Self-care has a profound impact on nourishing and nurturing us. And yet for many of us, self-care is not something that comes easily. By understanding the resistance we often encounter we can overcome these barriers and discover how to make self-care an integral part of everyday life.
In this episode, I share
- The reasons behind our resistance to self-care
- A super helpful reflection question to feel more nourished
- Calling on our masculine energy to support our feminine
- An easy practice to cultivate embodiment
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Hey everyone and welcome back to my channel. In this episode, I want to explore how self-care practices can really support us to nourish and nurture our feminine energy. And I'm going to offer it to you through the lens of embodiment. Specifically what I want to explore, which I find really curious, is how we resist practicing self-care. What are some of the reasons why we might struggle with bringing self-care into our lives? And then I want to offer you a way to orient yourself to making self-care part of your everyday living. When we take care of our own wellbeing and when we can nourish and support ourselves, it really allows us to tap more into our divine feminine qualities of self-love and intuition, and trusting the self and being open and feeling free to express from your beautiful heart and from the truth of you. The first big stumbling block that I see to us practicing self-care is that we are just too busy. We are too busy to stop and smell the roses. We are too busy driving the kids to soccer practice. We are too busy taking care of everyone's needs at home. We are too busy making sure that everything runs smoothly at work. We are just so busy and our lives are so full. It's not really capacity for us to hold space for ourselves. One of the skills that we really begin to develop when we work with our feminine energy and our feminine essence is we begin to be able to hold more. So we build our own capacity to hold more, more space, more love, more grace, more honoring of self, more deepening into our own truth. So this is a big reason why we don't practice self-care because we are just too busy. Often you'll find that this busyness is accompanied by, you can call it a lack of boundaries. You can call it fluctuating boundaries. Boundaries play such a big role in our ability to be able to put our own needs first, and not in a selfish way, but in a way that resources us so that we can show up as the best and the most truest version of ourselves. That leads me into the third thing that makes it so difficult for us. We feel guilty when we take time for ourselves, and a big reason has to do with how we've been socialized as women. We have been really trained very well to place the needs of others ahead of our own. We've been trained very well to show up in the role of nurturer. And if we don't nurture according to these external standards that has been put on us, we end up feeling guilty. We feel that we are lacking, we feel that we are not doing enough, and that can lead to us overcompensating and then giving too much, which leads to resentment. And this is this terrible spiral that we find ourselves in. Before I go on to the next section, if you're finding this helpful at all, then please let me know by giving the video a thumbs up. The final reason that I see we struggle with self-care is that we have this idea that self-care is something that you pay money for. It's something that is connected to a luxury item or a luxury activity that costs money. And there is definitely a whole industry that's geared towards self-care where you can spend a lot of money to, you know, buy self-care tools and self-care things, but real self-care is taking actions and being in a way that fulfills you on a very deep level. So here's a very powerful question that you can ask yourself whenever you are doing any task, anything that you're doing, preface it by asking yourself, how can I do this in a way that is nourishing? How can I do this in a way that is supportive? What do I need in this moment to make this task or this thing that I'm doing to make it a pleasurable or as pleasurable as possible for me? And when this becomes a way of thinking, when you start bringing the habit of this pattern into everything that you do, you'll see that you slowly begin to infuse self-care into all areas of your life. So no longer is it a standalone practice where you decide, huh, now I'm going to do self-care, but I have to see how am I going to fit it in with, you know, my busy schedule and exactly where will I make time for this. No, when we infuse self-care into our life in these small little ways, it just becomes another way of how we are being, of who we are becoming and how we show up. So if you recognize any of these four blocks that are perhaps in your way, if you find that you wanna practice more self-care, but you keep on putting it at the end of your to-do list, or it's just something that you never seem to get round to, or you feel that you simply don't have time for that in your day, then I'm going to offer that first of all, you explore the belief that's keeping "I don't have time for self-care" stuck in your, in your psyche and in your soul. And secondly, an invitation for you to choose differently. We have got the ability to always choose differently. We can always change direction. We can always reorient ourselves to a different way of being. It's a possibility that's available to everyone. And the first step with that is to commit. So when you have the awareness of something that's not working, when you have the awareness of wanting to do different, to be different, to live different, then you commit. That's really how we can call on our masculine energy to hold space for the feminine. That's providing you the safety and the structure and the support so that your feminine can then relax into the experience of being nourished, being taken care of, having her needs met. We all get nourished in different ways. We all need different things. So what I see as self-care may not be self-care for you. It might be something that provides you with lots of stress. So it's important for us that as we begin to explore how can we make self-care a reality, and how can we do this in a way that really allows us to become more empowered and to experience more joy and pleasure and just overall life satisfaction is, explore like, what will do that for you? So what are the practices and the things that really bring you that fulfillment? Often it can be quite challenging for us to land on what is it that I'm feeling, especially if you have been disconnected from your feelings and your body for a long time. And so it can be very helpful to slowly begin to teach yourself to connect into the body again, so you can begin to name your feelings. And even if you don't have the right name for your feeling, even if you, you're not sure what it is that you're feeling, just being in the experience of that feeling and being in the felt sense, like the subtle nuanced sensation and intensity of that emotion or feeling that you have, already that connects you to your truth, already that opens you up to tapping into your own wisdom and your own knowing, because you're busy cultivating that relationship with yourself. Walking the path of the feminine, really cultivating the access to your feminine intuitive wisdom and to accessing your self-compassion and self-love and self-acceptance, you can begin to cultivate all of that through becoming more skilled and accessing your felt sense by really becoming curious about what is going on in your inner world and using that as your guidepost. And by bringing embodiment into more areas of your life, by really beginning to live more embodied. And a very simple practice that you can do is when you wake up in the morning and when you go sleep at night, check in with yourself. And you don't need to go and solve anything. You don't need to figure anything out. You don't need to understand anything, all that you need to do in that moment is just to drop in and see how are you doing? How are you feeling in this moment? And this is really going to begin to develop that skill of living more embodied. So I'd love to hear from you, any practices that you already know supports you and nourishes you, and you can let us know about these in the comments. I'd also love to know how this video landed for you. So let me know as well. And if you listening on the podcast, thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you in the next one.