A light in the darkness

  Image Credit:  sergiovisor_ph  on Pixabay      The first page in my food diary, which I started in 2006, I guess, after I secured a good salary job and was thinking of marrying, was a recipe that I saw in the newspaper. In those days, the internet was not so common, and newspaper reading was explicitly practiced.       I belong to a small city where hotels were not so very famous and meals usually used to be delicious home-cooked meals. So, after having a secure job and a good earning, I was living in a hostel. The life here was totally different. On one such occasion, our team planned an evening outing to a restaurant. I guess such an outing was the first of its kind for my batchmate and me, the hostellers.       Our other colleagues ordered a good starter and soup servings followed by a dinner. As they served, they named the dishes, and one of the chicken preparations was made in red wine. As we both unmarried new...

  Reaching the end, now I have discussed with you everything we can do to show self-love. This topic will be incomplete if I do not discuss this one barrier, which has the capability to pull down everything.  If we have open wounds, we can dress and heal them; if we have ulcers, we can take care and medicine to get them healed; if a fire breaks out, you can call the fire brigade and help, but what will you do if you are judging yourself or you are being judged? Judgement fear is like a cancer that flourishes within no time. It ruins our self-confidence and self-esteem; it kills love and understanding between me and my inner self; it convinces us that self-love is not for us; it is a property of few.  The sting of judgment is poisonous. No one escapes it. I had learned how to fill myself with positivity; I knew how to keep myself charged and encouraged; I took good care of self-compassion and self-care. In this balanced state I fell into a situation where I offended one o...

  I was trying to find out the connecting bridge between hobby and self-care. Self-care is any act that takes care of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life. It is responsible for our overall well-being.  Hobby is defined by Merriam-Webster as  a pursuit outside one's regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation. This means that a hobby is something that we don't do regularly. Secondly, it is accompanied by relaxation, i.e., we do it because we get pleasure and relaxation.  Hobbies are not just anything that you use as filler to pass your free time. They are the bridges that connect you to the real you. You do work for others and gather loads of baggage that makes your visibility impossible. We worked together, but one got recognition and the other was ignored; resentment and inferiority feelings came. Like this, so much baggage we pile at our backs every minute and every day makes our visibility poorer and poorer. When we take up ...

As we have reached the end, I now need to wrap up my stuff to make my A to Z look like an organized pile. I was thinking about what to write for this letter. Since my theme was self-love and I have now focused on one segment of self-love, i.e., self-care, I think this topic needs to be attended to here.  I have been talking so much about what is important and then prioritizing myself; these all draw to one point, and that is sleep. I had been a very good sleeper in my early years. Ask me to sleep in class, ask me to sleep in the night, ask me to sleep in the day—all times it was possible for me without regret. Climbing the ladder of advancing years, I found that my sleep was getting lesser and lesser. Yes, hormonal changes are the reason, but the need for sleep remains there. So, I thought to include this in my journey. I read two books in this context. One is "Why can't we sleep?"   Darian's narration reminded me of a famous concept from health psychology: either you...

  I never thought that exploring self-care would bring me this far. In my last post, a sensational strand of support brought me to the post,  why it's so hard to ask for help . This sent my brain to work as to why we don't take help when it is available. Jameson's research on the impact of gratitude and self-compassion on asking behavior was something related to my search. In his research paper, he proposed that we do not ask for help because we will have to become vulnerable. Mike Robbins also has similar views, where he says that when we ask for help, we present ourselves as weak. Secondly, he also says that when we ask for help, we also come into the zone of hearing no or being rejected. Further, when we seek help, we have to open some of our own details to the other person, which we do not want to do. Vulnerability is equal to death. Yes, when we have to open ourselves, we feel it is near impossible because that is what we have been trying to hide all these days. Vuln...

  When I started talking about taking time for yourself in my previous, I thought they would also advise all routines of meditation, exercise, rest, etc. The book began with a story in the book Gratitude Jar.   Mrs. X was having two kids. One was 4 years old, and the other one was 9 months old. Her husband was the breadwinner, and she was the homemaker. All day she would look after the house and do every chore and eagerly wait for her husband to come back so that she could sneak into the kitchen and have her daily doses of booze. This has totally sent her off track, and now she feels that she needs to fix this. This kind of life is not what she wanted.  She was lucky enough to find a coach. Even before the coach dives into her self-care, she asks her to take help from her husband when possible; that was the turning point.  A few years back I attended the conference of Michael Unger on Resilience. In his course, he also emphasized social support. He had us draw a map ...