Browsing Tag

challenge

Gratitude, Guest Posts, I Have Done Love

Thanksgiving Challenge.

November 27, 2014

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black

 

By Jean Klein.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a conversation about challenge. I was quick to say I don’t feel the need to be in competition with anyone. I later realized I was wrong. I need to challenge myself everyday to be the best person I can be. To love, care, and respect everyone. To be gentle, and kind.

So one of my challenges to myself this Thanksgiving is this: To contact family and friends that I will not be able to see for the holiday by phone. To TALK to them, to tell them you love you. To LISTEN to them. To hear their voices.

While I understand social media and text has its pros and cons I believe we have forgotten what it is like to speak to each other and listen. We, myself included are to quick to message someone, post something on their wall, or tweet. Or, just send a quick text.

I want to challenge everyone to take a few minutes this Thanksgiving to pick up your phone, not to post, tweet, or text, but to CALL someone. Call your friends or family members. Let them know you are thinking about them and that you love them. Continue Reading…

Self Image, Video

The Challenge.

July 24, 2013

You in?

Watch the video then post a picture of your face on my Facebook page or tag me at @jenpastiloff on Instagram.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxi0vJkkF-A&list=UUo7CxUPFOH-Z6LKCDHbHveQ&index=1]

And So It Is, Beating Fear with a Stick, Daily Manifestation Challenge

Annoying & Superficial.

October 9, 2012

Did that get your attention?

It got mine.

Earlier today, as I was home with a cold, nursing it so I didn’t have to relive the horror I experienced in Italy with getting sick like a dying dog, I amused myself by playing on the computer and reading. I found a funny E-card (a lot of them are really funny!) and it resonated me with (sadly) so I posted it. I thought it was hysterical.

Here it is:

Anyone who knows me well, knows my slight addiction (okay, not so slight) to my iPhone. Needless to say, I thought it was cute and funny so I shared it on my fanpage on Facebook, which, incidentally says “Jennifer Pastiloff Yoga.”

The irony of this story I am about to tell is not lost on me. Just this morning I was once again fretting that my page with almost 7 thousand “fans” says “Jennifer Pastiloff Yoga” and not just “Jennifer Pastiloff” as if the yoga part limits me. As if it will make me not a real writer, but a wannabe yoga teacher/writer. Once you get over 100 “fans” you can’t change a name. C’est l’avie.

Except I obsess on it. Like it matters.

(It doesn’t. Not really.)

Anyway, I post funny iPhone picture (see above) and a girl who I have never met and who apparently lives in The Netherlands (I told the story in class and by sheer Freudian slip called it Neverlands) posted under it: OMG! You are too annoying and superficial to be a yoga inspiration.

What the what?

You are in my house, woman!

She is on my page. Why even comment? Don’t like it? Ignore it. Don’t like me? Don’t like my page!

I looked her up and her profile had one quote. A Mother Theresa quote on love: “I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love” and her religious views as love and peace written over and over again.

Where is the congruency? 

Of course it made a few things happen inside of me.

1) Question myself.

Until I got how absurd that was. The fact that I was letting a woman (who knows if she is a woman. It could be a fake profile) whom I have never met, determine how I feel about myself.

2) It had me look at where I am not being congruent.

Where I am posting love and peace love and peace love and peace and yet living hate and gossip? It was actually a little gift because I chuckled at her quotes, not because I was making fun of her but because I thought: we all do this. To some degree, we all have discrepancy in our lives. Maybe not that big. Maybe you would never post on someone’s Facebook or the equivalent how annoying and superficial they are. But still.

3) How I defended myself and I NEVER need to do that.

Under the said picture I wrote ‘how important it was for you to have a sense of humor in my world and in my class bla bla bla’. The thing is, I didn’t need to say that. Or think it. I was defending myself to someone who is not in my tribe, who in no way has any bearing on my life, who said something that actually has nothing to do with me.

4) How happy I felt that I was a kind person and that I attract kind people.

After she wrote that I wrote the following on my page:

Find Your Tribe.

