Ellen's book will strengthen and guide you in your role as caregiver to an elder parent or relative, and help you understand your own physical, emotional, mental & spiritual needs.Now available at
Selfcare Category
Change is the name of the game for many of us of late. My personal process is eclectic as always, ranging from formal meditation, to the occasional Church visit, to psychic readings from friends (I seem to know quite a few psychics, interestingly).
My intuition is increasing as time goes on, as is yours, I’m sure. I’m working on tuning into it more and following the subtle guidance given to me by my internal self. I do find the key to moving through this chaotic time is to to continually ask myself, “What now, what’s the next step?…today, this year, this very moment.”
I find the occasionaly psychic reading validates what I’m already sensing and planning, and adds ideas to my projects. This week an old friend read for me, and oddly (to both of us), said I was too detached from material things!! She/they reminded me the importance of having a goal, visualizing it, and fleshing it out with as much detail as possible, even including writing a cheque to yourself (I’ve not done that before, but have heard of it).
If I give it the time and space, the answers always come. Sometimes I know I’m meant to do nothing, to simply breathe, to walk by the water, at other times creative inklings come to me, plans for the present and the future. For example, the facebook group I started a few weeks ago, Surviving & Thriving as a Caregiver, has been a joy to me; the response of the women and the interactions available on facebook are fun. In the fall an in-person support group will spin off from this group. Other plans for the fall, after months of quietness and “holding the space”, are volunteer coaching work with people with chronic and persistent mental illness, beginning Indian singing lessons and possible other volunteer projects along with my coaching work.
Everything happens at the right time; we’ve heard that over and over, but that’s a hard one to surrender to. Now after my changes of the past year and a half, in my work and my personal life (death of two people close to our family), I’m ready to move forward in different ways.
Last week I began a facebook group called Surving & Thriving as a Caregiver.
To access it simply click this link:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/143593152384407
or search the name of the group.
Surviving & Thriving as a Caregiver is a group for women who are caregivers for their aging parent, spouse or other family member. It’s purpose is to offer helpful information and to give caregivers a forum to share ideas and support each other.
- Each week I will post an article about a different aspect of being a caregiver, to help you in your journey (see over page for 1st article)
- This group will offer you an opportunity to connect with other caregivers and to share your experiences in the comfort of your home.
- Future group plans include a small in-person support group in Ellen’s home.
- If you are not familiar with facebook, simply sign in, (it’s very simple to set up an account), then search “Surviving & Thriving as a Caregiver”.
Here is the first article, posted on July 6th:
Being a caregiver is often an all encompassing role. Even when we are not with our parent or other family member, we may be thinking about them on some level, consciously or unconsciously. It’s easy for our role of caregiver to expand so that it takes over much of our life, and that’s okay, as long as we are clear on what we are doing and why.
Caregiving is a labour of love. We often become closer to the person we are caring for than almost anyone else in our lives. We share good times with them, and bad times, when crises may occur. We may be there or on call for our family member most of the time.
This is why we need to augment our life beyond the role of caregiver, to give ourselves a break from the challenges of caregiving, to provide balance in our life.
I invite you to think about the ways you are balancing your life – activities like walking, exercise classes, dancing classes, a glass of wine with friends, gardening – whatever takes you away from yourself and your duties in a positive way really.
I will be posting an article each week on this group page and invite your feedback, questions and concerns.
You can read other relevant articles at: http://ellenbesso.com
Joyfully
Ellen
The role of caregiver – for an elderly parent, a spouse, a disabled child or other family member is a challenging one – no argument there. Finding time to live your own life, apart from your role of caregiver, takes a lot of planning and soul searching. Many – most? women, (and cargivers are predominatly female), cope quietly, sometimes desperately, often with very little outside help.
Women are strong; we know we can deal with just about anything that arises in our lives. But we don’t have to do it all alone, we need support – this is not a competition in endurance – who can last the longest without breaking…
Even if, as caregivers, we have the paid or volunteer support that means we don’t have to perform all the physical tasks, we still need psychological, emotional and spiritual support in order to feel healthy and joyful – they are an essential ingredient.
I invite you to take a look at your personal story about your role as caregiver. We all have stories we carry in our heads, about our lives in general, and about the specific roles we perform.
Here is a powerful technique for uprooting what is causing you pain, what is limiting you, keeping you from living fully:
- The unconscious, that part of our mind that stores and processes so much, works in symbols and metaphors. Therefore working with symbols and metaphors can unlock old patterns.
- Write or type your story of who you are as a caregiver and how it is for you. It can be as brief as a paragraph or as long as two or three pages. Be sure to focus on the parts that are not working, as well as the positives.
- Think of a metaphor or symbol that might represent you and your role as a caregiver. (Both metaphor and symbol mean something used to represent something else). This could be a character from a book or movie; an inanimate object, an animal. Whatever pops into your head first will be the right one; you don’t have to understand why you thought of it. (My symbol was The Little Match Girl, a sad story of the girl who froze to death on the streets of London. I couldn’t understand why my unconscious mind came up with that one, but as I worked through the exercise, I discovered that the story of the matchgirl was full of magic and light, as well as sadness, and the process allowed me to move forward.
- If possible share your story and your symbol with one or more sympathetic friends or family members. Discuss it with them a little.
- Then go back and rewrite your story.
- Your second story will be different. The act of writing your story, choosing your metaphor, then being witnessed in the telling of it will allow a shift to take place within you.
- Your story as a caregiver will be a different one when you are finished and you will be different.
This exercise was originally given to us by Dr. Martha Beck. It is one powerful way of growing through storytelling; there are almost as many forms of processing through storytelling as there are stories!
This webinar is sponsored by Open to Hope/the Grief Blog for those grieving on Mother’s Day due to the loss of a Child. Open to Hope has been serving those dealing with loss for many years in a variety of compassionate ways. A couple of years ago Doctors Gloria and Heidi interviewed me about self-care during grieving.
Free Webinar-May 2 with Darcie Sims: Mother’s Day: Survival Techniques After the Death of a Child
“You’ll get tired this very day: Use it. Surrender to the peace at the heart of fatigue, the Wordless mind awakens.” —Martha Beck, Daily Coach Tips
Something has happened to me. The transformation began in Dharamsala, India, the home of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. It was the fall of 2009, and we spent six weeks there, volunteering and making new friends, enjoying the light, spiritual atmosphere of this small town set in the foothills of the Himalayas.
It’s difficult to express in words, but simply put, my spirit was happy there. I felt that anything was possible. We lived in a monastery guesthouse, right in the midst of the Kirti Monastery, very close to the Dalai Lama’s temple; each day we were surrounded by what I liked to think of as the “monk energy” as monks of all ages went about their daily business.
We made many friends at the Hope Center where we volunteered, and tutored students in our apartment as well. When time permitted, we visited with our Tibetan doctor friends and their family down the hill at the Dalai Lama’s Men-Tsee-Khang Clinic.
My connection to McLeod Ganj was, and is, very powerful. It seems clear to me, and some others I’ve spoken to, that I’ve spent many lifetimes in this area of India.
I took the energy of this amazing place back home with me, and felt inspired to make small changes and begin new projects, both in my personal and my work life. Over the summer we attended a couple of Buddhist events at home and in Vancouver; the powerful energy of the teachings and initiations, and the Tibetan medicines I took also changed my energy system.
This fall I entered a different phase in my process, a quieter, deeper place. I began to look at my life in a different way, to realistically examine what was and was not working for me, what was making me happy.
The business I’d pinned my hopes and dreams on for the past four years was not developing in the ways we had intended, so I began to let go of my attachment to it. This was a painful process…depressing. But after a few weeks I felt more peaceful; letting go of my high expectations brought a certain level of peace and contentment.
Then, one week before Christmas, our daughter’s friend, a beautiful, talented young woman, like a younger sister to our daughter, committed suicide. Tortured for eight years by a serious bipolar condition, her latest medication transition was too much for her to cope with, and she ended her life in the waters off Slahkayulsh Rock in Vancouver, leaving everyone connected with her and her family in shock.
On January 3rd recent and ongoing events seemed to come to a head in me, and I had what I refer to as a chakra meltdown. Few people know what I mean; my psychic friend agrees that’s exactly what it was, and my chiropractor has some understanding of it. It felt like an implosion in several chakras and in the master point, (so named in Asian medicine), in my left shoulder.
It took me deep inside myself. I could function from this place, but my thinking was slow, heavy, at first. Instinctively I knew I needed to be, to do as little as possible, to conserve my energy for the healing I knew was taking place at a core level. The process felt intuitively like “active waiting”…waiting and trusting that something was germinating inside me, new aspects of myself. Some people call this “sacred waiting”, an appealing term.
After about three weeks slowly, slowly, my creative juices began to flow, and my energy began to increase, and come up, out into the world again. Like tiny shoots in the garden in spring, each day I received small creative guidance about what to do next.
I’ve emerged from this experience feeling different. Now I’m taking action again, in ways that please and enthuse me, though sometimes I move too fast and anxiety begins to rear it’s head, a healthy warning sign. Then I remind myself to slow it down, that’s only my “pushing brain” talking. I need only relax, to check within to see if I’m going with the flow, and to take a measure of whether the project I’m working on “delights me” as my friend Alma suggests. Now I hurry less; I trust that things will unfold. I’m redefining the idea of what success means to me personally.
Many Westerners are going through a process of change now, as we move into a higher level of consciousness. Some people term this a shift into the Fifth Dimension; even physicists at Harvard and Johns Hopkins are studying it. Our stories are different, yet there are commonalities in them. Some of us embrace this body-mind-spirit transition we’re going through while others may pretend it’s not happening and work towards “getting back to ‘normal” a.s.a.p.
The concept of personal growth is big in our society. Thomas Moore believes we talk about the process “lightly, as if we know what it means, and as if it’s a positive, progressive development.” We fail to realize that the soul’s development requires a “descent as well as an ascent” he says. He refers to the process as “The dark nights of the soul”.
Moore suggests that when we are in a transition such as this that we do not pretend we’re bright and carefree when we know we’re in the dark, but that we “weave the process into our life”, while at the same time pulling back some. I’ve always believed that our intuition will instruct us wisely, if we allow it space.
My recent transition was not my first surrendering, and it likely won’t be my last. It can be a scary process if we are unfamiliar with it, and we may feel quite isolated going through it…disconnected from our life, from things and people that formerly gave meaning. We may be in an unfamiliar emotional place…uncertain about the the sense of emptiness we feel, the impression of waiting for something. Having at least one person in our life who understands some of what we’re going through helps tremendously. We then feel supported. If we honor our darkness and our not knowing, slowly, slowly, after a time, out of this place will come a calmness, a hint of creativity and joy.
What does your spirit need? It may be different from what you thought. Archangel Michael says: “You are no longer moved forward along the “tracks” of career and work that once supported you. Now it is the energy and movement of your creative passion that will take you forward.”
Trust your own unique process of unfolding. Talk about your concerns with like-minded friends and family. Don’t be afraid to get input from a trusted doctor, counsellor, coach or spiritual advisor. Pulling together in unity will bring us to a new, delightful, place of joy.
What changes have you noticed in yourself and your life? I am gathering stories for a new book about changing consciousness and invite you to contact me through my website.
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