21 Jan Be Well

‘Self-care isn’t selfish, it’s self-esteem.’ Ashley Judd

Do you have trouble putting your own needs ahead of the needs of everyone & everything else around you?

Have you ever struggled to understand why you say ‘yes’ when you’d love to say ‘no’? Or why you find yourself exhausted at the end of a day spent caring for everyone else, that you’ve got no energy or time left for yourself? No time to fill your own cup.

What fills our cup? Shall we call it energy or time or resources? Perhaps you’ll call it something else. Regardless of what we call it, our mindset about how we use the contents in our cup is often unhelpful.

You see, many of us work with a ‘scarcity’ mindset. We live as though there’s not enough to go around & yet, we continue to give & give without pausing to replenish our cups. We’re doing it wrong.

A wise man named Tom once explained that we can live in abundance if we choose to. Instead of pouring from our own cup – giving to our family, giving to our work, giving to our home, giving to our parents, our friends, our pets, our self-care – and ending up with a cup that runs dry.

Instead, we embrace an abundance mindset & focus only on filling our cup until it’s overflowing.

Everything outside of ourselves gets our over-flow.

Read that again.

So how do we switch our mindset? How do we change this self-sacrificing coping style of ours, the one driven by our inner self-critic that tells us loud stories about not being loveable, good enough or, worthy of self-care.

We know all too well that when that voice is loud, we trample all over our healthy boundaries, saying yes to everything & everyone that isn’t us. It doesn’t matter how tired we are, how time poor, how much we need to spend time at home with our family, that old self-sacrificing voice threatens the world will end if we dare put our own needs first.

Driven by a fear of rejection, exclusion, abandonment, failure or whatever you’d like to call it, that inner critic never seems satisfied. It just seems to demand more & more & more. And that’s okay. You see, these systems are primal. They’re a part of what it means to be human. But, where threats used to be sabre toothed tigers, they’re now more likely to be social in nature. They’re no longer life-threatening.

We develop many ‘safety strategies’ to avoid our fears & self-sacrificing is one way. The problem is, if we’re always prioritising everyone else’s needs ahead of our own & pour from an empty cup, we will eventually feel resentful, stressed, burnout or sick.

Practicing self-compassion by acknowledging these very old, very human responses is a wonderful first step to shifting our mindset.

We’ve seen this so many times on retreat & in the clinic, when we are able to identify these ancient functions of our brain & practice self-compassion to recognise these responses are not of our choosing, nor are they our fault, we then place ourselves in a position to choose how we respond to the stories our body & mind tells us.

Response is always better than reaction.

Compassion allows us to understand our emotions & behaviours in context & when we’re able to do that, we understand our own worth & the value of prioritising ourselves.

When we are living our lives consciously, when we are more present, less distracted, we’re in the best position to choose how we want to live. How we want to be.

According to the Happiness Pie theory, consciously, intentionally choosing how you think about life & how you live your life accounts for almost half of your state of wellbeing.

Our Be Well Retreat workshops provide you with the tools to learn how to choose a values-driven life, how to boost your wellbeing, and how to choose you, over and over and over again.

We embrace a Positive Psychology focus, using evidence-based practices with a strengths focus as opposed to a deficit focus. And we do it all within the ancient, spiritual surroundings of Desa Seni in Canggu.

All that’s left to do, is for you to choose your self.

by Eve Drew & Dr Jodie Fleming