You know, the ones that make you feel the most YOU. The ones that lift you up and help you remember who really are. The ones that remind you that a blip in the road is just that, a blip, and not to mistake it for an earthquake and even it were to be an earthquake they’d be there with the Earthquake Emergency Supply Kit. They are the ones that when you walk out of a room, they make you feel like a better person than when you walked in. They are the ones that even if you don’t see them face to face as often as you’d like, you see them heart to heart. You know, that kind of tribe?

She is not in my tribe. Why do we spend time on the people who don’t like us? I certainly can’t be the only one?

So I am happy she wrote that I was superficial and annoying. It made me dig deep.

As far as being a yoga inspiration? She made that up. I never said dem words!

As Wayne Dyer says: If you meet 200 people you will have 200 reputations.

I know who I am.

That’s all that matters.

I will tell you right now who I am if you tell me below. Will you? Start the sentence with I am _____.

Here goes: I am compassionate, empathetic, sloppy, disorganized, witty, perceptive, pretty deaf, someone who loves sleep, wine and coffee, a yoga teacher, inspiring, distracted, a lover of her phone and being overly connected to a fault, loyal, sometimes obsessive, a healer, a connector, a manifester, authentic, nostalgiac, sensitive, moody and a writer.

Where can you own who you are and live with congruency?

Take the challenge. I am. xo, Jen

Poster by SimpleReminders.com. Pre-order their book (which I am in!!): https://www.SimpleReminders.info Subscribe for more: https://www.bryantmcgill.net

Poster by SimpleReminders.com.
Pre-order their book (which I am in!!): https://www.SimpleReminders.info
Subscribe for more: https://www.bryantmcgill.net

Thank you Simplereminders.com for this!

*update: since the writing of this blog, Facebook has indeed changed the name of my page and dropped the Yoga bit. But, at the end of the day, it did not matter. 

Jennifer Pastiloff, Beauty Hunter, is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Salon, among others. Jen’s leading one of her signature retreats to Ojai, Calif. over New Years. Check out jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up: South Dakota, NYC, Dallas, Kripalu Center For Yoga & Health, Tuscany. She is also leading a Writing + The Body Retreat with Lidia Yuknavitch Jan 30-Feb 1 in Ojai (2 spots left.) She tweets/instagrams at @jenpastiloff.

Uncategorized

Daily Manifestation Challenge. Are you in?

October 9, 2011

As I start to write my book. Wow, I just reread that sentence: As I start to write my book. Or that fragment of a sentence, which is how I prefer to write. I just reread it, and it hit me… I am writing a book! Get ready world!

As I go through this journey I am going to send out weekly and daily challenges. They will help me as much as they may (or may not) be helping you. I would love people to take the challenges on and comment on what is coming up or how it’s going.

Today’s:

Karen Salmonsohn's art. She is a role model to me.

Join me in the Manifestation Challenge! I am committed to releasing the thought ” I am tired.” I constantly say it in my mind, even when I may not be really tired at all. I literally wake up and blurt it out before I know if I am truly exhausted. It’s like a broken record. After a while, I start to believe it. And you know what? If you say it aloud, which I do often… NO ONE CARES! No one gives a flying rat’s a** ( rhymes with grass) if you slept your full 8 hours. I am fully awake, alive and inspired!

I am also releasing the negative thought that I don’t have enough money or I will somehow run out soon enough and end up in a box on the street. That there isn’t enough. Sentence fragment again, I know. It’s how. I speak. With pause. Anything I need is on it’s way. I have an abundance of wealth, financially and otherwise.

Will you join me in the challenge? What thought can you release that is no longer serving you? What are you repeating over and over in your mind like a dingy old broken record from the 80’s? What can you replace it with? What mind virus can you kick to the curb? Which new thought can you place in the vacant apartment where the old negative one used to dwell?

Place your comments below and let me know how it is going. I support you fully. I am on this journey as well, learning how to be the best Jen I can be. You be the best whatever your name is. Unless your name is Jen, then you too can be the best Jen you can be.

Good luck. It may be bumpy but buckle your seatbelt, grab a glass of wine and never, ever stop doing yoga. (Try not to drink the wine and do the yoga at the same time though. Wine AFTER yoga. Repeat.)