If you’re the primary thinker and doer in your household, I want you to know I completely understand how exhausted and worn-down you might feel. I urge you to consider my three-part remedy because whatever makes YOUR life easier, will inevitably make your loved-one’s life better! Simplifying your plans, your tasks and your routines can only serve to make your burden lighter.
We also invent reasons for avoiding self-care, sometimes because we’ve confused self-care with pampering or self-indulgence (as might be the case with the nail scenario above). Self-care isn’t simply about making ourselves feel important (worthy?) or comfortable, or attractive – self-care is about consciously taking action to feed the soul, nourish the body, nurture the spirit and most of all, replenish the relationship we’re building with ourselves!
It was a beautiful winter day; all was going remarkably well! As a caregiver, you know to spot these days, to cherish them and appreciate that they may not be frequent experiences in your week or even your month. This was one of those days, lovely in every respect.
For me, the biggest changes I’m working to make this year have to do with how I eat and how much I move. Both goals feel like huge hurdles in a season when the great outdoors offers mostly cold and wet weather, and my inner inclinations are pointed toward hibernation behaviors.
No doubt you’ve heard me say before, to be a healthy caregiver you need a team of people around you that you can count on for assistance and support. However, building those relationships, and perhaps more importantly, repairing those relationships if they’ve become fractured, is an important skill set for all of us.
Remember how, in the Star Trek movies, the Captain would have the Ensign set a course for some obscure region of the galaxy? Being a solopreneur, an all-by-myself health coach, there’s no Ensign at the front console to command and have my course set for the coming year – I need to do that for myself.
There’s a phenomenon that I notice as the holidays approach – it’s like a time compression or a time warp. The list of things I want to accomplish seems to grow longer and the time in which I have to wrap things up for the year seems to grow shorter. There are other “symptoms” associated with this phenomenon as well. . .
For most of us, this can be confusing, we’re struggling to be compassionate and kind to ourselves, often in the hope that it will make us feel better than we usually do. But this is a misconception. We move toward self-compassion in order to accept all of who we are – the parts that feel good, and the parts that experience pain, sadness, grief or suffering, and still be compassionate!
Yes, it seems counterintuitive to me too, the notion that we can or should let go of expectations. But here’s what the writers who foster such a life-view mean by that statement – we make our own journey much more difficult when we hold out expectations for how life is supposed to go.
Lots of people struggle with holiday stress – it’s as if there’s a national competition going on for who can be the most anxious person over the never-ending details of celebrating our winter holidays. We start from the premise that perfection is possible (it’s not, no matter what the well-curated magazine covers portray). The sooner we let go of that notion of the “perfect” holiday, the more breathing space we’ll make for ourselves and others with whom we share the season.
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