The holiday season is here, and I like to remind our community how important practicing self care is every day, and especially during the holiday season where we may feel triggers more easily when engaging with people and specific situations that we may not engage in during the rest of the year.
Prioritize your well being. No job or relationship is worth jeopardizing your wellness.
Purposefully create a safe, quiet space for healing. You will NEVER be able to heal in the midst of chaos or in the company of those who are infusing unhealthy behaviors into your space and causing you anxiety.
The thought that family bonds are “forever and unbreakable” sadly is a fallacy. ANY person who consistently infuses toxicity, drama and triggers anxiety into your space is NOT enriching your life and wellness.
Healthy relationships should enrich, not complicate your life into a spiral of confusion and despair.
Make peace (this takes time and should not be “set” to a timeframe) with the people and situations that are not serving you and discharge them from your life. If we don’t accept these realities and eliminate the emotional and toxic stressors from our lives, it WILL significantly hamper our recovery from the situation and keep us stuck in a dysfunctional mindset and relationship/job/situation.
Your only job in practicing self care is to re-visit your own expectations of self, create realistic, achievable goals, and to create a small action step to achieve that goal. Move forward slowly and strategically. Offer yourself as much time as needed to heal.
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO FEEL WHATEVER YOU FEEL FOR AS LONG AS YOU FEEL IT.
YOU are the one who is in charge of your thoughts, behaviors, relationships, happiness, and on the flip side, the unhealthy connections that exacerbate and fuel anxiety, sadness and can even manifest in physical symptoms of dis-ease.
There is NO quick fix.
Being in a hurry to “fix” it only fuels anxiety.
It is a daily process of reminding ourselves of how we want to feel, daily, and how we want to be received by others. What kind of environment do we want to create for ourselves and those we CHOOSE to allow into our space.? We need to ask ourselves, “What will bring me joy today? What do I need in this moment to feel peace? How do I need to love myself today?”
Inherently, we all know the answers to these questions.
The way in which we respond to these self reflection questions directly influences the reality that we create including the relationships and situations that we choose and allow into our space.
1. Speak your truth to yourself first. “To thine own self be true.”
2. Be selfish with your energy. CONSERVE your energy by not expending it in any negative connections through worry, anxiety, anger, etc.
3. Set healthy boundaries. Say “I love myself and my body. My boundaries will speak to others what I will and will NOT accept into my space and energy.”
4. Make a mindful decision to create a safe space for yourself whether at home, at work, or out enjoying fun times with others. Make a mindful decision to never engage in an energy that will drain your own energy.
5. Empower yourself through self care, self compassion and self preservation. This is the way that we empower and teach others.
For more on self care, read my book, Write Pray Recover: A Journey To Wellness Through Spiritual Solutions and Self Care available on Amazon and online bookstores worldwide. Or click here: http://www.writeprayrecover.com
Wishing you a blessed and peaceful holiday season.
Love and blessings,
Wendy
Write Pray Recover 