Wellness - PART 2
Did you have a chance to note down what makes you feel good about you, empowers you, and makes your heart sing as mentioned in Part 1? Let’s think about how to incorporate one or two of those things into your daily life. Knowing that you will be nurturing yourself on a regular basis is food for the soul and especially for your inner child. Intentionally planning and giving yourself positive experiences to look forward to are mentally and emotionally telling yourself that you value your own happiness and your wellbeing. This is a sign of good mental health maintenance, and this maintenance will sustain and support you through the rougher times in your life. When you practice good self-care, you know that are in your own corner coaching and empowering yourself.
One of the things in your busy life I recommend that you do is to schedule Yourself into your daily calendar. Carve out time for yourself even if it is only 30 minutes a day. If you tune into your own needs and you decide how you can best nurture yourself each day to maintain your wellbeing. I feel that I need to tell you all that self-care is not selfishness. It is taking care of yourself and that is one of the healthy goals of becoming an independent, mature, and capable adult. Selfishness is when you only ever care about yourself and that is not the intention of self-care. We can love and help others and take care of ourselves at the same time. Society, different cultures, and different families place all kinds of expectations and demands on us as children and then as adults. Some of these demands and expectations are unhealthy and can distort our self-image if they don’t support our sense of self-worth. Sometimes we are taught that we should not take care of ourselves but that we should take care of anyone else but ourselves. In some cases, things get turned completely backwards by emotionally immature and needy parents. This type of parent teaches their children that they have to take care of their parents’ needs. This is very sad and difficult for the children who feel empty from the lack of parental care that they so desperately need. For those of you have who have experienced these types of familial issues, it is even more important that you learn to feel your own needs and to provide them to yourself as best as you can. This is an important focus of your personal wellness practice.
I’ll share some of my personal go-tos that I use for maintaining my own mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. It is my hope that you can think about and learn from them, and then ask yourself what yours are and how you plan to implement them into your personal wellness practice. Remember, you’re worth it!
Meditation- Having an active, creative mind as well as being intuitively very sensitive, I need to meditate. It is when I feel. deal with and calm my emotions. It eases my mental stress, relaxes my mind, and allows me to just be with myself, instead of being there for others. I love being of service, but no one can be on 24/7 for others without burning out. We all need time to go inward and evaluate our own needs to give what we need to ourselves. This way, we fill ourselves and we are not endlessly “giving from an empty cup”. This is helpful for parents to remember as well. Kids. Are. Needy. It is the nature of all young beings to look their parents to fulfill their needs. Parents need to take time to recharge themselves daily. Anyone in a caregiving job, being a parent, a teacher, a healer, etc., It is a necessity to replenish and care for ourselves. I also feel that it is important for parents to distinguish for themselves, and for their kids, the difference between needs and wants. Kids don’t need those candies at the check out counter that stores put there for impulse purchases. Kids may act like they will die without them, but really, they won’t. The candies are there to make kids want them and then to seemingly torment their parents into buying them. Marketing strategies work and can be hard in everyone…. And meditating on issues like this one is also a bonus! You can shop with a strategy you may have found while meditating to order to deal with these stressful triggers in the grocery store!
Alone time – Take a minute now and consider how much time alone do you need? Some people are very extroverted, and they absolutely thrive on socializing. And this is how they relax and recharge themselves. Other people balance somewhere between socializing and taking time out just for themselves. And some of us need much more alone time than others. I personally fall into the third category. I am what is called a “Psychic Sensitive”. Being an empath and psychic intuitive, I pick up on other people’s emotions and energy very easily and it shifts my emotions and energies if I am not being careful, this can be quite draining.
If you are also empathic, you may find that after a day working around other people and being “on” all day, you are exhausted mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you’re a caregiver and an empath like some in the medical fields, this goes double for you. Allowing yourself to have a transitional period of time where you can release all of their energy, and to recalibrate yourself to feeling just your energy and emotions is absolutely a core wellness necessity for you. Also, having a practice where you begin and end your day with recreating your energetic boundaries is a wellness must. On my to-do list is to create easy, guided healing meditations to help you to do so, so keep an eye in my social media outlets!
Healthy and organic foods – Good food is medicine, health, strength, and wellbeing for all of our bodies. The types of wholesome foods you ingest may depend on a medical issue you are treating with your specific diet. You may be an athlete with a specific physical goal which strictly regulates your food intake requirements. Or you may follow a spiritual or personal conviction about what your do and do not eat. We all have our reasons for how we eat. Eating mindfully about what we choose to actually eat still applies to all of these cases and more. Are you aware of what’s in what you have been eating?
