Becoming Self Full.
Time out! Slow down. It’s summer time - the perfect season for rest, repose, and retreat. Heed the call for an emotional truce with yourself and create a grounded, meditative state in which to recoup lost energy. The external chaos of life may continue to rage all around you, but with your emotional and mental boundaries firmly established, you will remain calm and centered. Recovery, rest, self-reflection and insight all await you for the purpose of healing your body, mind and spirit. Remember – you can’t give from an empty well. Taking time for yourself is not selfish – it’s self-full!
Meditation Musing:
From Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
"With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls - woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balance, not matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel...
But how? Total retirement is not possible. I cannot shed my responsibilities...I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return...
It is a difficult lesson to learn today - to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week ...For me, the break is the most difficult ... And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the voice, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. "
Today's Challenge:
Plan a retreat for yourself - alone - in solitude...for an hour, a day, or a week.
Blessings on your path,
Beth