Written by: Lottie Reeves
Inside every issue of SOULACY, Lottie Reeves shares with us a beautiful love note to aspects of our journey of womanhood and entrepreneurship.
For this Valentine's Day we've compiled a collection of some of Lottie's Love Notes from the pages of SOULACY over the past year.
We love you! Enjoy.
A love note on being the person you're destined to be
Hello Kindred Soul,
I’m willing to bet you’re not the same person you were a week, month, or year ago. You’ve encountered new experiences, challenges, passions, hobbies, and people along the way, and each of these has had an impact on you.
As we move through different chapters of our lives, our world morphs and changes and we challenge ourselves to explore new elements and expand to let them stick. This expansion is what enables us to become different versions of ourselves along the way, the person with many interests and hobbies, whose soul gets set alight by the things they do, who allows themself time and space to learn, who has found their people, and who is filled with memories of laughter, love, and adventure.
For so many of us, expansion is something we crave and seek. As we honour these cravings and seek this expansion, we encounter new elements and things to explore that ignite our curiosity. And in that exploration, we create space for growth and change that prevents us from feeling constricted and becoming stagnant. It allows us to have the life we dream of.
Expansion of our consciousness, our skills, knowledge, capacity, love, and compassion means we’re not the same person we used to be.
This month’s Love Note is for the expansion that enables us to become the person we’re destined to be.
A love note on self-compassion
Happy new year Soulful one,
Although, if you’re anything like me you might already be feeling worn out about the prospect of 2022 and how much ‘work’ it’s going to be to recover and move on from the chaos and turmoil of the last few years.
I know, I know, it’s a new year and we’re meant to be focusing on the positives, looking for the light and raring to go to make 2022 ‘better’ than 2021. But, you know what, all that can wait. It can wait until you’re ready - if you’re ready.
It’s okay to ease yourself into the year (I still don’t have any clue what day of the week it is tbh).
It’s okay to have resistance when it comes to doing All The Things, or in fact doing any of them.
It’s okay to focus on doing the things we love, the things that light us up instead of focusing on all the changes we need to make and the improvements that should be happening.
It’s okay to spend time leaning into, and embracing, where we are now rather than constantly and anxiously striving, needing, and waiting to be doing better and having more.
It’s okay to understand and accept that happiness doesn’t only happen at the end of the journey. That the journey to being our ‘best self’ isn’t a journey with a destination in mind, it doesn’t require bigger goals, better ambitions, or a new you. The journey - the experience - involves giving ourselves permission to work and grow when we feel called to, to take the actions we feel inclined to with ease, to explore and be curious, to give ourselves space and time to process and connect.
Above all, it’s about being kind and gentle with yourself.
So as we move into 2022, give yourself grace.
Real, authentic connection with people is important - pick up the phone and have a good old chatter.
Self-care is vital - even the little things like taking time out for a cup of tea with no distractions counts.
Feeling all the feelings rather than ignoring or trying to fix them (or yourself) makes life a little lighter to deal with.
Tackling a few things at a time rather than trying to do it all will help you feel like you’re making progress and achieving something.
Explore what your best self might look like from a place of curiosity. A place of security and desire rather than frustration with what we have, are, and do. Embrace the turmoil, the feelings and the emotions and trust in the knowledge they too shall pass.
Revel in the fact that you've made it, that you're still standing and that slowly, gently, you’re healing from those experiences along the way.
This month’s Love Note is for self-compassion amidst the world’s messaging that you’re not enough exactly as you are.
A love note on living a life that ignites your soul
Oh Kindred Soul...
Isn’t it easy to set goals, to predict how we want things to be, and put lists of tasks in place to help those ideas come to fruition? Isn’t it easy to create plans and strategies, to list all the things we need to learn, know, and do in order for those plans to be fulfilled?
Isn’t it easy to be hellbent on living a certain life as a parent, friend, partner, woman finding her place in the world?
The challenge comes when those goals, dreams, and plans don’t become the here and now. When we have to sit back, reflect, and decide how we’re going to process our current reality.
Does life excite us? Are our relationships filling our hearts? Is business fun, light, and being done with ease? Are we filling our days with activities, people, and places that bring us joy?
Many times our realities look different to the one we’ve imagined because, along the way, we’ve been distracted, life has snuck up on us in that funny way that it does, and gotten in the way of all the things. But deep down we know we still want those goals, that life, those dreams - we just need to get back to making our way towards them.
Other times, the differences are because the blinkers that forced us into having our sights set firmly on a vision, fell away, our eyes were opened to all the opportunities around us and we seized them. Along the way our intuition nudged us off the path we were trying to take and onto the one our soul is meant to be exploring. And now we’ve stopped to catch our breath, we can see this is, in fact, where we’re meant to be.
Either way, every time, our current realities are the result of us having lived.
And that is something to celebrate.
Instead though it’s easy to beat ourselves up, to be frustrated, feel unaccomplished, and to feel lost because we’re not where we thought we would be. Because we aren’t living the life we so clearly mapped out with vision exercises, boards, and manifestation tools. It’s easy to think of ourselves as imposters, waiting for someone to catch us out living a life we didn’t set out to create but that our intuition discreetly guided us into.
The challenge comes from deciding whether where we are now is a place that sets our soul on fire, from leaning in and determining whether those accomplishments and successes still excite us, and if bringing them to fruition is going to fill our soul with joy. Or is there a realisation that our reality is more joyful, exciting, and aligned than the visions we created in our wildest dreams?
Either way, this reflection allows us time to celebrate the path we’ve taken, the things that distracted us allowing us time and space to learn and grow, the opportunities we’ve seized, and the deviations we’ve taken.
This month’s Love Note is for living a life that ignites your soul and celebrating the path that gets you there.
A love note on being embodied
Hello kindred soul,
As humans we’re embodied beings. Our bodies are essential to our learning, growth, and relationships with others. Our physical bodies bear traces of our previous experiences - physical, cognitive, or emotional traces of what we’ve been through are incorporated into our bodies.
Our bodies make visible who we are: Our mood, personality, emotions, feelings, and experiences.
But we live in a world where it’s all too easy to disconnect our body, mind, and soul, to try to hide those tell-tale signs of what we’ve been through, to keep them tucked away as if they’re something to be ashamed of. A world in which we’re discouraged from making visible who we are, encouraged to put on a brave face, to dull our emotions and feelings, to fit in with the expectation dictated by those around us and the situations we find ourselves in.
But what if, instead of ignoring the sensations, of desperately clambering away from your body, you leaned in to all that it represents? What if you allow yourself to feel at home in, and connected to, your body, to feel in alignment with your soul, and aware of your physical, cognitive, and emotional needs?
What if you allowed who you truly are to be visible?
Maybe in turn you’d move towards that feeling of sense and peace that we all crave, the deep inner knowing that helps us know ourselves and grow as individuals.
By giving yourself the grace and space you need to learn to be in your body, to move, and to use your body, you allow yourself to live in a state of flow - a state of embodiment.
This month’s Love Note is for being embodied - for connecting our body, mind, and soul and allowing them to make visible who we are.
A love note on growth that comes from challenge and comfort
Dear Kindred Soul,
At our very core, we’re creatures of habit, enjoying familiarity, certainty, and knowing what will be next.
Even when given a choice and an opportunity to step away from the norm, so many of us choose the easy option - choose to stick with what we know and not to rock the boat.
No doubt there have been times when we’ve made choices in order to protect ourselves, keep ourselves safe, and to avoid risk, uncertainty, and doubt.
But avoiding the challenges we’re drawn to and sticking with what feels familiar leaves us stagnating and trapped inside our comfort zone.
Instead of pushing ourselves, we ignore the drumbeat deep inside, tune out our intuition, and dampen the fire that longs to set our soul on fire. We stick to safety, trapping ourselves as a side effect of needing to be comfortable.
And the more trapped we become, the more we stagnate, and the harder it is to start growing again.
We miss out on the confidence, inner peace, and joy that ultimately come from growth and change, from digging down and allowing the fire to burn.
The new job, the massive lifestyle change, the new business venture, the adventure we hanker after, each teach us something different, provide new opportunities, allow us to discover more about ourselves, and keep us alive.
Each allows us to grow into the next version of ourselves.
This month’s Love Note is for the growth that comes from challenge and discomfort.
A love note on allowing things to end messily
Hello Kindred Soul,
Some things end messily, untidily, and not how we wanted them to be. And with our constant hankering for perfection, this can be a hard reality to accept.
The job you lost
The relationship that ended
The words you didn’t get to speak
The misunderstanding that never got resolved
None of them ended how you would have liked. None of those situations and experiences ended tidily with you feeling ready to move on, to start afresh with a new beginning.
Because when things end we often feel abandoned, unloved, uncared for, unsettled, inadequate, a loss of control, or unsafe, and our human nature wants us to revolve these feelings. To be able to look back on an event without wanting to make changes, without feeling the grief and pain that it dragged up.
And so for many of us, the desire to go back, to make changes to how we acted, felt, and thought - so that things end neatly and tidily instead - so we can draw a perfect line under them, is intense. We don’t want to have messy chapters. We don’t want to look back and only focus on the loose ends that haven’t been tied up, on the emotions that haven’t been tidied away in a box. Sometimes this desire is based on our own preferences but other times we want to go back and neaten things up for other people, so they don’t feel discomfort or think of us as ‘untidy.’
But the problem with this need to tidy things up, to rectify the messiness, is that it keeps us in the past, away from the present and instead back there in the mess.
So it’s time, my friend. Time to give yourself grace to allow the mess to sit there, to close the door, leave it behind, and walk away.
Today’s Love Note is for allowing things to end messily.
This has been a collection of Love Notes from Lottie found inside each issue of SOULACY.
Subscribe to read each of Lottie's Love Notes.