journal is here to guide you through that journey step by step.
Any article on getting to know yourself would be incomplete without talking about identifying your values and what matters to you.
A values-driven life is a meaningful one. Even for your desires to be fulfilling, it’s important that they reflect deeper values.
For example, maybe you want to travel. What are the deeper values there? Is it freedom? Adventure? Appreciating other cultures?
During some seasons of life, it’s not possible to do the things you love. (Such as travel during the coronavirus.)
But if you know your deeper values, you can find fulfillment and happiness anyway by filling your days with things that honor your deeper values.
Maybe you could do something that makes you feel free, like dance, if that’s a value.
Or perhaps you could cook exotic cuisines to fulfill your thirst for discovering other cultures.
Even the energy of adventure, I’m sure you could cultivate by taking a drive and exploring new outdoor terrain or even watching an adventurous movie.
This may seem obvious, but so many people don’t take the time to answer these foundational questions, and then wonder why they can’t figure out what they want in their lives or how to be happy!
Grab your copy of the Self-Love guided journal to be supported through a really cool journaling exercise that I learned from a mentor to get clear on your values and priorities.
At the end of the 30 days writing in this journal, you will feel more connected to yourself, having released painful patterns and emotions.
You will feel clear on what you want, and how to create a life that brings you joy — right now.
You will release the relentless feeling that nothing is ever enough so you can relax and enjoy your life!
It's time to walk your own path, to create a life as unique as you are.
That, as always, is our mission at Soul Scroll Journals.
All the love,
Suzanne
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Focusing on other people can manifest (and mess you up) in a couple of ways.
One is when you focus on other people’s opinions, expectations, and even doubts and fears since other people’s limitations can easily become our own if we take them on without questioning.
When you do this, you worry more about what other people think of you rather than what you think of you. This stops you from following your unique path in life.
Another common way people focus their attention on other people is through social media, perhaps living vicariously through others while your own life stagnates.
Fiona Apple described this in an awesome way as getting swept away in the “propaganda brochure” of other people’s lives, wanting what they have because it looks cool even though it’s not an authentic desire of your heart.
This is why it's so important to learn how to focus on yourself.
We’re all so inundated with stories from other people’s lives, and focusing on them makes it easy to fall out of alignment with our true path.
This happened to me when I got into a rut of selling online courses and coaching even though the business systems I built following that path didn't align with my true needs and desires.
(Not saying I'll never offer those things again, but the business model I built was not good for me physically or mentally.)
I had a goal — make money online using my gifts of helping people heal emotionally, understand themselves and create unique lives, and saw other people doing this through coaching and courses.
So I started doing coaching and courses and although it was fun, and I helped a lot of people, and made some great money, this pathway ultimately didn’t align with my soul.
If you’ve been around for awhile, you’ve probably heard me say it before: Both our goals and the pathway there must align with our souls.
The way to find this unique path to your unique life is uncovered step by step. It’s an ongoing practice of healing your past pains, listening to your inner voice and taking action on the messages you find.
That’s why today I'm sharing how to focus on yourself.
That’s why Soul Scroll Journals exists, by the way — to help you understand yourself to create a life as unique as you are through journaling.
Think of your relationship with yourself as you would any other relationship. When you think about building strong relationships with significant others, family or friends, it’s all about spending time with them and hearing their stories.
You want to know their hopes and dreams, their desires and fears, their values and priorities.
Yet when it comes to ourselves, too few people dig in to ask themselves these foundational questions. And if they do, they don’t do it regularly (because we’re always changing) or they don’t actually create changes based on what they find.
We expect the relationships we have with ourselves to flow without any effort, but any relationship without effort will fail. The relationships we have with ourselves are no different.
You have to work at it. Put yourself first. Value yourself enough to discover who you are beyond how other people see you or what they want from you.
This is how to focus on yourself.
In the Self-Love guided journal, you will spend 30 deep, delicious days exploring every layer of your being as you answer questions in all of these areas.
(This doesn't have to take a lot of time. Even 20 or 30 minutes a day will create great results.)
In the journal, you’ll learn the thoughts and past pains keeping you from receiving your own love.
You’ll explore your values and what matters to you.
You’ll dig deep and learn to define yourself so your actions in the world reflect your authentic self rather than a mask of who you think you should be.
The biggest reason people spend so much time looking outside of themselves for answers, or not trusting what they find, is that they don’t trust themselves. (Blog on this coming soon.)
You may receive guidance from within for a project to start, curiosity to explore or goal to set, but many people waste time wondering if it’s the right thing to do, worrying what other people will think of them if they do it, and fearing what will happen if they fail.
Even if you do know what you want to do, if you don’t trust yourself, you’ll crash into the next obstacle — not knowing how.
Nobody knows how to do something they’ve never done, but letting that be an obstacle to creating change in our lives is just an excuse. You can figure it out, one next right step at a time.
You may find practical, logical reasons why you can’t do the thing you want to do — not enough time, resources, or knowledge — but I’ve found in my own life that whenever I really wanted to do something, absolutely nothing could hold me back.
The obstacles were always within.
In the Self-Love guided journal, you’ll learn how to identify the voice of distrust, understand why it’s there and change these ongoing patterns so you can feel good about yourself and your life.
There are readings and potent journal prompts on reclaiming your intuition, unlocking your inner power and tapping into true confidence (versus perfectionism) so you can trust yourself and become who you were born to be.
When you don’t trust yourself and follow through on the inner guidance, you end up focusing on what other people want and need, or living vicariously through others while feeling stuck and frozen in your own life.
It’s time to learn how to focus on yourself.
We’re alive as humans to evolve. Like an old-school photograph negative, we are here to develop into full color.
To translate the possibilities and potentials within us and develop them into actuality.
I find it helpful to focus on one change at a time and make it a habit.
This blog is promoting the Self-Love journal and not Play with the Day, but I can’t help but mention how helpful this yearly goal journal been to track my habits and continue creating forward momentum in my life.
In the past, I’d create change and then plateau or even regress. Growth never felt solid, and I struggled with having goals while still enjoying daily life because I have obsessive tendencies, which leads to fixating on where I want to go rather than being where I am.
If I did create amazing change in one direction, that success was usually due to my obsession, which created imbalance because I would focus on one goal in one area of life to the detriment of other areas of my life.
So then I’d have to go back and clean up other areas of my life, losing the ground I’d just gained in the first area.
Through Play with the Day, I set monthly intentions and goals that are balanced in all areas of my life and track the habits required to make progress on those goals.
Now, my fear mind likes to tell me I’m not moving fast enough, but in my heart I know that I’m moving forward in a much more grounded, spacious way that will support my ongoing chronic fatigue recovery, and without short-circuiting my energy in obsessive pursuit of a goal.
I do enjoy the moment more now, but I find it very important to keep setting incremental new goals, and keep turning up the dial, as an old mentor used to say.
If we don’t move forward, we stagnate. Of course it’s fine to coast sometimes, but just like on a bicycle, if you coast for too long, you’ll eventually lose momentum and fall off.
So tune in, what’s something you’d like to develop in yourself right now?
Something I love about the Self-Love guided journal is the way it helps you clear lots of space before asking you to dream about the future.
Week 1 is all about the foundation. You’ll learn about common self-love myths and why they hold you back from feeling good enough while examining in broad strokes how to move through the world in thought, feeling and action as one who deeply loves herself.
Week 2 is a thorough inventory. You’ll examine generational patterns of self-care in your family, including the mother wound (patriarchy’s dismissal of all things feminine) and how they’re affecting your day-to-day life.
You’ll also identify more clearly the stories you tell yourself about your worthiness so you can heal what needs to be healed and create meaningful change in your life.
Week 3 is all about reclaiming your power. We talk about the difference between being nice and kind, which is so important and an area where people give A LOT of power away.
You’ll also explore the kinds of boundaries you’d like to set (and how to do it), along with ways to deepen your connection to your intuition.
This is a great, powerful week because we explore how deeper fears of inadequacy and rejection have influenced how you show up in the world as a way to protect yourself.
Once you create a feeling of safety within yourself, no longer trying to get it from the outside world, you will feel emboldened to live more boldly and unapologetically than ever before.
Week 4 is all about rediscovering your dreams.
One of my favorite readings and prompts is from Day 27, about learning how to receive.
I guide you through a powerful shadow work process to heal tendencies of over-giving that naturally result in a most-frustrating tug of war: feelings of resentment when you over-give and guilt when you try to set boundaries or say no.
You’ll explore your desires, which is sure to be a powerful conversation with yourself now that you're so deeply connected. I also talk about my unconventional views on life purpose, including a super fast way to create clarity even when you feel insanely confused.
The Self-Love guided journal is one of my favorite things I’ve ever created. It strikes the perfect balance between deep healing and fun exploration.
If you’d like to learn how to focus on yourself and want support to feel good enough, I know you’ll love it!
Questions? Let me know, and I'll reply!
All the love,
Suzanne
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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You might change how you act or try to achieve certain goals, all in the hopes that it will make you happy or help you feel better about yourself.
Ironically, taking action from a place of not feeling good enough actually makes you feel worse about yourself.
This is because whatever emotional energy you take an action from creates more of that energy.
Taking action from fear creates stress. Taking action from peace and a connection with your true self creates confidence.
Continuing this line of thought, taking action from fear if you never feel good enough pushes you off your true path in life.
Meanwhile, taking action from a place of being rooted in who you are and knowing that you are good enough results in a life that's uniquely you.
For example, I spent the first 32 years of my life freaking out feeling like there was some purpose or mission to find, always feeling like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, never feeling good enough.
This fear made me negative, depressed and anxious. I lived in my brain, always finding things that seemed wrong with myself and my life.
I searched my past for things I could have done differently to create a different result all while feeling powerless to create any positive change.
I didn’t love myself, although if you had asked me, I would have rattled off things I was good at and reasons why I knew I deserved good things.
The proof of not loving myself could be seen in how I treated myself. How I was always so hard on myself, criticizing and finding fault.
How I blamed myself (and sometimes other people) for everything that went wrong while never giving myself the opportunity to move forward (because I was secretly afraid of failing and having no other options).
How I felt stressed and unhappy rather than at peace, full of faith that things were always working out for the highest good.
I had this insanely tight grip on life and it suffocated the life and potential out of everything.
I created a spiritual practice and spent more time in my journal working to shift rather than just ranting and venting.
As I released old pains and beliefs I no longer needed, I created more space for love.
I dissolved the barriers of pain and fear disconnecting me from my heart and blocking the guidance of my higher self.
Now tuned into these messages, I followed them to create a life that reflected my unique desires and abilities, my true nature.
When I started this journey, I was living in a bland beige house in a bland beige suburb having just quit my toxic office job but having no clue what I wanted to do with my life even though I was already 32! All I wanted to do was make money and travel, to have time and financial freedom.
Today I live in a more exciting, walkable part of town that isn't my dream, but vastly better than where we lived before. I have created Soul Scroll Journals based on my truest gifts of asking the right questions to help you grow.
If you know me, you know that I am famous for my odd schedule — I sleep late, eat dinner late and flow through work and rest / relaxation throughout the day.
Basically I know myself, own my quirks and talents, and have created a life around them!
The point isn't you creating what I have.
It's knowing that loving yourself and feeling good enough in exactly who you are comes first, before any external accomplishment or approval.
If you never feel good enough, sandpapering down your unique edges to fit in a soul-destroying box of normalcy will never make you happy.
Reveling in what makes you weird and building a life around it, will.
Journaling is the best method for self-inquiry, to help you release the thoughts and past pains that make you never feel good enough and instead love yourself.
Once you embody this knowing, you will sparkle. You will shine. You will be who you really are proudly and boldly.
The world may feel like it's falling apart right now, but that's exactly why it's time to dig into your soul and decide what new paradigm to create for yourself.
When nothing is certain, anything is possible.
“When you're not operating in the world from your true self, nothing fits.
We judge our true selves, thinking them not enough, and try to play the role of someone we think will be worthy of love or worthy of getting what we want. We connect with others, find jobs and create lives while playing this role, but nothing satisfies.
Because nothing satisfies, we try harder to shove ourselves into a box, trying to be who we think we need to be to get what we want, feeling more miserable all the time because everything feels stifling and hard.
