Self-Care Strategies

So people ask sometimes what I do for self care, I would say that self care is a complicated notion and self care is different for everyone. So I wouldn't say that there's a ritual or routine or a daily exercise that I do to take care of myself. Most of the time I wait till I burn out and then realize that some self care needs to come in. Um, which might not be the best strategy and I'm learning as I go traveling a lot, teaching many hours a day. And uh, being in the studio, doing studio owner stuff is fairly exhausting for anyone who's ever owned a business. But I think it's more about finding pockets of time in the day to take care of yourself rather than an organized predictable time that you know that you will take care of yourself. Like my house isn't covered and like a special kind of crystal or like a meditation corner or my favorite beverage necessarily. It's more about carving out 10 minutes, one minute, a subway ride, a commute, um, to take care of yourself if that means that you have to eat or if you have to just not talk to people for a little bit or go to the bathroom.

Uh, that would be self care and my definition of it. But I really see the value in the more classical understanding of what self care means, where you would maybe go to a spa or take a vacation or go for a long walk or have a ritual where you drink a glass of wine at the end of the day. I don't do that, but I'm not against it. So maybe I should listen to what other people do and take a cue from them. One of the other things I do for self care, um, in my understanding of it is that I try to give each student that I'm going to see that day as much as I can, but I also try and tap into a certain reserve that it's one of like the amount of teaching that you have in your body that day and you try and think of, okay, I have six people and I'm going to divide my energy into six segmental pieces.

And then I will each person literally all I have or if I'm teaching four people, I'm going to each give each for like sections of my energy and then I know that has a beginning and an end and everybody sort of got their fair amount. So I don't start the day in a big splash and then slowly taper off and lose my thread by the eighth person. So part of that would be a self care routine for me is to look at what I have to do that day and then divide the day into palatable segments and then go and give each student or class or whatever the project is, the amount of energy that I know that I've reserved for that person for, for teachers who are tr generally traveling a lot. And um, I'm learning those now who travel and give workshops and maybe give workshops where they live and they need a lot of new people on a regular basis. Um, I would say that that's pretty depleting to give a whole new group of people once or twice a month or whatever your schedule is, your undevoted attention for however long it is that you're planning on teaching them. And one of the strategies that I've found is to try and check the temperature of the room and then try to teach what it is that I came to teach, but not let the attendees, if I could say that, dictate where the workshop is going to go.

So I have the agenda that I want to teach, but sometimes that doesn't jive with the room. I'm sure everybody's experienced that before in their teaching and it's really easy to be thrown off. Um, so I find that I try to ignore what they think they need and give them what I think they need. One of the ways to feel like you're taking care of yourself is to evaluate your days and your weeks and your months and your years, and see if you're doing more percentage of things you don't want to be doing and you're doing less of the things you do want to be doing and what can you can, what can you do to potentially either even out the percentage of what you don't want to do to what you do want to do or make the things that you're actually more interested in a bigger part of your day. The thing that is the most tiring is to do the stuff you aren't that about anymore. So I would say the biggest part of taking care of yourself is potentially saying no. Yeah, that would be that.