Day 43 Making Time for Self-Care
Reflecting on how our time aligns with our self-care priorities
We are in the final week of our Lenten study of Sacred Self-Care! This week is all about extending our heightened self-care focus over the past six weeks into our daily lives. Today, we begin this by taking a look at how our time reflects our self-care priorities. What did you notice when you did this? How did you put self-care on your schedule today? What strategies and resources can you utilize to incorporate self-care into your daily routines?
Register for Saturday’s Zoom Session
On Saturday, March 30, we will hold our closing session from 11am-12pm eastern time. Dr. Chanequa will share tips for creating and utilizing the Self-Care Rule of Life. Register for the session here.
The best thing I have done this year is structured my day so I go to work at 9am. That allows me plenty of time in the morning to exercise, meditate, and do other personal tasks. I find at the end of the day after work I’m too tired to prioritise myself in any productive self-care practices. What has helped me a lot is to use a daily checklist of things I want to do for me (yoga/walking/drink 8 bottles of water/take medicine/etc.). I can accomplish most of the list by the time I leave for work (not the water!) and that feels good. In the reading, I found it reassuring to acknowledge how schedules will likely need to be changed at times but the “template” gives a place to return to. Overall the weekend I realised I had not referred to my daily checklists for a week or so and I’m back in the habit now.
What has been very grounding is to allow for silence, reflections, prayer “Care of Soul” to start my day and “Care of Self” to end my day with physical stretching, walking, or dancing (to move my body because of a sedentary type of day).
When heavy emotional or spiritual distractions interfere the flow of the day, I tend to pause, breathe and do a quick body scan. It is my way of seeing where my body is holding the heaviness of the distractions.
Doing this Lenten Study now has been teaching me how to continue to be intentional in pacing and self-care, to avoid getting back into “exhaustion land.”