Instead of questioning the way we’re living, we question ourselves, wondering why we are not enough.
The problem is not that you are not enough — you are so very much enough. The problem is the paradigm. Creating a life that fills every crevice of your unique heart requires honoring every crevice of your unique being.
To find our true path, we must be our true selves.”
Some of my favorite journal prompts I’ve ever created follow this reading, which is all about reclaiming any pieces of yourself you’ve lost in life while trying to check the boxes of other people’s expectations.
If you’re ready to feel good enough in all your weird, sparkly glory, and would like a step-by-step guide through this inner work, check out the Self-Love journal here.
May this book serve you on your journey of creating a life as unique as you are
All the love,
Suzanne
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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This article will teach you exactly how to know what you want if you feel confused or uncertain right now.
You are a unique being with a special combination of gifts, talents, insights, experience and perspectives. You have a lot to offer the world.
You deserve to give your gifts in a way that makes you happy and financially successful. You deserve to be recognized for those gifts, and you deserve to create a day-to-day flow that fulfills and energizes you.
But for some reason, you feel lost about how to know what you want. You may feel stuck, confused and frustrated, like you’ve spent so long trying to figure it all out and yet the pieces still aren’t coming together.
You're tired of banging your head against a wall, asking for answers and hearing nothing.
I know how you feel. There have been many times in my life where I had no clue what I wanted.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I quit my toxic but high paying office job in hopes of making it big as a freelance writer.
My husband and I were living in a boring beige house in a boring beige suburb and everyday I looked around, asking myself — how the fuck did I end up here?
Despite it all, I never gave up on my dreams. Dreams of finding out what I was put on this Earth to do, of working a job I loved, of traveling and having adventures.
During that time, I tried SO hard to figure out how to know what I wanted, but the harder I tried, the more confused, stuck and frustrated I felt.
This made me super negative. It’s not who I wanted to be, but I had no clue how to translate my longing into reality, and this made me really unhappy.
Finally I surrendered, took the steps I’m sharing with you today about how to know what you want, and things began shifting immediately.
Today, I know who I am and what I want. I have a clear vision for who I want to be that I work towards every day, no longer focusing so much on other people that I lose myself.
I’ve released the emotional trauma keeping me trapped in patterns of self-sacrifice, unfulfilling work and feeling not good enough.
I’ve shifted the my beliefs that told me I didn't deserve what I wanted, or success was for other people and not me.
This is what I'm here to help you with, too.
Using the process I'll share with you today, I've realized my special gift is helping people listen to their souls by asking the right questions. I want to help you grow and be who you are meant to be.
This is why I created Soul Scroll Journals — to help you stop placing experts and influencers on pedestals, paying more attention to what they say than the wisdom in your heart, and find out what YOU want and believe.
The bad news is nobody is coming to save you. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you and give you want you want.
The good news is you are mind-blowingly powerful and have all the answers and wisdom you could possibly need inside of you.
One of the first things that needs to shift to know what you want is to release the story that says you need to have it all figured out, or that because you don’t know now, you never will.
Take a moment right now to ask yourself — What stories are you telling yourself about the situation you’re in?
We attach so much meaning to these stories. That we’re failures or not where we’re supposed to be. The pressure we put on on ourselves to figure it all out disconnects us from our hearts.
The pressure puts us in a place of fear and anxiety, and it’s impossible to hear your inner voice — let alone trust what it says — from this place.
There are many more disempowering stories we tell ourselves, and if you want to clear them away and learn how to know what you want, the Listen to Your Heart guided journal will guide to create a crystal clear vision for your life.
It’s human nature to focus on the negative — what’s wrong or what you want that feels impossible to create right now.
A lot of personal growth exercises guide people to envisioning their ideal lives, and those are great exercises.
It’s important to have a vision for who you want to be and where you want to go ultimately. Listen to Your Heart definitely invites you to imagine what you’d create in a world with no limit.
However, I’ve found that when I feel really stuck and confused, one of the things that trips me up the most is having a vision for what I want that feels impossible for right now.
Rather than having a clear plan to work toward, I end up worrying I’m supposed to be somewhere else in life because I can’t see how to create what I want from where I am.
I also find that when I focus too much on an ‘ideal’ life (if that even exists), I do things that I think are required to get me there while losing connection with what I actually want to do.
The unique lives we’re meant to live are created step by step.
In Listen to Your Heart, you’ll spend a lot of time getting clear on what the best version of your life right now looks like, and from there you’ll continue expanding into wherever you want to go.
If you want help with how to know what you want, you’ll love this guided journal.
One of the best ways to start expanding and figure out the next chapter of your life is to take the next right step.
Explore your curiosities and interests even if you have no idea where they’ll go.
My other business besides Soul Scroll Journals is a personal brand with offerings like online courses and coaching.
This business started all because when I was stuck a few years ago, I began following my curiosity. At first I did random things like take a jewelry making class and tennis lessons.
That led to yoga teacher training and eventually to sharing my yoga and emotional healing journey on Instagram, which led to my blog, which led to the courses, which ultimately led here, to Soul Scroll Journals.
People often want to tie their lives up in neat little bows, to have arrived somewhere. But the only place to arrive is right here, right now in the present moment.
You’ll never have it all figured out because life is a constant process of evolution. Some people may indeed stick with the same thing for their entire lives, but even then, they’re learning and growing and expanding within that container.
Once you take the pressure off yourself, it creates space to hear the next step and learn how to know what you want, but then it becomes equally as important to follow it.
Often the next step you’re given is small, and you can’t see where it will go.
The tendency is, because you can’t see the bigger picture or how this random idea will lead you to a life that makes you happy, to avoid taking the step all together.
But life doesn’t always give us the bigger picture all at once.
One of my favorite analogies for teaching you how to know what you want is driving in a car in the fog.
You might be able to see only 10 feet in front of you. But if you keep your eyes on the road and keep figuring out the way home 10 feet at a time, you’ll get there.
However, if you turn your brights on in an effort to see further ahead, you become blinded.
And if you stop the car all together, or avoid taking that next right step, you’ll never get where you want to go. You’ll stay stuck, confused and in a fog.
Only in this analogy the fog never clears because what creates clarity is action. If you do nothing, nothing changes.
Soul Scroll Journals are created on the foundation that when you expand fully and completely, with joy, into your life right now, you will effortlessly expand into the next chapter.
As you spend time with the inspiring daily readings and soul-stirring journal prompts in Listen to Your Heart, your next steps will become clear.
If it feels right, this journal is your right next step.
Taking it will teach you how to know what you want.
Collectively, we fear emptiness. We fill every second of our lives with social media and movies and socializing and entertainment.
We feel an inner ache, an emptiness, but because we fear it, we don’t stop to truly listen.
Inside this emptiness lies all the answers you’re looking for.
One of the things many highly successful, accomplished people have in common is they create space to listen to their hearts, even if they wouldn’t call it that.
Bill Gates is famous for taking Think Weeks, where he locks himself in a cabin to read and contemplate his next big idea.
Steve Jobs loved to take long walks, to think and solve problems, to hear his intuition.
And Oprah Winfrey is a well-known meditator and journaler who takes time each day to go within.
The world is a noisy place. It’s easy to get lost into wanting things you don’t even want because of advertising, social media and other people’s opinions.
I know it can feel scary to carve out the time to connect with your soul.
This fear can manifest in seemingly innocent ways, thinking you don’t have the time, always finding yourself procrastinating and doing other “important” things, thinking things like, “it won’t do that much good anyway.”
Taking this time to journal or meditate is especially important if you struggle with depression, anxiety or other mental health issues. A journaling practice will dramatically improve your mental health by helping you understand why you feel the way you do.
Soul Scroll Journals are particularly great because they're a guided journal / self-help book hybrid, giving you amazing questions for growth but also important mindset shifts to help you grow.
Listen to Your Heart is designed to guide you with how to know what you want so you can live the unique, authentic life available to you.
It will guide you through 30 days of beautiful daily readings and soul-stirring journaling prompts to help you get clear on exactly what you want and precisely how to create it.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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It means you’re standing at a threshold between the new and the old. The new has yet to make its way into your life but the old no longer feels good.
Feeling stuck is a portal between chapters of your life, and it’s very important that you treat it accordingly because the truth is some people never move beyond this.
Some people spend decades of their lives feeling frustrated, wanting something else without quite knowing what, never digging into what this feeling is telling them, instead resisting the experience and hoping life will end this chapter for them if they wait long enough.
Take it from me — an incredibly slow learner —when we feel stuck it’s because life is asking us to evolve.
Fortunately the growth on the other side of this experience is boundless.
The times in my life when I have felt massively, mind-bogglingly stuck but followed the steps I’m about to share with you have been the very times I’ve made significant forward movement in my life.
These steps are simple, but not easy, and I suggest you try them because they work.
We are alive to learn, and if we don’t allow ourselves to evolve into what may feel scary, we’ll continue to feel stuck because we’ve outgrown what the past has been.
Ready to turn the page? Read on.
I know this feels crazy difficult. After all, your biggest desire is to get out of this place.
How can you accept this feeling?
There are a lot of ways, but one of the most important is to identify the five main fears keeping you in resistance.
It's the fear that's keeping you stuck in what no longer works, creating the sense you don't know what you want.
One of the five main fears is that your situation is unchangeable, which is a feeling of powerlessness. The natural reaction is to resist this powerlessness, when to reclaim your power, you actually need to accept the feeling.
In this acceptance, you gain the power to move forward based on how life actually is rather than how you wish it was.
On Day 2 of the Listen to Your Heart guided journal, I talk about the four other big fears keeping people feeling stuck, unable to break free and create a life that makes them happy.
As you release these fears and write a new story, you will stop feeling stuck and reclaim a sense of incredible freedom and power.
You'll realize deep in your heart you can create anything you want, and with that realization, you'll receive the next steps to create a brand new chapter in your life.
There is wisdom and beauty here, even in feeling stuck, and the universe will open the gates for you to move forward just as soon as you take a deep breath and accept where you are.
When you’re feeling stuck in life, chances are two opposing forces are pulling you equally in two different directions — forward and backward.
Maybe you can't let go of the past or feel nervous about evolving into something new.
It's very important to patiently explore your attachments to the past so you can move on in a loving, gentle way rather than getting mad at yourself for not creating change or buying into limiting beliefs that it's not possible for you.
Or perhaps your desires are conflicted, with one part of you wanting, for example, to eat healthy, but your husband, who you cook for most of the time, hates vegetables, and you can't figure out how to reconcile the two.
Trust that every conflict has a creative solution of the highest good. There is no problem that can't be solved by thinking differently.
Giving yourself space to identify and resolve these inner conflicts will help you stop feeling stuck and start creating forward momentum.
If this resonates, you'll love Day 5 of the Listen to Your Heart journal when we explore how inner conflicts are stopping you from making changes that would light your heart up like the Griswold's house at Christmas.
You'll be guided to figure out how you can satisfy your true desires in a way that honors the ways you value showing up in the world.
Of course, this also requires you know your values and priorities, which you'll of course explore in Listen to Your Heart, as well.
One common reason people feel blocked in knowing what they want is because of the roles we play and what we think they require.
Our ideas of what makes a “good” partner / daughter / mother / father / boss / employee / entrepreneur often get in the way of doing what we really want.
Mothers feel selfish for taking time away from their families for self-care or to pursue their creative desires.
Entrepreneurs get stuck in strategies that aren’t a right fit for them because they’re blinded by what everybody else is doing.
Adult children feel guilty setting boundaries with parents even if interactions leave them feeling drained and resentful.
Underneath these problems are limiting beliefs. They feel true and frustrating to fight against, but that’s why being stuck is actually a good thing.
The inner work of getting unstuck involves gifting yourself permission to give in to what you actually want instead of buying into lies stealing your happiness and personal growth.
This isn't about being selfish and never doing anything for others, but instead redefining what matters, what's important and creating space in your life for you — the real you.
Not the version worried that wanting certain things makes you a bad person.
Throughout Listen to Your Heart, you'll get clear on your values and priorities so you can support those who are important to you from a place of love while creating plenty of space for your own needs and passions.
(If you died tomorrow, someone else would do the things you're worried about doing for others. What really matters to you?)
