Dear friends,
I hope this little message finds you well and filled with wonder.
How did we get here? Not just to July, but to this life where we add and add and give and give and do and do and pour out and fill up some more?
I was at dinner last night with a handful of my friends and they were talking about all of the demands of their lives from preparing for depositions to kids’ swim practice (which sounds like a full-time job in and of itself), from traveling all over for work (one friend had been in three airports yesterday alone and somehow made it to dinner) to wedding planning, from doing the really important work of caregiving for patients and tending to kids to overseeing renovations, from managing the schedule of an entire family all the while trying to be the best (read perfect) person, colleague, friend, partner, parent, ____you fill in the blank_____.
Our lives are so full and time so precious.
I have the clock set absurdly fast in my car and when I picked up my friend Lindsay from the airport, she asked me why. My immediate response was that I wanted to give myself more time.
Isn’t this so true?
We want to give ourselves more time, but we trick ourselves into believing that we are doing so. I know just as well as you do that there are a finite number of minutes in a day and no matter how many ahead I set the clock on the dashboard of my car, I am not getting any extra.
We pour out our lives into all that we do and (most often) the people we love. But, how are we taking care of ourselves? How are we letting ourselves be taken care of? Where do we find the time?
I bumped into restorative yoga a handful of years ago when I was regularly practicing warm yoga. The studio offered a restorative ‘playshop’ (all play, no work!), and I was intrigued. When I started the session, I could feel my body opening, my muscles relaxing, and space being made in my lungs and cultivated in my heart. As I held poses for specific lengths of time, it felt as if all time slowed down. The teacher read from texts that spoke to the core of my being all the while I breathed in and out, taking my time, not hurrying but slowly, carefully, intentionally moving through it all.
I need to be reminded to slow down, take care of myself, and resist both overfilling (packing too much in) and overflowing (giving too much away) my life. And, I imagine you do too. A couple ways that I practice doing this are through doing yoga regularly (mostly restorative and Yin) and intentionally setting aside time to retreat.
If either of these acts of self-care sound like they would serve you, I am offering a restorative playshop on July 23rd from 2:00 – 4:00pm in Louisville and, great news for you!, there are still a handful of spaces left. Click here to learn more and register. I am also offering what promises to be an amazing retreat of restoration for women in Loretto, Kentucky the last weekend in July where there will be space to rest, relax, dream, create, and be all the while being taken care of by me! Like the playshop, there is space available just for you! Click here to learn more or register for what promises to be an incredible experience.
PLEASE! Take good care of yourself and I will too!
Love, Dawn