Let's Get Naked for Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day to all of my Fit Moms. Enjoy this guest post from Lisa McCourt... 

Not that kind of naked. Okay, maybe that kind, too. But Valentine month is also a perfect excuse to get emotionally naked with everyone you love. Most of us have a number of comfortable, pleasant relationships that suit us but do nothing to deeply nurture us. Emotional transparency is the key to upgrading those relationships to the level of juicy, juicy joy!

The fact is: you are a tribal creature by nature of your humanness, and the more deeply you can connect with your fellow humans, the more you’ll thrive. Our society doesn’t foster transparency—quite the opposite. We’re taught from a very early age to put our “best face forward” and to hide or deny any traits we fear will make us less attractive to others. We’re taught that our success in life depends upon the image we project and manage to uphold. How often have you been told “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression?” or “image is everything”? My friend who works in sales for a large publishing company likes to quip, “Anybody who says you can’t judge a book by its cover never tried to sell one.”  The cover is all we judge by! And all of us want us our covers to be the shiniest, most impressive covers we can manage to project.

But where does that really leave us in terms of self-love and genuine connection with our fellow human creatures? Hiding and denying genuine aspects of your precious self creates an energetic declaration that those pieces of you are unlovable. Having too many of these unlovable bits will prevent you energetically from being able to receive love. People can only truly love you to the precise extent that you’re loving yourself, and to the extent you’re willing to hold your complete, authentic self up to be loved. Ergo, more transparency equals more love.

A happy bonus is that your own transparency will invite others to be more transparent themselves when they’re around you. We think hiding our “negative” traits will make us more likable, when the opposite is actually true! Since we all share a longing, deep down, for the freedom to live life as our most uncensored, real selves, most of us are irresistibly drawn to transparent people! They give us permission to let our own guards down, which feels really, really good.

To honor Love-Month, try being more transparent with the people in your life. If you’re blessed to have a significant other, do frequent check-ups to see how transparent you’re being with your beloved. To a large degree, the success of our intimate relationships depends upon our level of transparency with one another, as well as the degree to which we’re matched in our capability and determination for transparency. We all want to be seen, fully, by our partners and loved for who we are. But it’s not up to our partners to make that happen. It’s up to us to show up as our most transparent selves, and only when we’re able to do that will we be capable of truly exchanging love.

Transparency . . . it’s not just for negligees anymore!

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About the Author: Unconditional love expert Lisa McCourt is a dynamic speaker, seminar leader and author whose 34 books have sold more than 5.5 million copies worldwide. Her new book, Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self, teaches people to embrace "radical authenticity" to fully experience unbridled joy in life. Lisa lives in South Florida with her two children. For a free Juicy Joy audio program, visit www.LisaMcCourt.com.

Self-Love Month: The Biggest Secret You Never Knew About Love

Here's another great guest post by Lisa McCourt as we continue to focus on January or Self-Love Month:

Having sold over 5 million books about unconditional love, I thought I was a real smartypants on the subject. Turns out I wasn’t so smart after all. But now that I am so much wiser, I’m going to teach you the biggest secret I learned about love. The best way to teach it is to demonstrate it, so play along with me now, kay?

Take the Love-Test:

• I want you to take a few deep breaths, shake out your shoulders, roll your head around, get really comfy. I want you to suck in all of the attention you’ve got stuck in the past; suck back all the attention you have scattered in the future . . . and then drop that big ball of your energetic presence right down into your heart center. (I’m not talking about the organ that is your heart; I’m talking about that energetic space in our bodies that we call our heart.)
• I want you to imagine opening your heart, as wide as you can, however that feels for you.
• Have you got your heart open wide? Now imagine the flow of love.
• I’m going to ask you a question now, and I want you to answer it silently and truthfully, with the very first response that comes up for you.
• Imagine the flow of love. In which direction is the love flowing?

