When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
--Rumi
Happy Friday everyone! This week felt longer the most weeks in the past year. All I kept thinking, is that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of being in the COVID-19 quarantine. During the past year, I’ve realized that I struggle at times with my time management as my work often takes over all hours of my day. It seems that sometimes my day drains me. Several years ago, I went to an amazing MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) class where, for eight weeks we went deeper and deeper into a practice of becoming mindful about our daily function, our thoughts, the way we approached our life, our activities, and our emotions. There was one practice in particular that I enjoyed and I’d love to share with you.
First, pick a recent, more typical day. Think about your day from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed - the activities you do on a typical day. Just write down about 15 or 20 things for now, and you can go back and put more detail in later if you want. For now, what we want to do is get down on paper what you do throughout the day. Now, I want you to go through the list and put an “N” Next to the activities in your day that are nourishing or nurturing, in other words, they give you energy or bring you up. And put a “D” next to the activities that you consider draining or depleting, the ones that take away energy or bring you down. If the activities are completely neutral, you can leave them blank or write “N/D.” Now, you can go back through your list. This is your life. You know, we often live in our heads, or think that a better future is coming, but in a very real way, you are looking at the moments that constitute your life. It can be very interesting to see it on paper. So, did you have more “N’s” or “D’s” on your list? Now, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to figure out how we can add in more nurturing and nourishing activities in our day and what we can do to reduce some of the depleting and draining activities. Food for thought…
I’d love to hear if this activity resonated with you.