What is balance anyway? What is recovery?
I don't know about you - but I have been experiencing that finding a place of balance or determining what is a natural start to my day or the end of my day more difficult to locate. The constant pull to being perpetually PLUGGED in has contributed to this state of affairs, as well as, being self-employed perhaps?However, I would wonder and am curious about whether many people are experiencing this similar challenge of finding balance? Maybe or maybe not...We all have so many pulls for our attention, work, life, family, friends, home chores, financial commitments, when is there down time, what is recovery time? what does that mean to recover and to rejuvenate?
Let's face it, life's demands can be stressful, and it has become critical to our health to find recovery and rejuvenation time.
Michael Gervais' podcast - Finding Mastery, conversations with Michael Gervais in a recent podcast with Arianna Huffington, was helpful to assist with answering some of these questions. Arianna Huffington is the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, the founder of The Huffington Post, and the author of 15 books, including, most recently, Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. She has also been named to Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful women list.
The mission of Thrive Global includes, "changing the way we work and live by ending the collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success" (https://findingmastery.net/arianna-huffington/).
Some of the take aways on how to turn it off and do 'recovery and rejuvenate' are:
- Turn in your electrical devices at the end of the day, to put them to bed outside of your bedroom at least 30 minutes before going to sleep yourself - check out the parody "Good Night Smart Phone" free on Audible
- Declaring an artificial end of your day as we don't necessarily have one anymore because we can be plugged in all the time
- Focus on getting a good night sleep - making sleep a priority & taking naps etc. - a fatigued brain leads to lack of mental clarity, staleness, illness and earlier death
- Meditation - focus on being more present, authentic, grounded versus doing 'more' in your day
- Avoid comparison mind, look to self vs to others for betterment
- Growth and betterment are incremental and don't happen overnight - small baby steps
- Weaving in more JOY in your life - finding small moments of joy in your life, celebrating your accomplishments and successes no matter how small or large
- Embracing failure - failure is a stepping stone to success
- Loving Kindness to self - Non-judgmental tone and self-compassion
My joy this past week has been more forest bathing: This is the healing way of Shinrin-yoku Forest Therapy, the medicine of simply being in the forest. Shinrin-yoku is a term that means "taking in the forest atmosphere" or "forest bathing." It was developed in Japan during the 1980s and has become a cornerstone of preventive health care and healing in Japanese medicine.
If you are interested in exploring recovery and rejuvenation in a supportive, compassionate and non-judgmental environment connect with me here.