If you’re having anything like my experience in America (and across the Northern border in Canada where many of my wonderful friends and extended family live), you may be feeling overwhelmed by news, uncertain as to how much you should take in vs. how much to protect your own mental state, or unclear on what you can do to take action. All-the-while having to keep getting life done.
I know I have felt powerless against the forces that are play in the wider world right now.
I also know that we each have a lot of individual levers we can pull to affect outcome and our own experience.
Today, I thought I’d share FOUR things I’ve been doing to keep myself sane, and hope that you can glean some helpful support from this list, especially in such uncertain times.
Why work to keep ourselves sane? Because I believe that when we feel better, we make better choices and everyone else around us benefits. As humans / caretakers of other beings / moms, this is critically important. Sure, our days can and will get derailed on the regular, but we KNOW that when we feel calm, strong, and more in control, things go better.
It takes real effort to carve out the time and space for your well being. I believe it’s worth it.
Here’s the list:
Decide yourself that it’s worth it to take care of yourself and learn HOW to do it. We’ve all heard the “put your own oxygen mask on first” analogy, and this is true, of course. We can’t help anyone else if we collapse.
But HOW do we actually do this? How do we start to shift the mindset that has been so ingrained in our culture that we, as women, need to give up our own needs for the sake of everyone else? Especially when we truly love those everybody-elses more than anything and would do anything for them?
I’ve been enjoying a great meditation series lately called “Living from the Heart” with Scott Schwenk, and there is a practice in the series that he teaches where you practice receiving the breath from all sides of your body in the inhale, and then you imagining that energy overflowing beyond you to all beings like a waterfall on the exhale. I have found this to be a very visceral way to practice receiving strength, clarity, inspiration, compassion, fill-in-the-blank and then expanding that beyond my own little life. This overflow can expand to your family and/or beyond.
We have to really show up for ourselves and get as stable as we can. Only then can we give our best to those around us. Find ways to regularly practice this receiving of self-care. It pays off.
Be an example for your kids & those around you. It’s an important life skill to learn self-regulation, mindfulness, and mindbody practices so we can be strong and calm in life. Letting your family and friends see you doing your practice or getting ready to go out to do your practice helps reinforce the message that working out and doing mindbody work is something we do as people in the world.
Get down to brass tacks and get organized. At some point, instead of just collecting information, you have to make it happen. Get a plan, commit to a schedule, get your space organized. Sometimes, if your life is super scattered and you’re having a lot of trouble just getting to your practice/workouts, you need to treat the setup as a mini-project. Set up all the systems and the spaces and the time, and then this setup will pay off. You’ll get to just show up and let the practices work on you.
Over the last 9 months or so, I have been incredibly focused on following a consistent movement plan, and it makes all the difference. Having structure in the form of a calendar, a clear framework and a way to track progress keeps us motivated and moving forward without many of the roadblocks that more often get in our way. Don’t have a plan? Reach out and I can help you develop one.
Use your practice to fuel your life. We often compartmentalize our workouts and the rest of our lives.
I work out / practice yoga.
Then I go home / go back to the rest of my life.
What if, instead, you decided how you wanted to feel in your life and intentionally trained that feeling in your practice? This is honestly such a different way of working out and moving. Want to feel more confident? TRAIN confidence in your practice. Want to feel less rushed? Slow down and TRAIN ease in your practice. When you practice in this way, you will actually want and need to show up for your practice in order to do the work in the world you want to do and to care for those you want to care for.
In times like these, we remember WHY we’ve practiced all this time, and it becomes clear that we need to keep it up.
For those who are interested, here are some other resources I recommend these days:
5calls.org - 5 phone calls you can make to your representatives to make sure your voice is heard and is counted. Updated daily.
Independent journalism - Two that I’ve been reading are News Not Noise and Tangle. I especially like Tangle because it presents both right and left sides of issues, plus a ‘My take’ section at the end. Got others you like? I’d love to know what you’re reading…please share!
Americans of Consciousness Checklist - a weekly checklist of actions you can take to move the needle on democracy.
Yours in sanity,
xo,
Robin
Beautifully stated, Robin. I am in the throes of working hard on the organization and planning. Your four points are very thoughtful and much appreciated.