5 reasons why everyone should have a practice of self-care!

Are you practicing self-care?

And by self-care, I mean taking care of your entire self:

• Nurturing your body

• Nurturing your mind

• Nurturing your entire self!
  

Most of us lead such busy lives that we are constantly moving from one task to another, from one event to another. But this kind of 'busyness' frequently affects our self-care and our overall health!

You may argue, that I do exercise thrice a week. Or, that I am eating my greens regularly. Or I am keeping my mind more calmer with a regular practice of meditation.

That's great and yes, all of the above are part of self-care.

However,  my conversation about self-care is the holistic nurturing of the entire self and giving time, energy and attention to all aspects of you that need you!

Here is an example that will help explain this:

Neena is a busy working mom also taking care of three young kids. She tries to feed her children nutritious meals and wants to expose them to different activities. 

In the process of doing all of this, she finds herself sleeping late and getting up very early. She also is more stressed at work and ends up having an underlying anxiety because there is always so much to do.

When Neena attended a self-care class, she discovered the magic of mindfulness and learnt to pause between activities. She relaxed her tight schedules and found that when she was doing a little less, she was actually getting far more done in terms of quality and satisfaction. She slept better and was more available for her children.

In Neena's example, her self-care practice was not just about exercise or diet. It involved giving more space to herself and allowing herself to relax. In doing so, self-care incrementally increased the quality of her life.

Here are 5 reasons why you should be practicing more self-care:

1) Self-care gifts you more energy to do all the things you love to do in a way that brings more satisfaction to your life.
2) Self-care moves you from a quantitative movement through life to a more qualitative acceptance and understanding of life. You move from 'I have to do more tasks, more activities, more exercise' to ' Doing these tasks were so fulfilling'.
3) With increased self-care you find the joy component in your life increasing. It might even feel odd that by doing 'less' you are getting 'more'. More joy, more time, more energy!
4)  Your health and vitality increases enormously. You feel a sense of vibrant energy that you may not have felt for a long time.
5)  With greater happiness because of self-care comes greater fulfillment in relationships. You are able to make deeper and stronger connections with people. As you learn to love yourself better through self-care, you are able to love others more deeply!

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In my client sessions, I frequently recommend practicing gratitude journaling. Why do I do that? Because of its enormous benefits on both the physical and mental health for my client.

In this fast-paced world filled with constant distractions and pressures, it's easy to lose sight of the little things that bring us joy and peace.

However, practicing gratitude can be a powerful tool to help us reconnect with what truly matters and unlock a deep sense of happiness and well-being.

What is gratitude ?

6 Life-Changing Reasons to Practice Gratitude

Six reasons why you should practice gratitude, life-changing reasons :

Aren’t these great reasons to start a gratitude practice today?

But an important question to ask ourselves:

Can we give water from an empty cup? Can we give something, we do not have? Can we support others, when we are not supporting ourselves?

 If you want to support your loved one, please ask yourself: 

Am I supporting myself? Am I needing to heal? Am I allowing myself to heal?

So, dear friend, today make a resolution that: 

Let me look within myself and see what I need to heal.

Once we are healed, once we feel the energy flow within us again, we can support our loved ones much better.

 When we make time and effort to heal and help ourselves, we do our bit to raise the consciousness of the world.

Even simple statements of love and support can be a balm and give the much needed vitamin boost to help them cope with struggles.

And the beauty is when we are giving them a balm of love, we are also giving ourselves too.

Watch this short and sweet inspirational video where two birds are supporting one another through a storm.

Saying words of affirmation are an excellent way to share the love energy that will go a long way to make both you and your loved one feel supported and cared for.

Try these affirmative statements of love when your loved ones are struggling:

I am there for you.

I am there to support you.

Together we can do this.

 Hold on. Hold tight. We will be ok soon. 

 While we are both struggling, we can both support each other through love. 

 Our love for one another will help us sail through this. 

 We will survive this. 

 The challenges we are going through are big but our love is bigger and more stronger. 

 Just breathe in love. 

Use these affirmations of love and support to help yourself and your loved ones sail through storms and challenges and notice the boost of strength and support that you both get.

Do share your own affirmations of love and support in the comments.

We also had other naturopathic treatments of detox which included massages, sauna, and colon hydrotherapy.

The icing on the cake was a great yoga program designed to help us slow down our minds, cleanse our breathing system and make our body more agile.

My takeaways

Here are my takeaways from this awesome experience that I wanted to share with you:

1) Body has an incredible ability to heal when we give it a nurturing lifestyle and right diet.

2) We have the ability to change the way we feel and increase our energy levels with yoga, mindful breathing, diet and an effective routine.

3) Our body needs far less food than what most of us give it. The excess food becomes toxins and can cause inflammation and disease over time.

4) Periodic detoxification is required especially when we cross 40 years.

5) Taking care of our body and mind is one of the greatest acts of self-love. We need to do this on a daily basis.

6) Detoxifying may require making massive changes to our current lifestyle. We need to keep our mind open to change.

7) Most importantly, we need to have a consistent practice of self-love, self-care for the body and the mind.

I hope my sharing will inspire you to support your body and mind in the right ways. Start with just one consistent practice and see the difference.

Honoring the Inner Mother 

 While we all need to acknowledge, honor and feel blessed for our physical mother/ mother-like people; it is equally important to honor and respect and connect with the 'Inner Mother' and we all have that mother within.

***In this article/video, I will share with you more about

* What is the Inner Mother?

* Why do we need to connect to her?

*The benefits of connecting to the Inner Mother

* How can we do so?

Happy Mother's Day wishes to you.

So today I wanted to share a little bit about the whole concept of Mother's day and we know that this is special day for us to remember, honor and respect our earthly mother, our physical mother or maybe a person who is mother-like to us and this is very important. 

