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Selfcare Category
Almost everyone I meet nowadays says “Something’s happening”. As our world appears to be speeding up, many of us are quite challenged to find a way to live that feels healthy & lowers our stress level. Here are a few tips to help you to slow down & smell the roses!
- Remind yourself that Less is More in terms of activity during this time of change (this applies to our work, personal life & leisure time)
- Spend as much time outside as possible, it’s rejuvenating & supports our transformation
- Drink more water than usual if possible, this supports our changing systems
- Meditate, pray, ask for guidance (whatever suits you & your philosophy) – it works!
- Do something for creative release each day, e.g. singing, art, yoga, dance, walking in nature
- Use grounding techniques to deal with your stress: e.g. walk on the grass barefoot, lie on the grass under a tree (these 2 are from Ayurvedic (Indian) Medicine; Stamp your feet; Imagine roots coming out of the soles of your feet, drop them down to the centre of the earth & anchor them there
- Eat moderate amounts of high quality food
- Balance your intake of alcohol, coffee, sweets, television & on-line activities (the latter may disrupt your nervous system)
- Laugh & have fun
If you feel you’re going through a transformation, you can check out this link: Indigo Children & Adults: Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening - (It’s not just for Indigos).
Check out my second blog Spiritual Journeying, you’ll find some excellent recent guest blogs on it.
Please give us your input, using the comments section. Thanks.
In spirit
Ellen
I think you’ll enjoy this guest post by Dana Williams, a powerful healer who lives in our community:
THE UNIVERSE IS NEUTRAL
We are so plugged into the idea of ‘Right & Wrong’.
If we are happy, then we must be doing it right… Right?
If we are unhappy, we must be doing it wrong… Right?
Unhappiness leads us to work harder to fix it, so that everybody is happy, and, by the way, we tend to leave ourselves out of the equation.
We compare past moments of happiness, try to recreate them, but it all falls flat. So we work harder to get the happiness back. When it doesn’t happen, we blame and shame ourselves for not being good enough.
When we feel like we let “them” down and we go into judgement and wrong ourselves for not working hard enough to get their love and approval, this is the key to recovering our missing piece. In this moment of realization, we are actually doing something right !
Stay with me here …
The Universe will always match us where we are unclear, in particular with the gap in our boundaries. It will match the lowest vibration in the gap of “no” boundaries and send in the messengers to dance with that energetic match.
Years and years of matching and dancing with the old patterns put us in a trance of thinking that we are “wrong” or else we would be happy.
Often, the reason we are not happy is because we are doing it for someone else’s approval and this is wrong.
So we are actually right when we discover this.
Kinda upside down at first, but when we get it, it will automatically change our life.
“Happy” is a very subjective state. We often unconsciously give our power to close relationships to decide for us if we are allowed to be happy or not.
Let’s call back the responsibility for our own creations from the start. Hanging out in judgement, blame and victimhood is a choice.
We can be so habitually trained to be busy and working hard and not being in our truth and putting others first in order to avoid looking these frightened monkeys in the eye.
Why would we want to give all of our power over to these dancing, jacked-up, scared little tricksters? Often it is to keep us safe from our own brilliance, because this brilliance is foreign to us.
Let’s look these patterns in the eye and allow them to be released so that our clear boundaries can be the theme to send out to the Universe.
When the Universe picks up the energies of clarity and co-creation with higher vibrational personal endeavors, it will match these ~ always!
The Universe has no agenda, other than to follow our inner self talk and communication. So, living small and in fear becomes a choice when we know the truth of the above wisdom.
Make the choice to update these old habitual patterns and send out a new call through your energy so that you can witness new awareness.
Call to yourself what you want,
instead of what you don’t want.
End the “Story” !
Known as The Artist of Change, Dana Williams is trained in Energy Healing, Certified as a Transpersonal Clinical Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner and Advanced EFT Practitioner. Her practice is based in Roberts Creek, on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of BC. She incorporates EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) with other healing modalities to help her clients shift and transform their lives and uses humour and intuition to move the sessions along easily and gently, to release old stuck patterns, programs and limitations.
Dana’s 2-day workshop, HEAL YOUR MONKEY MIND on April 28th & 29th will help you to look behind THE MONKEY BUSINESS and release your phobias, fears and anxieties.
