This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | August 20, 2025 — keep hold of your self care

Happy sweet Wednesday to your wonderful heart 💜

Last week I received a lot of feedback that many of you feel the burn out and overwhelm that happens as you’re moving about life, particularly when your own self care gets shoved onto the backburner.

This week, I’d like to encourage us to look that ugly beast right in the face: why is our first reaction usually to put ourselves last?

For me, I can tell you that I’ve been taught to be a martyr (doubly so since I’m a woman), that I must give all I have to others — whether that’s a company I’ve worked for, my daughter, my business, my community, social causes, etc etc etc. I am to leave nothing for myself because if I do, I haven’t done everything I can and that renders anything else good I’ve done useless and flawed. And how dare I? Besmirching the world with my needs as a human. Who do I think I am? 

And as I write that, I feel the anger swell and my lips curl, and I want to death stare that beast straight down into the darkest oblivion. For all of us.

Can you imagine? To give everything you have to something else? To leave absolutely nothing for yourself? To not see yourself as human as everyone else?

Ludicrous. But it’s what many of us have learned is expected of us.

Mindfulness shows us a wider, bigger truth: the universal law of giving and receiving. Everything is an exchange that requires balance. You taking care of yourself keeps the universe (and the YOU-niverse) in balance.

Yes, let’s give — with wide open hearts and soft minds. AND let’s receive. From others and ourselves. When we have that balance, we can release resentment and the grodiness of feeling utilitarian. We embody our humanness and make the world shine a little brighter.

You’re just as worthy as every other human on this planet. Receive that energy. Receive support. Receive the time you give yourself to meditate, sleep in, take a hike, read a book, or find pleasure in whatever fills you up. 

So this week practice noticing when your automatic response is to let your own care slink off into the passing breeze. Pause and take a breath, and choose to hold onto it.

With tender good energy,