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lilacs

written by Anne Bolender

Here in Southern Ontario where I live, lilacs are a very welcomed sight. Lilacs signal that the snow and cold of winter has finally left the area and the warmth of spring has finally arrived. Lilacs also signal the beginning of rituals around spring cleaning – a time of caring for our homes and gardens in order for our homes and gardens to be the welcoming, warm places and spaces in which we can thrive.

Well, this year I have decided to add self care to my spring renewal rituals so that I too can thrive.

For many people, self care is the occasional massage or mani/pedi or time to ourselves; or self care is seen as creating a beautiful environment in their home and garden – which are all fine, but deep, pure self care is so much more that this.

What I am discovering is that self care involves pretty much anything and everything you do to and for your body, mind and spirit – up to and including choosing ethical hedonism and a spiritual practice (which is a topic for another post or two 🙂 Thinking positive thoughts, taking vacations, choosing to be happy (not fake happy, but real joy and laughter happy), feeling your authentic emotions, giving yourself permission to just be who you are – to make mistakes and take risks……all of that and so much more is the basis for self care.

There is an assessment that is used in a semi-professional/professional way to identify how well a person is doing with self care. You may have heard of the SCAT Assessment. There are roughly 250 points you can get by rating specific behaviours associated with self care. I thought I would do well with this assessment – after all, I am not unhappy with my life. Shocked me no end when I added up the points I had given myself and scored out at about 125 points (and that was probably being generous with any number of the behaviours listed.

The bad news was that I was not doing anywhere near as well as I thought I had been when it comes to self care. The good news is that I now get to play with adding self care rituals to my daily routines.

But more than that, I now understand why my energy levels are as low as they are most days, why there is so much I dream of doing yet never get around to doing it, and why I am not being as successful as I could be with manifesting my intentions. All excellent reasons, to me at least, for upping my self care routine.

So dear readers, what self care routines and rituals do you practice on a daily basis?

Till next time……..

 

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