Self-care for Sensitive Souls
Reconnect with your inner resources
Do you ever feel that your life consists of getting through the day? Many of us spend our energy and focus on an endless to-do list. We have family, bosses, bills, the relentless inbox and other assorted demands to manage. We’re constantly responding to these demands. Prepare for tomorrow's meeting, pick up some milk, fill up with petrol, read the meter, go compare (again), make a massive chilli to freeze, answer the important email I should have answered yesterday, clear out the spare room. And if all that gets done (good job with the spare room), we’ve made it through another day. Till tomorrow. We know we’re in a hole, but we can’t seem to dig ourselves out of it. So we tell ourselves we’re busy and productive. The more ticks we have on our list, the more productive we feel. (Anyone else write down completed jobs just for the satisfaction of ticking them off?) The same routine follows day after day, week after week. The big snag is that eventually, months and even years can go by like this. And almost imperceptibly, the opportunity for a deeper life slips away. But a beautiful remedy is already right here with you. When we’re in pain, we naturally try and do whatever we can to make it go away. Sometimes that works and then great, we’re back to normal. But stubborn pain that won't go away is another thing altogether. It can make us feel burdened and frustrated with the way the pain is affecting our everyday life. This calls us to a deeper level of self-care. Fortunately we have just the thing: an innate source of relief for pain and distress. It's profoundly soothing, freely available to us, and works better the more we use it. There’s plenty of evidence that the simple practice of meditation can free us from the hold that pain has over us, and bring ease and comfort whenever we need it. Here's how it works ... You know how it is. Sometimes we just need some compelling ‘what’s in it for me’ reasons to get on with our meditation practice. When we feel the benefits are a bit patchy or hard to pin down, it’s nice to have some encouragement from scientific research. If you’ve been around meditation for any length of time, you’ll have come across loving-kindness meditation. Loving-kindness is the practice of cultivating the feeling of universal love - in other words love for all beings, beyond personal or romantic love. Typically in meditation we do this by directing compassionate wishes towards ourselves and others. You would probably expect the research to show that loving-kindness increases positive feelings of goodwill and empathy, and indeed it does. But researchers have turned up some other, unexpected benefits ... |
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Claire Seabrook Body Mind practitioner Cheltenham |