Three years ago, in 2021, I purchased a mini-course about manifesting. It was called the “21-Day Change-One-Thing Adventure”, and it took me through the fundamentals of manifesting and creating intentional change in my life.
The course was framed as the foundation of manifesting, with a rinse-and-repeat formula that participants could use for anything and everything. For the initial 21 days, participants were urged to choose one area of their life they wanted to change and apply the teachings to it. I chose health.
At the time of doing the course, I was neck deep in early motherhood, completely overwhelmed with work and the pursuit of money and success and honestly not in the right headspace to integrate everything being taught. I learnt it on a logical level, but I didn’t know it in my BODY.
After compiling my vision board, I set out to take micro action each day on my way to the final destination – health, fitness and vitality.
My original vision board, 2021.
The results didn’t come.
However, I continued to take micro-action over the subsequent three years.
Some of you have seen my many Instagram stories last year about my intention and commitment to start exercising two days per week. Some of you might have also seen my goals for 2024 and how much I’m exercising now.
Exercising twice a week in 2023.
However, I firmly disagree that my results have come from doing more exercise over the last three months. I’m 43, haven’t trained consistently since I was 30, and am a self-professed food lover. A little extra exercise can’t explain the extraordinary results and momentum I’ve gained this year.
It has been effortless. It has come from a place of pure certainty and power, not force and willpower like other times in my life.
I literally look like a different person.
I want to share what I believe can explain the results.
Last year, I was basically at the bottom of a hole. I had given up my business, the one I believed to be my life’s work and purpose, 18 months previously. I had worked on my stories that linked my self-worth and enoughness to my extrinsic success and money. I had powerfully birthed my son and embarked on a new journey into motherhood. (With Makia, my maternity leave was two days). I had stripped back layers and layers of my identity and revealed a blank slate beneath.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted, what value I could offer to the world or how to be purposeful again. Coming from someone who had always had a strong sense of self, this was extremely confronting and had resulted in lots of forays into social events, friend dates and environments where I could practice being … just Lauren. (Not LAUREN, PROFESSIONAL INSTAGRAMMER, LAUREN, CHEF, LAUREN, SEVEN FIGURE BUSINESS OWNER, or even LAUREN, MOTHER.)
It was pretty awkward, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t know how to be. I had forgotten how to ‘people’.
But amongst the discomfort of those experiences, I started a journey into self-acceptance that has resulted in the most indescribable self-love I’ve ever experienced.
After I finished the Spiral in December, I was laid bare. Scrubbed clean, fresh and new. I chose to start showing up in the world as someone who already had everything I wanted. Someone who was living in complete alignment with their values. Someone who loved themselves passionately. Someone who loved others and opened their heart.
Strangely, although I was embodying the person I WANTED to be, I was balancing this with complete acceptance of where and who I was.
Bear with me; let me try to explain. It’s actually wild because one area of my life in particular went through a profound change – my physical health.
One of my greatest desires is to live in a strong and vital body brimming with energy. I want my eyes to sparkle, my skin to glow, and my vibration to be noticeable to those around me.
I want to be so comfortable in my skin that I smile BIG when I think about how beautiful, strong and capable I am. I want to look in the mirror and feel my heart opening with gratitude for who I am and how much I have respected this incredible vessel I have been blessed to live in.
I envisioned this for myself and set out to manifest it when I started the 21-Day Change-One-Thing challenge in 2021.
But this desire is in direct contrast to how I have traditionally viewed myself. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have body dysmorphia, but I am certainly on that spectrum. When I started seeing a psychologist again in 2021, one of the first pieces of advice he told me was to stop looking in the mirror if the inner commentary was negative every time. It was the first time I realised how much I hated my outward appearance.
During the work I did in The Spiral, I had a major breakdown when I realised that I believed I was disgusting and that no one could love me because I was ugly. It was subconscious, but it was driving my behaviour and how I showed up in the world and in my own body.
In the past, during times when I nurtured my physical body, it has always been from a place of LACK. What am I lacking that I need to fix? I would work out because I was displeased with my figure. I would eat clean because I thought I was too fat. I never accepted myself, which made the work I did on myself feel forced. It was never easy, and my willpower always, eventually, crumbled, returning my physical vessel to the perceived “ugly, disgusting” version of itself that I couldn’t love.
