MK's Reflections - marykatekopec.com

Overcoming Negative Thoughts

A Page from MK’s Journal: Overcoming Negative Thoughts

Hello Sweet Friends,

Recently, I had to go for a mammogram and ultrasound … to investigate “a spot.”

With gratitude, I can tell you, I was given the all-clear.

But the days (and month … thanks to delayed scheduling during the pandemic) leading up to my appointment were a struggle.

Negative thoughts. Anxious thoughts. The what-ifs. The scary drama train I was riding. My brain kept trying to derail into darkness.

Thankfully my coping and wellness toolbox is chock-full of helpful images, positivity, affirmations, activities, … tools of the survival trade.

Even so, I was having a bit of a challenge after a month of build up and waiting, so the few days before my appointment, I started feeling anxious. That horrid jittery energy that frazzles in your chest? … Had it. Insomnia? … Yep, that, too.

I started having lots of little physical manifestations from the negative, anxious mental and emotional challenges I was facing … from being told there might be something wrong with me physically.

Oh, how the cycle goes round and round. Well, actually, mental, emotional, and physical health are interconnected, not so much cyclically … more dynamically interconnected … tweak one and they all get tweaked.

So, there I was, starting to feel my body cave. I knew I needed to get to self-caring on MAXIMAL SUPER BIG TIME to stop the train from wrecking, and wrecking me with it.

Time to try something new! Time to grow my toolbox.

The universe heard me, and as I pulled up my Yoga With Adriene playlist, YouTube made a suggestion: Let It Go Flow with Adriene.

Yes, please!

If you’ve heard me say it once, you’ve probably heard me say it a million times – Yoga With Adriene is an angel on earth! She helps me heal, and I luvs her SO MUCH! (Maybe someday I’ll even get to meet her … there’s a happy thought!)

I definitely recommend yoga in your toolbox. Yoga is scientifically and medically shown to improve your health … in all the ways (mental, emotional, and physical)!

But for today, I want to share a bit from this Yoga With Adriene: Let It Go Flow. It resonated so BIG with me that following my healing practice with her, I immediately hopped into my journal and started creating new journal pages to go with my daily living practice!

Amazing Reminders from Yoga With Adriene!

In her Let It Go Flow, Adriene shares the following:

“Don’t give up on yourself.

“There are so many things that are out of your control,

“But there’s one thing absolutely in your control

“And it’s you, your thoughts, your energy, how you treat your body, how you use your thoughts, your energy and your body, hey-o”

And Adriene offers the following 2 mantras:

1st Mantra:

“Everything is as it should be.

“… This is acceptance.”

2nd Mantra:

“The universe is for me, and so is everything else.” Adriene’s mom

And in a her Yoga For When You Are SICK video, she also mentions “Yoga as a medicine for life.”

These are some of her words that resonate with me so deeply! And so I’ve journaled them. To remind myself regularly, no matter which daily practice I am doing with her.

Reflecting on Yoga With Adriene’s Words of Healing Wisdom

Adriene’s guidance, words, and wisdom reminds me to:

Focus on what I can do … I can let go of negative thoughts, and let flow the positive thoughts.

Instead of “What if there is something bad about to happen?” how about “What if something good is about to happen?”

I am a beautiful vessel of healing.

I nurture and nourish my wellness with care, so I can blossom brightly. My loving efforts create healing, and help avert illness.

With this mental power fueling me and helping me cope and feel calmer, I hopped into my journal to create some pages to hold me.

Adriene’s words, the words of her mother, and my reflections along with the artwork I was inspired to create (written and shown in this post) are my journaling for my healing, and they helped me cope through my mammogram day.

They helped me overcome negative thoughts.

I now have these words and images as daily (or as needed) loving reminders in my toolbox, and I love them!

You might’ve noticed I used the same flower art for 2 different positudes. That’s the beauty of it being my journal. I can doodle art it up and write whatever works for me, and I just love, love, love how my flower turned out, and it felt right for both of my positudes. So, I doubled up for big hugging loves!

I hope these words, reflections, and positudes help you overcome negative thoughts, too!

May your heart be light and filled with PINK! May your smile be bright! May you feel my giant loving hug I’m squeezing you with right now!

MK’s Reflections: What life do you want to live?

What life do you want to live?

Hello Bright Star!

When I was a young adult, the life I wanted to live was survival. Pay rent. Get food. Afford electricity. The basics.

