21-Day Meditation Challenge

Tomorrow, a 21-day meditation challenge with Deepak Chopra will start and I will participate and would like to invite you to participate as well. (I'd like to also take the opportunity to recommend reading the blog HappyIch of Sue because it is there where I read about this meditation challenge for the first time. Sue also already participated in such a 21-day meditation by Deepak Chopra in July and reviewed it on her blog.)

Meditation is not new to me. I started to meditate in September to alleviate the stress my thesis is putting me through by starting a zen buddhistic meditation course. Actually, it is a Qi Gong course, but we are mostly meditating. I don't know how common it is to meditate within Qi Gong courses but in my course we are doing it all the time. Currently, I am meditating once a week within that course and afterwards I feel incredibly relaxed and happy and powerful and this sometimes even holds for a couple of days afterwards. I'm quite impressed by the results. Unfortunately, I am still finding it quite difficult to practice meditation also on my own at home. This is why I am looking very much forward to join the 21-day challenge of Deepak Chopra. It will be my first meditation with Deepak Chopra and also my first guided meditation as my meditation practice in my course hasn't been guided yet.

The meditation challenge that will start tomorrow will be all about "Creating Abundance". The participants will be taken to a journey to an authentic abundance consciousness. According to Deepak, we'll discover what true abundance is, the source from which it springs, how consciousness and the mind affect its flow, and that each and every one of us is worthy and deserving of an abundant life. We will learn how to leverage the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success to manifest our heartfelt intentions and live a more abundant life, attracting more comfort and ease, joy, peace, love, or anything we desire. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Joining the 21-days meditation challenge is free. You can subscribe here either with your facebook account or with your email. Starting from tomorrow, each day a 15-minute guided meditation will be made available. Here you can find more information about Deepak Chopra who is well-known for his books on yoga and meditation.

Are you interested in meditation as well? Will you join the challenge? 

New Alverde Limited Edition Sets

Today I have been in the city center and discovered two new limited edition sets by Alverde. Each set consist of a shower gel and a body lotion. As I have made only good experiences with such kinds of Alverde limited edition sets, I wasn't able to hold myself back and bought them both. The sets don't cost that much. Each was available for only 4 Euro.

Here is a picture of my DM haul. I also bought winter chocolate by Alnatura which currently is my favourite choclate. Actually, this is exactly why I went to DM in the first place. :-)

(The magazine was available for free ;-))

Beauty Favourites October

In October I had a lot of fun with a couple of products and I'd like to share that with you. (I know, I should be working on my thesis and will do so immediately again. ;-)). 

I loved these cleaning and caring products in October:

These are in more detail:

• Blütezeit organic almond showergel: It smells like camomile and I love this scent. It's relaxing and soothing and I enjoyed it very much to start it as I haven't used it up yet.  Besides this shower gel, I also loved the Alverde Lemon Love shower gel which I emptied and therefore discussed it already in my October empties post.
• Apothekers Lippenbalsam: This is a new discovery. I bought it because it was mentioned by Paddy from Innen und Aussen as her favourite soothing lip balm for the night. It is a pharmacy product and it is really great. I am using it now each evening and my lips look great in the morning. I also like the taste and the scent of this product. It is on its way to becoming a holy grail product for me too.
• Lush Therapy massage bar: I love it. It smells great and nurtures the skin. It has to melt when put on the skin and therefore you need a lot of time for applying it by slowly massaging it onto the skin. But actually, this also contributes to the joy of using this product. I.e. being forced to do it slowly can be fun, too. But I admit that I prefer to use it on the weekend because only then I have the time. ;-)
• Alverde Apricot nail and cuticle balm: Smells lovely like apricots and nurtures the nails and the cuticles. This one is also on its way to becoming a holy grail product. However, I think that Alverde stopped selling this product. I have to check but last time I had a look at Alverde products at the DM, it was not available. So terrible. I can't understand how this could have happened. I hope that I am wrong and the product is still available. 

Concerning makeup products, I enjoyed using these products in October (sorry, the soap is not a makeup product of course. I don't know how it got into the picture below - it is a favorite though and maybe I added it to this picture because I also like to clean my brushes with it ;-)): 

See below a discussion of these products.

Beauty Empties October

This month I was able to get rid of 36 products. I went through my nail polish collection again (this is something I do quite often as you might have observed) and decluttered a lot of nail polishes again. However, don't worry, I still own a ton of them (around 30). Hence, I won't suffer of a lack of nail polishes after this huge decluttering action.

Here is a picture of all products that left me in october (my hair tint by Khadi is missing, sorry, I forgot to add it to the group picture - you can see it below though):

Beauty Empties in September

I'm still very busy and don't have much spare time for blogging due to my thesis. I am very sorry guys. :-( However, as I still keep a journal on what I empty beauty wise for myself as a reference (besides of being a lot of fun, journaling such kinds of things also helps me a lot to discover what's best for me), I think it's not so much additional work for me to share my beauty empties with you. Some of you might also be interested in and benefit from my experiences with and my thoughts about the beauty products I try. 

Hence, I'll now show you my beauty empties of September: in September, I got rid of 52 products. It's crazy, I know. But I also decluttered a lot of stuff that I didn't want to empty anymore. At the moment, I try to shrink the amount of beauty stuff occupying my bathroom and to just keep those products I really like and enjoy using. I also used up a couple of samples that don't fit to my sex (i.e. some were for men) or my skin type (i.e. some were for combination skin) just in order to get rid of them but to not throw them away.

I also read a lot about color categories and skin color seasons in September and I also (re)discovered that I belong to the summer skin colour category. Actually, I stumbled upon the fact that I am a summer type in the skin color seasons system one or two years ago, but I somehow forgot about it. I personally found it very difficult to find out more about my skin undertone and my color type in the skin color seasons systems. I still don't know what kind of flow I belong to within the summer color category. A webpage that helped me a lot to find out that I am a summer type is the Beautyjunkies Farbtypen F.A.Q. I highly recommend to read this in case you speak german as, unfortunately, it is written in German. For english speakers, however, I recommend to read the book Colour me beautiful by Carole Jackson. As I rediscovered that I belong to the summer skin colour category and also observed that I didn't wear the colours that don't suit me anyway, I decided to declutter a couple of makeup colours that don't suit me at all and haven't been worn often anyway.

I also started to journal my teeth products again because I want to find out how fast I use these products up as well. It's just a journaling issue and shall help me to get more organized and to get a feeling for when something needs to be repurchased because it soon will be empty. In the future, I want to repurchase stuff at the right time and stop hoarding it. ;-) 

22 of these 52 products have been decluttered by me. Among those 30 products which I really emptied only 12 products were full size. The others were samples, each with a different amount of content.

Here is a picture of all products, I emptied or decluttered in September: