SAAM Day 5: How to start a self-reflection practice.
Why is self-reflection so awesome and how do I start?
Great question! Self-reflection saved my life and changed the game for my healing journey.
Telling someone to go to therapy might be well-intentioned, but it can be so harmful and dismissive. When I had access to therapy, I was terrified of the stigma. When I was ready for therapy, I couldn't afford it.
Over the past 15+ years I've bee collecting and creating tools and techniques that have helped me make sense of what I've been through, and now I'm stoked to share them with you.
I am hosting a self-reflection workshop on Saturday and I'd love to see you there. For 90 minutes, you can set down the weight of what you've been carrying, join our community of big-hearted adventurers, and learn how we turn every experience into an opportunity to develop self-trust, compassion, resiliency, and courage.
The foundational activity of our Blaze Your Own Trail to Self-Love program is called the Trail of Life Maps exercise where we will guide you through how to start a self-reflection practice of your own. Drawing inspiration from the cover of my book, we take a look at what we've survived and celebrated so far and find inspiration in our stories.
This is a great way to start reflecting for Sexual Assault Awareness Month and everyone is welcome, as this practice applies to all areas of life, no matter what you've been through.
Registration is $33 (or Pay-What-You-Can) and participants of this workshop will also get access to our Read + Reflect program for free (also $33)!
Journal Prompts:
Journaling is a huge part of my process and is one of the reasons I’m still here to share this story. No matter what is happening in the world around me, I know that I can always come home to myself by finding a cozy place to settle in, making a cup of tea, putting on some great music, and making time to reflect on whatever is happening in my life at the time. If you’d like to dig in deep on this practice, please consider joining us for the Trail of Life Maps workshop on Saturday!
Video Transcript:
Good morning. We are walking. We're talking. In a week we'll be back in San Diego, so we are just soaking up the beginning of what is spring here in Maine, going for a little walk and talk. If you haven't seen it lately, we've been doing this sexual assault awareness month thing where I decided to show my face every day and that's pretty fun. So, we are talking today about why why self reflection is so dope. And I've been thinking a lot about this.
So far in the series we've talked about like, what even is trauma? What is sexual assault? Because for me, I had denied that what I experienced was sexual assault for more than a decade because it didn't fit into this, like very narrow definition of in an alley gun to your head with a stranger. So we're talking about expanding the definition of sexual assault to include those instances where you know, you didn't like it. We also have been talking about how to start that conversation with yourself. Like if you haven't had a conversation with yourself about what happened to you, how to start putting words around that. Talk about how to identify who's safe to share a story with. And then yesterday, I was talking about how to start that conversation, once you identify who you'd like to share with how to start that conversation.
So today I thought I'd talk about what you do, after you've like, come out as a survivor. Because I think like just the act of calling it what it is and admitting to yourself that you're a survivor of sexual assault and also the victim of a crime. I think that's something that isn't talked about enough like we talked about how it's not healthy to live in a victim mindset, but you are a victim, like what happened to you is illegal and should not happen to anybody. It is the worst thing that can happen to the human body and human spirit like short of being murdered. Right? Like, there's nothing great about it.
So why is self reflection so awesome? And how can you start to use that? First and foremost, like, people tell you, “Oh, you know, go to therapy.” I didn't have access to therapy. When I did have access to therapy, I was terrified of the stigma - I didn't want to tell a stranger my problems like I already felt broken and gross and dirty and everything else… I didn't want to risk having somebody affirm that for me. And also like going to therapy made it face I feel like oh, this is really real like and I just wasn't ready. And so when I had access wasn't ready, when I started talking to people about how therapy had helped them, and I started to break down the stigma around therapy and how I felt about going and I was actually ready to go, I didn't have access. l couldn't afford it.
And so over the last 15 years, I've been collecting and creating these different resources and activities and community spaces where we can start to have these conversations with ourselves through a self reflection practice, we can start to have these conversations with other survivors through our programs, through our private social network.
So the reason that I'm so passionate about this is self reflection literally saved my life. It is why I'm still here. I did not have any other way to process like I didn't tell anybody for so long. And then even after I told people I still had to do my work. And I didn't have access to therapy and I had to find a way to heal this like Pandora's box of understanding that I had unlocked and open for myself.