I joined the US Air Force to get stability and ended up in the Gulf War … not the most stable of life events. And then I got lucky. I was offered the GI Bill. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was help to go to college, and so I did.

In college, I knew I wanted 2 things: to be the absolute best student I could be (on the ideal this would provide me more options), and to get get a degree in science. I nailed both.

This whole time, I never stopped to ask myself what life I wanted to live. I was just simply living and surviving. It was instinctual. Habit, sort of. I was just digging into life like what I saw other people doing. Go to work, pay bills. You know the drill. But with college, the closest I got to asking myself what life I wanted to live was to simply keeping living and trying to build a better life than “survive.”

Jump forward a few decades of endless work ethic and hours, followed by chronic illness most likely brought on by all the work and surviving, and I’m in a new place.

A place with reflective and insightful perspective. I’ve learned to ask the question: What life do you want to live?

Of course, this is a value based life query.

What life do you want to live?

I invite you to make some time for yourself and answer this question. Grow your idea of life. Grow your hopes and dreams. Give your life meaningful direction by understanding what is important to you!

I’m going to share my answer to this question by rephrasing the question as: What are the TOP 10 things you want to do in your life? (Asked this way by the ever wonderful Leonie Dawson!)

Have a beautiful, happy, supportive, loving, wonderful life with my honeybun
Create happiness, light, love, joy, positivity
Live in gratitude & wellness
Grow and nurture beautiful relationships
For my body, mind, soul, efforts, and energies, nurture, nourish, live, learn, and grow with sustainability, conservation, goodness, wellness, healthiness
Movement in my life through yoga, walking, bouncing, and outdoor adventures
Be authentic and genuine and be my best possible self
See and experience the beauty of nature
Live and die painlessly
Have a positive, kind, loving impact on all those I encounter … and if possible improve the earth’s wellness through my actions and helping others in need, like seniors, homeless, and abused and neglected animals

I hope sharing my list helps encourage you to create your list!

I use my list to guide my daily endeavors … I am living this life! I love it!!!

I hope to help you grow a life you love living, too!

Big Hugging you with my loving PINK heart!

MK’s Reflections: Reaffirmation and Positivity for Coping with Chronic Illness

Mary Kate Kopec. Love and Big Hugs! Coping

MK’s Reflections: Reaffirmation and Positivity for Coping with Chronic Illness

Hello Beautiful Blossom! I’m feeling so badly today. It’s one of those days where I start feeling like I’m never going to feel better. Chronic illness and feeling badly almost every day is the pits. I know I’m not always going to feel so badly. I know whatever my symptoms are today, in time, they generally pass. Sometimes it takes a long, long, long time. I spent the bulk of 7 years in a bed with chronic fatigue and body weakness. That’s a long bit of time. Far longer than a 3 day migraine. Both symptoms suck. Pain. Weakness. Fatigue. Disability. … It can get demoralizing. Depressing. And none of the symptoms are ever fun. But so … I’ve been coping with chronic illness and the many symptoms of for a decade now.

Coping with Chronic Illness

And I can tell you the thing that makes chronic illness worse is emotionally and mentally going further down the rabbit hole when trying to cope with the illness. Facts: Your body does not distinguish between mental, emotional, and physical stresses/challenges like the medical community has made of point of separating them. Your body is one cohesively, cooperatively, interconnected, interdependent entity of acting systems that must navigate stressors and challenges no matter whether they are mental, emotional, or physical. So … the more you can do for each of your health aspects, the more you can help your whole body heal and cope.

Eat well (nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory yummies), hydrate, rest, & rejuventate, and get movement into your body for physical wellness!
Engage emotionally and mentally supporting activities for your emotional and mental wellness: smiling, laughing, hugging & loving & connecting with happy peeps, creative efforts & arts, sitting in nature, reassuring yourself with positivity and reaffirmations, and more will help your emotional and mental state.
In turn, the better you feel physically, the better you do mentally and emotionally. Likewise, the better you feel emotionally and mentally, the better you do physically.

Supporting Your Overall Mental, Emotional, & Physical Health and Wellness (and with Chronic Illness)

So today in loving support of your overall mental, emotional, and physical wellness, I give you Positivity and Reaffirmation to help you cope with the challenges in your life and/or chronic illness!

Here are a few of my lil Positivity and Reaffirmation mantras you might find helpful:

I am ok. I am going to be ok. I am getting better.
I am healthy getting healthier. Stronger getting stronger. I will heal.
I can control my breathing, and when I slow down my breathing and do paced breathing, I reduce my inflammation and stress, which helps me cope and heal.
Focus on what is working.
Focus on what I can do in the moment to help my body cope and heal with this current challenge.
Every little bit I do is better than not doing anything at all for myself and my wellness.
I am worth 10 minutes of my time … to do some yoga, to eat something nutrient-dense, to do some paced breathing, etc …
Stop. Close your eyes. Breathe. What is happening? What do you need to cope and heal? Give yourself these things.
I can do this … I AM doing this!
Be gentle with myself.
Surround myself with peeps who love and support me … and who will hug me extra lots until I feel better!
Love my challenged body and work with myself to navigate this challenge.

Loving You!

So even though I don’t feel well, I have a strong toolkit filled with helpers for coping, and I know I just need to gently dig in and take it one breath at a time. It will pass. I just need to give myself time and what I need to cope and heal. And even though I don’t feel well right now, it seems like the perfect time to write this to you … cuz I’m in the moment. I’m very present with how I feel. So I can share in authenticity to hopefully be able to help you find your “feeling better again” soon!

I’m sharing in hopes you will feel my pink heart today, even if only faintly … it’s still PINK … and I’m still loving you big! Tower Garden by Juice Plus+. Mary Kate Kopec. Love and Big Hugs!

MK’s Reflections: Love Is a Choice!

Love is a Choice.

“Love is a Choice. Life is beautiful – don’t waste a moment of it.” Mrs. McInerney, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Vows We Have Made”

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeessssss. This!

These words are foundational to my existence. My living. My approach to my relationship with myself, others, my wellness, and the world.

Today, Sweet Blossom, I want to share this life changing goodness with you from the pinkest depths of my heart! I hope this share will brighten your life, enlighten you, and help you grow this goodness deeper into you and your days.

Love is a choice.

I once lived a life not loving myself.

Trauma, angry/hateful drama, stress: the trifecta of unwellness in growing up in a seriously dysfunctional home additionally challenged by a significantly mentally ill parent.

My young adult years were characterized by low self-esteem, low self-confidence, … essentially low everything. I was easy to manipulate, take advantage of, and abuse … all for seeking love that wasn’t there … that wasn’t able to be given … that was chosen not to give.

Imagine me young. A little pink-hearted, spritely, effervescent, openly loving little kid … all I wanted was friends. People to like and love me.

You would think that kind of inherent happy spirit would attract good people to me to love and like me. Instead, it was more like I was the light, and the darkness flocked to me to feel my brightness, but instead drained me of it.

By the time I was an adult, I was wary. Cautious. Damaged. Cynical. Sarcastic. I’d built a protective wall around me so high, no one would ever get over it. No one would ever hurt me again.

The thing is, when you build a wall that high, it blocks out the light. The chance at love. The chance at growing beyond your own boundaries. You’re trapped inside a protective, self-limiting vessel of your own making.

In reflection, the way I overcame this …

I’d grow to the limits of my wall, and with that new confidence, that new self-goodness, I would chip away at my own wall … allowing new light in … allowing for new growth.

Bit by bit, day by day, year by year, I grew. My confidence. My self-esteem. My understanding of who I am … what I need … what brightens my lights and what dims it. I learned what I liked about myself and what I needed to grow. I learned to love myself.

I learned that for all the years that people hurt me, it had a lot to do with my inability to protect myself by not having the internal strength, will, skill, and self-care toolkit to love myself, respect myself, and care for myself.

Lemme see if I can explain this … It wasn’t that all the people in my life were malicious, horrid people spending their days trying to figure out how to destroy me. No. I learned that these people suffered with their own insecurities. Their own self-doubts. Their own feelings of self-negativity.

And the secret trick … the essential life lesson revealed: You cannot give that which you do not have.

You cannot give that which you do not have.

Meaning, you can’t give love to others, when you don’t love yourself first. Not fully, not with self-empowered/self-knowing authenticity. It’s like wispy cloud love instead of sunny, warm, fluffy, cotton-ball, guess-the-shape kind of cloud love.

Likewise, if you surround yourself with people who don’t love themselves … guess what they can’t give you …

Yep. You’ll be getting wispy cloud love, if any.

But here’s the thing.

Love is a choice.

We can choose love.

Sure. It’s not always easy. It took me YEARS to find my way to myself.

It. Was. So. Worth. It.

And it’s not like my days leading up to where I am now were filled with darkness. No. In fact, the more I realized I was important to myself. The more I realized I was worthy of my time, love, kindness, patience … The more I realized I wanted happiness, goodness, and love in my life … the more I grew in.

So each and every day just got brighter and brighter!

Positive, functional relationships, anti-inflammation, health. Mary Kate Kopec. Love and Big Hugs.

Choose you. Choose love. You are worth it!

Choose you.

Choose love.

Choose to surround yourself with people who love themselves, so they can share their love with you and love you back. (Or at least choose people who are learning to love themselves … aka … on a similar path and growing love into their lives.).

Love is a choice.

And the truth is … You are precious! There is something so uniquely precious about you, that only you can bring this light into the world!

And I promise you, WE NEED YOU!

We need our beautiful, bright light shining in the world, making positive difference.

We need to combine all of our uniquenesses and all of our differing bright lights to create a tremendously thriving, complementary, beautiful rainbow of light, love, and life.

Love is a choice. Life is beautiful – don’t waste a moment.

Love is a choice.

Life is beautiful – don’t waste a moment.

Growing yourself toward the light to live brightly in it … never a moment wasted … with every day getting brighter and brighter, filled with more and more love. For yourself. And to share.

Be Love. Mary Kate Kopec. Love and Big Hugs.

Loving You!

Thank you Sweet Beautiful Blossom for sharing your time with me! For growing love into your life! For being the bright light only you can be! For making our world a more delightful, loving, happy place to be!

Hugging you so big, and SO PINK!

MK’s Reflections: Patience

Beautiful Blossom,

Maybe you can relate.

My honeybun tells me, “You have to have patience.”

But, … but. I want it now!

Sometimes we’re talking little stuff, like landscaping and wanting to get my flowers in to see the beauty … but it’s too late in the season. Or I want to go find some pretty rocks to decorate with, but that would mean being around people.

Sometimes we’re talking big stuff, like I keep trying so hard to wellness myself into feeling well again … but it’s taking fooooooooooooorrrrrreeeeeevvvvvvvver! Being a girl is way harder than it looks! Hormones – gah!

Something I’m learning in pandemic times is patience.

With my health compromised and the risk of being around people who may not be vaccinated or willing to wear a mask has made my life one of contact-free, stay-at-home … and all the limitations that come with it.

Prepandemic, going to grocery store was easy. Going anywhere was easy.

Now, I go almost nowhere. To the doctors for medically necessary appointments, and that’s about it. And even then, I’m putting things off that don’t outweigh the possibility of getting sick.

Prepandemic, the world was nicer. It’s not so nice these days. Which, when you are building a house, needing landscaping, needing skilled laborers to help and assist … comes with intimidation, frustration, and a desire to DIY as much as possible.

Prepandemic, we didn’t have supply chain challenges and supply shortages. Now we stock up and wait when there’s no stock.

Patience.

I’ve learned patience.

Where once I would simply run out and get that “thing,” now, if I can’t order it, I don’t get it. And even if I can order it, I wait for it to arrive.

The gift of this is I’ve learned the value of need vs want. I’ve learned the difference between immediacy, and that which can wait. I’ve gained independence and self-sufficiency through home growing food to reduce my reliance on grocery store supplies, among many other new ways of living, like simply learning to consume less – need vs want.

It’s the great silver lining to facing challenges. With open eyes, thought, and reflection, we can learn a lot and adapt. We grow. We get better.

I’d gotten used to the convenience and ease of “just running out to get ‘it.'” Our culture focuses on making our lives easier, more convenient. But those are only two values in a very complex equation of living life.

Patience.
Kindness.
Understanding the difference between need vs want.
Accepting we cannot control the world around us, but we can adapt and grow and find what works best for us.

May we all find the patience we need to get through this pandemic well, healthy, and safe. May we remember kindness helps foster community and positive connectivity, and engage kindness as our MO. May we come to see that need is more important than want and change our focus to what we need. May we accept the challenge before us and use this time to grow and adapt. May the love in our hearts shine through brightly!

I wish you a wonderful day filled with love, big hugs, laughter, and goodness in your belly and your heart!