Here is a tip on how to get into the habit of connecting to your SELF: keep a ‘calendar of your SELF’. You may write it in a notebook, on your personal computer, in a diary, or in the form of a calendar. I used to keep such a calendar in my teens, and there have been other periods in my life when I did so. It felt so good in the first place, and then it has helped me understand myself and my needs, as a starting point for better communication with the others.

Write one label of the day in the morning, and another one at night, before going to sleep. Both will define your day. You may skip the morning one, if you want. Sometimes you may write both labels at night, if you feel like it and want to go back in time to remember how you felt first thing in the morning.

Process                               

Step 1. WHAT, or Key word(s)

When you wake up in the morning and before going to bed, take a moment to be with your SELF. Breathe in as deeply as you can, breathe out slowly, relax, and see how you feel in that moment. Then try to put that feeling into words. Go down to the very essence of it, and look for a key word to refer to it. If there is a mixture of feelings, try either to identify a symbolic word for each, or one word only to express that fusion, or well a short sentence, e.g., Whirlwinds agonize.

Do not necessarily search for words denominating feelings, moods, or states, like happiness, expectation, frustration, etc. See what symbols come to your mind, and if you suspect they do so under the influence of what you may have laid eyes on upon awakening or before getting into bed, close your eyes and go back to yourself. If table, or clouds, or mountain pops up, then that is the key word. If two or three words do so, count them all in.

Any part of speech can be your key word for a particular moment, an adjective, an adverb, a verb, an interjection, a conjunction, a pronoun, whatever suits your SELF. E.g., happy, likely, go, hey, but, what.

Step 2. HOW, or Attributes

Concentrate on the intensity, quality, or nature of the feelings, and find such descriptive terms to attribute to your key word(s). Mixed or confused feelings can result in unlikely juxtapositions of words and their attributes, or otherwise unlikely sequences of any words. Think table of clouds, hot clouds, childish brick mountain, happy what, I ocean, for instance.

If no attribute comes to your mind, it means there is no need for one. Mountain, or happy could be enough, for instance.

Step 3. COLLOCATE, or Fusion

When you collocate attribute(s) and key word(s), or just key words, you should feel deep down that the fusion created expresses exactly how you feel in that moment, how you feel about that day.

Step 4. WRITE, or Clarity

With writing down these labels, you will begin to get clarity. Read them and try to figure out what may have prompted them, what recent events, what unfulfilled need, what aspiration of yours, what desire, or what past event brought forth by some recent stimulus (a word, a person, an object, etc. associated with that event). By practicing this exercise each day, you will get closer and closer to your SELF, you will open up wells of inspiration and intuitive understanding that will help you deal more easily and successfully with whatever comes your way.

Benefits

Clarity on your SELF will enable you to get clarity on the situations you are involved in, and also to get your message across to the others, swiftly and truthfully, and everyone will surely feel at ease.

Examples of labels from my ‘Calendar Of My SELF’

• wet ashes
• daisies above
• I rain butterflies
• silent nerve
• deposit of gusts
• cut
• still crashes
• my plains
• pride lashing
• so what
• stale wait

• #Calendar of my self
• #clarity
• #Communicate Better
• #Next Woman
• #Self