We need to have that gratitude. Gratitude itself is such a great blessing for all of us. 

So what is the inner mother and why is it important to connect with this inner mother? I'm going to share a little bit also about the benefits of connecting with the Inner Mother. And finally I'll talk about how we can actually make that connection.

So, let's get started. 

What is the inner mother?

We all have parts within ourselves, we have a part of ourselves which is like a little child-like you know it needs attention, it's very innocent and that part of ourselves is very loving and very open when dealing with people, it is fun like. That part of us is our inner child. 

Similar to that we also have a part of us which is like the inner parent and more specifically like the inner mother and this part of ourselves is very kind, very compassionate, very nurturing and very encouraging, all the qualities that we would like to see in our ideal mother, right? 

And you might say lata, but I don't feel that part within me and I don't think I have that part within me.

So let me ask you a question. Have you ever had a situation where you were compassionate towards anyone else? Have you felt a sense of caring for someone? Have you felt that you ever encouraged someone? It could be a friend, it could be a child, it could be a colleague, it would be a spouse or a partner. Have you ever felt that?

Now let's look at Why do we need to connect to that inner mother right now?

We all have earthly mothers, but we may not have a good relationship with our earthly mother, or maybe we feel a sense of connection and she is very kind. She is there for us when we need it and she's very supportive. 

It is also possible that maybe she's not as kind and not as supportive, maybe we don't have a good relationship and I'm not on talking terms, or maybe our earthly mother is not alive anymore, like in my case she's not there anymore.

And then what do I do?

Mistakes are a part of life. We all make mistakes. Some mistakes are small and insignificant and some of them are huge and impactful. 

However, when I make a mistake- small or big, I have feelings towards myself – I might feel angry with myself for making the mistake, I might blame myself, I might also feel worried about the effect of the mistake on the situation, on other people.

There are other repercussions to it too. I might lose confidence; I might lose credibility and trust. I might also lose motivation and courage to do the task again.

As you can see mistakes can affect us in multiple ways.

The question that might arise is: How can I love myself when I make mistakes? Or do I even deserve to love myself?

Do watch the video or continue reading to understand the process we can follow

 to move from self-blame to self-love and how we can practice self-love when we make mistakes.  

Having a sensitive nature, I went into a self-reproaching conversation with myself: ‘How stupid could you be?’ ‘Couldn’t you have been more careful’. I might have asked the question ‘why?’ multiple times: ‘Why did I do this?’ ‘Why am I behaving so badly? And over the next hour, I found my energy dipping and my mood getting worse.

When we make mistakes, while we might have hurt the other person, we are hurting too. Most of the time our focus is on the mistake and the damage we have done. However it is important for us to notice and acknowledge that when we are hurting, we need self-love and self-compassion to heal. Only when we give ourselves self-love, we are in a better position to rectify the mistake and make amends.

Stage 1: Giving myself Self-Love

Let me go through the steps I followed to come out of the self-blame by giving myself self-love.

Step 1: Acknowledge the mistake

I first did acknowledge to myself that I made a mistake. Acknowledging to oneself helps prevent sweeping feelings and the situation under the carpet. Being honest with oneself is a must in self-healing and is an integral part of self-love.

Step 2: Acknowledge my intention

I then acknowledged that I did NOT have any intention to hurt the person or say the things I did. It was a mistake, not an intentional crime.

Step 3: Identify the pattern

 Initially I couldn’t understand why I had acted so badly. If there was no intention to hurt, then why did I say those words? For a while I had no clue. But slowly it dawned on me that it was a pattern, a pattern of communication that I have brought with me from my childhood. A pattern that has helped me sometimes but has also created these weird speech responses in me at times.

Step 4: Breathe and give myself love

 Once I was able to do all the above, it was far easier to give myself love. I breathed slowly and consciously for a few minutes. That helped a lot to actively practice kindness to myself and I was able to tell myself: ‘You had good intentions, there was never any intention to hurt. However, you have some old patterns that got in the way. In time, you will slowly heal your patterns and bring more awareness into your communication.’

Stage 2: Taking corrective action

Once I was able to complete stage 1 of giving myself love, I was in a much better position to look at remedial actions. Releasing our negative emotions helps us get to a place of greater comfort where we have the band-width to take action.

Step 1: Acknowledge a need to repair and restore

 Once I realized that it was a pattern, not a conscious wicked impulse, I knew I had to repair it. So, I sent a message to the other person clarifying what had been on my mind and clearly stating my pure intentions. I felt much better as I sent the message.

Step 2: Handle the anger from the other person

Even after sending the message, the other person was clearly still angry at my behavior. Her anger affected me again and I had to repeat the process of breathing in self-love. I took care not to go back to a place of self-blame.

Step 3: Let time do the work

I realized that people need time to let go of their anger and resentment. I did a process called figure 8 (I teach that to my clients and in my meditation classes- a Phyllis Krystal technique). That helped me distance myself from their anger.

Step 4: Gave myself self-forgiveness

After all this work, I reached a point of allowing myself a chance at forgiveness. I repeated the statement, ‘I forgive myself for doing this mistake’. I also followed the Ho’oponopono technique (from the Hawaiian tradition).  I hope to teach this at some time, and you can look it up on YouTube too.

Step 5: Look at the pattern and work at healing it

Finally, I reach a point where I am willing to look at this pattern and work at healing this. I must say that the healing process will take time and energy but rectifying the pattern will mean I will be more conscious with my words and not repeat the same mistake again.

This was the multi step process of moving from self- blame to self-love and is especially useful when we beat ourselves up when we make mistakes. I hope this was useful for you. Do leave a comment here and let me know how you like this article.