Is your wellness calling you?

We all know how it goes, and yet for a lot of us, we ignore this!

I’m right there with you, and we aren’t alone. Over-doing is the sickness of the 21st century, closely followed by all the chronic illnesses that this produces - but why?

We are all living to work in this day and age, and the guilty party behind this is capitalism! Humans don't instinctively want to work, work, work to buy stuff or ‘achieve’, It's a rotten dream we've been sold to keep some people at the top very rich, and to help Rihanna with song inspiration haha!

We aren’t just stupidly buying into it for no reason though, our innate search for satisfaction and happiness means that we can be led to believe that the answer is in external things - and voila! you have a world hooked on ‘consuming’ and ‘attaining’, which means DOING to get this stuff, including love.

We have become so conditioned to keep going and be productive, that slow pace and ‘less is more’ have been long forgotten and replaced with more caffeine (even in canned drink form now), fast food so we don’t have to ‘waste’ time cooking or eating, and then a million ways to distract from the fact that you aren’t enjoying this scenario of life - cue endless TV series, alcohol consumption at an all time high, drug mis-use, porn and gambling.

Now I know you may be sat there thinking, ‘Well I don’t do any of those bad things really’, but ask yourself this - what DO you enjoy at the weekend or when you’re off work?

For most people the answer to this can be a glass of wine or a pint, a take-away, a movie or getting stuck back into the series you just started…but yet none of those things actually gives you rest-bite from the over-doing and over-stimulated monkey mind, they just distract or numb us, and they certainly aren’t contributing to our wellness so then we end up over-working or with endless to-do lists of responsibilities, and then we add to that by not providing our physical, mental and emotional systems with a rest, in fact we stress them even more with poor nutrition, poison (alcohol), and more stimulation from tv.

Ok, so by now you might want to not read anymore as it sounds like I am telling you that everything you are doing isn’t great, but hang on a second more, because I am saying these things for a reason.

The world is sick, a lot of us are a bit sick, and the only way out of this mess in IN! It’s not to ignore this even more and dig our heads into more distractions (“ooo I know, let’s get a bigger house/car/married/more kids/new job/new friends/new series/new tv/new kitchen/new outfit etc and then we’ll be happy”);

we have to stop and go inward, turn off the input and SLOW. RIGHT. DOWN.

Happiness and being able to fill that dissatisfaction we all feel with external things i.e. job, car, house, relationship, providing for others, being needed by family etc, this is THE misunderstanding of the world.

So I’m going to share a bit of Buddha wisdom here (I love that guy); Happiness does not come from anything outside of you, it’s already within you! You are love, you are joy, you are peace - we have just forgotten how to access it and unless we stop, then how can we?!

🤔

In my work I see first hand how out of balance a lot of us are and it only gets worse if we carry on ‘doing’.

The balance of the world and of ourselves is of yang (think doing, achieving, striving, consuming, giving, making) and yin (resting, slowing down, flowing, surrendering, receiving), but in truth the world is YANG orientated so we neglect the yin parts, which are so essential for everything to work and function, including our bodies.

Eventually the system breaks, whether it be globally, like we are seeing at the moment, or on an individual level, because it is so out of balance for so long. This means chronic illness or injury, or dis-ease in us humans.

Thankfully though there are many warning signs, and if like me, you ignored them for a long time, perhaps it is time to listen. You know what I mean. The nagging injury, the stiffness in your lower back, the feeling of being stuck, the disgruntled or frustrated or angry feeling, the tears that don’t stop, flying off the handle, not being able to sleep, the chronic illness, the lack of motivation or energy, or the feeling that life has left you behind. These are all instances where we missed the subtle voice of warning signs that our bodies and emotions communicate, and we’ve gone too far down the path of believing that the only way to live is to DO.

Achievement and consuming has become the 'norm' and is in hyper drive 🚗

I recently wrote a list of all the things I do in a day and a week and I kid you not, nearly all of them were yang. And I then tried to eliminate some of them and decide what I could drop, I watched myself recoil and feel bad, like I was failing, and I was saying to myself;

'BUT HOW WILL THOSE THINGS GET DONE?!'

This is THE killer of wellness and why we don't MAKE time for it!

We think that unless we're 'doing' our life won't move anywhere, or we won’t be happy, or we will let those we care for down, but in fact we won’t, and in over-doing and trying to be a superhero when we need to stop, means eventually we will be unable to be there to do these things at all - we aren’t much use in bed unwell!

Magical things happen when we change our mindset and prioritise finding balance and rest. This could be doing less, saying no to things, taking a walk somewhere so it takes you longer but you don’t sit in traffic, turning off the tv and sitting doing nothing instead, getting a massage, joining a yoga class instead of a HIIT class…the list goes on and it’s very personal to each person - the message is -

SLOW AND FLOW.

One way I have been consciously doing this has been setting aside time in my diary for self-care practices BEFORE I set my appointments and work for the week/month - this has really helped me make sure I MAKE time for me and for nothing, rather than trying to fit it in after ⚖

In my online healing immersion ‘ReWilding’ we address this theme of over-doing and where we look for happiness BIG TIME. We look at what drives us to lose balance in life, what beliefs are beneath this, and what practices we can work on to help bring us to more happiness, peace and flow, in our minds, our lives and in our bodies.

If it’s time for a look at the balance in your life (and if you’re reading this then I would like to hedge a bet that it probably is) then drop me an email to chat or sign-up below to join my FREE ‘ReWild Your Life’ online workshop in 2 weeks and find out how ReWilding can help you go from stressed to blessed ❤ You’ll also receive my ‘yoga nidra for a peaceful night’s sleep’ session as a thank you to yourself for choosing YOU. If you haven’t done yoga nidra before then you are missing out! It’s yogic sleep and really helps get us deep into our rest and restore nervous system 😴

Stay tuned for my next blog on this topic entirely and something I love very much: SLEEP!

What wellness practices are you making time for this week?