Self soothing or self regulation is a vital life skill that helps us with our emotional wellbeing, resilience building and ability to navigate life’s challenges better

If we haven’t learned to do this in a healthy way for ourselves, we may reach more often for an external bypass that can be short lived and short change us, increasing our life challenges to boot

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Our mind may have very different ideas about how to live our life than our body. We each have an innate pace of living true to our nature. Notice how different we all are to each other. Some meander through life quietly and at a paced manner; others operate at a faster pace.

The issue is less about the speed and more around the truth of the matter for each of us and whether we are living at the right pace for our true selves.

You may find yourself exhausted, overwhelmed, even confused – that in spite of your best efforts and the energy you give out to do, achieve, become, you feel you may never quite arrive.

If this is the case, perhaps you are living in the wrong gear to your unique, personal, true nature. Perhaps you are drumming to someone else’s beat. Working towards someone else’s vision for your life. There are many valid and intricate reasons for living in our head and avoiding our true nature.

We can get so caught up in our heads and pursuing the notion of how life should be for ourselves. Are we working under our own individual terms and conditions or someone else’s.

I find a daily audit helps me hugely to understand myself better. At the end of each day, reviewing my day; where did I operate in alignment with my mind and body; where did my mind race ahead and disregard my body, belie its needs, exceed my own energy and other resources available to me.

Obvious signs of living out of alignment might be exhaustion, the afternoon slump, a need to pep up the tank and rev up the gear with caffeine, sugar, other stimulants.

Less obvious signs might be brain fog, low level yet chronic exhaustion and other persistent health issues that lie just below awareness (as we choose to avoid focussing on them) yet which niggle away and indicate low immunity, a sign of chronic stress.

Other signs may be a lack of sense of purpose, loss of a lust for life, a sense of just going through the motions every day, a persistent feeling of dread - that there has to be more than this.

Perhaps the issue not ‘out there’, it’s not the job, the perceived problems, the money, the weather, the news. Perhaps you are operating in the wrong gear for your nature, going at breakneck speed through life and wearing yourself out in the process.

Our bodies are always talking to us – through sensations, feelings, emotions, aches, pains. There is always an invitation here – to tune in, slow down, pay attention, tend to.

Our minds can race ahead, focus on the prize rather than the journey, to the detriment of a good quality of life along the way. If you get a sense that your body and mind are out of sync and working against each other rather than in communion with each other, a reality check may be helpful.

Slower is not necessarily better; more to the point is knowing ourselves well enough to operate in the optimum gear for ourselves, being flexible to this as we change all the time and tending to ourselves along the way with compassion.