Internal Self Care

 

This past week my emotions have been on edge. A few times, I have even had to temper the desire to scream out loud in frustration. I definitely had the feeling of being overwhelmed. Thankfully, I have enough insight to see this as a sign that my inner world is teetering towards the point of total imbalance and do something about it before I completely loose it and fall off the rails.

What my body was telling me, is that I need a little internal self care.

When folks are in crisis, it is easy to prescribe a time out, to take a little break from the issues surrounding them. The purpose being to rest, to gain a wider perspective and to calm the nerves enough to build a bit of resiliency. Much like a warrior needs to recover from battle before he can be strong enough to wade back into the campaign.

But for me, there is no crisis. In fact, life could not be better. Things are moving forward with ease in my life right now. So why would I feel on edge and desire the need for a little time out?

It is actually because my life is moving forward and that I am striving and reaching my much desired goals, that I need to take time out to re-balance my body and soul.

Any time we make a large leap and cause change in our life, even good change, we have unknowingly moved the fulcrum on our internal scales. Too much focus on one area of our lives can mean that we have neglected other, important areas, and this causes internal imbalance.

Think of a children’s seesaw. If you have two children on one side and one child on the other, in order to balance it out, you have to move the pivot point over to one side and redistribute the weight.

Or another way to think of this is, if I only focus on one room in my house, it won’t take long for the other rooms to become stale and dusty from mis-use. The same goes for the four main rooms of our internal whole self. Those being the emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual components that make up a well rounded person.

 

 

So in order to continue moving forward on my mental goals and feel calm, focused and in control, I need to purposefully re-balance the internal components of my life.

This is the lesson I needed to learn this week. In my mission to move forward with the goals I have set out for myself, I had inadvertently neglected the other rooms of my internal house and instead became ultra focused on only one of the rooms. That being the mental room, and too much mental was making me, well, mental.

But there were other factors that entered into this imbalance as well because instead of ignoring the other rooms in my internal life, I had actually been pulling out energy from them with out replenishing my withdrawals. I was quickly draining my reserves.

The edginess I was feeling this last week, was really my body advising me that the need for internal self care was paramount if I want to successfully continue towards my current goals and so a little time out was needed.

For the vast majority of us, it is our mental aspect that gets overloaded. Meetings, to do lists, schedules, constant media assaulting our sight lines, our minds rarely rest.

There will also be times in our lives when the emotional aspect of our life will take a beating.  Loss, failure, death, financial stress are but a few of the stressors that can, and will, impact our emotional well being at some point.

Interestingly, it is the physical and spiritual aspects positioned on the other side of the internal seesaw that are meant to balance out the mental and emotional aspects, and yet those are the two to most likely be ignored.

And here’s the thing, if you are self aware, it doesn’t require much to re-balance your internal house. A mindful walk in nature, a few hours spent in play with a child, a re-dedication to your morning meditation practice, or even an hour sitting in the sun with a good book can give you the self care boost needed to re-balance the scales or air out all the rooms of your soul.

So that is the goal for me this weekend, some soulful self care. Sunday mornings have always been my spiritual recharge time. I decided to grab that time back from my ever increasing to do list. Even though mother nature has not cooperated this spring, my physical aspect is crying out for some serious movement. So a walk in the rain it is for me as well.

A little internal self care goes a long way. The key is to listen to your body, honour the message and correct any imbalance before even the aspect you have been focused on rebels along with the others, and more drastic measures are needed.

 

What do you do to practice internal self care? Join the conversation and share your thoughts.