My guess is that you feel love pouring out of your heart. You might have automatically called up an image of your kids, or your pet, or your beloved, but I want you to really feel how easy it is for you to pour love out into the world this way. For many of us, this is just our default setting. I love to love, and I could always easily imagine just globbing love out all over everyone.

But when I started developing my Juicy Joy trainings, I realized something interesting. I want you to stop imagining the love flowing out of your heart for a moment.

• Now imagine love flowing into your heart. Pause long enough to really imagine that. Is it as easy for you to imagine? If you were able to imagine it, how does the flow feel? Does it have the same volume, the same energy, the same intensity as the love you sent out?

For many of us, this is a real eye-opener. It certainly was for me. It’s harder to imagine the love flowing in, isn’t it? It might be tempting at this juncture to point to the people in our lives and say, “They’re not loving me enough.” But guess what. No one can give you more love than you are equipped to receive. And that amount is not determined by how much love you want. You could want mountains of love, but if you can’t close your eyes and imagine love pouring into your heart like a tidal wave, and feel what that would feel like, there’s no way anyone can give it to you.

Love is energy, and you are an energetic being and you control the traffic in and out of your energy field. Most people are controlling it unconsciously. You’re going to learn how to control it consciously. Many of us have had painful experiences when our hearts have been wide open. Our protective instinct to close our hearts to receiving love is so common and understandable. But it doesn’t serve us.

This is the biggest secret I learned about love. We have this misperception that the only thing we can control is how much love we give. We think it’s up to other people to decide how much love we get. It’s not. That’s the lie. You are actually in charge of how much love you receive.

Practice imagining love flowing into your heart. Start with whatever feels comfortable for you and then gradually build it up. Call to mind the people you already know love you. Deeply feel what receiving their love feels like, and then amplify it in your imagination. Allowing someone to love you; inviting someone to love you, isn’t selfish or greedy. All of our hearts want to give love. Letting someone love you to the best of their ability is the kindest thing you can do for that person. Pretend your heart is a giant vacuum, and practice sucking in love from everyone you encounter. Your family, the bank teller, the kid who delivers your pizza.

You’re not pouting and demanding people’s attention—that kind of behavior comes from a closed heart. You’re joyfully, gratefully, allowing the natural love that exists everywhere to flow, graciously toward you. And when you do that, you don’t even have to think about sending love to others. You’ll be doing that automatically. When you fill up with love like this, you’re a love fountain. It will ooze out your pores. You will be love.

That’s why I’m much more interested in teaching you to receive love than I am in teaching you to give love. Being loved is as simple—and as crazy difficult—as granting yourself access to the abundant flow of love that’s always available to you.

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About the Author: Unconditional love expert Lisa McCourt is a dynamic speaker, seminar leader and author whose 34 books have sold more than 5.5 million copies worldwide. Her new book, Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self, teaches people to embrace "radical authenticity" to fully experience unbridled joy in life. Lisa lives in South Florida with her two children. For a free Juicy Joy audio program, visit www.LisaMcCourt.com.

Juicy Self-Love Means Rewriting the Rules

Did You Know January is Self-Love Month? Yes, I said Self-Love Month. No, I didn't know that either. But who couldn't use a little self-love? With that, I have some guest posts to celebrate this unique celebration month. Here's a great article from Lisa McCourt...

I teach the combined arts of authenticity and self-love, and one of the most profoundly transformative skills my students learn is the ability to rewrite rules. When you start loving yourself enough to script your own life, independent of the expectation of others, shift happens.

My most difficult and significant rule re-writing took place as my marriage was winding down. Greg is a warm, kind, smart, generous, and all-around wonderful man, but for reasons I won’t go into here, our marriage had stopped working for me. With the help of several years of marriage counseling and many personal-development and relationship courses, we were able to overcome old patterns and significantly strengthen our partnership with the exception of one vital component: I could never reawaken the romantic attraction I had once felt for Greg. I valued him as an important person in my life, but I could not access the deep-connection feelings of marriage-style love with him. It was a tremendous test of my authenticity and self-acceptance to finally admit this. I tried everything possible to turn it around, but the one thing I would not allow myself to do was to become inauthentic about it.

