As a woman of a certain age, I carry a lot of baggage around the idea of nurturing and caring for others. In my life, it has always been the role and the responsibility of the women in the family to do the bulk of caretaking and nurturing. Not only should I take care of all the emotional, physical, and spiritual needs of the family, I should do it perfectly. I should be able to fix everything,
Certainly a lot of my contemporaries struggle with the same issue. We feel guilty and wrong when we take care of ourselves, or when we ask for help. We assume that we are the only ones who can do things right, so we attempt to do everything ourselves. Then we long to run away to someplace where there is no one to make any more demands on our time or energy. We beat ourselves up when we are tired, cranky, or out of sorts. We speak negatively to ourselves in ways that we would never speak to others. We blame ourselves for everything that goes wrong. In short, we take on the responsibility for the world and blame ourselves when we can’t carry the load.
So what would happen if we were as kind to ourselves as we are to others? What would happen if we rested when we were tired, if we asked for help when we needed it, if we gave ourselves permission to be less than perfect? What would happen if we took time alone to recharge our souls? What would happen if we gave ourselves credit for the good things we have done and let the bad things go? What would happen if we quit the negative self-talk and began to give ourselves “atta girls” for the efforts we have made? What would happen if we treated ourselves as well as we treat others?
So just for today I am going to be kind to myself. I am going to give myself the gift of time for myself, if it is only five minutes of focusing on my Soul. I am going to quit blaming myself for things that are out of my control. I am not going to beat myself up internally or call myself names when I don’t do something perfectly. I am going to forget the shoulds and focus on the I want to’s. I am going to love myself, for it is only when I love myself that I can truly love others.
