Episode 132: How Caregivers can Find Love for Themselves in Just 10 Minutes a Day
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Transcript
We spend a lot of time wishing we were loved more, appreciated more and seen. We base our future happiness on the health of the people we care for. How many times do you think or say that you’ll do something for yourself or feel happier once they recover or feel better. So we spend forever waiting because even if that day were to come we would probably push finding our own happiness to the side.
We can’t base our happiness and our self love on other people. Yes people in our lives can bring us happiness. We feel good about ourselves when we feel we are truly seen by people. However, that happiness doesn’t last long.
Somehow we have to find that happiness and love from within ourselves. Hear me out…
We are caring for people out of the love we have for them. Being around our families can make us happy. But… all of that comes from outside us. Caregiving can prove to be extremely difficult and we need to be able to pull from an inner source of happiness. We need to be able to have a source of love that is not dependent on other people.
We need to love ourselves.
Easier said than done, right?
Maybe you’ll get to it when there’s time. When they feel better. When life is easier you’ll consider spending more time on your relationship with yourself.
I get it.
Our relationships with ourselves and how we see ourselves in our world is tied in to a ball of complicated emotions, experiences and relationships we’ve been in through the course of our lives. So how dare I suggest you love yourself more when there is no time or energy to combat the negative self talk, feelings of being disregarded and abandonment that intensified when you became a caregiver.
To that I say there is a way to start cultivating more love for yourself it isn’t complicate and it takes less than 10 minutes a day.
There is a special list of techniques I learned in my Yoga and Meditation training that have always been my favorites. One of these is the practice of Loving Kindness and it ties in to the concept of you are what you think.
You see if I were to tell you to simply stop engaging in negative self talk, spend more time falling in love with yourself and begin to see your value I’m not helping you.
However, if I say spend just ten minutes saying these four short sentences I’m giving you something you can do anywhere at anytime.
I’m not trying to discount how important it is to work through things with a person qualified to help you. I truly believe we all have periods of time in our life when therapy, counseling or coaching is important. Lovingkindess is not a substitute for that.
It’s kinda like that “Employees Must Wash Their Hands” sign in restaurant bathrooms.
You see that sign everywhere and it probably didn’t seem to be a big deal to you.
First of all we know that washing your hands in a public bathroom has it’s merits. So we don’t question the sign. We assume that people who come into contact with your food have washed their hands and that they know they should. However having a reminder like that for the employees to remember to wash their hands would seem redundant and at the same time we’ve seen that sign so many times we feel confident in their devotion to cleanliness. Seeing the same message over and over again creates a belief that might not necessarily be real but is stuck in our minds to be true.
Lovingkindess is like that and I’ll explain more about it in next week’s episode but for today I’d like for you to understand and maybe feel what this practice can do for you.
If you were to practice lovingkindness in order to find more acceptance and love for yourself you would say these four sentences in your mind.
May I be happy
May I be Healthy
May I be Safe
May I live with ease
These sentences can be changed there are no rules for the exact words. However, it needs to mean something for you but in a broad way not in a specific “may I not burn dinner tonight” kind of way.
The process is simple. Say the sentence to yourself. Try in your mind first. Say the first sentence May I Be Happy and just sit with it. Say it a few times or just say it once and think on the sentence and then move on to the next one. You continue until you’ve made it through the last sentence.
I always work with this practice a the end of the year because upcoming holidays always feel complicated as a caregiver. I personally need a reminder that I need to be gentle with myself during a season that can feel like loving and liking myself as well as other in my life is harder.
Here’s why it helps and why I start thinking of this in October.
I try to spend at least a week saying these four sentences to myself. Sometimes I’ll do it sitting or lying down as I would if I were meditating. Other times I’ll do it while driving or waiting in an elevator. There are no rules
In the beginning the sentences feel mechanical. I’ll say them. Feel nothing much. Move on to the next one. Then as I continue throughout the week it starts to mean a little more each time and almost every time by the end of the week I have at least one session doing this where I cry.
Why? Because it’s hard to put myself first.
That’s why I love this practice for you. You’ll learn next week that there are other people you say these for but the practice ALWAYS starts with you!
In fact, if you are a subscriber of the November issue of the Caregiving Confessions magazine I create each month, we will experience this practice in it’s entirety together as I lead you through it in our live session.
Putting ourselves first can feel impossible to do. This practice starts you out thinking only of your own happiness and wishing yourself only positive things. We always wish our loved ones were happy, healthy and safe and hope for them to be able to live with ease. How sad it is to not be able to find those words for ourselves?
When I learned this practice I wasn’t a caregiver. My life was carefree as most pre caregiving lives where (at least in retrospect). So wishing myself happiness didn’t have the same meaning as it did when I practiced this after becoming a caregiver.
When I first began to wish myself happiness I felt anger and sadness. In wishing myself health and safety I felt regret and shame and when wishing myself a life of ease I felt resentment.
I wondered how something that felt so basic when I learned it bring on such strong feelings? That’s the power of this practice. Sometimes you’re just saying words. Other times the words are so strong they hurt.
So why try it?
How many times did you have to tell yourself you don’t deserve to enjoy life because you’re a caregiver before you started to believe it? How many times did it take for you to say you don’t deserve to do things for yourself because you aren’t the one that’s sick before it became true?
What we say to ourselves is important. We might not notice how much impact our negative thoughts about ourselves affect the way we live our lives.
After a week of saying these simple four sentences to myself I am so much nicer to… me. One day towards the end of my week practicing this I broke an egg right at the edge of that crack in between the stove and the counter and watched helplessly as it seemed to be sucked right down into it. Normally I would have become frustrated and angry with myself but this time I just laughed and said - that’s ok… things happen. I just found a way to clean up the egg and move on.
The reason why the exact words aren’t as important as the process is because simply saying these things to yourself creates a change in you. Shifting your negative talk allows you to give yourself more room to be human. Even if negative talk isn’t an issue for you, making it a choice to tell yourself positive things will have a positive impact.
We’ll get into the science of lovingkindness and why it’s the perfect practice for caregivers next week but until then say these four things to yourself.
May I be Happy
May I be Healthy
May I be Safe
May I Live with Ease.
If you need to find these again they are in the transcripts for this episode at loveyourcaregivinglife.com
Thank you for listening.
