Me Time ✨

Happy Sunday everybody. My dog was very adamant today that he wanted to be a part of the program. So here he is. Me, Jersey. Say hi. Good morning everybody. So here we are. My name is Jean Nicholls. I'm excited to be here on Sunday. I think I always start it that way. If I go back and look at tell, listen to all my live streams, I'll say the same thing. I'm excited to be here, but it's true. I am. I love listening in to the other Cadre contributors and making a little space for myself and hearing what cool things they have to say.

Hi Jules. You'll see that major decided to join the festivities today. Think he just wanted to get some pets. So today. Hello, welcome, welcome Tdots Dot. I like that. I'm Jean. If I haven't held space with you previously, I am excited to do so today. Whether you're joining live or you're joining on replay, if you are coming in, I simply invite you. If you're not driving a car to post in the chat where you're calling in from today, I am calling in from my little meditation corner. You'll see I have a furry friend, but you'll also see that I have one of my sound bowls that I play.

I'm working on getting better microphones so that I can do some playing of my sound bowl, but what I can try to do is just do a little in the back and see how it sounds. You can tell me if it's working or not working. So I find that when I need to give myself a timeout, not about sitting in the corner, it's about sitting and playing sound and harmony. Not sure if it's coming through or not, but I will be working on playing for you guys. I have one different microphone to try and then I'll create some lives for you.

Jewel said, you just finished your run. Congratulations. I also am very sweaty haired. I just finished my 16 miles training run. I have one more 20 miles run and then I tapered down before the first of my two marathons coming up very fast. But I wanted to just come in today on this me time and talk to you about. I know I've brought this up before, but I wanted to bring it up in a different way. As I was running today, I started to think about some of the things that I've been doing for myself lately and I was listening to speak wonder recently.

I don't know if you've ever dialed in to speak wonder, but she was talking about being a caregiver for her mom breathing to not try to tear up a little bit. But in her conversation, she shared that she would always get her mom's calendar. So she is the current caretaker for her 90 plus year old mom, and she would get her calendar to find out what activities her mom has so that she can try to go to some of the activities with her, like bingo or crafts, whatever that might look like. And she was talking about how she got a call one day and it was at an odd time from the facility, and it made her nervous.

And when she answered the phone, it was her mom on the other end, and her mom had a question about a doctor's appointment. And it made me take a pause because almost a year ago, it'll be a year in October, it'll be two years next Sunday, where in two years I'll have lost my father, have passed from Alzheimer's, and it'll be a year that my mom has passed. And it made me think a little bit about how I was the caretaker for my mom. And she would show me her calendar, and she would share with me how excited she was when she went to play bingo.

And she would show me all of her arts and crafts that she would do, and we would celebrate, and we'd laugh and she'd tell me stories. But it never dawned on me to look at her calendar and say, gosh, I should show up and go play bingo with my mom. And I felt really bad. Speak. Wonder if you listen in or you dial in. Please know that I love you dearly. But it reminded me of, like, how. How much my mom, I would tell her about my weeks, and my mom would never ask because she knew that I worked a lot and I was really busy and that my work, like her work, she was a nurse, is really important to me because I help people move forward and I help people heal, and I coach people into change, and I hold space for people a lot of.

And she always thought that my work was so important, and she never wanted to disrupt my work. But I wonder about that sometimes, you know, like our work is sometimes our passion, sometimes our purpose, sometimes something we dread. We talk about that on Mondays with professional development day. But on my run today, I just got curious. And my curiosity took me a place of reflection of how much time or how we feel when we do something for ourselves. So, Jules, you mentioned that you were out for a run, and now you're relaxing.

And I was out running for 3 hours today. I walked a little on the way back because I went longer than I intended. So I took an extra ten minutes and walked 20 minutes and just walked and enjoyed the moments. And it got me to thinking, you know, there are often times where I'll go do a workout or I go do these long training runs and it's time where we don't feel like we have, but then somehow we make space for. But how often do we do things for ourselves? Get a massage, go to a sound bathe, go get a haircut, go get our nails done, go for a walk.

And we start to feel guilty about the time that we take for ourselves. Maybe we sign up and go on a retreat. Maybe we don't sign up for and go on a retreat because we feel like we're taking too much time for ourselves and we should be using that time for everybody else. And in that moment, I started to get a little panicky. I carry all my stress in my chest, so I know when I'm overthinking too much and I start to feel like I can't breathe. It's not that I'm having a panic attack or an asthma attack, it's literally, it's.

I'm starting to stress myself out. And. And it's been interesting because as I think, I mean, I'm out there for a long time, so I'm only talking to myself for 3 hours. I've got a lot to say, apparently. And today I was thinking about all that time that I take for myself and how sometimes I start to receive guilt from other people, or I start to feel that they're putting something on me that maybe they're not, but maybe I'm receiving. Maybe it's just that they really like spending time with me or doing things with me.

And when I take the 3 hours for myself instead of doing the 3 hours with them, it's time they'd like to spend with me. Or maybe when I decide to not go out for pizza or go to do an activity or something with friends or family and I just need time alone. Am I missing something? You know, fomo feels real, but in those moments I feel like I'm taking time for myself so that I can recover for myself, so I have the energy to give and offer to others so I can be really present with them. Because I found that when I'm really energetically depleted, I'm not giving my best self and giving all that I want to give when I'm in those moments.

So what do you do when you take time for yourself? Do you feel that you find that guilt? And guilt is really only something we can do to ourselves. Nobody can do it to us. It's something we actually create for ourselves. People might use that language with us, but we get to choose to accept or reject whether or not we take in that feeling, those emotions. So in that discovery of me time and taking 15 minutes here and there to listen in on Cadre, or taking a half hour or 3 hours to go for a walk or a run or do a workout or something that feels right to you, going to play bingo?

Maybe it's going to do the thing with your mom because that's what feels like it's important, or your dad, or a sibling or friend. It's just today is a day of reflection for me, and I wanted to bring that into our conversation for us to see where we're all at, to allow ourselves to put into our tool basket what we need for when we decide it's right to take time for us. And how might we not feel that pressure from others around us and really allow ourselves to know that when we say yes to us and we say no to other things or other people, it's not right or wrong.

It's what will fuel us versus what might deplete us even more. And in today's world, it's very different than maybe in the seventies or maybe in the eighties, maybe even the nineties, depending on how old you are as you're dialing in. Because as technology has advanced, it's helped to facilitate a lot of simplicity, but it has also helped to facilitate a lot of complexity in how we interact with people and complexity and how we are able to take time for ourselves. Back when my mom and dad were growing up, they didn't have the same access to information or the same access to work.

When they went home from work, they went home from work, and if somebody wanted to get a hold of you, they hit the buttons, or they dialed up on that old phone and they had it hanging on a wall. And if you wanted to talk to your friends, you had to maybe fight with your siblings to get phone time. Or as a computer started to become an existence, it took a long time for them to dial up. So you can check if you've got mail, pun intended, if you know the movie. So, in a world where things just continue to advance and information is readily accessible and work is readily accessible, and the opportunity to be connected digitally is so much more advanced than what it was.

Taking the space to be in nature, or finding the time to be alone so you can refresh and reset. I'm one of those people that's uniquely extroverted and equally introverted. So I externally process a lot of things, but I also equally need to reset by myself. And it's a vine balance. Sometimes we we find that we get so much more out of interacting with people in person. So how might we find that? How might we explore our city like a tourist to recharge and reset? And how might we minimize the amount of pressure we put on ourselves when we decide to retreat, when we decide to breathe, when we decide to go for that long run?

Or take a relaxing moment on our deck and allow the noise of the outside to pause and allow the noise from the inside to be created in a way that can lift us up and support us. So if this resonates with you, if you found that you feel that same push and pull from rejuvenating and I being and living, I'd love to hear what tools or techniques have you found that work for you? What allows you to get out of your head so you can get into your heart so you can reset? Because we are perfectly unique individuals, every single one of us.

So what works for me may or may not work for you. But I love to learn from all of you. So feel free to share the so I hope your Sunday is going incredibly well. You're finding time for you to just breathe and relax and reset. Love to learn about what are your goals? What are your tools? How do you disconnect to reconnect? We can always have more tools in our tool basket. So on this beautiful Sunday, I'm just wishing you all the best, wishing that you have the opportunity to get a little less in here, be a little less connected on our phones, a little less connected digitally, so we can reconnect here.

Monday's right around the corner. It's a brand new week. It's a brand new month, it's a new moon. So if you're into moonology, now's the time to write some goals and start to put some intentions of what, what you want to create for the next few months or the next 30 days. So a lot of new, a lot of refresh, new season. So let's take what we need today so that we can launch into tomorrow in a more whole and a more connected and grounded way. Have a great rest of your Sunday and we'll see you soon.