It's Monday and I have finally gotten a chance to rest. There's been so much going on and I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about. Work, children, family, duties outside of the home. So many outbound requirements that make us forget about us. I think as women especially, we have this crazy tendency to use others - and our love we give to establish some sort value to our own lives.

Essentially we equate to happiness we can encourage in others, as a sort of passive happiness for ourselves.

The last few years I've gotten reacquainted with a part of me I have forgotten since childhood. How good it feels to just do little things for my own personal benefit. Bubble baths are great, a new purse is awesome - but these things fade. Their value and how we feel about them fades as quickly as we get them. For me, I remembered how it felt to do something repeatedly. Sometimes watching the same bird outside my window, more recently now - getting up a 5-6 to scavenge my garden for slugs and caterpillars. Even when I had a corporate life, I would wear lingerie under my clothes.

Now, a bit wiser, a bit more secure in my future and end destination. Happiness comes in the form of ritualizing certain habits that promote positive feelings about myself. Not just mantras or special little notes we leave and never see again. I mean a more tangible and more visceral set of habits and adornments that have significance.

As a mother, the first tackle for me was being resistant to adopting habits that only had a benefit for me and no one else. My garden was the place that taught me this lesson. As a gardener, the importance of feeding and nurturing your plants is important not only for the production of blooms and food but also for the vitality of further seedlings and off-shoots from the mother plant. In my garden, I see what happens when some plants take priority over others. Some plants thrive and grow big and green. The ones unattended left to suffer from being overshadowed, and lack the nutrients they need. Eventually, these plants produce little to no fruit and harvesting seeds is never an option from these plants.

I applied that same thinking to myself, visualizing me as a plant in a much larger garden - needing sun, water, and nutrients. How I feel about myself and what I do to maintain positive feelings is just the same as tending to the garden.

The next thing I had to do was to forgive myself. As a true earth sign - I most often suffer in silence. The guilt from things that happened years ago weighed heavily on me. I never spoke about it because I just assumed people really don't want to know about the wars I've battled in my life. Also, I was conditioned to believe that real women must struggle some sort of way to validate our womanship. I had a conflict in narrative, as I presented myself one way to the world - strong and unmoving, and the narrative of my heart that wanted to be weak and cry, to tell others who I really was and the things that hurt me.

I became aware of what I was doing to me and decided that the only way to heal was to purposely and repeatedly do things that make me feel good about who I was/am.

I ritualized things that make me joyful and help me find happiness.