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Care Package Archive

Rejuvenating and practical frameworks for creating Clarity and Wellness in all areas of your life.

Coaching is sacred. This space is protected. Gates and paths open to our guides. Gates and paths closed to anyone who wishes to do us or our loved ones harm. Dedicated Protector.

Care Packages🤲🏽

You know when someone who loves you sends you a parcel with a bunch of goodies in it? I’m endeared to the care package (in whatever form it comes) as a way of making, way of caring, way of sharing. There’s no shortage of possibility as to how a care package presents, what it contains, what assortments are collected, how it’s delivered, how it’s received, and what it might mean to it’s recipients.

I value that this orientation toward making and giving can bring together items that you don’t always see together. You’re simply giving what’s needed and what might land as care. I like when a care package is a sweet collection of some practical stuffs and also things for pure enjoyment (maybe highlighting the functionality of joy and pleasure to our survival); a mix of things you can use in the long run plus some things to use right now. A box containing socks, a nice notebook, some chocolate, a bag of rice.

I like both mail and creating with the intention to give, so the Care Package holds a place in my heart. I send the people on my list a weekly (email) Care Package 🤲🏽. I write them with the intention of both holding space for all the positive possibility that you radiate, and to be of real tangible use. Ideas that you can grab onto, that make a difference in your life.

I created the Care Package Archive to collect these packages all in one place. Sign up if ya wanna receive em straight to your inbox.

Care Package 21 🤲🏽 Calling your habits “bad” is already backwards. 1 thing you need to understand about stabilization

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Welcome back! Do ya like music? (This one’s either high energy work flow or dance party, I’m not sure I know the difference! I’ve binge-listened to all of these songs and would like to share their magic with you. Enjoy.)

Ok here’s the thing: No habit is innately “bad”. In fact, a “bad” habit done rhythmically or with unapologetic reverence… could be an essential part of your wellness journey, a bridge between one chapter and the next. 

I’ll come back around to this but first I want to talk about a subject that is underutilized in lifestyle change: Stabilization!

I’ve talked about stabilization a lot over the past year and a half as it has grown increasingly relevant. Stabilization is a concept that is inextricable to strength training vernacular, because it’s understood that the environmental stability (or lack there of) plays a part in the overall stimulus and therefore adaptation of the body. 

Ground stability is one of the first things we take into account. Performing any task on unstable ground is added stimulus that makes any task percentages more difficult because it adds the work of stabilization (which is no small thing) to the workload of the body. Why does this matter to you? This matters to you because I’m guessing last year was, at a minimum, a little destabilizing. You may just now be getting your bearings, or not even. Either way, out of respect for you and all the changes you may have experienced and may still be experiencing, I want to shed light on the work of stabilization.

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It’s important to remember… Any change is recognized by your system as stress, even if it’s change that you deem positive and important, because it requires adaptation which is work for your brain and body. 

When environmental, social, external elements of your life are shifting, it takes effort to re-stabilize. You may not even recognize that you are extending this extra effort but you might notice the lag in other areas that are meaningful to you. 

Example: have you ever been in the middle of a move, or finals, or some other chaotic life moment and, even if the project goes perfectly smooth, right around that time you keep misplacing your keys or missing meetings or confusing dates? You’re not alone. During times like this we are expending effort to stabilize that takes away from our focus in other areas. Things start slipping through the cracks. This same principle is why a sprinters fastest running happens on the track with spikes and not on beach sand. While running on the beach can be beneficial training, the constant adjustments your body needs to make to deal with the unstable surface takes away from the ability to produce maximal speed.

Stabilizing your immediate environment as much as possible is priority number one in any wellness work because it’s simply too much for your system to be in a constant state of stress and also try to be productive or creative.

Think about the difference between trying to learn a dance move while balancing on a bosu ball and also being tossed a bag of oranges versus trying to learn that same dance move on stable ground without multitasking. And have you noticed that when learning any physical sequence (shooting hoops, kicking a soccer ball, hitting a baseball) your footing is almost always instructed first? Your footing and whatever posture is going to afford the most stability so that you can funnel your energies toward the highest quality of whatever comes next. It’s no coincidence. In the performing of any important and consequential series of actions, any strength or quality movement focus, footing and stability is always preliminary. It’s true in every sport and, in fact, any ambition.

Stabilization is such a tangible, physical, visible, and applicable concept that I utilize it in my work with clients as the first step to optimize an individual’s wellness ecosystem and lifestyle, whether we are working specifically on their home or generally on their clarity, wellness, and alignment. Stabilization always comes first. 

And after a year during which almost every part of everyone’s life was turned upside down, there hasn’t been a more relevant topic than stabilization. But how do we stabilize in our lifestyle? In our home? In our body?

Here’s where habits come in! 

What I’ve discovered is that rhythm is what affords stability in lifestyle. In other words, habits. Habits create stability for us. I like to emphasize the rhythmic aspect of habits for two reasons:

1) If you’re like most people you’ve learned to have a judgemental relationship with habits. We’ve learned to wrap everything into interpretation packages of either “good” or “bad”; “these are good habits, these are bad habits.”

The problem with this is that it initiates a relationship with habits that is based in control, and this approach is never sustainably fruitful. I prefer to forge a relationship with habits that is based in connection rather than control and what that looks like is, essentially, replacing judgement with curiosity.

2) Rhythm is the true active ingredient in habits and everything we gain from them. Rhythm is why and how habits work. Rhythm is why and how habits are healing.

The reason why it is stabilizing to create rhythms for your activity (ie: establish habits) is because we live on a rhythmic planet in a rhythmic solar system and the grander forces that we exist within are, themselves, ritualistic. Those larger forces which are undeniable have momentums of rhythm that, when we sync up with them, are (and have historically been) supportive to us. Examples: punctuating sunrise and sundown with a routine, marking our weeks (7 sunrises) with a habit of work and rest, initiating our years (earth’s trip around the sun) with a ritual of festivities, etc.

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If your life feels chaotic or you’re in a struggle amidst challenges, it’s especially critical to stop judging your habits and to not make an enemy of anything that happens to help you out. Make friends with all things that give you joy, sustenance, or hope, even if they’re things you would have previously shunned and even if they’re things you hope to shift in time. Welcome and appreciate the role they are playing for you right now. If it’s what you need, do not be shy about creating stability for yourself and don’t underestimate it’s importance. While you may want to create huge shifts now, stabilizing might be the single most important thing you do to set yourself up for more sustainable and far reaching success to come.

Stabilize, stabilize, stabilize! Stay fed, stay curious, stay gentle. Don’t start any thought or action from a basis of judgement; Be gentle and curious because this is resilience.

Steady ground and friendly strategies,

Loretta

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Images

  • A gorgeous Oreo cookie image. We have a unique relationship with; oreos got me from one chapter to the next.

  • An awesome guy slacklining in an awesome landscape.

  • A red tail hawk stabilizing it’s head while flying. 

  • The planets that make up our solar system, the larger rhythmic and habitual forces around us.

  • Wild elephants resting after a long trek. The little one is situated in between the adult so that it doesn’t wander off.

Loretta Barrera