Your Courageous Life

(Click the icon above to download the e-book).

E-Book week continues–each day this week, I’m offering a new PDF downloadable e-book, utterly begging to be colored with pretty markers and crayons and whathaveyou (bring on the glitter, folks).

I love making these e-books. It seems like an almost irreverent way to take a serious topic or subject, something I’m excited about articulating, and then turning it inside out with pictures and funky text–squeezing the uber-seriousness right out of it and just having fun (because I do believe that “This stuff has to be SERIOUS” is a Story. And if you’re not yet familiar with capital-S Stories, wait until you see the e-book that comes out on that one!).

I wrote the following for the Free Resources page on my website, when I first made this book available:

I want to be clear about what I’m sharing as my vision for Courageous Living, and I wanted to offer free resources for you to try out. I don’t believe that Courageous Living is about sprinkling fairy dust and reciting affirmations (though hey, don’t knock that until you’ve tried it…). Rather, I see Courageous Living as being about embracing all that comes into the circle of your existence. Courageous Living is about making space for the hurt and pain in addition to–and to create more–joy and passion and alive-ness (and, hey–affirmations and fairy dust if that’s the way you roll, or more laughter over martinis with friends, or more sketching in a notebook in the grass, or more window shopping at Anthropologie, or more sipping kombucha while reading a design magazine. Seriously–all of it).

There’s a lot of discomfort in our society with “all of it.” We tend to want to pick and choose so that we only have the experiences that we say we want to have, and I think that this tips things out of balance. It also makes the things we say we don’t want feel more unpalatable, and creates a culture of people who look for ways to disconnect (usually through substances).

(Not to put too fine a point on it.)

So, then, I created this wee e-book on Courageous Living. It started out as a brainstorm and then as I was sitting at the desk it took on a life of its own, and before I knew it I was scanning pages and hitting ”save as > PDF.” Funny how those things happen, isn’t it?

I hope you enjoy. Feel free to pass along the link to the e-book!

If what I say here resonates with you, then you’ll also vibe with The Courageous Year (registration closes this week!).

By the way, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve done lately? If you step past all of the stuff about how “that’s not big enough to be courageous,” what have you done lately that you’re excited about?

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I had to come back and edit this post to add that I really love what Brene Brown is sharing about worthiness! She writes: ”

Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone; I am enough.

It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging.”