Creating this vision is important because you’ll allow yourself to move forward as soon as you have a clear desire and intention to do so, AND you’re no longer emotionally attached to the fears and inner conflicts holding you back.
Removing the emotional attachment holding you back allows you to move forward with ease and grace.
But creating this clear vision can feel overwhelming! A lot of people feel like they don’t know what they want.
One common reason for this is simply because people often don’t create the necessary space to tune into these desires.
It can feel scary to admit what you want. It opens you up to fears of failure and loss.
(In order to create a new chapter, you must close the old chapter. Walking into the unknown can feel scary even if the past isn’t something you enjoyed.)
This is why during the first week in the Listen to Your Heart guided journal, you’ll spend time getting clear on what exactly what fears and limiting beliefs are stopping you from acknowledging what you truly want.
After clearing space, it’s equally as important to sit with yourself, to get clear on what you value, what your priorities are and what makes you unique.
Give yourself permission to remove the limits and ask yourself what kind of life you truly want to live.
Weeks 2 through 4 in the journal are about clarifying who you are and what you want, designing your next level, and becoming limitless, which invites you to consider your relationships to success, money and your inner guidance.
I firmly believe that creating your next chapter is about expanding so fully and joyfully into your life today that the next chapter has no choice but to appear.
This allow you to stay grounded and grateful in what you have while reaching for more.
So often when people start manifesting a big dream, the hugeness of the dream paralyzes them.
That staggering divide stops you from taking action because you don’t know how to get from here to there.
It can also create a lot of suffering if your desires make you so future-minded that you start resisting the present, feeling like it’s not good enough.
Your life is right here, right now.
It’s SO important to walk this balance of loving what is while reaching for more.
You’ll spend a lot of time in Listen to Your Heart getting clear on what makes you unique, what you value, and how you can create a life that perfectly suits you.
Throughout, you’ll be supplied with amazing journaling prompts to help you create a vision for your life while honoring your fears and the very real inner conflicts keeping you feeling stuck.
This inner work will help you break free so you can create something new in your life. And best of all, these are tools you can revisit over and over whenever you’re feeling stuck.
You’ll now know this feeling is an invitation for you to evolve, to step more boldly into a life of success and significance.
It’s not necessarily about living a BIG life, but living a UNIQUE life. The life that’s designed perfectly for you
To create that life, you’ve got to listen to your heart, and this guided journal will show you how.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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This guide to limiting beliefs will teach you how to manage your mindset, which fills your mind with either thoughts of defeat or ones of victory.
Think about how the thought, "Good things happen to other people, not me," could influence your life.
It would cause you stay in situations that don't make you happy because you wouldn't believe efforts to change would work out for you.
It would limit the number of chances you take because you'd focus on all the problems and things that could go wrong.
It would cause you to feel like you don't know what you want because instead of listening to your heart and taking your dreams seriously, you'd spend time trying to figure out what would make you happy that "someone like you" could achieve.
Only this search turns up nothing because what you really want, you don't believe you can create.
Rather than listening to your heart, you’re more likely to spend time thinking thoughts like:
“I don’t know what I want.”
“Things feel so hard and confusing.”
“Nothing ever works out for me.”
Never realizing these limiting beliefs are the exact things blocking you from getting clear and believing you can achieve your goals.
I know exactly how to help you out of this situation.
But you have to be willing to do some inner work. That's what I'll teach you in this article.
I've totally transformed my life over the past few years — from someone who was depressed and directionless, who felt like she was living someone else's life without the power to change anything...
to someone who is connected to her life purpose, has created multiple successful, passion-based businesses, and wakes up feeling happy and peaceful (most) days. #highlyemotionalhuman
I have a lot of good reasons to believe why things wouldn’t work out *for someone like me.*
I lost my father and sister and survived cancer all by the age of 30. I don't really fit in with most people and often feel like an outcast. I suffered from serious depression for a lot of my life and have received more diagnoses than I can count before I learned how to heal myself.
These are all good reasons to believe I am unlucky.
But I never bought into it. I've always known deep in my heart that we can overcome anything and create any kind of life we want to.
And that's why I created Soul Scroll Journals. To pass on the tools and mindset shifts I've learned along the way so you can thrive, too — as long as you're ready to do the work.
A limiting belief is any negative or fear-based belief that limits your potential.
They’re stories we tell ourselves about who we are, how the world works, or what’s possible for us, often based on past pains.
We are all born into households with parents and a society that see the world in specific ways.
The world is considered a hostile place or friendly one, a world to be met with love and openness or suspicion and fear.
Our existence is celebrated and met with love, or perhaps met with apathy or even violence.
Inside of these world views, we have experiences.
Ideally, we’re taught confidence, which is really a result of loving experiences with adults who tell children things like, “You are amazing. I love you. I believe in you.”
But sometimes we’re taught insecurity. Maybe you felt like nothing you did was ever good enough, or a sibling got more attention than you, or learned that because you were a girl, you had to do or not do certain things to be "good."
Maybe you were taught that success comes from working in an office and having a fancy title.
Or maybe you were taught that success and money is for other people, not for someone like you, who grew up in the neighborhood you did.
These experiences are sometimes passed on verbally, but other times through body language or even genetically.
Research is showing that trauma, which is ultimately repressed emotion, can be passed on through bloodlines.
As children who come into this world as blank slates, we inevitably pushed up against our parents' and teachers' ideas of how the world works, what's wrong and what's right.
Each time we felt rejected for who we are, our ideas, or desires or needs, we felt pain. This is a trauma, no matter how small or large because it made us feel unsafe.
And in that painful experience of not feeling safe, we blamed ourselves for the pain. In turn, we adapted, creating limiting beliefs and behaviors to help us fit in and receive the love and resources we needed to survive.
Rather than wondering if the worldview was flawed, which is impossible because we were so young, we believe ourselves to be flawed.
As a result, we dial down our unique qualities, try to blend in, learn to play it safe, learn what is means to be a “good” girl, and adopt the rules of what our family and society sees as necessary for surviving in the world.
Rewriting your limiting beliefs and healing your past is the very exciting work of realizing there's nothing wrong with you.
There never was.
You were simply exposed to a limited worldview, and now you get to change that worldview to create whatever kind of life you want.
As you do this work, you will free yourself from the past and open yourself up to unlimited potential.
The best way to rewrite limiting beliefs and heal your emotions is through journaling. This is why I created Soul Scroll Journals — to help you do this important inner work so you can create a life as unique as you are rather than spend your life wanting things you don’t believe you can have.
Here's a four-step process I’ve used to erase limiting beliefs, step into my purpose, and create a life where anything is possible:
The easiest way to identify limiting beliefs is to start with a specific area where you’re struggling. What is the story you're telling yourself around this struggle? Is that story ultimately true?
One of my favorite exercises inside the Listen to Your Heart guided journal involves identifying limiting beliefs about the roles you play in life — for example wife, mother, daughter, boss, employee — and how they may be stressing you out while limiting your potential.
Do you feel like you never have time for you? Always bending your day and desires to accommodate others even though nobody does the same for you? Guilty for doing or buying things that bring you joy? Mad that nobody understands how hard it is for you?
An outdated story and limiting beliefs are running the show — things that aren't even true, but create so much stress and frustration. Your struggle will continue until you correct the cause.
You have the power to change your life. Nobody else.
Painful limiting beliefs are energetically encoded in our bodies, which is why it's necessary to heal emotionally before changing the belief to something more empowering.
This happens when emotions related to past painful experiences aren't fully processed, which is really common because most of us weren't taught healthy ways of navigating our emotions.
This is what I'm really good at, and I'm so happy to help you heal in this way.
Without releasing the emotions underneath the limiting belief, you won't believe the better-feeling one. It will feel like a lie, something that can't possibly be true.
But when you release painful emotions, you're suddenly free to believe empowering things and take action to back it up.
This is how you stop feeling stuck.
Journaling is one of the best tools to do this work.
Writing your thoughts down helps you process your feelings because as you write, you feel, and as you feel, you heal.
Plus, everyone who buys Listen to Your Heart receives special access to a 20-minute version of my famous Feeling Awareness meditation, which guides you through my signature process of freeing yourself from emotional pain.
It's very powerful and many people have said it's helped them feel connected to parts of themselves they didn't know existed.
Once you’ve done all this hard work, creating space, now comes the fun part!
Select beliefs that align with what you want to believe and who you want to become.
In Listen to Your Heart, we spend a lot of time on this.
Each day's reading and journal prompt will guide you one layer deeper into getting crystal clear on what you want for this next chapter of your life.
You'll identify how this person sees herself, how she spends her day, and what she believes. This is how you lay the groundwork for transformational change.
As you go through your day, this deep inner work will naturally begin to shift your thoughts from negative to positive, from defeat to victory.
When limiting beliefs keeping you stuck do arise, you'll be much more aware of them. They won't hold you back anymore, creating stress and confusion.
Instead, you'll notice thoughts that say you can’t or don’t know the answer and immediately shift to a new story that says you can do whatever you commit to.
Writing out empowering, victorious beliefs each day is the best way to create change. Near daily shifting of my thoughts in my journal is one of my most important personal growth practices.
If you’re letting limiting beliefs live in your mind, that’s why you’re not where you want to be in life.
But you have to embark upon this process with love and understanding, in a way that opens your heart rather than closes you off from it, leaving you stuck in your mind.
At the deepest level we have these limiting beliefs because we feel they keep us safe.
That’s another reason why Soul Soul Scroll Journals are so great. This entire process is designed to help you feel safe.
If you’re ready to get clear on what you want and create a mindset that will help you achieve your goals, check out the Listen to Your Heart guided journal!
This is a carefully designed 4-week program to help you shift from feeling like, "WTF is happening with my life," to knowing exactly who you are, what you want, and how to create it.
It's time to declare victory in your life.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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I have a unique view on building a positive mindset because, as you’ll read in the steps below, I never force myself to be positive when I don’t feel that way.
Instead, I drop in and work on the mental / emotional / spiritual levels until positive thoughts naturally arise.
Nurturing positive, healing thoughts is important, but the truth is that when we are fully aligned with who we really are and connected to our souls, positive thinking is natural and not something you have to consciously do.
Unhealed painful emotions often lurk beneath negative thoughts, and these painful emotions make it difficult to believe empowering things.
It’s important to take the time to do deeper inner work through journaling to understand yourself, identify limiting beliefs and release painful emotions before changing your thoughts to something more positive.
The intention of Soul Scroll Journals is to help you do this deeper inner work. This creates space to get clear on exactly what you want and connect to the faith that you can create it.
With that, here are eight tips for building a positive mindset so you can achieve your goals.
Most of the day, we think thoughts — mostly the exact same thoughts all day long — but we're not consciously aware of what they are.
“I feel so stuck.”
“I don’t know what I want / how to achieve my goals.”
“WTF am I even doing with my life?”
These thoughts become such a running dialogue we don’t even know they’re there. Yet they become our reality because focusing on them creates no space for anything else.
Only by becoming aware of your thoughts can you change them.
This allows you to consciously select a positive mindset aligning with the person you want to be, and become that person.
The Listen to Your Heart guided journal helps you rewrite the story you’re telling yourself around what’s wrong with your life and why you don’t have what you want.
With a more positive mindset, you’re free to create this new life.
Is this something you truly believe, or a random, silly thought to brush away?
You can tell by the amount of emotion attached to it. Does this thought feel painful and true? Or does it feel silly, almost like — Woah! I wonder where that came from?
If it feels random or not attached to a deeper emotion, simply remind yourself of what you’d rather think, and move on with your day.
If the thought is connected to a deeper sense of emotional pain, if it feels really true, or it’s something that’s been bothering you for quite some time, then continue on with the next step.
One of the principles I teach more in-depth in a course called The Big Shift is called the Divide and Conquer strategy.
This is about separating your thoughts from your feelings to deal with each independently. Because while thoughts and feelings are intertwined, they are in fact two separate things, and easier dealt with separately.
To get curious about your thoughts, ask where they come from. Why are you thinking this thought? Is it true?
There’s more to this process I’ll get to in a moment, but using negative thoughts as a way to understand yourself more deeply is a great way to reclaim your power.
This also helps you approach the work of building a positive mindset within the frame that you are good enough.
It’s not like you need to have a positive mindset to be happy enough or good enough so people love you and you get what you want.
You get to have a positive mindset because it reflects the truth of who you really are — an infinite being with infinite potential.
You are stardust sandwiched in skin. Any thought that tells you otherwise is a lie!
Each beautiful daily reading inside the Listen to Your Heart guided journal helps you identify old stories creating patterns of anxiety, sadness and defeat.
I'm really good at articulating all the layers that feel like jumbled confusion inside your mind so you can make sense of them and find peace.
The journal also guides you through the next step.
This is perhaps the most obvious step to building a positive mindset, but it’s actually the frosting on the cake!
Once you’ve done the deeper work to create a strong foundation, this part is natural and easy.
Without doing the deeper inner work however, you will fight your thoughts, resist them, and judge yourself for having them, which ultimately makes it harder to build a positive mindset - and achieve your goals.
That's why these next steps are important.
Joy, peace and confidence directly relate to your connection with your soul and spirit.
The more spiritual energy you fill yourself with, the more you focus your attention on what’s infinitely good and true in the world and in yourself, the more naturally a positive mindset will arise.
We started this conversation by talking about the unhealed emotion lying in your energy body that creates negative thinking.
As you fill your body with spiritual healing energy, it releases repressed emotional pain from your body.
This is a very important part of the process. It doesn’t matter what you believe in — God / gods / angels / Universe.
What is important is that you connect to the energy of all that is daily, allowing it to uplift and guide you.
Plus having a daily practice helps you create that all-important awareness to begin noticing negative thoughts of defeat rather than identifying with them.
Glasses, not contacts. (Even though glasses do not make me look cute.)
As you do this inner work through practices like journaling, you will understand the sources of your negativity with compassion.
This allows you to build a positive mindset while loving yourself along the way rather than fighting negative thoughts, feeling like they make you less worthy.
This can in itself be a healing, but other times, it’s a start. An experience of creating awareness.
The Listen to Your Heart guided journal guides you through this process step by step.
You’re busy, running around all day doing a million things. You don’t always have time to stop, drop and journal or sit for a moment in self-inquiry.
That’s exactly why having a game plan is important.
A game plan of not only which thoughts you’re trying to change, but what thoughts your new, more positive mindset includes.
That's why in the Listen to Your Heart guided journal, you'll spend a lot of time choosing new thoughts and stories so when old, negative thoughts rise up, you know exactly what to tell yourself instead.
This allow you to shift out of negative thoughts and painful emotions much more quickly not only because you're prepared with the positive, but also because you've processed your feelings through writing them down.
This creates space for a new, more positive mindset to grow!
Then, as you go about your day, simply notice the negative thoughts and replace with those you’ve already selected as new beliefs to take on.
You are a human being in process. The more you can love and accept yourself even when you feel sad, depressed, angry or negative, the faster these emotional states will shift and you will return to a state of peace and harmony.
Release any pressure you feel to be positive.
The universe won’t punish you for being human and having a human experience. It’s okay to feel pain.
Of course you want to be happy, and it’s true that it’s much easier to attract good things into your life when you are in a grateful, joyous state, but the way to create that state is to love yourself unconditionally.
That means love yourself no matter how you feel, what you’re thinking, or what’s happening in your life.
Love yourself, don’t judge yourself!
This is the best way to create a positive mindset, build a life that makes you happy, and realize all your biggest goals and dreams in this life!
Ready to transform your mindset? Check out Listen to Your Heart guided journal here.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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But elevating your self-worth and shifting your mindset is essential if you want to build your life around what makes you happy rather than feel guilty and backpedal every time you try to make a change.
The good news is self-belief is a mindset anyone can develop.
We have so much power to release the pains of the past and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves into ones that uplift and empower us.
Soul Scroll Journals is all about helping people get to the root of the emotional pains creating self-doubt and criticism, and healing those pains with love and understanding.
We want to help you heal, understand yourself and find inner freedom so you can create a life as unique as you are.
Faith is a choice, and so is fear.
Yet criticism and rejection undoubtedly hurt.
It can feel easier to hide or quit or settle for lives less than we deserve rather than face this pain.
But faced in the right way, the pain can teach us where we criticize and reject ourselves — which is the real reason outside rejection and judgment hurt.
Facing failure, disappointment and rejection ultimately builds inner strength, perhaps even getting to the point where others may throw blows or reject us, but we are so strong in who we are that it no longer causes us pain.
That's why in the Listen to Your Heart guided journal, you'll examine your relationship to these things in order to grow so strong nothing can hold you down.
#thickskinopenheart
I've definitely received my fair share of judgment over the years.
I’ve been told I’m annoying, my voice is annoying, I email too much, charge too much, that my views are “dangerous,” to take my posts down, that I’m wrong for cursing, and a million other things.
Receiving these comments hurt, but they pale in comparison to some of the comments I’ve seen tossed other people’s ways.
I think that’s the hard thing about learning how to believe in yourself — the things we fear will probably happen.
We will experience failure on the way to success. Strangers will judge us, and sometimes make those judgments known.
Depending on the people you have in your life, they may support and encourage you, but they might not.
Sometimes I’ve wanted to wrap myself in bubble wrap and never leave the house again.
I’ve often wondered if I’m just too sensitive, if I should just give everything up and go work a 9 to 5.
But that’s not the life I want to live.
I need to live according to my unique inner clock and flow. I need the freedom to travel and work on projects of my choosing.
I know I have gifts the world deeply needs, as you do too, and these gifts and desires will never see the light of day if I choose fear.
Ultimately, I don’t want to face myself on my dying day and realize that I chose cowardice over courage.
So over the years, I’ve learned how to love and accept myself unconditionally, believe in myself, and am now working on elevating my self worth. (Journal on that coming soon!)
In martial arts, one technique is to use the opponents’ force against them.
So instead of blocking a jab, the fighter would deflect it, essentially allowing the opponent’s momentum to continue in a different direction, throwing them off balance.
When fighters resist things, they enter into a battle of brute strength where one relies solely on their own power.
This creates fatigue. The strongest person wins.
This is similar to life. When we fight and resist life or ourselves, it IS possible to win. But the result is not necessarily peaceful victory.
We may feel tired. We may have created conditions out of harmony with the universe, if the universe allows us to win at all.
We live at odds with ourselves when what we need to do is resolve inner conflicts and find peace.
In an effort to believe in yourself and create the life you want, you may be tempted to blame your sensitivity.
But sensitivity is a gift. It's only at odds with self-belief when unhealed past pains and low self-worth run the show.
Sure, sensitive people may have more to heal because they bruise more easily, but healing your inner world will also thicken your skin.
This allows you to keep your big heart full of compassion while not allowing it to destroy your chance of realizing your dreams.
Through the inspiring daily readings and thought-provoking journaling prompts inside Listen to Your Heart, you’ll identify (and re-write) the stories and inner conflicts causing the war within.
This greater self-understanding helps you love yourself more while increasing your confidence and ability to believe in yourself.
It might seem odd to put self-care into an article about learning how to believe in yourself, but I’ve found this is really, really important.
When I am hungry or stressed or overwhelmed, not expressing a boundary or slacking on my spiritual practice, I am much more likely to fall into spirals of self-doubt or comparison.
Conversely, when I feel doubtful, I’m more likely to lapse in self-care — skipping my morning ritual or exercise because I’m so ‘focused on work and don’t have time.'
Bullshit! Self-care is a basic necessity of life.
Caring for ourselves, creating a rhythm for our lives that involves healthy food, water, sleep, fun and relaxation, purposeful work, and time with loved ones calms the nervous system, creating a sense of deep serenity and security within.
Self-doubt can cause lapses in self-care, but one way to ease back into self-belief is simply to take care of yourself.
When you feel good, you’ll think good, empowering thoughts.
One thing I love about the Listen to Your Heart guided journal is that in it, you’ll connect not only to what you need to feel vibrant and alive, but also be supported to identify the best flow for your day.
You’ll spend time understanding why the voices your head sometimes make you feel guilty for doing what you want, or why you feel like you don’t have time to care for yourself.
Doing this deeper inner work is really important for making lasting change, and understanding why you self-sabotage when you inevitably do.
Creating self-awareness is the most important gift you can give yourself, and Soul Scroll Journals are your unbiased guide to find out who you are and what you believe so you can become who you want to be.
I’m all about positive affirmations and reprogramming my thoughts from limiting to empowering.
However, it’s also important to hold space for where you are.
The fastest way to move through an experience of panic, feeling not good enough, frustrated or sad is to fully be with it. Let it exist.
NOT giving yourself space to feel is resistance. Resistance separates you from your heart and creates thoughts in the family of “shoulds.”
These statements don’t reflect your true self. You are an extraordinary person, a slice of infinity sandwiched in skin, with so much love and so many gifts to offer the world.
However, our human selves typically react to these statements in one of two ways:
First, most people don't have the awareness they're even thinking these thoughts.
(It's like fish being unaware of the water they're swimming in.)
This is why journaling is so massively important. I believe everyone should have a journaling practice. How can you create true happiness without self-reflection?
Humans who react without awareness continue believing these thoughts, which of course influences every decision and sadly limits their experience of life.
Another common scenario is that people immediately shift to a positive affirmation, trying to remind themselves of what they want to believe.
Saying affirmations you don't believe damages your self-belief because it creates resistance and inner conflict, worsening the war within rather than resolving it.
It places you at odds with yourself as you fight to believe something you don't and blame yourself for not believing it.
Think of driving a car: If it's in reverse, you must first shift into neutral before shifting into drive.
Our psyches are the same. You must create space to identify what's blocking you from believing the positive thought before the affirmation can help you rather than hurt you.
Soul Scroll Journals are expertly designed to support you through this process.
An important thing to know is that underneath these negative beliefs lie deeper, bigger, more fundamental fears like:
In Listen to Your Heart, you’ll identify these deeper fears and give them space to exist so you can move beyond them in a way that honors your sensitivity rather than placing you at war with it.
This is incredibly healing. It also creates so much space to fully, deeply believe in yourself so you can continue with Step 4.
After you hold space for the pain, doubt and fear, you will feel a sense of inner peacefulness.
Then, you get to decide: What new story would you like to write?
We focus on this a lot in the Listen to your Heart guided journal.
The daily readings and journal prompts will help you get super honest about how you feel, and the areas in your life causing you frustration.
You’ll also be guided to write a new story.
How about:
Repetition is really important with this process. You've been creating negative thought patterns for decades, and it can take time to reprogram your brain.
That's why daily journaling, reaffirming the thoughts you want to believe, is such a powerful way to learn how to believe in yourself.
And that’s exactly what you’ll do in the Listen to Your Heart journal here!
It features a carefully designed process to help you shift from confused to clear about what you want to create in life and what will make you happy!
I poured my heart and soul into creating this journal for you, and I know you will love it!
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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In this article, I’ll share with you a simple process to help you find out what you really want.
First, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that finding what makes you happy is more about constructing your life in a way that the sheer living of it brings you joy rather than focusing on arriving at a specific destination.
Life is about following your heart, knowing yourself, and investing your energy in wise ways — in both following your dreams and savoring the present.
When I was in Italy, one thing I really admired while spending time in a little seaside town packed with locals rather than tourists (which was really intimidating because people barely spoke English!), was how ludicrously relaxed people were.
The beaches there are a little different — most aren’t public. The town I was in was pretty luxe, and it cost $50 USD to rent a cabana for the day. You have to rent the cabana to hang out on the beach.
At first this seemed like an absurd about of money, but I felt tired and justified the expense realizing I could easily spend that much on some tour.
Half-way into the day, dozing off underneath the umbrella while lying on a comfy daybed, not worried about getting burned or chasing down a flimsy portable beach umbrella, I realized the Italians really know what they’re talking about!
In the US, beaches often feel active while in Italy, everyone seemed so relaxed, passed out under the sun, chatting with friends and family, resting up before a night of wine and fresh food during a cozy dinner.
It was honestly one of the most relaxing days of my life, and perfectly encapsulated the Italian philosophy of dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing.
People reading this come from all over the world, but in the US, everyone is obsessed with achieving, being the best, and doing more things, faster.
I am as driven and goal-obsessed as the next girl.
