Happy September Birdies!
I hope you are well. After taking three weeks off in August I feel relaxed and rejuvenated. I spent an entire week on my own in sunny Cyprus and then went on a campervan trip with Keivor through France, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg. It was just what the doctor ordered. Self care really is so important.
As I headed back into work mode this week a client pondered the following…
‘The world is actually a really challenging and stressful place, maybe we’re all meant to be stressed, and the self care strategies are numbing us out to the reality of the situation.’
At first the statement stumped me. I didn’t know which angle to tackle it from. I mumbled something along the lines of self-care strategies actually being quite messy themselves, and processes through which we connect with our truth. Frustrated, I couldn’t quite land on a response that really made sense to me or my client.
However, about half an hour after the conversation, as I walked alone through the streets of London, my real response hit me like lightening.
The world is a challenging and stressful place because most of us don’t practice self-care strategies.
When we ignore our feelings of pain, doubt, sadness (and we all have these feelings by the way – we are all a spectrum of emotions) we end up projecting our stresses and anxieties out into the world. When we fly off the handle or blame and moan about other people we are actually releasing our unprocessed challenging emotions.
When we prioritise our self-care, our self-love, our self-esteem building practices we are each taking responsibility for reducing the amount of stress there is in the world. We are processing our challenging emotions rather than projecting. For most of us the projection will be minimal, and may seem insignificant, when we get road rage for example, or get really p*%sed off when we break a mug or dinner gets burnt. But when we scale it up and look at the bigger picture, people go to war over their unprocessed emotion. The conflict and challenges the world is facing comes from peoples’ inability to really look at, be with and healthily process their emotions.
Self-care, processing of emotion, building self-awareness is not a nice to have, it is a crucial part in creating a peaceful, sustainable world.
Self-care is the most important job for us to do. To work on ourselves and make sure we are kind and compassionate and loving to ourselves means we are being kind and compassionate and loving to the world.
Self-care is an absolute priority, it is not a luxury.
Sending so much love, Hannah
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