That changed last year. After unearthing my subconscious belief about my appearance, I consciously decided that I would no longer live as if I believed that story. Sometimes, these stories take years to unravel, and sometimes, they are so toxic that there is no choice but to cut them off at the head. And so I did.
I spent thousands of dollars on new, beautiful clothes that made me feel like a goddess. I literally set the intention that I wanted to look like a goddess.
I started to admire my curves. I bought myself crop tops that showed off my gorgeous, childbearing stomach and dressed to suit my shape. I began to notice that I was taking more selfies and admiring myself in the mirror when I walked past. I grew out my armpit hair and loved stroking it and admiring the softness and colour.
Wearing crop tops for the first time in my life, 2023.
For the first time in my life, I accepted my body. And in that moment of acceptance, a crazy thing started to happen. I began to WANT to make different choices to love and honour it even more.
I started exercising more. Not because I was fat and needed to exercise to lose weight but because I loved how my body felt when it moved.
My body loves to move.
I started to eat more whole foods. Not because I was dissatisfied with my appearance but because whole foods felt nourishing and helped my energy levels soar.
Food is for energy and nourishment.
I stopped putting commercial products on my skin. I stopped wearing deodorant entirely for a while until I found a recipe for natural deodorant and made a batch. I also made my own sun cream and am about to experiment with body butter.
Homemade deodorant. Note the pineapples in the background. Remind you of my vision board?
The ocean became my soap and shampoo, and the merest hint of conditioner would go through my hair once a week. (Also on the list to make my own.)
I started leaving the house more, practising breathwork daily, honouring my intuition as to what movement I needed, if any. For the first time in my life, a missed gym workout wasn’t a FAILURE or LAZINESS but an honouring of needs and a beautiful way to tap further into my intuition.
And with all of these changes, which came from a place of complete and total acceptance, came the most astonishing results.
The weight has fallen off me. My eyes sparkle, and my skin glows. People around me notice my energy and go out of their way to approach me and be close to it. I take a million selfies daily because I love how I look and want to celebrate myself. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined so much could change in such a short time.
Shot yesterday.
And then I remembered something from the 21-Day Change-One-Thing Adventure. Somewhere amongst the mini workshops was a special little session detailing the importance of ACCEPTANCE and GRATITUDE for where you currently are. When I took the course back in 2021, I completely missed this point. I accepted only on the surface; the acceptance wasn’t embodied or integrated.
And when the acceptance actually came, my god, how things changed.
Accepting this gorgeous body in 2023 has helped me to get to my current body.
The thing is, it’s okay to want more for ourselves in any area of our lives. We are constantly growing and evolving. It’s human nature. Striving for more is healthy, normal and indeed desirable. I strive for more in almost every area of my life.
But I no longer strive from a place of lack. I accept myself and my life and circumstances exactly as they are.
Every time a Centrelink payment clears in my bank account, I am grateful. How lucky am I to live in a country where that support is available? I am grateful every night I go to sleep in my tiny bedroom with my children piled onto my bed. How lucky am I to hold them so close? I am grateful every time my mum folds our washing or does the dishes. How lucky am I to live with my parents and have that help?
Piled into bed.
Returning to my old victim mentality and place of lack would be easy. “I’m unsuccessful. I need to live at home. I can’t even give my kids their own bedroom. I’m a failure”. But it doesn’t even feel remotely close to being true. In all honesty, I feel the happiest I have ever felt in my life. And I believe that I have stumbled across the secret to it …
Strive for more, and take action. But never, ever, EVER forget to love yourself and your life exactly as it is.
Strive for more and surrender to what is.
Intentionally create your life, and also stop to bask in the small nuances of every miraculous day that you’re alive.
Smell the flowers, feel the sand between your toes. Taste the sweetness of fresh fruit and marvel at the warmth of the sun on your bare skin. Life is a miracle.
And you are and have always been a miracle, too.
I love you.
How beautiful is life?
**Originally published to my email database on the 12th of April, 2024**
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