Self Love | Rohini Ross - Part 4

Optimal Performance Doesn’t Require Perfection

I have been writing my blog for over a year, and this is the first time I haven't been sure what to write about. Normally something stands out during the week, and I make a mental note to write about it. This week my brain has been foggy. When I reflected on this, I realized my mood has been lower than usual. I think this may be related to the Ketogenic diet I started last Sunday.   I began the diet because I have put on about twenty pounds over the past year. This is very unusual for me and seems to...

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Are We Human or Are We Divine?

"Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are." -- Brené Brown  The ego's mantra is to feel more, do more, have more, be more. It screams, "I am not enough!" It believes the next moment, the next hour, the next future will better. We humans can so easily get pulled into these thoughts.   Given that, how do I sit with my insecure thinking? How do I accept feeling my unworthiness?  I find it easier to be with these thoughts and feelings when I realize they are simply part and parcel of the human experience. I...

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Taking the Plank Out of My Eye — Nothing Can Disturb My Peace Other than My Thinking

When I scrolled through my emails recently, I saw one from an established coach listed as personal. The email title was my name. When I open the email, it said, "Do you have space for a new coaching client, Rohini?" I have seen this email before. I remember it.   Six months ago, I was speaking with a new coach developing his practice. We were discussing how his business was going, and he was very excited that he had received a personal email from this coach asking him if he was interested in new coaching client. He assumed the email was specific...

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I do not want to love myself — I want to know myself as love.

Working as a therapist and a coach, clients often share with me an intention of feeling worthy and having good self-esteem. In the past, I might have supported them with identifying the misunderstandings in their consciousness responsible for their painful feelings of not being good enough. This certainly provides respite, and helps clients see their beliefs as false. It allows them to let them go of the limited thinking and experience a more accurate understanding of themselves. Working with the content of thought and clarifying it so a deeper realization can emerge is healing. However, there is another way to address...

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Losing my Mind and Waking Up to my Self

I thought I lost my mind one day this week. I started out the morning feeling very proud of myself because I was so organized. I had an earlier than usual client session, and my youngest daughter had just started school. We weren't quite in the swing of things yet. My husband was out of town, but everything was going swimmingly. My daughter was up on time, on track for getting to school, and I was ready to go.   There was construction happening outside of our home. We were notified to move our cars by 7 am. I was out of...

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Accepting Ourselves Warts and All Brings Out the Best in Us

I just finished co-facilitating a Less Stress, More Living Workshop. It was so moving to witness the participants experience more freedom of mind and have a deeper connection with their true nature. One of the themes that emerged during the workshop was a concern that if we hold the perspective that everyone is doing the best that they can based on their understanding in the moment that this would condone bad behavior and ultimately encourage it.   This reminded me of a story one of my mentors, Linda Pransky, shared at a workshop. She explained there was a time when she had problems...

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What a Relief to Know I Don’t Need to Keep Working on Myself

Seek without seeking, for what you hope to attain is already within you. -- Sydney Banks   It was such a relief when I realized I did not have to keep working on myself and striving for self-improvement. I had been successful in many ways with an amazing husband, wonderful children, a successful psychotherapy practice, and a lovely home, but I struggled to relax and really appreciate my life. I was plagued with feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. I did not feel good enough. I felt unworthy. No amount of success on the outside made a difference. I had pursued many avenues of personal...

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Understanding the Power of Thought

It can seem overly simplistic to say that thought creates our experience. Most of our thoughts are so invisible to us they don’t look like they generate our personal reality. When I tell my clients their experience comes from thought, some only see the simplicity of this explanation and miss the profundity of the implications. The understanding is then initially dismissed as unhelpful. Others struggle to see that thought has anything to do with creating their experience. Instead, they see their experience as sourced from outside of them, the result of circumstances and situations.   I was that way for many years....

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Stop Trying to Escape Your Humanness and Surrender to Your Loving Essence

If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world. — Sydney Banks   Wellbeing and peace exist within us. They are a state of mind, a level of consciousness, we can all experience. The only thing that gets in the way of us residing in that state of mind is when we get gripped by anxious thoughts that take us out of our natural capacity for equanimity. When this happens there is no doing needed. We can simply relax and let our thoughts settle so we can fall back into our natural...

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Jump Off the Tightrope of Perfectionism and Fall to Your Bliss

I usually have an idea that pops into my mind each week to write about in my blog. This week the theme of perfectionism showed up, and how apropos that when I started to write about it nothing came forward. It is fitting that this subject brings on immediate writer’s block. Just thinking about it is enough to stifle the creative juices. It makes me laugh to think how easy it is for certain conditioned thoughts to look so real that they don’t even look like thoughts at all. It is like wearing virtual reality goggles without knowing you have...

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