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5 Ways to Find Time For Your SELF.

Need help finding your ‘back to yoga school’ spirit?  🧘🏼‍♂️

Summer is almost done, the holidays are nearly over, and the kids are going back to school (or in my case flying the nest!) Life can get back to a ‘normal’ routine. But will that routine include something for your Self?

If you’re currently telling yourself that you’ll do yoga, “if” you have time you almost certainly won’t have time, right? I know it, so do you. (I’m a tough love kind of girl)…☺️😍

So instead, get still, breath and make a conscious choice. Ask, do you want to make time for your Self?

Right, now decide when you’ll do it. Don’t worry, I’ll help you with that…but first, let me just say that now is the perfect time to begin or return to yoga ‘school’ because I’ve got a new programme of classes about to start and each one offers a wonderful way to lay down a foundation for your practice and get you working towards your bigger whys? The stuff you really want….

Let me have a stab at what that might be…

  • To be healthier
  • To improve your performance
  • To achieve your dreams
  • To manage your weight
  • To manage emotions
  • To build resilience
  • To find flexibility
  • To build strength
  • To cultivate peace
  • To secure space in your day.
  • To achieve balance.

For me yoga is a completely sustainable conscious-based wellbeing practice that I know will enable me to do all the things I love to do, for longer – and hopefully as long as I’m still breathing!

I’m off to Devon in a couple of days and I want to surf, swim, hike, and camp and I want a body and mindset that can respond to those demands and challenges.

Yoga has become my non-negotiable

For a long time that wasn’t possible, chronic back pain made the whole experience (quite frankly) blooming awful. That was my window on what life would look like if I didn’t make time for what matters…so I did. Yoga has become my non-negotiable. It’s an everyday practice for me and this year I’ll be back out on the surf – just try and stop me!

And that, my friend is what a yoga practice offers to us all. Yes… you too. I don’t care how inflexible you are, what you’ve got going on in our life right now, or what life stage you’re at. Your body and your mind respond in every moment to the choices you make every day. So, stack up the odds in your favour and start making good choices…like making Yoga a non-negotiable lifestyle practice.

Don’t wait for the time to be right. Life is messy and busy, you have to carve out time to accomplish the things you want in your life.

You may think you don’t have time now… but you certainly won’t have time to deal with any injury, illness, stress, disease, fatigue or discomfort further down the road.

Do what’s necessary

Trust me, when your health, dreams, goals are on the line, you find the time and resource, will to do what’s necessary. I did, and so can you.

Need some help finding time for what matters most?

Follow these 5 steps to finding time for your Self.

  1. To take back control of your to do list first assess what you’re already doing. Get your calendar out and make a list of where your time’s being spent now. Get it on paper or use the notes app on your phone.
  2. Once you’ve looked at where your spending your time. Look at that list and ask what are the things that really matter to you, what are the things you want to do, but less of, what’s not important to you, but may be important to someone else, and what’s really not important at all.
  3. Go one step further and place each task into a category. Daily non-negotiables, priorities for the next 3-4 days, and what’s important within the next few weeks. Consider what is supporting your lifestyle and remember to weed out the tasks, events, and commitments that are not.

Note to Self: Where a lot of us get stuck is looking at the big picture of everything that needs to get done, which can instantly lead to feeling overwhelmed. It’s easy to get spun out with all the deadlines, and “someday” projects that start stacking up in the back of our minds.

Learning how to prioritize and break things down into workable chunks can really help.

  1. So…just as yoga classes follow a specific sequence that has each pose building on the previous one, work to complete your tasks in an order that will make the next thing easier to accomplish. That will make bigger projects seem less daunting and help you bypass any overwhelm and frustration that can stop you in your tracks.
  2. Use a calendar to plot your tasks or use apps like To-doist or Asana which I use all the time. Both are free to download and only ask for subscription if you want to get extra features. Don’t forget to set reminders to check in with your longer-term goals because that will help to loop you back into what you’re doing all these ‘tasks’ for. And as your complete your tasks, remember to celebrate and appreciate all the small wins that are creating space and possibility for you to move towards your bigger dreams.

Note to Self:

Remember, life happens and sometimes things take longer, don’t happen the way you expect or get completely blown out of the water. Life is beautifully unpredictable and as much as we can set our intention for how we want things to pan out, it’s important to remain detached from the outcome.

So, when your perfectly designed calendar gets thrown out of whack (and it will) don’t be tempted to throw your dolls out of the proverbial pram. When things don’t go our way, you know that’s ok. 😆 Minimise your suffering and make the conscious choice to go with the flow, allow for any change, be flexible, but remain committed to your intention to do less of what ‘you have to’ and more of what aligns with who you are, what you want, and how you want to shop up now, and in the future.

The key is to not give up but instead to adjust. Again, just like when we’re practicing yoga, we tweak the pose to make it work for us in the moment. If you keep doing that over the course of a few months, your body will respond and create the space for more movement and… bingo ☑️, you have a new sense of control over your body.

Keep coming back to your calendar to assess where you’re at and you will find you have a sense of control over your time too and that’s how you create more space for what matters most to you.

That’s it for this week. If you liked the content and think it could be helpful to others I’d love for you to share it out to your friends and family.

And if you have any strategies of your own for doing more of what matters most to you, don’t keep it to yourself, whack it in the comments.

Before I go, a reminder that the new yoga programmes are up on my website  and you can book on to any of my September classes right here. So, get the dates in your calendar and make that commitment to ring some fence time for you. You’ll have heard this before, but I’m not afraid to repeat it. If not now…when?

Make every day of your life count… you have arrived already.

Love J X

Pick one of these…make your Self count.

 

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