Melany Coyne of Affirm Vitality On How Each Of Us Can Leverage The Power Of Gratitude To Improve Our Overall Mental Wellness
An Interview With Shawna Robins
Extracting the good — Having a daily gratitude practice allows a person to see a ‘bad or negative’ situation and extract a piece, although it could be soooo tiny, of goodness from the scenario, even if it is simply that you are grateful to still be alive.
As we all know, times are tough right now. In our post-COVID world, we are also experiencing what some have called a “mental health pandemic”. What can each of us do to get out of this “Mental and Emotional Funk”? One tool that each of us has access to is the simple power of daily gratitude. As a part of our series about the “How Each Of Us Can Leverage The Power Of Gratitude To Improve Our Overall Mental Wellness” I had the pleasure of interviewing Melany Coyne — Affirm Vitality.
Melany is a meditation coach and business development professional who creates guided visualizations, courses, rituals and print books focused on healing specific emotions, limiting beliefs, behaviors and traumas. Her platform, Affirm Vitality encourages people to treat their healing as a personal development objective for the business of their life.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about you and about what brought you to your specific career path?
On the surface, I was living my dream life… Beautiful family, rising in my career, owned a home on Maui. But in reality, I was trapped in the cycle of abuse and doing everything I could to hide it so that my ‘dream life’ didn’t fall apart. Eventually it did fall apart and now here I am sharing my story to help others understand it is OK to fail. It is OK if your ‘dream life’ turns out to not actually be what you want.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
My career has been a lifelong evolution of learning that just because I can accomplish something does not mean that I need to accomplish it. Deepening my self awareness has deepened my ability to accept and embody the gratitude I am seeking for myself and others.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why do you think that resonates with you? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
Break it until you make it. I found myself so trapped both in the external cycle of abuse and the prison of my own internal limiting beliefs. Breaking free from the external cycle of abuse was not enough, I had to continue the work to break free from all of the limiting beliefs I had collected over my lifetime. They were constricting me, and forcing me to stay on a path that felt out of alignment. I am still uncovering and reprogramming limiting beliefs.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story about why that resonated with you?
Lundy Bancroft’s ‘Why does he do that?’. I had been told by my abuser that the reason he was treating me so poorly was due to his mental health condition(s) and his childhood trauma. Even with regular therapy and people trying to ‘wake me up’ I couldn’t see that he was abusive and I was trapped. It wasn’t until I started reading Bancroft’s book that I realized how much he was benefiting from my confusion, my desire to keep what was happening a secret so that our life didn’t crumble apart, and my enabling of his behavior by not setting the boundary I needed to set — LEAVING in order to discontinue accepting the abuse.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes! I am writing a book and each month I release at least one new guided visualization ritual for the full moon.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I am thankful for so many people in my life. Those who have positively supported and also those who have rejected and hurt me because they have shown me where not to go, and what not to put my energy into. If I had to thank one person in particular it would be my son. Without the experience of a mother’s love, without realizing that by staying in an abusive relationship I would be not only teaching my son that abuse is acceptable but also preventing him from seeing his own mother at her full potential, preventing him from fully experiencing my love because I was constantly under attack and stuck in survival mode… I may have never escaped the cycle of abuse and embarked on this path of not only deep healing for myself but sharing my story, my methods, in order to encourage and facilitate healing for others.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now that we are on the topic of gratitude, let’s move to the main focus of our interview. As you know, the collective mental health of our country is facing extreme pressure. We would like to explore together how every one of us can use gratitude to improve our mental wellness. Let’s start with a basic definition of terms. How do you define the concept of Gratitude? Can you explain what you mean?
Gratitude in my mind is allowing space for the appreciation of what I already have, and what I have learned. I explore gratitude by writing in my daily gratitude journal, which is available to print on Amazon, and by sitting with the feeling of ‘enough-ness’ knowing that what I am and what I have is enough. Knowing that I have value simply due to my existence.
Why do you think so many people do not feel gratitude? How would you articulate why a simple emotion can be so elusive?
This world is overwhelming. There are messages coming from all directions trying to control us in some way. Many people become trapped in power and control dynamics that don’t leave much space for them to stay connected to themselves… and I believe in order to fully feel gratitude you must be connected with your own spirit.
This might be intuitive to you but I think it will be constructive to help spell it out. Can you share with us a few ways that increased gratitude can benefit and enhance our life?
Increasing your gratitude can increase your occurrence of ‘good luck’, it increases your mind’s ability to appreciate gifts, and it decreases your emotional reactivity to loss by allowing you to extract something good out of the loss.
Let’s talk about mental wellness in particular. Can you share with us a few examples of how gratitude can help improve mental wellness?
From my personal experience, my gratitude practice has helped me to stay focused on the present when my mind wants to get lost in the past. I have PTSD from surviving domestic violence, and it can be easy to get lost in the past. Having my daily gratitude practice continues to bring me back to the NOW and I believe it can help others in this same way.
Ok wonderful. Now here is the main question of our discussion. From your experience or research, what are “Five Ways That Each Of Us Can Leverage The Power Of Gratitude To Improve Our Overall Mental Wellness”. Can you please share a story or example for each?
1 . Journaling — The act of writing, and taking the time to really think about the things you are grateful for brings those things to the front of your mind and allows you to feel that gratitude in your present reality.
2 . Meditation — Allowing yourself to breathe deeply, be still, and focus your attention on gratitude can boost your internal feelings of safety and peace.
3 . Sharing with others — The act of sharing with others often sparks gratitude in another person, which allows the giver to observe gratitude and reflect that in turn. Creating a cycle of gratitude with one or more others.
4 . Extracting the good — Having a daily gratitude practice allows a person to see a ‘bad or negative’ situation and extract a piece, although it could be soooo tiny, of goodness from the scenario, even if it is simply that you are grateful to still be alive.
5 . Visualization — Taking meditation and a list of gratitude a step further, you can use visualization to imagine yourself in new situations where you are grateful for things you do not yet have. Some people call this future casting.
Is there a particular practice that can be used during a time when one is feeling really down, really vulnerable, or really sensitive?
Writing. Write 10 things you are grateful for. Even if it is only one word per line. Those 10 things will bring you back to the present moment and temper whatever emotion or situation you are currently experiencing.
Do you have any favorite books, podcasts, or resources that you would recommend to our readers to help them to live with gratitude?
Yes! I created a print on demand gratitude journal called ‘A Year of Gratitude’ by Melany Coyne. You can find it at Amazon.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I would like to see the medical profession prescribing meditation and guided visualization for more illnesses both mental and physical.
What is the best way our readers can further follow your work online?
On instagram @iaffirmvitality and my website is www.affirm-vitality.com
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Shawna Robins is an international best-selling author of two books — Powerful Sleep — Rest Deeply, Repair Your Brain and Restore Your Life, and Irresistibly Healthy — Simple Strategies to Feel Vibrant, Alive, Healthy and Full of Energy Again. Shawna is the founder and CEO of Third Spark, an online wellness hub for women over 40 who want to reignite their sleep, reset healthier habits and respark their lives. Shawna is a sleep expert, hormone health expert, and a National Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBHWC). She has been featured on many podcasts including Dr. Mindy Pelz’s “The Resetter Podcast” and in Authority Magazine, Thrive Global, and The Huffington Post. A free download of her latest book can be found at www.thirdsparkhealth.com/powerful-sleep/ You can follow her on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