But the rules we live under stop us from truly enjoying life and finding what makes us happy.
It's easy to get destination addition, thinking we'll be happy when we make the money, get the body, have the relationship, snag the raise, but if we aren't happy on the way to achieving our goals, the entire thing is meaningless.
How we travel is how we arrive. The point of a goal is to engage in an enjoyable process of growth on the way to achieving it.
Destination addiction not only blocks us from feeling joyful, but also prevents us from realizing our goals because it increases the odds we'll give up.
Allowing ourselves to relax so we can enjoy life itself is an important foundation for this larger conversation about creating a joyful life.
A lot of times people skip over this part because they want to be positive, don’t find value in it, or perhaps don’t feel like digging through the painful emotions of looking honestly at their lives.
But getting soul naked with yourself and your life, beginning with a radically honest assessment of what’s not working, is critical to discover what makes you happy.
The first week of the Listen to Your Heart guided journal guides you through this important process in a loving, compassionate and curious way.
This is more of an inward exploration, thinking about how you relate to yourself, your life responsibilities and the people in your life. What is creating friction, suffering or resentment?
One of the reasons it’s so important to begin with this honest assessment is because underneath of any compulsion or feeling of obligation tying us to doing things we don’t like is a deeper story about who we must be to be worthy of love.
In the Listen to your Heart journal, you'll explore the roles you play — wife / mother / daughter — and what you think is required of those roles versus how you actually want to show up.
You'll create space to resolve your inner conflicts, which is when one part of you wants one thing, but another part doesn’t. This allows you to create forward momentum with deep reverence for your needs and values.
This is the real work of how you move forward in life.
Once you deal with these things, you create space to hear your inner voice and follow it to find what makes you happy.
Many of us are so focused on figuring out what the world wants from us so we can get outside approval that we don’t take the time to ask ourselves —
Who are you? What do you value? What are your truest goals and dreams? Not things you think you should want, or that look cool on Instagram, but what does your heart really, truly want?
One of the reasons I created Soul Scroll Journals is because I found myself spending so much time on social media, getting swept away in how other people’s lives were cooler than mine.
It made me feel woefully inadequate and rather than put down my phone, these feelings of inadequacy made me spend even more time on the apps!
Journaling has always been one of the ways I return to my center.
The daily readings and journal prompts inside Listen to your Heart guide you through this process.
You'll explore your values and priorities, identify what makes you unique, and how you can create a life that reflects the core of who you really are.
This is the foundation to finding out what makes you happy because you have to know yourself in order to figure that out!
So often in personal growth and development, we’re tasked with designing an ideal life or a perfect average day. I’ve come to hate these exercises!
Honestly, one of the first versions of Listen to your Heart included that question. Then I realized I am morally opposed to it.
Here’s why:
An ideal life doesn’t exist. So often people think they know what they want only to create it and feel stuck inside a prison. The reality isn’t what they thought, or what they wanted was based on something other than a heart-felt desire.
It’s obviously important to know what you want. We spend quite a bit of time inside Listen to your Heart connecting to your heart’s biggest desires.
But the main philosophy of this book, and of Soul Scroll Journals, is of connecting to your joy right now.
Filling your life with things that make you happy right now. And trusting that as you expand fully into the present moment, you will naturally expand into the next chapter of your life.
Compare this to writing down every detail of what you want your life to look like in 5 years and then feeling frustrated, overwhelmed or not taking action because you feel so far away from where you want to be.
It's very important to cultivate happiness for where you are right now while reaching for more, and I believe a great way to do that is by focusing on expanding so fully into the present moment that your life has no choice but to also expand.
(And spoiler — that's one of the questions inside Listen to Your Heart guided journal.)
During Week 3 of the journal, you'll go deep into designing your next level, which is really about making the life you have right now the most amazing it can possibly be.
This journey is so powerful because you’ll already have done so much clearing work. You’ll know who you are and what you want. You’ll understand your deeper inner conflicts and ideas of who you should be, things that have held you back before.
And now you’re free. Free to dream. Free to tap into your joy and live it every day.
This is the most important part of finding what makes you happy!
Creating change in your life, and even achieving your dreams and goals, is about making little tiny shifts and adding new habits over time.
It’s about consistency, and opening up to more joy in the every day.
What do you need to feel happy and balanced?
What would bring you joy right now, in this moment?
For me, I need a daily spiritual practice, which has changed over the years, but is now my decadent morning routine.
I love fun drinks like my healthy hot chocolate that I drink pretty much every day.
I love to do yoga because it keeps me grounded and present in my body.
A lot of times people think about adding more highlights to their life, the big, once-in-a-lifetime moments, or feel like they’re not doing it right unless every day is a gleeful adventure.
But most days are ordinary.
A happy life is one with balance. Where you know what matters, what your dreams and goals are, and you do your best to incorporate most of the things into most of the days.
Savor life’s small pleasures. The sweetness of doing nothing.
And keep adding little pockets of joy into your life. Let yourself savor them.
Enjoy the journey of realizing your dreams. Have the strength to live a life that’s true to you — not what other people expect or what you think will get you approval or help you fit in.
If you’re interested in digging deep over 30 days to find what makes you happy, check out the Listen to your Heart journal here!
All the love,
Suzanne
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Not too long ago, my life felt like a total mess. All my good habits had gone out the window. I felt tired, sad, and out of balance.
Nothing was really working, and wondering how to make the lifestyle change I wanted felt overwhelming.
A little voice inside said, “add pockets of joy. One at a time.”
I did this by incorporating simple rituals into my routine daily, things I could look forward to like a yummy hot beverage or my decadent morning ritual.
Once that felt established, I added the next thing and the next, until suddenly, I’d made a total lifestyle change.
Maybe that sounds dramatic, but the momentum of all these little changes added up and made things feel easy.
I started going to bed earlier even though I’d been fighting myself with that for years.
I stopped eating so much sugar even though I’ve been an ice-cream junkie forever.
I even stopped biting my nails! This is something I’ve done forever and have stopped a few times, but always started again. Now it’s been a good few months and I can comfortably say the habit is gone for good.
I share this to let you know that no matter how stubborn you are....
No matter how much of a deep, dark hole you find yourself in.
No matter how long you’ve been trying to change that one habit that just won’t shift — you can make a lifestyle change, and I can help you learn how.
It’s easy to get swept away in all the changes you want to make.
This happens each year around New Year's and by Jan. 12, millions of people have already called it quits, according to a study done by Strava, a social network for athletes. What?!
Huge overhauls rarely create lasting lifestyle change.
Instead, it’s better to focus on adding one new positive habit at a time.
This worked with my most recent lifestyle change.
I got clear on the one result that would make the biggest change in my life (feeling happier), and then tuned into the simplest way to do that, which for me was to begin one new joyful ritual every day.
Just start. Continue until it sticks. And then add something new.
I love how The Play with the Day yearly goal journal includes space each month to set a single intention and just three goals to commit to for the month.
This helps you focus, which helps you succeed.
Plus, writing your goals down increases the odds you'll achieve them by 42%, according to Inc Magazine.
Think how much your life could change in a whole year by putting all your heart, energy and focus into achieving a few simple goals each month.
This might sound obvious, but most people have trouble creating a lifestyle change because they don’t truly want to or they haven’t decided.
Focusing on why you want the change helps but ultimately —
This is kind of a random analogy, but I got these really cool handmade ceramic salt and pepper shakers in Italy last year.
I’ve always wanted to use them, but could never figure out how to remove the little plastic stoppers because they were really wedged in there!
So they sat on my counter-top for months, beautiful but irrelevant.
Fast forward a few weeks ago, this Ayurvedic face oil I ordered arrived in the mail.
It too had a little plastic stopper in the top! It seemed really jammed in there, and I groaned, wondering what secret to life I was missing out on.
But I decidedin that moment to remove the little stopper.
Immediately my mind went to work, and I received the inspired guidance to try a new technique.
It worked!
Fired up with enthusiasm, I tried the same technique on my salt and pepper shakers, and guess what? That worked, too!
So now I happily use my face oil AND my handmade Italian ceramic salt and pepper shakers.
You can do anything you put your mind to. As long as you truly, in your heart, decide.
Have you ever heard about kaizen?
It's a Japanese concept referring to small, continual improvements.
A book I once read talked about a severely overweight lady who wanted to exercise but felt overwhelmed at the idea of a dramatic lifestyle change.
So she started walking in front of her television for 7 minutes each night. Seven minutes became 15 minutes which became walks around the block which became legitimate half-hour workouts.
(I could be making some of that up but the gist of the story is definitely true.)
I’ve found success in my life this way, too, by taking one small step at a time.
This is a big one. A lot people think about “stopping sugar,” or “stopping mindless scrolling,” but whatever you focus on expands.
The key question is — what do you want to do instead?
It's hard to stop doing something if that's all you can think about!
When you add positive things into your life and let them build, they gradually crowd the less positive things out.
When setting intentions, it’s fine to be general, but when making a lifestyle change or creating a new habit, it’s important to zero in on the exact change you’re trying to make.
Take the goal of reducing sugar.
When do you usually eat sugar? Is it a dessert? What's a healthy alternative?
So then instead of, “I want to stop eating so much sugar,” it becomes, “I want to start drinking this yummy healthy warm drink after dinner.”
You’ve defined a goal. You’ve made it small. And you’re focused on adding things.
That’s how you succeed!
You know every day if you’ve succeeded or missed your target.
But there's another step!
I honestly always thought habit tracking was kind of stupid and didn't see the point, but let me tell you —
Habit tracking is life-changing.
It's suprisingly motivating.
Imagine if you've decided to reduce sugar by drinking a yummy healthy elixer after dinner to stave off late-night cravings.
(In the morning or late. :) )
And instead of just thinking about your goal, you wrote it down.
And then you tracked the habit. You literally checked off each day if you enjoyed your yummy, healthy drink.
(OMG. I can't stop saying that word.)
But some nights you went to sleep without checking it off. You'd know deep down the next morning you'd wake up and see a blank space where you broke your promise to yourself.
Knowing that inspires you to follow through and make the lifestyle change.
Self-accountability, friends.
Play with the Day yearly goal journal features a daily habit tracker that will motivate you to make gradual shifts in your life so they last.
It guides you through a simple but effective process of identifying your goals, breaking them down to habits or rituals, and then tracking those habits daily.
When I don’t keep my promises to myself, I observe the negative consequences.
Do I feel more tired the next day from going to bed late? Do I feel gross from eating an unhealthy meal? Do I feel stressed from skipping yoga?
Once you more clearly associate your negative behaviors with the negative consequences, and realize how the positive behaviors really do make life more pleasurable, you can funnel any frustration into positive momentum to create change.
At the end of each month, Play with the Day yearly goal journal has space to review the month.
You're invited to tune in and see if there are any shifts you feel called to make.
This is a great place to recognize the negative consequences of poor choices so you can continue heading a more positive direction.
I love Elizabeth Gilbert's quote: “I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting sick of their own bullshit."
And it’s true. You DO have to be your own personal trainer.
This isn’t about criticizing yourself so you feel like shit, but hold yourself accountable.
We all have an inner child and we also all have an inner parent. Activate yours.
It’s those moments of looking yourself in the mirror and vowing, “This will NEVER happen again,” that create real change.
Another great saying is, “you can have either excuses or results."
This is essential wisdom for making a lifestyle change.
Listen. There’s always somereason why you weren’t able to follow through on the promise you made to yourself.
But the bottom line is you let something come between you and your goal. You let something else be more important than your dedication to change.
It’s tempting to start making excuses, but in those moments, you just have to admit you broke your promise to yourself and vow to try again tomorrow.
Honestly that people call it quits on their goals 12 days after the New Year speaks volumes about why the masses... are the masses.
You have to keep going. Every day is a new day. Each moment is a new moment. You don't need to wait until the new year to make a shift.
People lapse on their good habits when creating change. That’s the process.
That’s why they say it takes 21 days or however long to make a good habit. (I personally think that for some habits, it can be longer.)
So if you mess up, try again. Keep going. Keep re-affirming and recommitting your desire for a lifestyle change.
I've been trying to go to bed earlier for Y E A R S, and only just now am I achieving that goal.
