No one is immune from stress, loss, change, or ill health… we all have a fallible human body, we all lose people we love. Energetic bankruptcy is no joke. We need self-care to keep us topped up. Self-care gives us a fighting chance in the face of life’s inevitable curveballs.
Suzy Reading
Self-care helps us cope during challenging times. Often, this is when self-care gets dropped from the agenda because we are too time poor and fatigued, but this is precisely the time when we need to nourish ourselves. We just need an evolving toolkit that meets our needs and resources at different times.
Self-care helps us heal whether it is a physical, mental or emotional wound. It’s about taking the time to soothe and seek out the help we need to process and move through trauma or injury.
Self-care provides a buffer from future stress. Engaging in regular nourishment boosts our resilience and helps us respond with greater resourcefulness and creativity to challenging events.
It feels good! Often, self-care is a pleasant and life-giving act and something that we deserve to really savour… Sometimes, the act itself might be uncomfortable, like taking that run when all you want to do is sloth on the sofa, or maybe it’s the discomfort of practicing forgiveness. If it’s not intrinsically pleasurable it is expanding us and helping us grow in some way.
Self-care is good for our relationships. When we take the time to engage our heads, hearts and bodies in ways that we find energizing and replenishing, we come together in relationship with lighter hearts and greater generosity. Great things blossom when we encourage each other to do things that make our spirit soar, better still do them together.
We need to role model self-care for our kids. Want to raise compassionate and resilient kids? Who doesn’t! Rather than hoping they will pick it up by osmosis, that’s if we have our own self-care practice… teach them the tools of self-care, involve them in your rituals of nourishment.
Self-care gives us access to compassion and this can transform the quality of our day in an instant. I can’t think of a quality more needed in this world. Use the mantra ‘I soften into this moment’ and feel how this cultivates greater calm, openness, acceptance, and compassion.
Engage in self-care and you tap into your best self - it is the ultimate win win! Take little moments to energise when you’re feeling sluggish, to let off steam when you’re feeling full up, to focus when you’re feeling mentally dissipated, to just drop when you’ve been carrying a heavy burden. When we are kinder to ourselves, we are kinder people! Self-care helps us be a better incarnation of ourselves, and it benefits not only us, but every person our life touches.
Without health, what do we have? So give yourself permission to nurture yourself head, heart and body.
Suzy is a mother of two, a Chartered Psychologist, Yoga Teacher, and Health Coach. She specialises in self-care, helping people manage their stress, emotions, and energetic bank balance. It was her life experience of motherhood colliding with the terminal illness of her father that sparked her passion for self-care which she now teaches to her clients, young and old, to cope during periods of stress, loss and change and to boost their resilience in the face of future challenges. Suzy is a contributing editor for Psychologies Magazine and the Psychology Expert for wellbeing brand Neom Organics. She figure-skated her way through her childhood, growing up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, and now makes her home in hills of Hertfordshire, UK. Her first book ‘The Self-Care Revolution’ published by Aster, is due out 28th December 2017.
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The Self-Care Revolution by Suzy Reading is published by Aster on 28 December, £12.99 (octopusbooks.co.uk)