Whether our parents or important others in our lives modelled it, or if we came out of the womb with our personalities already shaped, most of us have perfectionistic tendencies, at least in some areas. While it’s great to do whatever we’re doing well, the stress that develops in us if we always push ourselves towards higher achievement in each and every area of our lives, can reach unbelievable heights. This takes an enormous toll on us physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
In Saturday’s Vancouver Sun, Jennifer Newman puts a different spin on an old exercise, one I’ve described before from the Martha Beck POV. Newman suggests that when beginning a project, we make a list of the most important tasks, going downward to the least important, then categorize them according to the standard they require: E for excellent, S for Satisfactory and G for Good Enough. Then we can allocate tasks not in the excellent category others. We’re now not micromanaging, in that exhausting way that burns us out and that others find extremely annoying and erodes their confidence in themselves.
Striving for “good work” rather than “perfect work” in every little aspect of our lives allows us to relax, to let down a little, something that many of us find difficult nowadays. Developed to help mothers involved in the child welfare system, to enhance their parenting skills without demoralizing them, thus reducing their effectiveness, the “Good Enough” concept can be applied to any subject or activity. I wrote a short blurb about it on my facebook caregiver support group, Surviving & Thriving – a Caregiver Group just the other day in fact.
Glendon Wiebe writes thoughtfully about our society’s drive for excellence in December’s Insights into Clinical Counselling, published by the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors, the organization I belong to. Widespred media coverage of everything imaginable has given many of us, especially the most impressionable children, like his own, the idea that if we’re not the best at a sport or some other action activity, we just don’t count.
I believe most of us, us “big kids” too, have absorbed this idea and that it contributes to our perfectionist pushing, the sense of never being quite good enough, or having accomplished quite enough. We compare ourselves and quantify our performances, and more often than not, feel that we come up lacking, whether it’s in our business, our social life, the coolness of the place we live in, our wardrobe, whatever – and the big one of course – our income.
We’re probably never going to go back to a pre-media, pre-social networking society, but we can choose how much exposure we want to give ourselves and our families and how we react to what we see there. Perhaps the best way to appreciate ourselves and our contributions more and to pressure ourselves less, is to remember the old concept of comparing ourselves and our progress to what we did previously, not to others’ accomplishments.
Wishing everyone a peaceful and joyful holiday season.
* Fill yourself with the company of loving family and friends
* Spend plenty of quality time alone
* Soak up nature
* Enjoy your favourite books and movies
* Give of your time or money to those in need
This prayer was sent to me by a friend recently. I’ve found several slightly different versions of it; each one says “Author Unknown”. Hope it speaks to you as it does me.
“May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.”
Author Unknown
By midlife our family and work demands often lessen, making this a time when focus and energies shift towards new projects, goals and dreams, interests that add a different kind of meaning to our lives. For many of us a new responsibility emerges - caregiver for an aging parent.
It’s surprising in the 21st century that the responsibility of caregiving still falls primarily on women. The elderly turn to daughters, daughters-in-law and granddaughters for help when they don’t have a partner to care for them. Often we’ve been raised to believe our job is to take care of our family’s needs, so we fall naturally into the role of caregiver.
For thirteen years I was a caregiver for my mother who had Alzheimer’s Disease. We were fortunate to have many skilled and loving in-home and care home professionals available to do much of the practical work of looking after mom, but it was still a demanding and at times distressing experience, rife with a lifetime of feelings that begged to be resolved.
The midlife caregiver experience can be very stressful, and it’s easy to lose sight of ourselves during the process of taking care of aging parents. This is especially true in a shared living situation where the caregiver is available to her parent around the clock. As time passes we begin to realize, then to acknowledge, that a large part of our tension, with its accompanying sadness, guilt and frustration, is a result of our complicated relationship with our declining parent.
Humans are like plants, they can get survive for years in poor soil and light, but it’s not good enough for us to merely get by during our parent’s declining years, we deserve more than that. When we burn ourselves out it’s very difficult to recover a state of good health and joyful living later on.
When do we know when it’s enough? Over time, as our thoughts and feelings become clearer, we come to a personal decision about what is comfortable for us. Then the important parts of our relationship come into focus; we become clearer about what can be delegated and the things that are simply unnecessary.
It’s not always easy to live mindfully when schedules are so full; but by taking the time to honour one’s personal truth and by attending to those important physical, emotional and spiritual needs, we empower ourselves to live the rich and joyful lives we deserve and yearn for.
I invite you to examine your beliefs about being a caregiver, and on your own or with professional guide, find ways to change the thoughts and habits that limit your joy and vitality. Once balance is achieved in your own life the mutual understanding with a parent will deepen.
c Ellen Besso 2011
Ellen Besso, Martha Beck certified life coach and trained counsellor, is committed to helping midlife women enrich their lives. She is the mother of an adult daughter and was caregiver for her elderly mother and a close friend who recently passed away. Ellen’s personal goal is to live and work in a spiritual, heart centred way. She is the author of Surviving Eldercare & has numerous articles published on midlife and eldercare.
