HOW TO BE YOUR OWN MOTHER IN 6 STEPS

It was Mother’s Day last weekend and the day got me thinking about something truly powerful.

What is it about mothers that makes them so special?

Aside from them giving to us endlessly, as children, we all relied on our mothers at some stage in our lives to keep us alive, fed and sane (and some of us still do to this day…).

This week I started to ponder what would happen if we all truly started to step into a deeper sense of being our own mother?

And is that possible for us to create for ourselves a depth and nurturing to the degree that a mother has for her own child?

What would happen if we truly all started to mother and nurture ourselves? And how do we become our own mother?

In life, we flourish through a balance of challenge (masculine) and support (feminine) and in my experience, we are all too familiar with the masculine ideas of challenging ourselves.

Challenging ourselves often arises in self-critical, comparison or judgement ways.

A healthy dose of self-awareness and criticism is, in fact, a natural element of survival. But often in life, it holds us back from reaching our true potential. We need to know that we are safe to express ourselves and to be taken care of. And if we are going to be judgemental and hold ourselves back due to criticism and perceived imperfection then we also need to balance that out and learn to be equally self-nurturing.

There are six key thoughts I have had this week about how we can all start to be our own mothers… the first three I’ve shared below, and the rest I go into depth in this week’s Podcast which you can listen to here:

NUMBER 1 – SELF CARE

Treat your own self-care as your vital life force or oxygen. As a baby, what would have happened if your mother stopped loving and caring for you? You would have perished. As an adult, your own self-care is this loving and caring energy that you turn inward. So, what does self-care truly mean to you? It can be a unique notion for us all, but here are a few ideas I use…

1. A regular daily meditation practice
2. Drinking 2l of warm water every day (warming liquids to encourage smoother digestive fire, see Podcast 114 with Paige Olsen Dr of Chinese Medicine for more on this)
3. Giving yourself a facial or getting a massage once a week

NUMBER TWO – COMMUNICATION

In ANY good relationship we know the old saying ‘communication is key’. So why is it so easy to forget to communicate with ourselves?

Well, Eckhart Tolle in his book The Power Of Now famously got us to ponder the question ‘if I am the one doing the asking, who is the one answering?’

It can seem strange to enter into a dialogue with yourself, but it is the best form of learning to build a strong foundation of communication with yourself.

You could start by talking to yourself whilst driving. Turn the radio off and start off with some easy conversation starters ‘Hi X how are you feeling today?’ and then answer out loud as if you’re having a chat with a friend. Some other of my favourite questions are ‘what are you feeling challenged by right now’? and also ‘what has triggered you lately?’ These are also great journaling prompts if you’re more the pen to paper type of communicator. I am also a huge fan of journaling, especially Bullet Journaling. This kind of communication with yourself is really insightful and enables you to start learning how to be your own coach. This is also an example of a tip that Paul (my partner) and I share in our monthly ‘Life Evolution Membership. Each month we share tips to help you enhance your mind, body and spirit and also share tools to help you learn how to be your own life coach.

NUMBER THREE – ENCOURAGEMENT

When you have an idea or a dream, do you encourage yourself or do you shut yourself down and tell you all the ways you can’t do this? In my book ‘Relaunch My Life‘ I coin this term being a ‘dreamcrusher’. Imagine if whenever you were a child you shared a dream with your parent they continually said ‘you can’t do that!’ Note: I know that some people’s parents were actually like that. So that’s why step 3 is so vitally important now you are in the driver’s seat of your life.

Learning to be your own mother (or parent) for that fact requires you to start taking the driver’s seat of your life and know ‘if it’s meant to be it’s up to me’.

No one is going to save you.

No one is going to give you permission to start that business, write that book or end that relationship.

You have to encourage yourself, and that becomes all the easier when you have followed the previous step on Communication.

For Steps 4, 5 and 6 to being your own mother I share them in detail in this week’s Podcast which you can tune into here.

And please, after listening to the Podcast, comment below and let me know which of the steps resonate most with you and what action you’re going to take as a result.

With love and respect,

Juliet xx