• The Importance of Solo Time • I once dated a guy who told me that he hated being alone with his own thoughts. When I asked him more about it, it really came down to him not knowing / liking himself, so he consistently turned to external stimuli to distract from having to face himself and his inner monologue. Turns out, I did that a lot, too. But, over the years, I’ve also been able to slowly cultivate a practice of hanging out with myself on a semi-regular basis, so now I feel comfortable, and “at home” within myself. I recently realized that I used to *always* have background music on at home and in the car, but in the past couple of months, I’ve been relishing silence more often than not. I wake up and enjoy having quiet mornings, and when I go out for errands, I’ll forget to turn on the radio since I’m in a thinking mode. Now I understand that if you live with others or have kids, this is a very rare occurrence. In that case, I urge you even more to truly *seek out* time alone with you, and without external stimulus to truly ground yourself in who you are, rather than be influenced by the barrage of incoming messages telling us to be this way or that way. Partner dancing in West Coast Swing is like that too--the more I try to be a “pleaser” in the dance and anticipate where I think my leader wants me to be, the more I compromise our connection and the potential for what our dance *could* be. But the real magic happens when I take a moment to breathe into my own body first, connect into myself primarily--and then, all of a sudden, my leader knows *exactly* where I am, I’m in no rush, our connection improves, and we get to dance more fully into the edges of our beautiful potential of our 3 minutes together. ✨ I wrote more extensively on the importance of granting ourselves this gift of “solo time” in my first book, Don’t Settle, if you’d like to dive into it a bit more deeply. The link is in my bio. But either way, I hope you grant yourself some space to just sit with *you* and get to know how amazing you really are… ‘cause ya are! 🙏 #solotime #silence #silenceisgolden #groundyourselffirst #grounding #deepbreaths #meditate #quiet #quietude https://www.instagram.com/p/CDxp_VnDT8T/?igshid=krgoezav0gfh