This Blog Post May not Change Anyone Else’s Life

The body says what words cannot. ~Martha Graham

It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Riding the wave of powerful cleansing energy from my Reiki attunement, I thought I would just continue to feel better.  After all 21 days of cleansing and balancing just happens, so why wouldn’t it be possible for me to just feel energized by that?  So I continued to do too much, and stress too much, and after the first few days, I fell into bed without doing self-Reiki, and went to work in the morning without doing meditation…and you know what?  I feel lousy.  

In some ways, even though I do feel less drained than I did before, I feel worse, because now my body is even more aware of what I’m doing wrong.  When dinner is cheese and crackers and applesauce, my body knows that something is missing.  When I’m too lazy to take my vitamins before bed, the things those vitamins are supposed to be balancing act up.  Now, all the messages that my body has been giving me all along are too loud to be ignored.  Something has to give, and my health has been that something far too often.  Even now I feel the ache in the back of my throat and the dull pain in my temple that means I’m dehydrated and overtired, and last night I was wide awake in the middle of the night with thoughts bouncing around in my head.

Self-care is not optional.  I knew this when I began training to be a psychotherapist; I knew that in order to treat and care for others, I had to have a way to care for myself.  And yet, as soon as I get busy, it’s the first thing I let slide.  I wasn’t going to write today – caught up in the whirlwind of final papers, I thought, I should take this time to write papers, not to write something “frivolous”.  But this is important.  This blog post may not change anyone else’s life, but it’s a reminder that I am committing once again to changing my own.  I need to write.  I need to sleep, and meditate, and eat good food, and do yoga, and do self-Reiki and make myself a priority.   Because when I put everyone else first, we all lose out, because I can’t give them my whole self until I make sure that I’m making myself whole.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; but spiritual beings having a human experience. ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin