Step by Step

Over the last few months, my family has been making changes to live a more free life. We haven't done it all at once, thanks to my wise hubby! We've made small baby steps towards change that are adding up.

The first step, for me, was getting informed. It all started with a simple video that my friend posted on her facebook page (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM). It's about sugar and how your body biochemically processes it. Kind of long and relatively boring, but very informative. What this video did for me was to help me realize that not all products on shelves are good for you, though they may be labelled as such.

Then, I watched Super Size Me. Another good film, but it has to do with food, and by now you're thinking how did this move on to other products?! To be honest, I'm not ENTIRELY sure, but I think it has to do with the idea that if our food products are as safe as we thought, are the lotions (etc.)?

This thought was just nibbling at the back of my mind, until the whole non-shampooing “revolution” was brought to my attention, and I read a few articles about that (see last post). The nibbling grew to a gnawing.

I started “liking” things that praised natural living on stumbleupon.com and it kept taking me to articles and blogs about how to get rid of now conventional products and replace them with more body-friendly items.

I admit, when I stumbled on the first few articles, I started to read more: the links that were provided; the links within those links; googling ideas in the links; and so on. I found myself reading so much about it that I was a little (okay, maybe more than a little) consumed by it. I wasn't able to sleep because I was thinking through all of the information and trying to figure out how to implement all of the new changes.

My wonderful husband kindly told me to stop it, and to take it one step at a time. Only implement one thing a week, or even a month and see how it goes. The brakes on my mind were put on, and instead of a myriad of changes running rampant, I narrowed it down to one thing I really wanted to change.

Shampoo-free was my first step. It took about a month before I saw that it was good, and then felt ready to make the next step: putting castile soap next to each of our sinks for hand washing. Then came using coconut oil instead of lotions (this one has been hard, and has had a longer getting used to period. I'm actually looking in to how to make it more like conventional lotion instead of just oil). After that, I started doing the oil cleanse method on my face (more on that in future post!!). And, last week, it was upgrading our drinking water filtration system and replacing some of our cleaners with just as effective, but way healthier versions of themselves.

What comes next? Well, I have a few ideas floating around, but I'm just going to have to choose one so as not to overwhelm myself, or my family. In becoming more free, we have to be careful in balancing what is important, and not making it our idol.

What steps, if any, are you taking to be more free?

XO,

Bliss