Tips 9 and 10 on how to improve your relationship with yourself
10 Tips on how to improve your relationship with yourself
Last Episode: Tips 9 and 10!
Tip 9: I shall nurture myself
Nurturing ourselves is something often misunderstood.
It is not about treating ourselves with something that just feels nice.
Of course it must feel nice but it must be much more than that. It must serve our growth.
For this reason, I like the expression of “Life-giving Connections” as offered by the PRH School.
A life-giving connection happens when we do something where we feel fully ourselves, we feel energised, and even connected with more than just ourselves.
These connections typically happen when we:
Spend some quality time with someone we like and who matters to us
Spend time in nature
Do something creative (visiting a gallery, making crafts, creative writing, dancing, day dreaming, travelling, listening to music, singing etc.)
Spend some quality time with ourselves (meditation, bath, colouring etc.)
There are two very important conditions for any of these connections to be life-giving:
We must be mindful, ie. Slow down and focus on what is happening inside us
We must consciously feel our love towards ourselves
These are the two conditions because they will allow us to receive the life-giving connection, receive the love and the energy.
In a nutshell, a life-giving connection nurtures our soul, serves our purpose in life, which is to blossom in who we are. This is why life-giving connections are good to prioritise when we want to improve our relationship with ourselves.
How can you help yourself?
Take a few minutes to list the life-giving connections you experience already in your life.
Make the decision to live more of these and see if there are activities you need to do less of because they are not life-giving at all and don’t allow you to be yourself
Schedule in your life-giving connections so you can indeed have them :-)
Tip 10: I shall spend some meditative time with myself
There are many ways to meditate. I would like to present you a new way today. In the PRH School of education we call this way “Having a time for being”.
A time for being is a meditation on one aspect of our identity that is essential to who we are.
Here is how you can go about it:
Prepare yourself by relaxing and bringing your mind to focus.
Let go of ideas about what you want to do now and connect with what you feel in your body right now.
From this place of connection, ask yourself “What aspect of my identity would I like deeply to grow?”
Make sure the answer doesn’t come from a desire of your mind but rather let your gut tell you what is really important for you now. Allow yourself to be surprised.
4. Once you have found this quality or aspect of your identity, let it grow inside you. Focus on it until the sensation of living it fills up your body, your emotional field and your mind. You are this quality right now.
5.Stay there for as long as you can.
6. Come back out of your meditation and see if something new came up. It often happens.
Examples of themes for times for being: “My aspiration to be myself”, “My ability to love myself unconditionally”, “My ability to persevere”, “My gratitude for my courage”, “My trust in life process”, “My ability to be truly free”, “My generosity”, “My ability for leadership”, “My aspiration to be part of such and such meaningful enterprise”, “My faith”, “My connection with the universe”, “My deep belief in a certain value (peace, justice, freedom…)”, “My love for someone (my partner, my child…)” etc.
Times for being are extremely powerful because they foster our connection with who we are so we can more easily be ourselves.
