• Cultivating Hope – podcast show notes and transcript. Enjoy!
  • Intro
    • Hello lovely people and welcome to the Lovely Digest podcast. I am your host and friend Emily, founder and creative director at BECK Creative, sharing weekly wellness wisdom with you every Wednesday. My goal is to help you design your dream life and make the transition from being in information overload to being your own personal success story. Make sure to subscribe to get notifications every time a new episode comes out so you don’t miss the latest simple and actionable tips for improving your wellbeing.
  • First Part
    • Hello hello, happy Wednesday. How did your assignment go last week? Or if you’re just tuning in, hello and welcome. We have little assignments here every week to help improve your wellbeing. Last week we talked about responsibility and surrender, and did an exercise exploring the line between the two.
    • Chronic illness can be a very difficult thing. I’ve been focusing on chronic illness the last two episodes because according to the American Hospital Association, nearly half the US population, that’s about 133 million Americans, struggle with at least one chronic health condition.
    • If you didn’t listen to the previous episode and are struggling with chronic illness, I highly recommend you go and listen. Today we are going to talk about cultivating hope and the next steps after taking responsibility and learning to surrender.
    • Before you can start to change your life it’s important to build hope and a vision for the future. Your WHY. Once I was in a stable position with my Crohn’s Disease, I could look around me again and realized everyone was forging ahead. I hadn’t been out of college that long, and all of my friends were moving on to their first jobs and I was stuck on the couch. If you’ve been really sick long term you know what I’m talking about. That transition when you come out of that bubble of just surviving to feeling so grateful to be alive, to going, “oh shit, what the heck is next??”
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  • Second Part
    • Life can seem super overwhelming when you have a chronic illness. You have to go from being able to go-go-go all the time to learning to ebb and flow with how your body is feeling, and this can bring on a lot of resentment towards your body. I know this is something I personally really struggled with.
    • The first hurdle was getting stronger, mentally and physically, and learning to forgive – just like we talked about in the previous episode. Forgive God/the universe for putting me in this position, for coming to terms with my new situation, for grieving my old life the old me, and ultimately seeing that I had so many new opportunities on the other side. This is a process that takes some time, but trust me, you will make it to the other side. And healing is not linear. I still look back and mourn my old self. But what I also see is a body that has never been as strong as the old me, a much more wise and compassionate human and friend, and someone who is so damn creative. Like, I have about 500 podcast episodes worth of content now how crazy is that! My disease literally turned into one of my WHYs.
  • Assignment
    • Your assignment for this week is to cultivate hope. One way I do this is on a monthly basis. I turn off my phone. I clean up my favorite room in my apartment, my office. Light a candle, do a little meditation, clear my mind, take a shower, get cozy. I put my hand on my heart and connect to my heart beat. Then I start writing. I write about everything I’m dreaming of. I allow myself this. This used to feel like an indulgence because I seriously could not imagine living into the future. Now I am so strong and those hopes and dreams I dared to write about have become true. So I write and write about the house I want, the career, the people I want to surround myself with, what I want to look like, and most importantly what I feel experiencing each of these things in my mind. Then I go on Pinterest and flesh out more details. I walk myself mentally through my future home, I picture myself doing this practice in that future dream office. I let myself get so creative and I challenge you to do the same. I love the free Miro white board app – you can just copy and paste from Pinterest and design a board for each aspect of your life and each dream you have. Doing this will help you cultivate hope for your future. These are your WHYs.
  • Outro
    • Well that is it for now lovelies, thank you so much for tuning in. For more tips, and to join our online community off the podcast, follow lovelydigest on Instagram and Emily Beck on Youtube, the links will be below. To join our email community and get notified of new discounts, tips, and resources, follow the link in the show notes. If you thought this was helpful or know if it might help a friend, please make sure to share it and if you feel inclined, leave a review. It really helps get these tips in front of the people who may really benefit from this community we have here. See you next week.

Show Notes:

• Chronic illness
• https://www.aha.org/system/files/content/00-10/071204_H4L_FocusonWellness.pdf
• Cultivating hope and your WHYs
• Resentment towards my body
• Getting stronger
• Turning my life around
• Assignment

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