Self care is NOT selfish. It makes you nicer.

Being female comes with a certain amount of guilt. We feel guilt for leaving our children to work, guilt for leaving work to attend to our children, guilt for eating that delicious cake and then the guilt for not exercising it off. We were raised to give so much of ourselves all of the time and we feel guilty and selfish if we book time out for some self-nurturing. But this guilt is self-defeating. By denying ourselves self-love we are basically saying to ourselves that we ‘are not worthy.’

The truth is that you are worthy. You are here, you might as well enjoy yourself.  Neuroscientist Rick Hanson says in his book The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, that by allowing ourselves to focus on positive experiences, we are training our brains to feel positive for more of the time, leading to a happier more fulfilling life. Likewise, by focusing on negative thought and experience, we are training negativity into our lives, and generally, our experiences and thoughts will be more negative.

Consider a Shiatsu massage, a whole hour to lie and rest. Tension is released, muscles and joints are relaxed, circulation is improved and your cells are nourished. You are giving yourself the beautiful message that you are worthy of care. Your brain neurons are getting training themselves in making positive connections, strengthening your positivity muscles and enabling you to feel good more frequently in future.

Taking action in your life to make yourself feel good, be it meditation, prayer, exercise, healthy food or a massage, will ultimately improve your experience of living. A happier body will free your mind to focus on getting the important things done. A chance to stop and relax will allow stress levels to normalise. Most importantly though, a sense of fulfilment will allow you to naturally be a more generous, giving and loving member of your family and wider community.

Positive change starts from the inside. There is so much wisdom in the saying ‘in order to change the world, we must first change ourselves.' If you can think of something you can do for yourself today to enhance your feel good factor please share in the comments below so we can inspire each other. I’m going to start with making a delicious Temple Bowl for dinner with brown rice, home-made hummus, cherry tomatoes, steamed bok choy and a boiled egg.

I hope you enjoyed this offering. I will be sending health and wellness tidbits on a weekly basis, if you would like to hear more please subscribe to my blog. I’ll keep you updated.

In bright shiny healthy love

Libby x