So I think one of the reasons why self reflection is so awesome, is that it doesn't have to be only about stuff that's hard that we need to process. We have a foundational exercise in our Blaze Your Own Trail to Self-Love program called Trail of Life Maps, and it's inspired by the cover of my book. On the cover of my book, it's like a trail that goes around the title and everything and each one of those little icons is a memory, a situation, a story that is something that I experienced, something that I survived. And so by taking inspiration from my book, I was like essentially I just like made a map of my life by writing this book. How cool would it be to frame self reflection in this way? So that's what we've done. And we call it Trail of Life Maps. We use this exercise to reflect on all the things that we've been through good, bad, ugly, indifferent. We try not to label things as much as possible because labeling adds morality to stuff, it doesn't need to happen.
So we're looking at the things that we've survived and celebrated to find inspiration like you look in the rearview mirror and you're like, oh stuff I've been through and I'm still here. It's awesome. Like it's, it's absolutely life changing.
So this workshop is an hour and a half long. It's on Saturday morning. And we're going to talk about how we use hiking as a mindfulness activity. We're going to talk about how any experience can be an opportunity for self growth and personal development and how we go about finding those little nuggets of insight from our experiences on this planet, in these bodies. And we're going to walk you through how to create your own trail of life map. We have a lot of really great examples we've had now three classes of the Blaze Your Own Trail to Self-Love program, of people that have made trail of life maps. One of our one of our homegirls Alexis did a PowerPoint presentation because that's a medium that she's familiar with and comfortable with as far as presenting information goes. Laura made hers like a tree and so the tree was like her life and the branches were all these little places where life had or go one way or the other. People have written poems, people have written songs - like it really is an opportunity to both reflect on what you've been through and find inspiration in that and also like tap back into that creative side. And if you're like me you might have been wildly creative as a kid. And then at some point, life got in the way or somebody told you that your drawing or song or writing or painting or sculpture or whatever, wasn't good and so you like internalized that and just stopped creating. We got to stop doing that.
So this is an opportunity to reflect, it's an opportunity to get creative, and it's another opportunity to meet our community. I might be biased because like we lead this joint but the people in the Hiking My Feelings Family are the most awesome, resilient, courageous, brave - insert every positive adjective here - kind of people. And if you're somebody who has been through something (and PS we all have) and you want a community where you can just show up, and there's no judgement, just support and curiosity and love, then we'd love to have you join us.
And the cool thing about this too is if you've already read the book, and you're like, “wow, Sydney, oh my god. So much of your story kind of makes me feel like you wrote it for me,” - we have a program called read and reflect that I developed to complement the book. The book itself is it's a memoir, I call it “memoir plus” because I've read so many memoirs in my life, where I get to the end of the book, I'm like, “This is awesome. Also, how the heck did you get to all these amazing discoveries like what is the how, behind the what and the why that you just shared with us?”
And so my book is the memoir. It's a story of how hiking helped me heal my mind and body but it also includes a coloring page to help you get out of your head back into your body again, tapping into that creative genius that you may have dropped at some point along the way, and offers journal prompts to help you start to extract the lessons that I learned on the trail and have these reflections for yourself. So the program breaks down all the chapters. And I specifically say like, this is the lesson that I learned, this was the inspiration behind this chapter. Here's an affirmation. Here's a morning ritual. Here's a prompt to help you use social media in a more mindful way.
Because as pervasive as social media is in our lives, it doesn't have to be bad. My Instagram feed is so inspiring. I've curated it to be something that teaches me about myself and about the world, about cultures that I just don't have enough knowledge of and it's a really positive experience. So it's teaching you how to do that as well. And then I picked a song for each chapter that if nothing else is sure to lift your spirits.
So that's the Read and Reflect program and when you sign up for the workshop on Saturday, you also get access to the program for free and it's immediate access. You can do it on your own pace as quickly or as slowly as you'd like. So yeah, that's what self reflection is all about, for me, literal life changer, literal lifesaver. And I'm really excited to share that with you guys. So sign up for the workshop. It's on Saturday. Trail of Life Maps, self reflection, meet in the community, feeling good and your body and your brain. And I hope to see you there!
