This weekend is Mother’s Day in the UK.
A day to appreciate all mothers, all around the world. To honour all that they have done for us in our journeys, all that they gift us and all that they sacrifice for us.
It is often a day when families get together, bring flowers or go out for a meal together. These are all wonderful tokens of gratitude to our mother and a great reason for families to gather.
But our gift to all the hard-working mothers is to give you permission to rest!
What does this mean? How can we afford to do this? we hear you say.
Listen to me, Dr Claire Maguire, explain why rest is so important…
I want to talk about the topic of rest and in particular if you are a woman. Why I’m singling out women is because women are often really busy & they make themselves busy and then they feel guilty if they’re going take a rest.
However, I hear all the time that people, women, are exhausted, that we’re overwhelmed, we’re stressed, we’re overworked, we’re busy, busy, busy. As soon as we stop, there are all these other demands on us. So we don’t want to take the time out as it makes us feel even more stressed.
But what I really want to say to you is that rest is paramount if we really want to start to build our energy up. We’ll never have high energy levels if we don’t understand the need for rest.
Rest isn’t running around watching the TV, twittering around on social media, speaking to somebody you know, having a glass of wine, eating whatever or chilling out. Whatever we might call it, these things are still ‘recreation’. We’re still actively doing something.
To rest is to really switch off, it’s to lie down. Maybe listen to some soothing music, just let the body go with a big sigh of relief. It’s about removing the internal chatter out of the mind as well, so we don’t feel guilty, so we don’t feel we should be doing something. We’re not trying to rush it.
To that end, what I’d really like you to do is to remove the guilt and this week make sure that you spend at least 11 minutes a day, if not half an hour a day, resting – just letting go and doing absolutely nothing.
See how you get on and see how that starts to build you energy levels up.
I know this is a huge challenge to women, in particular a mother, and I look forward to hearing how you get on…