your weekly mindful morsel

mindful morsels appear every Wednesday

*photo courtesy of* *Kelli McClintock* on *Unsplash*

Happy good Wednesday to your kind heart, Reader 💜

The other day (on the full moon!) I went to bed at 8:30pm!, and it felt glorious (until I got woken up by a phone call).

My daughter was with her dad for the night, my work for the day was done, and my body and mind were just tired. You know that kind of tired — where you just can’t think of a thing more you want to or are willing to do, and you can’t even imagine your body staying upright. So I gave myself permission to follow that need: I took an epsom salt bath to ease my body and went to bed.

Normally I would feel all kinds of guilt about it because yes, things “still needed done,” but to be honest, I couldn’t have cared much less. The last few weeks I’ve been working hard, I’ve been spring cleaning my home, and handling life as things come up. That’s enough. I’m doing a good job.

Making that decision to go to bed so early (for me) was ultimate self care. I felt the need in my mind and body, and I let that need guide me. Isn’t it wild that self care is really that easy?

Identify the need → figure out what's within your means to satisfy that need in a healthy, supportive way, and just do it.

Self care requires no fancy gadgets or extra spending. It's about finding your needs, hearing/listening to them, and satisfying those needs.

I’m going to take the risk here and assume that if you’re reading this, you have access to all you need for deep self care already (hint: it’s not the stuff being sold as ‘self care’). You might not feel like it because much of the time, we overlook the most obvious solutions (we don’t see the forest from the trees and all that). But trust me — you have access to some form of what you need. Some way. Somehow.

If you’d like to reflect on this a bit more, check out this early episode from the We Can Do Hard Things podcast: SELF CARE: How do we identify our real needs and finally get them met? — it has some tremendous nuggets to put this into perspective.

Your needs are important. Give them a listen. And if you do something awesome for self care this week, celebrate with a friend or celebrate by sharing with me 🎉

In full support of your deep self care,

Welcome to Zenful Mindings

I'm Brianne, a trauma-informed yoga & somatics facilitator, Reiki practitioner, and mindfulness advocate. I specialize in body literacy to help people reconnect with their bodies for a stronger sense of self, autonomy, and connection to natural rhythms.

If someone forwarded this to you and you're into it, subscribe.