Happy new week my love! :))

Did ya do something really fun for yourself over the weekend?

I did! And it was in a totally unexpected way.

First starting the Saturday RIGHT by chatting with the lovely ladies from Your Life in Flow. INSPIRING to see and hear their eagerness for change and willingness to take leaps. Truly makes me excited and dazzled to meet peeps like that. 🤩

Not too much later after that I got to meet IN PERSON a lovely artist here in Austin AND a lovely new place to hang out.

I love meeting peeps online but oh! getting giggly in person is a whole different story, isn’t it? 😀

Then of course, all the art chat got me inspired to go after some more.
Headed straight to the supply store:

Followed by some juicy printed inspiration at Barnes&Noble:

And I was on the run!

{notice the new GOLD paint I got at the store! 😉 }

The whole weekend I felt in a pretty fulfilled, calm, content, inspired state. Very very happy and grateful with my life and how things are turning out.

And that got me thinking…..

Not too long ago things were pretty much the opposite of that. Things were  heavy, hard, weird and stuck. REALLY stuck. There was no lightness, flow or air to breathe.

I remember meeting a girl that was an artist. She had a whole range of tricks up her sleeves. One day she was crawling through the streets of Denver designing beautiful chalk street art and the next day she was enhancing women’s beauty by painting all over their bodies with her artistic creations and she spent some others creating whimsical make-up for children’s parties and theater plays.

Ooooohhh, how painful that was!

The day she showed me the website she put up to get more clients? I could barely smile.

I was tingling with jealousy.

Worse is I didn’t even know why I was feeling that way.

Art, at that time, was totally “not my thing”. It had been out of the equation for years.

Still…. as a good learner that I am I took notice of those suffocating feelings when I was around her. All my fake smiles and the struggle to get excited when a new and exciting opportunity opened up for her.

I hated that feeling. I hated not being able to truly be happy for her. I hated realizing I was being one of “those” peeps that just can’t celebrate a friend’s accomplishment.

So I took note of it, questioned myself and at some point I was able to say it out loud: “I am so jealous she is going after her dreams. I am so jealous she is having the courage to do that.”

It was hard. {As I type this I get teary eyed remembering that moment.}

I wanted that courage and that freedom.

My attitude towards her completely changed after acknowledging to myself that I wanted what she had.

Instead of looking at her, biting my lip, locking my jaw and saying “That’s great. How did you pull that off?” I was able to look at her, have my eyes wide open, relax my jaw and stretch-out a big sincere smile while saying “That is great! How did you pull that off?” with honest excitement and curiosity.

Being around her became way more fun after that. I didn’t go after my dreams right there at that moment. It would still take me a whole year to summon the courage but being aware of those feelings made everything lighter, brighter, honest and real.

Today I am faster at recognizing when jealousness is coming through. It never gets to that suffocating extreme from back in the days and ya know what?

I celebrate it so much! It gets me really excited when that ‘lil itchiness starts.

Because that means there is something there. There is something for me to explore and add to my own journey.

There is a part of me longing for it that I didn’t know. I am grateful to get the message and go after one more desire, one more calling.

My love, if someone ever crosses your path and you have even the slightest bit of a discomforting feeling that their story sounds so good that you want it too {reads: jealousy}, I urge you sweets, I urge you to not suppress what you feel. Do not shove it down, hide it or “shake it off”.

Let it be there. Listen to that feeling. It is whispering something to you. Something important to you. Something to fulfill you.

Here’s to our journey of never ending acceptance and self-discovery. 🥂💖

Smooches,