WHAT HELPS ON A WOBBLY DAY – DAY 6
What warms the cockles of your heart, makes you sigh in contentment? Feel safer, cosy, cared for, nurtured?
N … the best bit of all: the ‘warm bath’ of the RAIN practice!
How do we nurture ourself on a day when it’s all too much? If someone we loved was living through an emotional storm, wouldn’t we offer them kindness and care? How do we do that for ourself?
When life has served up a corker of a difficult day, and we are full of hideous sensations and thoughts of catastrophe and disaster, the RAIN practice (see Days 1-5 of this course) can support us:
• First, we have to recognise what’s going on: R
• Then we have to stop fighting our internal response of self-rejection and get onside in caring for our own wellbeing: Allowing (A) ourself to be as we are
• This helps us get some clarity (see the bigger picture) and view things differently by investigating (I), using different options (see Days 3,4 and 5)
• N – today’s step – helps us to live well in the midst of the difficulty.
Today’s invitation is to experiment with choosing a nurturing moment as an act of kindness towards the part of you that is struggling, wobbling.
The question to ask yourself goes like this: “If this is how it is today, if this is how I am, how can I best take care of myself?”
This might mean talking things through with someone, or having time alone. It could be getting out into the fresh air, or going under a duvet. Eating something nurturing, or eating less or different food, exercising or resting. I plant these opposites as ideas to demonstrate that one size does not fit all. When seeking ways to find steadiness in the storm, or to feel nurtured, cared for, valued and loved, we need to be creative.
For today, maybe it is enough to consider taking care of yourself as an important step in steadying the wobble. And deciding that you are worth caring for?
Inspirational Poem
Wendell Berry: The peace of wild things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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