Giving up destroys the potential for change. You're essentially relegating yourself to live with negative consequences because you think you're not strong enough to make a lifestyle change.
Also notice the positive impacts your new habits have on your life. This will create momentum to help you make other needed changes in your life.
The Play with the Day yearly goal journal guides you through the exact same process I used to create a lasting lifestyle change.
Sometimes it can take a long time to make a lifestyle change. You might have relapses, or it might feel hard to finally shift.
(Or am I just particularly resistant to change?)
The key is — what direction are your thoughts going in?
Are you telling yourself to just give up? Not the right direction.
But if you find yourself working things out in your head, recommitting and affirming, deciding again, remembering why this matters to you and figuring out how you can get better at keeping your promises to yourself, that’s the right direction.
And as long as your thoughts flow in that direction, you will keep making small micro improvements.
Becuase you are what you think. So think good, life-affirming thoughts.
Those micro improvements will build and build, and eventually, you’ll have created the lifestyle change you’ve always wanted.
In Play with the Day, you're guided each and every month to get clear on the negative thoughts feeding your bad habits and to identify more positive, life-affirming thoughts to replace them with.
Doing this in advance will help you succeed!
Whatever dreams you hold in your heart right now, I know that if you want it badly enough and are willing to do the work, you can do it.
You can do anything.
You are more powerful than you know.
And as soon as you decide to follow the absolute truth of what's in your heart, you will be guided. The Earth will move, Heaven will support you, and you will be well on your way.
2020 is a year of momentum and positive change.
Let's do this!
Get your Play with the Day journal to receive support every step of the way.
All the love,
Suzanne
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Nothing works faster to create meaningful change in your life than a solid intention.
An intention is something that focuses your energy toward a desire.
It’s a way of inviting the universe to guide you there in a way that will surpise and delight you.
It’s less specific than a goal, but this is where intentions can lose their power, too. It’s easy to set it and forget it, but then your intention never has a chance to shift your life.
Don't worry. Today I'll share how to set intentions so you can use them to initiate magnificent changes.
But first, a story:
A few years ago, I was in a really negative mindspace. I felt really sad, wasn’t sure what to do with my life, hated where I lived, and had no idea how to change anything.
I was so committed to hating my life that it felt hard to find the space to shift.
But I set the intention to be more grateful, and held that intention for 30 days.
Once each day, I wrote a list of things I was grateful for, and throughout the day, anytime I noticed myself complaining or being really negative, I found something to be grateful for.
Since I was no longer focusing on all the things I didn’t have, I began to see wasted opportunity everywhere.
Instead of saying no to life's invitations, I started saying yes.
All those yeses eventually led here: to a business based on my truest gifts — Soul Scroll Journals, which offers guided journals so people can understand themselves.
Had my desires not been focused, centered instead on a vague desire to improve my life, I wouldn’t have created change as quickly as I did.
The secret of change is focus — selecting the next right thing, getting really clear on the changes you want to make, setting the intention, and focusing on that intention until you’ve achieved your goal.
Maybe that sounds harsh, but most people don’t create change simply because they’re all over the place and not focused.
It can feel hard to limit yourself to a singular point of focus, but you can always move on to the next thing once you’ve achieved the first.
One thing at a time. That’s how you create lasting change. And this is why intentions are so powerful.
The strategy outlined below comes from the Play with the Day yearly goal journal.
This magical book helps you not only set monthly goals and intentions, but keeps you connected to those intentions each and every day throughout the month.
If you're ready to create meaningful change in your life, Play with the Day is a magnificent tool to support your journey.
Before revealing my step-by-step process of how to set intentions, a quick note:
Goals tend to be specific while intentions are more about direction.
A goal is “work out three times a week,” while an intention is, “take better care of my body,” or, “learn to receive.”
Intentions are invitations for the universe to surprise and delight us.
A lot of times when I set an intention, it’s because I’m feeling frustrated and powerless over something with no idea how to shift.
When I set an intention, I’m asking the universe to help me find a path I'm having trouble finding on my own.
My thoughts will need to change. Uncomfortable emotions will likely stir to the surface to be felt and released. My actions will need to change.
When you set an intention, be prepared to transform into an eager student as the universe guides you on an incredible adventure that will rearrange every cell of your being.
Always, always focus on what you want. Whatever you focus on expands. If you focus on what you don't want, you'll create more of that.
Rather than “stop spending so much time on social media,” think about, “finding positive new ways to spend my time.”
If you’re not sure what intention to set, here are a few journal prompts to help. Trust what comes out! The first thing that comes up is usually the best thing.
Each month in the Play with the Day goal journal, you review the previous month before writing down what you’re grateful for and what you most desire in the month to come.
These journaling exercises will help you pick the best goals and intentions for your personal growth in the month ahead.
But it’s important to get clear and commit to the process rather than being wishy washy and flaking out on yourself.
That’s not how you create change.
Decide. Commit. Keep going.
I recommend working with intentions for one month.
It takes time for an intention to work its magic, to sift through all the dense layers of your being in opposition to it.
This process requires time and repetition — especially if you’re shifting something that’s really ingrained.
That inner sense of commitment is what transforms an intention from something cute and fuzzy to a fiery catalyst for change.
Play with the Day yearly goal journal is set up to help you both set a monthly intention and stay connected to it for the whole time.
Do the work; reap the rewards.
I like to reconnect during my morning ritual. My goal journal is by my side as I reflect on my vision and goals while reconnecting to my monthly intention.
Play with the Day allows me to have my soul's deepest insights and desires next to me in tangible form all day long.
We have to emotionally commit to the intention, put our hearts into it, let it change us, and re-commit every day until we’ve created the change we desire.
This is why each weekly habit tracker spread in the Play with the Day journal includes space to write your weekly focus and monthly intention.
I wanted to give you a simple way to look at your intention each and every day, to allow it to teach you what you need to release in order to welcome in new blessings.
This is how you create sustainable change. Little sips all day rather than chugging 8 glasses of water each morning.
If not, what do you need to do differently?
When you commit to a change, you’re not entirely sure what will need to change. But along the way, you notice —
Wow, that thought isn’t in alignment with where I’m going.
Holy shit, no wonder why I’m struggling. This thing I do doesn’t align with my intention at all.
Your intention is a point of awareness by which everything else you do becomes a contrast.
This is another reason why having your monthly intention and weekly focus with you all day long in the Play with the Day journal will help you solidify the new life you're building as you learn how to set intentions.
It’s in that contrast you become aware of what needs to release or change so you can create the life you want.
This is why you need to recommit every day, keeping your attention in the forefront of your mind, or at least reflecting on it once a day.
This is also why it's best to focus on one thing at a time.
This is the magical part of learning how to set intentions — where the universe literally does guide you on an adventure beyond anything you could have planned.
The intention will work its magic by supplying you with insights, epiphanies and action steps as you release fear and pain to trust in something greater.
Anything is possible. Your focus has created specificity in the infinite field of possibility, and your commitment is ensuring you're staying with it long enough to be renewed.
Take the actions. Let yourself change!
A lot of times making a commitment to change something illuminates all the things keeping you from it, or all your bad habits, flaws and insecurities.
This is a GOOD thing. These things are coming up so they can be honored and released, or at least accepted and wrapped in love.
Beating yourself up about the past or things outside of your control only reinforces any fear-based beliefs blocking you from living in a way that truly honors you.
Simply accept yourself and life’s challenges. Trust that everything is happening for the highest good. Allow yourself compassion. Invite in a wider universal perspective. Ask for help! It’s always there.
But also! — DO NOT MAKE EXCUSES.
I’m really bad about this when it comes to being in bed by 11:30 p.m. (I have a dangerously effective habit hack for even the most stubborn habits like this I can share later.)
Those nights when I’m still up at midnight, the excuses start rolling in. I have to stop myself and say — there will ALWAYS be an excuse. But I can’t accept that. I’m either in bed by 11:30 or I’m not.
And if I want to make that change, which I do, I can’t accept anything less than success.
As they say, you can have either excuses or results, but you can’t have both.
I choose results! What about you?
What is your intention for this month or year? Share below!
If you'd like support to set monthly intentions and goals, plus track habits to create a meaningful, lasting shift in your life, the Play with the Day yearly goal journal is a magnificent tool to help you do just that.
Happy New Year!
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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Feeling overwhelmed by all you want to do and feel like you should do is a natural experience.
There simply ISN'T enough time in the day to do it all.
But there IS enough time to do everything that matters.
Everything that's important and meaningful to you. That's why it's important to focus.
A mentor once told me that overwhelm is the absence of clarity.
One thing I've been doing each week in my Play with the Day yearly goal journal is writing my weekly focus at the top of the habit-tracking page.
This helps me answer another question I've loved to reduce overwhelm during the holiday season — what can I leave undone?
This week, for example, my focus is on tying up loose ends since it's the end of the year and I want to walk into 2020 feeling fresh and ready for a new beginning.
I'm taking time to do annoying life things I've been putting off. Things like buying a new shredder and going through piles of junk mail I've been expertly ignoring.
Having this focus has allowed me to be gentle with myself when thoughts come up that I should be further along on business goals.
It ensures I do what I deeply WANT to be doing rather than the random things my mind latches onto.
It helps me reduce overwhelm.
With so many different areas of life to think about, it gives me peace of mind knowing there's a time for everything, and also knowing when that time will come.
When thoughts / worries / ideas come up about something I'm not currently focused on, I simply write it down and vow to do it later.
That's the Figure Out Your Life journal btw, and not my focus for the week. :) Coming soon!
A lot of times in the hectic pace of the day to day, I’ll regret my choice of focus and think about switching.
So far, I always find that desire comes from my stressed out mind wanting to do a million things at once or push me beyond what I can energetically give.
The guidance from my soul about these weekly focuses are ALWAYS exactly what I need because they come from a place of connection after answering the monthly intention-setting journaling prompts and selecting my three goals.
That's how Play with the Day is supporting my journey next year to follow my dreams in a way that's deeply connected to what I really want and need.
Because in 2020, I intend to create a beautiful, magical life that reflects my heart and soul.
I want to live in a connected way, full of meaning and depth rather than a frantic way, always feeling behind while focused on what's next.
There is no next. There's only now.
That's the power of focus.
And that's how you reduce overwhelm.
Get your Play with the Day PDF journal here.
Or get the print version on Amazon!
If you haven't yet joined the SSJ Facebook group, connect with the family here.
All the love,
Suzanne
PS — Kelli left the most AMAZING review on Amazon!
She wrote:
"My friend sent me to Suzanne's website a few weeks ago and as I began to read her words, they resonated so deeply with my own heart.
Her ability to share her wisdom through her writing is nothing short of magical.
Shortly after I discovered her website and YouTube videos, she released this AMAZING yearly goal journal and I knew I had to have one!
It's funny because I'm not typically a person to set goals since I usually just think to myself, "why bother?", however, I was already so smitten with her relatable writing style, I figured I'd check this out.
I'm in love!
This journal's premise is so different than traditional "goal setting", which tends to focus on what the ego THINKS you should want.
This beautifully guided journal helps you to explore what your SOUL truly wants through asking a series of questions that helps you tap into your inner guru and connect your logical mind with your deepest desires and wistful imagination.
I also love that it helps you acknowledge where you've been so that you can cultivate more gratitude and take that into creating your future.
Thank you to Suzanne for this beautiful Soul Scroll Journal!"
And thank you Kelli for the beautiful review!
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Inside of you lies infinite potential. All of your random ideas, desires, past experiences and future hopes and dreams combine within you to create a unique energetic expression that has never existed before and will never exist again.
The journey of discovering who you really are, what you want, and figuring out how to become who you want to be is the purpose of your life.
Depending on your life and experiences, it may seem like you're nowhere close to creating a life reflecting the vast potential you know lies inside of you, or perhaps you're on the road but feeling frustrated that you're not there yet.
Either way, today I will share the exact steps I've used to transform from someone who didn't know her purpose, felt stuck, unhappy and unfulfilled, like she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had made so many wrong choices that she sometimes worried if her life was salvageable...
To living my purpose, waking up fueled by passion, and sincerely learning to enjoy the entire journey rather than waiting until I achieve an arbitrary goal to feel happy or good enough.
