Watch The Bindweed In The Border
Daily Practice of Self-Care Tools
This week’s blog is about the danger of complacency and the importance of daily practice of your well-being tool kit, which you can compile from my weekly blogs. This is number 19 so you could have 19 tools at your disposal already. Take the ones that work for you and leave the rest. If you’ve missed any of them, they’re all available on my website’s Blog Page.
Maintenance of mental health and well-being, which I call ‘staying afloat’ takes daily vigilance and persistence in the same way that gardeners have to watch out for the dreaded bindweed in the border.
The bindweed is so resilient. It’s rampant nature chokes plants in its grip, and yet it sprouts a deceivingly pleasant flower. Constant alertness is required to keep the garden clear of bindweed. It grows like wildfire and can take over a garden in the blink of an eye.
Bindweed can be a real problem for other plants, as it can outgrow most of them and takes all the nutrients, sunlight and water for itself. It can also sprout back very rapidly so it’s not about one day of weeding and that is enough. It has to be removed on a regular basis or the other plants will die.
Choose to nurture your well-being by doing what is necessary every step of the way. Make mental health your first priority, by being aware of prospective danger. Be alert to whatever looks attractive on the surface, like the bindweed, which in reality has the potential to drain your energy tank, metaphorically choking your growth.
Do your best to stay attentive on a daily basis to whatever is capable of ‘knocking you over,’ disturbing your serenity and peace.
Over the years, I’ve developed my own self-care tool kit, which is the basis of my blogs. Information support and guidance that I put together so that I could do my best to keep moving forward step by step in my life.
These have been carefully and lovingly compiled from all the wisdom that others have shared with me, throughout years of therapeutic support and 32 years of working the 12-step programme. My work as an Organisational Development Consultant and Creative Life Coach has also given me a great deal of insight as to what works.
What I discovered was that when I used these tools, as often as I could, most of the time, I have been able to keep my head above water and stay well. This has involved managing my mood swings, instead of being defined by them.
Conversely when I have become complacent or convinced myself that I was healed and didn’t need to be so diligent, or simply too lazy or felt that I had better ways to spend my time, gradually my mental well-being suffered.
So daily practice is what I suggest you aim for to stay healthy and balanced. To use what works for you in the same way that keeping your bank balance in credit helps you stay out of debt.
I can’t afford to just use the tools when I feel wretched and drowning. That’s like allowing the bindweed to take over. To stay afloat I need the discipline of a daily practice so that I keep my feet on the ground. I liken it to my emotional bank account which needs to be topped up regularly so that I can stay afloat emotionally mentally spiritually and physically.
Aim to use your tools of self-care every day, to the best of your ability. There will be days that you will rebel or feel so bad that you simply can’t. But as with a diet, you can forgive yourself rather than beat yourself up and then begin again tomorrow. Just make a commitment to yourself to be vigilant with the bindweed.
“As long as I live, I have to keep learning how to live”
Seneca