Hello lovelies and at very long last welcome back to a Mindful Mondays post. If you have been reading since my old blog then you will know I did a lot of these kinds of posts and if you’re new you’re probably thinking what the hell is this? Well to be honest it’s pretty self explanatory, we feel and do Mindful things on a Monday. That’s it. That’s the post…
No of course I’m joking, but the bit about feeling mindful on a Monday still stands. So practising mindfulness is something I have done since discovering it in second year at uni when I did a project based on the term. The mindfulness umbrella is pretty big and as an individual you can practice and relate a lot of different parts of being mindful to your physical life. So the things you do and the people you see and the events you have to partake in day to day. But you also have it in your mental life by the way you think and feel about yourself and others and situations you experience. But practising to be mindful is a great thing for our overall life experience.
If you do wanna see some previous mindful things I’ve discussed head on over to my old blog, katielouisejohnson, to check out the vibe of the posts. Previously we have discussed ASMR, our lives on the universe scale, the happiness list, relating to books, analysing myself, and these posts always tend to be very wordy and chunky but I love that as I really feel it helps you and I to connect.
So I thought today to bring back this segment of the blog and for some of you to enter this new journey of mindfulness and what it means to practice it; start with energy. I am a big believer in energy and energies about situations, people, moments, emotions. We’ve all had that feeling of walking into a room and knowing something has just happened and the vibe is lingering in the air. That is our intuition and reading of energies by feeling it within our gut. The intuition we carry with us in our daily life is an energy in itself, even if you don’t practice mindfulness often or at all, energy is all around us. For me personally I can tap into different energies depending on the situations and the people involved, not always positive but you can’t have all good and no bad because then our lives wouldn’t balance. We need harder elements in our lives to keep re-grounding us which in turn reminds us to remain mindful and thankful by finding the small things in the storm that spark joy and wonder despite how hard what we as an individual is going through.
I am a big believer in the universe, I’m quite a spiritual person if you guys haven’t guessed already and I have always been someone who puts their faith into the universe. I truly do connect with the state of being that the universe knows who I am meant to be and it knows where I’m supposed to go even if there are times which I feel I don’t. A big example of that is my career and my job. Whilst at uni I was so full of wonder and excitement for where I was gonna go and I think coming home to the literal come down of just moving back home and getting a retail job in my town really took it’s toll in the way of feeling is this it for me? It is hard especially when you see so many people you know or your friends doing incredible things along the lines of their degree and you do kind of have that low energy of “why isn’t that me?” – we’ve probably all felt it, not just with uni, but probably after many individual life events for each of us. That big shift of being so engrossed in a way of your life to all of a sudden for it to just be over and everything is different again. I think it takes a long time to rework your brain in figuring out what you actually want. I’ve said to you all many times before, being a performer will always be my biggest dream and when my opportunity arises I will take it. But for right now it’s taken me a long time to decide where to take my next step as I’ve always felt guilty if I step away from what I originally wanted to do. So when those thoughts start to go around and around in my head I feel stuck on what to do and then I don’t end up going anywhere. When in reality life is a constant flow of movement, it’s a bit like water. You can hold certain elements in a place for a period of time but eventually the flow begins again. My brain has almost been fighting and forcing me to feel stuck when in reality that low energy will only make me unhappy, frustrated, and upset. So I know I need to stop doing that because that lower/ negative energy will soon feed through to my mental space and out through my physical body.
In the ways of mindfulness, I’m currently directing my energy into things I want to do or I am interested in or want to try and do. You can only start small and work yourself up. For example, just this week for whatever reason I’ve been watching a lot of crafting videos. I’ve never been that creative in the way of painting on a canvas but I will always be creative in the way of imaging shows on a stage or how to make an area of my room to look appealing or listening to a song and imaging a style of dance to it even if I’m not able to dance it. I’ve always been a dreamer. So I watched some craft videos from a girl called Hermione Chantel on YouTube and since watching I have the greatest urge to create things and make something and have another creative outlet for me. I find the energy of us creative people also interesting because we constantly have people telling us we’re not good enough and for a while we feed into that and believe in the lies. But then something clicks and our whole perspective changes. Maybe it’s a growing up thing or maybe it’s this year but all of sudden the energy has shifted again and we’re experiencing our lives at a higher vibration. In the way of the negativity we once fed into, it can no longer touch us because we’ve gone through the turmoil that brought us down and we are now above that. Which means when the next drag comes down we will get above that as well because in our energy and vibration of our general being we already know we can because we’ve done it before.
Maybe I have an urge to do more creative outlets that are possible for me right now because I’m in a life situation where my performing life I feel it isn’t a possibility but these other ones I can potentially consume my time with are. Which is a great way of reconnecting with myself because I know I’m going forward with things I want to do. Even if it is just for my own benefit. Which all comes back to energy and re-grounding ourselves. Our whole being is based on energy and how we feel around certain life events. And I feel for many of us, myself included at times, this year we have all at some stage vibrated at a lower frequency. There is no denying 2020 has been a hard year for many and may be remembered as one of our most trialling years in the modern age. As I mentioned above you can have no good without bad because then life wouldn’t balance. I feel 2020 has been the year of events that will change the world for a lifetime to come.
2020 is a double digit year. These only happen every 101 years, once a century, and all of you reading this post right now this will most likely be the only one we live through. If you’re a big spiritual person you might follow angel numbers, I personally don’t have much connection in the ways of numbers and spirit guides as I don’t practice meditations to do that yet. But if you do, 2020 in that form is your spirit guides telling you to be prepared for what is coming your way emotionally as well as physically. Which on New Years Eve of 2019 not one of us probably could’ve predicted how significant this year would be in all of our lives. However looking back now I think it’s safe to say they were right.
I’m personally quite interested in astrology, but I’ll be honest I don’t know enough about it or it’s history and all of the star signs to tell you confidently about this whole of idea of 2020 having to be balanced on both sides. So our trusty friend Google will have to give us a hand. So it’s a day of learning for us all. So it turns out, the astrology of 2020 could be an indication of why this year has been so chaotic, intense, non-stop, and action packed from start to finish and it also turns out astrologers have been pre-warning us about this year for a very long time. 2020 has delivered a number of rare, intense, and life-altering moments that have shook up our foundations of life – personally, politically, societally. Forcing us to adapt to the phrase of 2020, “a new normal.”
From doing my research, astrologers have had the year 2020 as a hot topic of discussion for quite some time. Much longer than us as the general public would’ve thought about it. Many people, including world leaders, have labelled 2020 as a portal, a threshold if you will for humanity to embark on a new era. Narayana Montufar stated, “… The cycles of many different planets are coming to an end, bringing drastic changes that will unfold over the next 30 years.”
[SOURCE: Bustle: Why Astrologers Tried To Warn Us About 2020 For Years]
There is a rare and epic celestial happenings surround 2020 including: a series of super moons that happened from February all the way until May, the moon passed in front of Mars in February – known as occultation, the meteor shower drought came to an end on April 22-23 and May 6-7, there was a lunar eclipse on the 4th of July, the two biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, took the spotlight in our summer skies in mid July in which they were closest to Earth in their orbit – appearing brighter, there was a perseid meteor shower at the start of August, the blue moon at Halloween, then having a moonless sky for a couple of days in December, solar eclipse to darken the sky in South America on December 14th, the same time that most of us experienced moonless skies, and finally Jupiter and Saturn make another big show of 2020’s celestial happenings on the 21st of December. They [the planets] make an extremely close encounter following the first winter sunset – conjunction.
[SOURCE: Accu Weather: 10 Astronomy Events You Don’t Want to Miss in 2020]
That’s a quick run down of the celestial happenings. Of course there is much more information and deeper discoveries surrounding them all, but if I was to relay all that information this post would be ridiculously long. Check out both my sources to learn more, especially all of those events in relation to the zodiac signs.
But the new age all of these celestial events were preparing us for this the new era, the Age of Aquarius. My friend Chloe will be delighted, hence because she’s an Aquarius. Which begins once Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto are all in Aquarius. (N, Montufar, 2020.) So why is this important? Well it’s a stand out point in our life cycle because for the last 200 years Jupiter and Saturn have been coming together in Earth signs. Focusing our energy on material gain and security. But in Aquarius humanity is set to focus on the innovative and socialist ways which only the air element can generate for us.
2020 has shaken up everything to expose the cracks in our society’s foundations. We’ve all experienced the shift in power and safety. This year is our training wheel for the revolution of the next couple of years to come which will change the way we relate to our communities and what we value in our society.
[SOURCE: Bustle: Why Astrologers Tried To Warn Us About 2020]
As I look back at 2020, that last statement rings a few bells in my head about the year. The Black Lives Matter movement being one of them – don’t get me wrong we have a long way to go in the battle against racism that I hope continues into 2021. Educating, learning, changing the course of black lives for the better. It was probably one of the biggest social shakeups of 2020 because so many of us white people, myself included, were so unaware of how unequal black people’s lives are to our own in this day and age. Which was honestly heart-breaking to learn about and discover so much of what still goes on today as it did all those years ago. So as we move into 2021, I feel there will be bigger and better shakeups in our society for minority communities for elements that have previously been swept under the rug. Which whilst will probably be upsetting and hard to digest at first, in the long run it will be so worth it and vital for us all to move forward to a more equal and happy society. If 2020 highlighted anything to us it’s that the way we’re living and the way we’re doing certain things isn’t the most fair or most sustainable or most cost effective or most kind. Whatever that thing is that we individually realised, ‘Oh I didn’t realise that was happening or I was doing that. I don’t like that or I don’t want to continue that.’ I’m sure last year we all had something where we said to ourselves that needs to change.
I’m feeling positive about 2021. Even through the mess in 2020 I was still feeling positive and although it was a hard and rough year for many, my family included at times, there was still a few key moments of love and happiness and excitement. So some key moments from 2020 for me personally…
I got engaged! This is still crazy to me that this even happened. I got a boyfriend at 22 and then some how got engaged at 22 as well. Sometimes the universe knows where you’re meant to go more than you do. I’m also aware most of you who read my blog probably don’t know much about this event because since relaunching my blog I haven’t said much about relationships and stuff.
But what’s mad to me is this year Jake (boyf/ fiance) and I will have known one another for 2 years as we met in May of 2019 and these 2 years have gone so quickly it still feels like yesterday we we were in the seeing each other stage. But honestly I feel very lucky and grateful to have someone like Jake in my life. I’ve never felt so comfortable with another man in a romantic sense in my whole life and the whole setting around how we met is also wild that it even happened. Maybe I’ll do a whole post this year explaining it if you guys are interested? But yeah, I’ve never had a man in my life where I’ve felt so comfortable to just be me and embrace my weirdness and I can talk to absolutely anything about without judgement and who makes me feel like I’m more than enough and can do anything. When you find people who feel like light – keep that close. Genuinely that’s what I feel I’ve found with Jake.
You know what, another highlight for me was actually the first lockdown. I’m very aware that a lot of people will not feel the same as me and that’s okay. If you hated every minute of it I completely get that. But you can’t ignore the fact that the main part of 2020 was spent at home. And for me I felt something special during the first lockdown, there was some kind of sparks of magic about it. I don’t know if it was the astrological elements but something changed in a lot of us. We were creating things, we were finding new hobbies, reconnecting with things we used to enjoy, we experienced life for what it was for the first time in a long time instead of constantly making plans and constantly moving from A to B because we had everything we normally do stripped away. We couldn’t make any actual plans of going out and doing things because we had no choice. For the first time in a long time we had to stay in the place that sometimes we only come to eat dinner and sleep.
I think the first lockdown had a quality of well this is my life until god knows when, because at the time it really was, and you know we celebrated birthdays on zoom, did online quizzes, we were tie dying tracksuits, making dalgona coffees, baking banana bread, some people even made online businesses that are still going on, everyone got obsessed with Tiger King and watched the whole library of Netflix, we had online movie nights, everyone and their nan was creating Tik Tok’s, Animal Crossing was everywhere, loungewear was worn every day, Joe Wicks became everyone’s PE teacher, having to cut our own hair (although I never personally did that – would be a hot mess), the constant this or that’s on IG (if you follow me there you’ll know I posted some like every day and honestly I think that’s what grew my account), virtual tag challenges, clapping for the NHS every Thursday night that gave a real sense of community, coming together in the times of crisis – not just Corona but the death of George Floyd and how that sparked the need for change across the world, Normal People, everyone was reading again.
[SOURCE: Stylist: 100 Days in Lockdown]
For me it was just really wholesome to see people living their lives and there was a quality of excitement for life again as none of us knew what we were actually going to do each day. The constant life of 9-5 and having the weekends off is a reality for many but where’s the excitement. In your standard working life we only have 48 hours to do whatever we want and 90% of the time now people don’t even have that. I wasn’t put here in this universe to just work and only do what I want for 48 hours a week of my life. So to have all of the endless time in the world (at the time) to do whatever I wanted and to experience whatever I wanted and create whatever I wanted and be whoever I wanted was a really special time for me personally. Without the first lockdown I would’ve never realised last year what matters most to me and nor would I have known what direction I wanted my life to go in. The world physically stopped for us all to rest and reenergise and reconnect with our inner-selves and to then take our life forward for our outer-selves. So that will always always be special to me. So here’s some key moments and memories from lockdown season 1…
And then after lockdown, that also felt like a very weird time/ transition period because the majority of us had just spent 3 months inside our houses and then all of sudden it was time to go back to work and a slight hint of normal life resumed. When I look back now the first lockdown actually went so quickly but whilst we were living in it it, it probably only felt slow because we didn’t know when it was going to end. When I went back to work it was like I’d never been gone. But it’s also wild to me that we went back to 4 months of almost normality. Fair enough you know we still had to wear masks everywhere and social distance from other people but apart from that most shops and restaurants and venues were open and I saw the majority of my friends and Jake and I saw my family again. And even though the virus of course wasn’t gone in those 4 months and there was always a risk of us going into another lockdown (hey, lockdown season 3 episode 157) but it was almost like it wasn’t real even though we were so aware to the concepts of masks and social distancing. Does anyone else know what I mean? But when I did get to spend actual time with people, I also had some great moments…
You know what, despite all of 2020’s trials and hard times. I’ve had some of my favourite moments and memories in 2020. In the 4 months after lockdown season 1 Jake and I made more memories together – one being a cat cafe trip. Never been to one but I’ve always wanted to go, we celebrated my dads birthday, I took a trip in September to my friend Laura’s with our friend Jen to spend a weekend together and a few months prior that felt like a lifetime away and the fact it happened was insane and it’s by far one of my favourite weekends in 2020. Heather and I celebrated Halloween together like we always do and it was special that we got to do that again, my social media grew a lot more than previous years. Which was actually really nice as I enjoyed what I was putting out there and getting a great response back which gave me the push I needed to put more effort back into Instagram etc. I rediscovered my love and talent for nail art – so much so that I need and want to follow that as a career path. I’ve always seen it more as hobby through most of my life but you know what Corona has made me realise I don’t have time to waste. You know for anything, so if I wanna do something or make something happen I need to stop overthinking and just get at it. I personally just found 2020 so eye opening to a lot of things in my life and what needs to shift as I move forward. Let me know in the comments if you guys feel the same about 2020. Everything seems more special and cared about now compared to pre-pandemic life.
I no longer set resolutions, I set goals because you work towards a goal whereas a resolution feels like you have to accomplish it as soon as possible which isn’t a realistic way of working for me personally. I suppose my main goal for 2021 is to create and do whatever I want to do. Lately I’ve noticed myself get in a hole with a silly amount of excuses that I’m letting burry me alive. I don’t know how I’ve let myself get here but I need to start digging myself back out because I don’t belong down here. I’m great at supporting and rooting for everyone else but in the last 1-2 years I’ve become very bad at rooting for myself and I think it’s a defence mechanism. I’ve been hurt a lot in the past, when I thought people were my friends or cared about me or supported me and were in my corner and when it turns out they’re not it makes me not want to share things with those people anymore, naturally. But that has done this thing to my brain where I think no one is that bothered about me or my problems or what I’ve got going on so I just don’t tell people certain things. Which all that really does is put me in a box and makes me feel like I’m on my own and that I have to do everything on my own. Which I know deep down isn’t the case but it’s crazy how your brain makes itself think a certain way to protect you. I think it is really easy for people who have left university to feel like this because you’re floating on your own after that. So I think I’ve fell in the trap of I don’t know what to do or where to go so I’m not gonna do anything which is again counterproductive. Which I will change this year. I’ve got to because I know I’m not 100% happy with where I am but I don’t know how to start to get to where I want to be. So in that gap between the two sides I’ve got to find my bridge to take the first step on and keep walking. Just remind myself that I am worthy and capable and deserving of everything that is coming my way. Anyone else relate?
Tell me your goals in the comments and as you’re reading this we are well into 2021. This year will be a good year! Manifest it with me. It will be good and we will all achieve great things and more than what we thought. Manifest baby. The start of the year is very much going to be rocky, Miss Rona is still strutting her stuff but I feel the changes we want and need this year are coming for the good of everyone. We will all get through it my loves. Sending love and light and good wishes to you all as always. I’m excited to see where we go in 2021.
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