For my own physical wellness, I stay away from processed foods. I am a devote label reader and use the 5-ingredient rule when I buy anything at the grocery store. The 5-ingredient rule is don’t buy anything with more than 5 ingredients on the label. where if there are more than 5 wholesome ingredients on a food label, they had better be wholesome foods only. Processed food, like cereal, canned soups, and other prepared foods had better have healthy and organic foods only. If sugar or corn syrup solids is the first ingredient, if there are preservatives, food coloring, or any ingredients that sound like a science experiment, I simply don’t buy it. It’s really easy to learn to read the labels, and it’s second nature to me now. You may be interested to know that these types of food additives are toxins that other countries, like those in the European Union, have strict laws against putting in their food supply and even into their cosmetics. The women and men in these countries make darn sure that their politicians enacted laws that require that there are no pesticides, added preservatives, or chemicals in their processed foods. Makes me wonder about the food Lobbyists in the USA who offer financial support to our politicians’ campaigns in return for Not regulating what the huge food conglomerates put in our food. Food for thought, yes?
Regular Exercise –Exercise in the age of computers is absolutely essential. We all sit for hours behind our monitors or devices on a daily basis. Getting outside in Nature, working up a sweat, and moving is essential for maintaining our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. When we exercise, we release stress, generate and circulate “wellbeing” hormones throughout our bodies, called endorphins – the feel good hormones – that regulate and raise our mood, how good our bodies feel, and we feel good about ourselves. I cannot live without doing exercise in one form or another. Whether I am just taking a walk with my husband on the beach, doing CrossFit training, Melt Method, Yoga, or dancing this is simply a must for me. You are the proud owner of a human body. What works for you???
Spirituality – How you feed your soul spiritual sustenance, I believe, is an important practice of wellness, of wholeness. How we get there is very personal and unique to each of us. Some of us will find practicing a religion that best path for our souls. Some will combine belief systems and find meaning between them. And some of us will find it from many great spiritual teachers that have shared their own journeys. And by going inside our hearts in the peace of nature or in our meditation or prayer rooms to study and to pray. You may recall that Jesus said – “The kingdom of God is within you.” – and He also said “to go into a closet alone to pray.” I have found the last type of seeking best for me. Following within me the endlessly evolving inward path to my Higher Self and to the Divine is where I find meaning.
I have been a spiritual seeker all my life in one capacity or another. I have practiced a formal religion, Protestant Methodism, until I was 18. I studied Hinduism in college. When I got older, I independently studied the theologies of the world religions. I then fell in love with another religion, Buddhism, and studied it in more depth. I was also a householder yogini for 15 years. I have deeply studied and practiced two forms of spiritual energy healing and had a small business dedicated to this work. And, I have had some of the deepest spiritual experiences and awakenings through deep meditation practices. After 37 years of practice, I am now able to energetically connect with the Divine Consciousness, Angels, and Ascended Masters like Jesus and Buddha. I am also an Evidential Psychic Medium and am able connect to transitioned souls. The best way I have to explain where I am now is I am a spiritual mystic. I don’t believe that humanity is able to fully name what our Creator is or thinks because our minds are just not big enough to encompass the mind of what we humans may call God. But that does not mean I don’t explore, question, learn, understand, grow, and connect to The Divine. I personally believe that this is the most important journey of our souls: to evolve our souls through our seeking, to grow into our own personal connection with our Creator, and to discover what is our own, intimate understanding of this Mystery.
So, I hope in this two-part blog I have given you some helpful and useful ways to think about and to maintain your own wellness. Remember you are a unique individual with your unique needs in each of the categories of mind, body, emotions, and spirit. I do not claim to speak for exactly what you personally need for good self-care, but rather to offer ways to help you to see and to approach what you may need to be your healthiest and most whole self. And while you are thinking about your wellness, you may want to use my Spiritually Channeled Inhaler, Wellness, to awaken yourself to your capacity of being and staying well - even and especially when that roller coaster that is life takes an unexpected, unnerving turn. Wellness inhalers can be purchased at www.evolvingspirit.com for only $38.00.
As always, I wish you all the best in your life’s journey.
Namaste,
Jean