When I was a little girl I was taught to always ask first and then do second. When my parents said yes, that meant I could go ride my bike. When my parents said no, that meant I didn’t get dessert. The yes’ always felt the best but I seemed to have met with more no’s. This pattern continued into elementary school. When the teacher said yes, I could go to the bathroom. When they said no it wasn’t snack time yet, I couldn’t eat. The idea of asking before doing is to keep us safe as children but what happens is we all continue this habitual pattern that was given to us into adulthood without even consciously knowing we are still doing it, yep you heard me. We are all grown up’s asking for permission to just be ourSelves.

Okay okay, I know that self-care is this term that is being thrown around left, right, and centre but have you ever slowed down and really thought about what it means? For a while I watched women throw up bath pictures on social media and think that was self-care. I thought that moving my body every day was self-care. I have thought that sleeping all day is self-care. Being in the health and wellness industry I flirt with different ways of self-care all of the time but I got really frustrated being on social media and women bringing others down for how they were taking care of themSelves. Ladies, all of the above is Self-care and guess what, we are only able to take care of ourSelves and know what we need, not others

I’ve been moving my body for quite some time now. I would even argue that I came out of my mom running. I’ve always liked to move my body in tons of ways but somewhere along the line, I forgot that this was integral to my health.

Are you filling all of your life buckets? I mean really. Do you know how many life buckets you should be filling? I didn’t either until I had no choice. I got to a point in my life I felt stuck. I couldn’t make it further in my career, my relationship was on the rocks, I wasn’t moving my body for me and I was essentially burning out day by day. There was a point that I had enough and decided to ask for help.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourSelf why you move your body? Where did you learn how to move your body? What physical activities did you grow up doing? How has moving your body shifted with age?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever personally been victimized by Regina George? Just kidding but not really. How many times have you compared yourSelf to another womxn . . . too many to count? Me too.