To facilitate inner healing and growth, it’s vital to create an expansive, nurturing space for yourself.
In our last blog we encouraged you to cultivate a daily 10-minute routine to reflect on the thoughts that repeatedly plague your mind and how they might be limiting you from achieving your full potential. After an initial phase of self-inquiry, we moved on to reflect on how best we can maximise our resources — be they our money or our possessions.
Today we want to emphasise how important it is to ‘prepare the field’, much like a farmer. Let’s take a look.
Preparing the field: Imagine a farmer preparing his field after a season of drought. There are several factors that he must think about: how much water is required; the quality of the seeds to be sown and when best to sow them; when to add nutrients to the soil and in what quantity; to look out for weeds and pull them out regularly; watch out for pests and keep them away.
Now, let us try and draw parallels.
Create the space: Just like the farmer, we have many factors to keep in mind before we can start seeing the kind of results we are hoping for in our lives. One of the first things is probably creating healthy daily routines that nourish us physically, mentally and spiritually.
This includes:
— Good sleep habits
— A healthy diet regimen
— A regular exercise regimen
These three working in tandem form a sound foundation. Once we have set them up, and we are consistent with them, we can build over it. Spend some time to create a routine that works for you and your family and circumstances.
However, from time to time, please assess how well the routine is going for you. For instance, if you began by enforcing a strict 10pm bedtime rule for yourself, but a week in, you notice that you have slipped in some last-minute chores that prevent you from keeping your rule, then it’s time to re-assess your routine. Clearly it’s not working.
What can you do differently that helps you get the amount of sleep you need as well as the time to complete your tasks? Reinforce what’s positive — you getting enough sleep — and rid yourself of the negative — your teenage child may be slacking on his/her chores, forcing you to step in. This means having a conversation with him about getting back on track, so you can get back on track yourself.
This regular weeding out of the negative is necessary to preserve healthy growth. So don’t neglect it.
Take some time out today to create a routine — one that includes quality sleep; nourishing food and 30 minutes of exercise. Stick to it for at least 3-4 weeks to see any kind of results. A weekly re-assessment might be needed initially to tweak your schedule.
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