Knowing who you are and what you want essential to become who you want to be. These answers will guide every decision and choice you make.
This may seem obvious, but so many people don't know what they want, or spend more time focusing on what they don't want, or the obstacles in the way rather than focusing in on a vision and allowing your heart to guide you there.
Getting clear on a vision and learning to focus, which of course means removing your attention away from distractions and things that don't serve you, is critical for realizing your dreams.
So many people spend their entire day in distraction, constantly reacting to what life throws their way, wallowing in feelings of powerlessness or frustration.
Days turn into weeks, which turn into months, which turn into years and nothing changes.
You may wonder why nothing changes, why you don't know how to become who you want to be, but in order to change your life, you must learn to maintain your focus onto a specific goal and stop allowing every minor defeat, frustration, or cellphone notification take you off track.
If you're not sure what you want, check out the Listen to Your Heart guided journal. It will help you get clear on a vision and figure out exactly what you want.
Journaling is the best way to get clear on your desires and learn how to become who you want to be.
I do this during my morning ritual while pulling my angel cards and journaling.
It’s easy to get fired up and want to change everything in your life at once.
This sets you up for failure.
It’s exactly why millions of people make New Year’s resolutions thinking this year will be the perfect year, but then abandon their goals in 2 weeks and spend the next 50 weeks doing the exact same thing as last year.
Here's how this works:
Let’s say you have a vision of being healthy and successful, wealthy and with lots of fulfilling relationships.
You would then sit with the energy of that vision, let the emotion of it percolate in every cell of your body, and then from this energetic state ask: What is my next right step?
When you have big goals, it's natural to get caught up in fears you're not good enough or that you don't know how to create what you want, and those fears can cause you to doubt your visions, which in turn creates the feeling you don't know what you want.
But the truth is of course you don't know how to do it because it's never been done.
You will learn how to become who you want to be along the way.
Every dream is created one next right step at a time.
That's how I went from floundering, feeling lost and unfulfilled to finding my purpose and creating a business based on my truest gifts of asking you the right questions to help you grow.
I didn't know how to become who I wanted to be at the start, but I stayed focused on my vision and kept taking the next right step.
The Play with the Day yearly goal journal guides you through this very process.
Some people plan everything to a T, but that takes all the fun out of the journey. There's got to be a balance of planning and flow, masculine energy and feminine.
Besides, you don't know how to become who you want to be, so your plans need to morph as you learn and grow.
Play with the Day is for driven free spirits who want to plan things and be clear on what they want, but who also want to leave room for magic.
After all, it's the universe's mystical ways that make the impossible, possible so you can become who you want to be.
I believe in setting just a few goals each month based on your bigger vision and your monthly focus.
The Play with the Day system is very sequential, starting with a firm foundation, gradually leading you to increasingly greater clarity while helping you create space to flow while following your heart.
Some people set quarterly goals or 90-day goals, but I personally like to find the balance between working with something long enough for it to shift but not so long that I lose connection to it.
This is another common reason why people don't achieve their goals — they stop renewing their emotional commitment to it. It’s been said that millionaires look at their goals daily and billionaires look at their goals twice daily.
I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but I do know that emotional commitment to a goal is necessary to achieve it, along with removing limiting beliefs and building a positive mindset.
Goals aren’t a set and forget kind of thing. You need to constantly re-connect and readjust while also giving the goal enough space so you’re not freaking out over the daily fluctuations.
Setting new goals each month lets me renew my commitment to a goal if it needs more time, or to move on if it’s time to do that, too.
In Play with the Day, you’re guided to create 3 goals each month, connect them back to your larger vision, tap into how achieving the goal will feel, which is a manifestation practice, and connect to the next right steps.
You’re also asked to get clear on the cost of inaction, which will help you further commit to change, and identify your doubts and fears before shifting to a new, more positive thoughts.
This is how you become who you want to be.
And if you're feeling lost, stuck or confused and want to know exactly what you want, check out the Listen to Your Heart guided journal.
Over the years, I’ve set both outcome-based goals (like sign up this many students to my course) and process-based goals (like do yoga every day).
A lot of experts teaching how to achieve goals recommend outcome-based goals, but I personally am moving away from that this year.
I like to focus on the things I can control, and the only thing I can control is what I do every day.
It’s important to evaluate your progress to see if your actions are getting you the results you want, but for me, at this point in my life, I’m choosing to focus on effort not outcome.
In fact, one of the mantras I created for the Play with the Day yearly goal journal's calendar pages is “Let repetition be your effort.”
Each month in Play with the Day, underneath the monthly calendar, you’re guided to re-write your intention and 3 monthly goals, and then connect to the right ritual, habit or next step to achieve those goals.
Creating new habits will have its own blog post too, in this series designed to help you become who you want to be in the new year.
Habits are everything.
It’s very important to focus on the daily steps you can take to realize your dreams, adding one new thing at a time, rather than worry about big, abstract things like “being successful,” or “figuring out what to do with my life.”
Just do one thing at a time. Keep connecting to your vision and asking yourself — what is your next right step?
Then create goals and habits around that next step!
This is why Play with the Day has a daily habit tracker in the back.
This guided goal journal not only supports you in monthly intention, goal setting and review, but it also gives you a space to create new healthy habits so you can become who you want to be.
And if you're feeling stuck on what you even want, or feel like there's a lot of junk in your head holding you back that you want to work through, check out Listen to Your Heart guided journal.
It's 30 daily readings and journaling prompts to help you get clear on what makes you happy and create that life.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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It’s about consciously aligning your thoughts, emotions, habits and beliefs with the vision you are creating rather than any outdated, ingrained patterns not taking you where you want to go.
This sounds simple, but most people do the exact opposite, either not creating the space to get clear on what they want or focusing on worries or fears — things they don’twant to happen.
This is human nature. We’re wired for survival, and that means the habit of scanning our environment for threats is deeply ingrained.
Elevating out of survival mode and allowing ourselves to thrive is about calming down our nervous systems, grounding through rituals, and learning to trust the flow of life as we follow our hearts.
This is the journey of learning how to manifest using the law of attraction — living more from the heart and less from the head.
If you want support integrating these methods in your daily life, you will love the Play with the Day yearly goal journal, which was designed using this framework.
To create what you want, you first have to know what you want! Give yourself permission to dream big. You can do this in your journal, simply asking yourself what you want or create a vision board.
In Play with the Day, you'll create a vision for eight key areas of your life, including eight mini vision boards that you can look at each day!
Looking at these vision boards each day makes a delightful morning ritual.
Intentions are very powerful. They direct your energy and give your subconscious direction for creating your life.
Our subconscious minds control around 90 percent of our lives. Even though we think we’re in control, most of our daily decisions and actions are based on habit and impulses of which we’re unaware!
Learning how to manifest using the law of attraction is very much about creating more conscious awareness, allowing you to regain power and control over yourself and your life.
I really like sitting with the same intention for an entire month because it takes time to really shift.
That’s why Play with the Day starts each month by taking you through an intention-setting process. There's also space on the weekly habit tracking pages to write your intention.
Plus, it keeps you focused your intention, which allows it to slowly transform you.
As an example, a few years ago I set the intention to focus on gratitude. For an entire month, every time my thoughts veered toward the negative or I found myself complaining, I gently shifted to a more positive thought.
Our thoughts and habits are deeply ingrained, but a month is a perfect amount of time to make a lasting shift!
And a lasting shift it was — this time spent in gratitude planted the seed to a deep spiritual awakening, profound emotional healing, and waking up to self-love.
This has allowed me to discover the work I'm meant to do in this world, creating guided journals to help dreamers understand themselves and create lives as unique as they are.
Each month, I connect to my vision and identify the three most powerful shifts that will get me closer to my goals.
(Read: How to achieve goals in 4 steps to harness 2020 energy and become who you want to be.)
In Play with the Day, each month you’re guided through a brief review of the 30 days that just passed, absorbing the lessons and blessings, and then supported to create three goals in addition to your monthly intention.
You're then guided to connect to the habits or rituals that will help you achieve your goals. Action is a HUGE part of manifesting.
It just has to be intentional action that emerges from a feeling of inspiration or excitement rather than that place of hamster-wheel, fear-fueled drudgery most people take action from.
Aligned, inspired action will bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
Using the law of attraction will likely require you to reshape your relationship to achieving your goals.
We’re used to thinking about relentless action and over-planning, but learning how to manifest is all about magnetizing your desires to you through the power of positive emotion.
Creating a daily practice of connecting to your vision, allowing yourself to feel hopeful and excited about what you’re choosing to create, and allowing that positive emotion to pull you forward would completely transform your life in a very short time.
Focus on feeling hopeful, confident and expansive. Full of love and inspiration.
These are the most powerful states to manifest from because they allow you to stay grounded and avoid getting attached or obsessive about your desire.
The more I learn to take the right action at the right time and then let go, relaxing, playing, having fun and enjoying my life, the more effortlessly I receive things — sometimes things I wasn't even asking for.
Even more importantly, I enjoy the process of creating my goals, which means I enjoy my daily life, which is the whole point!
Each month in Play with the Day, you’re asked to connect to how achieving your goal will make you feel.
It feels SO good to really sink into that, and think about how you achieving your goals will improve your life and the lives of those around you. It makes it feel real, which it is — as soon as you let yourself truly go for it.
Emotions are your superpower but supportive beliefs are also very important when learning how to manifest!
Most of us are conditioned to either downplay our awesomeness or maybe don’t believe we’re awesome at all.
It’s okay if this takes time. Re-programming your mind is a big deal!
You are literally creating new neural pathways, which actives different genes in your body. You are changing your very biology when you do this work, all while overcoming generations of imprinting.
So give yourself grace!
To make this easier, select the positive thoughts you want to replace the negative ones with ahead of time. That way, you can change your thoughts in the moment when learning how to use the law of attraction.
Each month, Play with the Day gives you space to get honest about your doubts and fears while also supporting you to select positive beliefs to replace them with.
Taking action is a very important part of manifesting your dreams. Everyone has a different way of planning, but I’ll share with you what I do —
I essentially create an action plan and turn the plan into habits.
This is why Play with the Day features a habit tracker with space for a few daily to-do’s rather than a planner.
When you plan your entire day, you end up living by a list, never checking in with your heart and soul for inspired guidance.
This limits you to achieving your dreams by logic alone, closing you off to the immense power of the infinite universe that’s always available to help you manifest your dreams.
Learning how to manifest is very much about opening up to this inspired guidance, listening to your heart and your body.
For example, I have a plan. I have healthy daily or weekly habits that reflect who I'm becoming.
But as I go through my day, those are simply in the back of my mind. All day long, in each and every moment, I ask myself — what is the right thing to do now?
Sometimes that means I take a break and watch a movie in the middle of the day (like I did today) before writing this blog post, which is my habit.
I get my work done. I take the steps. I do the actions.
BUT — I also listen to myself, my heart, my soul, and my body. I ask myself — what is it that I’m meant to do today, in this moment?, and I do it.
Sometimes that’s exactly what I have written in my goal journal, and sometimes it’s completely different.
That’s how Play with the Day balances structure and flow. It connects you to what’s essential to create your goals, but it also supports you to create a new kind of life where, in the moments between, you flow.
You listen and respond to the always-changing beating pulse of the day, ultimately creating your life like the work of art it is.
This results in a beautiful, magical, sacred call and response with the universe. The same universe that has planted the seed of desire in your heart and is guiding you to toward it with an intelligence that is beyond anything any human can comprehend.
Play with the Day supports you through this journey through casting your vision, setting your intention and tracking the supportive habits that will allow you to live your purpose while having a blast along the way.
Surrendering is perhaps the hardest part of learning how to manifest! But we have to trust. We have to trust that we are being guided, that we will always be okay no matter what.
That we will always have access to everything we need.
That you are meant for incredible things, but you don't have to struggle and criticize and stress yourself out to acheive them. In fact, those things slow you down and make your life drudgery.
You're here to have fun. To be who you really are.
One of the most important prayers I've ever made is this:
This demonstrates a faith that there IS something out there for me, but I don't always know what it is.
Creating our destinies is a moment-by-moment commitment to following our inner guidance rather than letting our minds get carried away, planning things that might not even be the best way forward.
You don’t have to achieve or do or create or become anything to be worthy or deserving.
You get to create what you desire because you already ARE worthy and deserving.
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
Knowing you are worthy and that your life has beauty right here, right now helps with giving yourself permission to be happy along the way.
To enjoy every moment.
As you walk this path, everything that is meant for you will come flowing into your life easily and effortlessly, so gracefully you can’t even believe it.
Like magic.
It’s about surrender and ease and trust and flow and self-love and being good to yourself.
I created it for people like me — big-dreaming creatives with hearts of gold who sometimes worry too much but know they are meant for something big and are willing to do what's required to create it.
This goal journal will help you trust yourself and trust your journey. It will help you tap into your desires and learn how to use the law of attraction to manifest them, one right next step at a time.
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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When it comes to vision boards, people often think of creating something with inspiring images and phrases to depict their dream life.
That's great, but if you want to take it to a new level like I have, today's blog on vision board ideas is definitely for you.
It started when I was creating Play with the Day, my brand new yearly goal journal and habit tracker for casting a vision, setting monthly intentions and living with soul.
In the journal, you spend time reviewing the year and connecting to what you really want in life through juicy journaling prompts.
Then, you move through a very specific process of creating a vision in 8 key areas of your life, plus a general vision or intention for the year.
There's two parts to this experience, and both are important to make sure your vision board is rooted in something meaningful rather than based on pretty things that caught your eye while paging through magazines.
The first part is to brainstorm what exactly you want your life to look like in each area, whether health or career or relationships. Play with the Day provides questions to do just that.
It's this emotional connection to your dreams that will help make them real.
Then, after you've answered a set of questions and dropped deep into your heart, it's time to cast your vision.
It ensures you're not ignoring any area of your life even if you have big goals.
There was a time in my life I had only career goals, and it negatively impacted my health, happiness, and ultimately — ironically — my career.
There's lessons and growth in everything for sure, but learn from my mistakes!
Creating visions (and turning those visions into habits or rituals) in all areas of your life will allow you to truly thrive.
This is something else I've learned along the way. For a long time, I focused on my one-day goals. Things like moving to California and living on the ocean, traveling regularly, first-class all the way, and having a closet overflowing with designer clothes.
I still want these things, but I've found the best way to create my one-day vision is to take the next right step in front of me while focusing on making today the best it can possibly be.
For me, that means indulging in my decadent morning ritual, taking time to cook, and yes, watching trashy tv.
My philosophy in life, and the philosophy that all Soul Scroll Journals are created on, is that when you expand fully into the present moment, being so grateful for all the blessings that are around you, taking advantage of all your opportunities, and taking that day’s next right steps while caring fully for all parts you, you naturally expand into creating your wildest dreams.
But you do it in a way that feels so good along the way.
It’s easy to get destination-itis — when I get there, I’ll be happy. When I make X amount of money, find my purpose, or find true love, or find my perfect job, or lose the weight — THEN I will be happy.
But life is right here, right now.
When you’re creating your vision boards, take this balance into consideration, maybe adding things onto your board that represent a little bit of both — the here and now, and the one-day dream.
This one simple book will contain your biggest hopes and dreams pictured on your vision boards, offer space for monthly intentions and goals plus a review of how things went.
It also features a daily habit tracker to support you as you create positive momentum in your life, bridging the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
All in one book! How cool is that?!
How do you want your relationships to feel, both family and otherwise? What kinds of things do you want to do together?
What kinds of projects do you want to work on? What do you want your schedule and work space to look like?
How do you love to take care of yourself and nurture your body? What kinds of foods do you eat?
How do want to grow personally? What kinds of support do you surround yourself with to guide your growth and evolution?
How much do you want to earn? How do you want receiving this money to feel? What kind of investments do you have, if any?
This yearly goal journal has tons more guided journal prompts for each area, space to brainstorm, and a mini vision board on the opposite page.
When finished, you'll have a book that contains your beautiful visions and the support to realize them through monthly intention and goal setting plus habit tracking!
This is a book that will help you follow your dreams while staying close to your soul.
It will help you identify what you really want.
Let me know if you have questions!
All the love,
Suzanne Heyn
Founder, Soul Scroll Journals
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My morning routine / ritual has always been my jam.
There was a time I got super lazy and only meditated from bed before breakfast, but that laziness also set the foundation for a not so great time in my life.
A time of losing my grounding, becoming consumed by stress and anxiety, and lacking balance. I burned out very, very bad.
But as with all trials in life, a golden lining shimmered beneath the struggle. It’s been an opportunity to learn how to care for myself, deeply and completely, in a way beyond what I ever knew before.
An opportunity to become more balanced, to have goals in all areas of life rather than just focus on work.
An opportunity for greater self-awareness and understanding, to understand how my inner weaknesses made be vulnerable to going off track, and how to bolster them up so it doesn’t happen again.
An opportunity to close a chapter of my life and create a new one. It’s been a challenging, but also blissful experience of revamping my entire lifestyle — the way I eat, sleep, care for my body and soul, and my relationships to all the people and things in my life.
In fact, it's more than a morning routine. It's a ritual.
A ritual is something done daily, or sometimes weekly, that injects the sacred into the ordinary. When you do something everyday, with intention and love, it shifts you in ways that can’t be fully explained.
A ritual can be anything from mindfully drinking a cup of tea to taking a bath to blessing your food before eating to telling yourself “Good morning. I love you,” in the mirror each day.
When you punctuate your day with rituals, you bring peace and spirituality into every area of your life.
Rituals are grounding. Grounding is important because it’s how we rise. It’s important to have a solid foundation for growth.
They’re also incredibly soothing to the nervous system.
Things change every day. Sometimes life feels crazy, and it’s not always something we can control.
But when you create a rhythm to your day, eating at around similar times, going to bed around the same time, and punctuating your day with even small rituals, your body knows what to expect.
If you’re like me, and have erratic, creative energy, you will love rituals. I used to thrive on the idea of being someone so free spirited and blowing with the wind that I did what I wanted, when I wanted.
It was a big part of my identity.
And while I still relish freedom, I’m finding it’s important to have a base layer of supportive habits and rituals.
Starting the day with a morning routine is the most important part of this foundation.
Especially in the fall and winter months, when the energy is about rooting down, getting quiet to shed what we no longer need, and being still so we can blossom come spring, rituals are a powerful, simple way to connect with this energy and allow it to transform us.
On another level, creating happiness is about adding pockets of joy to your day. As the pockets of joy add up, eventually it overflows.
I’ll share more later, including the Ayurvedic changes I've made to my diet, my equally extra nighttime ritual, and, if you're interested, the spiritual / mental / emotional side of understanding the root of burnout.
Are those things you'd be interested in? If so, let me know!
I always have a glass of water by my bed each night in case I wake up thirsty (living in Arizona will do that to you), but now each morning I make sure to drink the entire glass pretty soon after waking up.
Hydration is really important for energy and overall health, and room temperature water in particular is better for your body than cold water, especially in the winter.
This is an Ayurveda guideline, though I’m sure it’s found other places too. The idea is that our bodies work very hard to maintain their internal temperature.
Our inner, digestive fire is thought to be the key to good health, and every time we drink cold water, we make our body work that much harder to keep that inner fire burning.
I’m in healing mode, so I make sure to eat all warm foods (more on that later), and do my best to drink water that’s a warmer temperature.
As a first step to my morning routine, I head to the kitchen and squeeze 1/4 of a lemon into a mug before pouring almost boiling water over it.
Lemon is very cleansing and detoxifying. Plus, drinking the two glasses of water combined ensures I finish my morning ritual feeling hydrated and blessed.
I’d always wanted to drink lemon water in the morning, but always used to meditate first thing.
I never understood logistically how people meditate AND drink warm lemon water in the morning. Do they drink the water and then meditate?
I feel like that rushes things. Or do they meditate and then drink the water? But then it’s cold! I don’t get it! Maybe it’s just me.
To officially start my morning routine, I walk into my meditation space, press play on a sacred morning playlist, light a candle, and walk through the whole house with burning Palo Santo, which is a wood used for clearing out old energy.
(I live in condo, so this doesn’t really take that long.)
While walking through the house, I also give thanks for the opportunity to start fresh and ask that old energy be released.
I take a little extra time to palo santo the television because my husband likes to watch the news. :) I also palo santo him when he’s home, lol.
I’ve been getting really into skin care lately, and because of the fatigue I’ve experienced over the last couple of years, have some bags under my eyes I feel really self conscious about.
I can tell you about my whole skin care routine if you want — let me know if you’d be interested in that! — but during my morning routine, I basically wash my face and layer on a few oils I love.
Then, I head into my meditation space after palo santo-ing the house, greet myself in the mirror, and massage my face with ice globes.
This sounds like the cold would be torturous, but — and maybe this is just because I live someplace warm — it’s really relaxing.
The stated benefit is reducing puffiness, but for me, my whole morning ritual is about pouring into myself, taking care of myself, being a little extra, and just showing my body and soul love and appreciation.
I have three or four decks I pull from during my morning routine. I like to pull cards, sit with the messages and think about what the cards mean together along with how they apply to my life.
The decks I have and love are Daily Guidance from Your Angels, Sacred Rebels, The Hero’s Journey Dream Oracle and the Goddess Guidance Oracle cards.
(Those are affiliate links, and I receive a small commission if you purchase. Thank you for your support!)
For the goddess deck, I pulled Aphrodite a while ago, and have been sitting with her ever since because she’s about waking up your inner goddess through dance, self-care and appreciating your divinity.
Seems appropriate! I used to pull a card and go on with my day, but now I put the day’s cards on my alter.
The next morning when I pull again, I thank the previous day’s card before putting it back in the deck to shuffle again. It’s so nice each day to see what I pulled the day before. It creates a thread through my life and helps me be more aware of how things shift each day.
This is something I include in my morning routine only if I have time. Sometimes I'm feeling ready to move on with the day, but chanting really does work.
There is a Deva Premal healing mantra album I love on Spotify. I do either om shree dhanvantre namaha for healing or om shreem mahalakshmiyei namaha for abundance.
Now, each day, I have my morning routine along with afternoon and evening rituals listed in a notebook, along with boxes to check for water and spaces to write what I ate that day.
This helps me track how foods affect my energy and also helps me eat healthier. The desire to write down a healthy meal is surprisingly motivating!
And now that I’m weaving work back into my life — not to mention navigating the holidays — habit tracking is helping me stay on track with my health and the rituals that helped me regain it.
That’s why, when I got the amazing idea to create a yearly goal journal a month ago called Play with the Day, (which you’d know about if you follow me on Instagram or Facebook!)
I soon realized I had to add in a habit tracker, too! I am so beyond excited to announce Play with the Day, a yearly goal journal to help you cast as vision, set monthly intentions and live with soul is now available! Check it out here.
I just created the most amazing yearly goal journal. Nothing else like it exists. I basically created what I wanted, but could never find. (And couldn't even really articulate.)
Most planners are a series of to-dos. Even if they start off cool asking you about your visions or goals, they soon turn into any other planner with lists of things to do, maybe with a few water cup icons to remind you This Planner Is Different. (Even though it's not.)
My planner is nothing like this.
You start out by reviewing this year that just passed.
Then set intentions for next year. Followed by vision-setting in 8 key areas of your life for next year. (Each area spans two pages, so this is plenty of space for dreaming.)
Then, each month for 12 months, you ask yourself a series of intention-setting and review questions. You get clear on what you want and how it ties into your bigger vision.
Finally, you set up to 3 goals for each month, and connect to the daily habits required to achieve those goals. This isn't about living by a LIST. This is about living your life.
The last part is the piece de resistance. This was totally unexpected, and came from something I've been doing as I focus on upping my self-care.
Habit tracking.
You take the habits you've identified that will help you reach your goals, and track them. This could be daily meditation or yoga.
It could be working on your book or business. It could be improving your money mindset or confidence.
There's also space to track what you eat, and of course, checkboxes to ensure you're drinking enough water. (A girl's gotta stay hydrated if she wants to glow.) This is not a PLANNER. It's not about what you DO. It's about who you ARE. The person you want to be.
This goal journal will help you become that, effortlessly. I poured my heart and soul into every detail of this journal, and I'd love for you to check it out!
All the love,
Suzanne
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