It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of the day to day, but when you lead a busy life, it becomes that much more important to set boundaries and take good care of yourself on all levels. Doing this mindfully can involve some finagling, especially if this a new concept for you or you have a lot of obligations that have already piled up. Excellent self-care includes but is not limited to reprioritizing, setting boundaries, creating time for yourself to recharge, and not giving away your energy if it isn’t a win-win-win situation or it makes you feel dread or resentment. Although this sounds easy enough, you may find yourself giving in to obligations or requests without truly thinking about them first, which can create more chaos within your life. This can result in a vicious cycle that could very well end in exhaustion or burnout, so please allow me the honor of sharing some thoughts and ideas with you about mindful self-care so that a truly detrimental situation can be avoided.
Nourishing yourself happens on many different levels, but the first step is for you to make the conscious decision and commitment to do exactly that: nourish yourself. This doesn’t mean you have to wake up with a perfect routine tomorrow, but rather, incorporating small daily habits one at a time can greatly increase your wellbeing overall and provide you with more energy, a perception that you have more time, and an increased ability to get everything done that you set out to during any given day. The last thing any of us want is the feeling of burnout, which can also lead to depression or other health problems related to stress. This is the part we want to avoid, so here are a few realizations that have helped me along my own journey, and I certainly hope that they help you on yours.
- Remember that no one will take care of you as well as you will, no matter how valiant and admirable their efforts. Caring for yourself keeps you emotionally and psychologically healthy, and this includes finding ways to meet any needs you may have, including needs to “talk shop” or socialize. Typically speaking, if a human being becomes too dependent on someone else for their basic care, it creates codependent relationships through long-term conditioning and can result in resentment and—you guessed it—burnout, stress, and depression. To help prevent this for yourself, it’s important to know how to identify what your needs are and how to meet them in the most effective and healthy ways that you can on your own.
- You are your own best friend! If you treat yourself well, you will attract the circumstances and people into your life that will also treat you well. This is what it really means when they say, “you can’t love someone else until you love yourself.” It’s much deeper than being superficially confident and calling that self-love. Rather, this unconditional love for yourself can be achieved by going within and uncovering various different layers of your personality and why you may choose to keep these aspects of yourself buried or hidden from others. That’s not to say that you have to go shouting all of your deepest, darkest secrets from the rooftops; rather, it simply means that you, within yourself, recognize and become aware of your quirks and idiosyncrasies and uncover what may have caused them and what causes you to hide them. For example, what impression did you get of a certain habit or behavior when you were a child, and how did that perspective affect your subconscious beliefs about that habit or behavior as an adult? Introspecting about this can greatly increase your inner peace as you work through ideas or beliefs that you can now recognize as being false or conditioned. Once you recognize this, it becomes easier to change those beliefs to serve you within this life rather than working against you.
- Every single human being has been conditioned in some way. All this means, essentially, is that we spend our entire childhoods allowing other people to dictate our lives to us—parents, teachers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents—essentially everyone. When you begin to become aware of the beliefs that were drilled into your head as “truth” by generations before you, you can also begin to analyze them and understand which ones you agree with now, utilizing discernment and your own logic, life experiences, and knowledge from continuous learning. You can then also identify those beliefs that you don’t or have never agreed with and begin to un-condition yourself or replace those belief systems with your own intentionally. And yes, you are the only person who should be telling you what you think! Anytime someone else tells you what to think as a child and it goes directly against your own ideas, it creates cognitive dissonance and conflict within you, which in turn also creates a dependence on those people telling you what to think because you probably get into trouble for disagreeing. This can result in all manner of personality disorders and false programming that will need to be undone as you grow into adulthood, especially if you intend to be a functioning member of society and be fully able to care for yourself. Understanding this conditioning is what many people now refer to as “waking up” or having a spiritual awakening, which makes it way less woo-woo and esoteric than it may sound, especially as science continues uncovering and providing evidence of these ideas.
- To truly be yourself, you must know who you are. So… who are you? If you’ve ever watched the movie Anger Management, you might remember Adam Sandler’s character losing it a little bit when he was asked this because he was answering with what he does for a living, his hobbies, etc. So, I challenge you today to begin digging deeper to truly uncover the core aspects of yourself. This can be accomplished through inner work and working through what you don’t like or want, in order to determine what you do like or want. Not only does this allow you to be more of who you are, but it will also increase your clarity about your true self and your life as a whole. This will also diminish the power of your ego, organically switching your perspective from one of pride to one of humility. Take that, ego!
- Not only do you need to know who you are… in order to truly show yourself unconditional love and nurturing, it’s important to accept yourself as a complete being, not just for the positive aspects of your personality or life experience. Of course, those positive aspects are what you will want to cultivate more of, but any shame, guilt, or negativity you feel about yourself will need to be healed and shown love to before you will get to that point. If you think of your emotions as energy, the positive ones being bright and the “negative” or undesired ones being dark, it becomes much easier to imagine how tainted and corrupted our energy and emotional state might be if we allow these feelings of shame and guilt and fear to permeate and fester within us. Having a creative outlet for these types of emotions is incredibly beneficial, and you could say that creatively expressing these negative emotions will get them out of you and allow you to transmute them into something more positive, namely your creative expression. Whether this is painting, writing, woodworking, making ice sculptures, or customizing your yoga routine doesn’t matter; this creative expression will be unique to you and only you can determine what works best for you, your needs, and your lifestyle.
Above all else, making the conscious decision to nurture yourself and committing to it is the main hurdle. Once you’ve done this, even if you don’t get everything “right” immediately, you will still have made that decision and be committed despite setbacks no matter what those might look like, and this will allow you to be compassionate for yourself and for your progress… even if you fail at first. Once you’ve established this decision and commitment within your conscious mind, you can take steps to help yourself through meditation, self-hypnosis, and healing music, among other practices. Once you set your intentions, everything else has a tendency to begin falling into place organically.
Thank you so much for joining us this month here on the Mindful Leader Blog! This month’s topic is nourishing your body, mind, and spirit, so I hope you come back to join us each week for more in-depth mindfulness techniques and ideas.
For more information about the Mindfulness Movement or the International Mindfulness Federation, please visit:
http://executivecoachinguniversity.com/mindfulness-movement
