Galentine's Day: Self-Love Event Recap

I am pretty proud of myself for hosting my first event. It was great to meet new people, have a girl's night, and discuss how we can love ourselves, and others, more.

A HUGE thank you to Lauryn Ashli for making these invites. Here's her website: http://laurynashli.com/

THANK YOU to those who came! I am so grateful you did and loved getting to know you and hear your stories and perspectives. And thank you to Brenda Lindsay, Aly Peterson of Build Your Beautiful, and Alexa Jorgenson of Munchin' with Moguls for sharing your self-love ideas and wisdom. I'll add a summary of what each one talked about below, along with thoughts we discussed as a group.

These are some golden thought nuggets we talked about altogether:
•We have POWER as women that we can use to help us get through hard times in life.
•You never know what someone may be going through so give them the benefit of the doubt. We are all fighting our own demons.
•You can change the world through your daily interactions, not just here on social media.
•Everyone has their own book of life and we are all writing different genres. Our beginning cannot be compared to someone else's ending.
•It's ok to ask people for compliments when you need that boost, and then accept them for what they are! Let yourself be loved, don't reject it or feel guilty for needing it.
•Be happy for others' successes, good fortune, beauty, achievements, etc. and then tell them! Share the positive things you think about others.
•Focus on the things you do love about yourself. And tell yourself that you do look good in that dress or your hair does look pretty in that braid or your bod is super sexy in that swimsuit. Own it.
•There is a beauty we all have on the inside that we may or may not feel like sharing, and we don't need to feel guilty if we do or don't share.

Brenda told us about her trials in life: her house burning down when she was a few months pregnant with her second baby, then losing her husband at the end of that pregnancy right before she was due with her girl, and that same girl being raped by her son's best friend at 14 years old; from which she has developed an ulcer on top of suffering from fibromyalgia. She told us about the power we have as women and how special we are because women. We can do hard things and handle whatever life throws at us.
Aly opened up about her struggles with her self-image and eating disorder in high school. She had us do an activity where we rated certain aspects of our life (i.e. physical activity, family, education and work, etc.) on a scale from 1-10 on how satisfied we are with it and then we drew a circle with lines representing those aspects of our life coming out of the middle. Then we made tally marks based on our rating on the line and then connected the tally marks. So the end product was supposed to be a circle within a circle, but our circles weren't very circular showing lack of balance in our lives. Balance is always the goal, and realizing what aspects of our lives may be lacking is a good place to help us start achieving that goal.
Alexa talked about having a "get it girl" attitude - which is being happy for others' successes or hairstyles or vacations and cheering them on, remembering we are all at different chapters in our own books of life, and how the comparison game we all play is never going to go away but we can choose to be at peace with things we may not like about ourselves or continue to let them bother us - because they aren't going to go away.

Aly Peterson.

Alexa Jorgenson.

I was so busy setting things up and in such a hurry to take them down and be out of the studio on time that I totally spaced taking pictures of things. So these are all I got.