Once I knew without a doubt that I would never again feel romantically inclined toward this man, the only authentic course of action seemed to be divorce. But for a long time, divorce just didn’t feel right. Ironically, all the counseling and personal-development work we’d done together had brought us to an impasse. We’d reached such a level of compassion and understanding toward one another and become such close friends that it seemed crazy to make such a dramatic change to our lives. Even though the romantic and sexual aspects of our union were indisputably over, we both cherished day-to-day family life with our two fantastic tweenage children.

I had bought into society’s picture about how divorce is supposed to look, and I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging our children back and forth between our separate homes. I couldn’t bear the thought of dividing up all the things we were so happily sharing, or ending relationships with one another’s families. I couldn’t even bear the thought of not seeing Greg on a regular basis. I truly loved combining forces with him on parenting and household responsibilities, laughing with him, and socializing together with our mutual friends. I didn’t want to give those things up, but I didn’t want to give up the possibility of ever again having a deeply connected romantic partnership in my life either. It was a heartbreaking decision—one I spent hundreds of middle-of-the-night hours crying over.

I was teaching Juicy Joy, and I knew that staying in a friendship-only marriage was not something I could authentically embrace. I am a passionate person. I love Love. I love big, lusty, voracious, capital-L Love. It seemed bitterly unfair to me that I should have to sacrifice something so intrinsic to my character in order to keep my family together.

I finally realized during one of those middle-of-the-night sobfests that I was subscribing to a law about the definition of divorce that did not jibe with what I felt, authentically, in my core being, to make sense. It was a law put there by the society I belonged to, not one that resonated with my inner truth. Wasn’t I teaching people how to re-write those laws? I vowed, in that moment, that I would have it all.

I decided I would not dissolve our family simply because I needed to dissolve our marriage. I got very specific about rewriting the rules of divorce to suit my particular situation. Who said my divorce had to look like my friends’ divorces, or had to even remotely resemble any other divorce ever in the entire history of divorces?

Obviously, this dream required two people to share the vision, and Greg was initially reluctant to get on board with my creativity because he did not want the divorce at all. He was horrified by my decision. My self-love and dedication to my authenticity was put to the ultimate test. To be true to myself, I’d have to disappoint someone I love, and that was simply not in my deeply-ingrained people-pleaser’s repertoire. It was time to finally walk my self-love talk. I asked the Universe to guide and support me.

I devised a detailed plan that included keeping the kids’ lives as unchanged as possible by having them remain full-time residents of our home—with Greg and me alternating time there with them—and all of us continuing to spend ample fun time together as a foursome. I rewrote the definition of “family,” so that parents who were no longer married to one another could remain a family unit with their children.

My resolve opened the floodgates to divine assistance. Miracles occurred daily. And I did get to have it all. Our divorce was sad, of course, and we all allowed ourselves the full expression of our sadness about it. But ultimately it was a dream divorce—nothing more than a peaceful, gentle relabeling of our continuing friendship, which remains supportive and joyful and full of family-style love.

What I feared would be a terrible ordeal for my family turned out to be the best possible thing for all of us. Those years I spent trying to fit myself into a mold that was no longer authentic for me were years that I was unable to be my best self and offer my best to others. Only after reclaiming and honoring my authentic self was I able to once again be the exceptional mom, daughter, sister, friend, and teacher that I knew I could be. Until we’ve given ourselves what we most authentically need, we have nothing of value to give to anyone else. Without self-love, no other love is truly possible.

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About the Author: Unconditional love expert Lisa McCourt is a dynamic speaker, seminar leader and author whose 34 books have sold more than 5.5 million copies worldwide. Her new book, Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self, teaches people to embrace "radical authenticity" to fully experience unbridled joy in life. Lisa lives in South Florida with her two children. For a free Juicy Joy audio program, visit www.LisaMcCourt.com.