An Invitation Vol. 5

An invitation:

Shake everything out starting with your hands and arms.
Shimmy your shoulders
Let your hips move from side to side
Shake each leg, wiggle each ankle
Allow yourself a moment out of your mind and into your body

Do you ever have moments when you realize that you've been taking everything way too seriously?

I spend so much time in my own head, even more so now that there's no where else to go and less (no) time spent in the company of others. As much as self-care is an important part of my life, I find that sometimes I can get caught up in focusing on all the rituals and things I "should" be doing to the point where the pressure to practice self-care is totally defeating its purpose. When I get into these phases it's helpful for me to remind myself to follow my intuition and what feels good. When I'm taking myself too seriously this usually goes hand in hand with getting caught up in thought patterns of fear and shame. So often, what I actually need is to play and spend some time in my body.

Here are some of my favourite ways to play and take myself a little less seriously:

🍭Put on a song and dance
🍭Sing !! My biggest accomplishment of 2020 was perfecting the vocal runs in "Tennessee Whiskey" by Chris Stapleton 😂 My sister suffered through many progress update voicenotes.
🍭Go on a walk without a podcast and listen to some upbeat music, sometimes I try to walk to the beat and usually end up dancing a little 🥲
🍭Draw, and I have no skill at this so I like to just draw circles with a bunch of shapes inside and fill them with colour
🍭Laugh at funny Insta videos and meme accounts
🍭Do a "shake out" like the invitation in this post. It's hard to take yourself seriously when you're shimmying at your work desk praying that your laptop isn't spying on you
🍭Watch shows that make me laugh - currently that's Superstore. Dina is a combination of Dwight Schrute, Jane Lynch on Glee and Melissa McCarthy's character in Bridesmaids and she is perfect.
🍭Head to my sibling groupchat which is my go-to place for laughs and dog pics.