Nurture Yourself To Nurture Your Clients

Health practitioners are very aware that when we consistently neglect our emotional and spiritual needs, we deplete our ability to cope with the day-to-day demands of life. This leads to stress, which if allowed to continue, leads to lowered resistance to coughs and colds etc, and eventually to increased risk of more serious physical problems. If we don’t nurture ourselves well, we aren’t able to provide our clients with the nurturing they need for their healing.

Life force energy needs to be regularly replenished

Scientists have demonstrated that everything, including the human body, is made up of energy. The life force energy that powers your body is known by names such as Chi, Prana, and in Reiki we know it as Ki. A healthy level and flow of this energy is essential to the maintenance of health and wellbeing. Your quota of life force energy needs to be regularly replenished to maintain your physical health and vitality.

In the past it was considered that the only means of replenishing the body’s energy supplies was nutrition. However this ignores the emotional and spiritual contribution to health. Nurturing does include the provision of nutritious, enjoyable food, but it is much more than that.

Allow yourself to receive nurturing

Babies and children require adults as their nurturers, as without nurturing a child would die. We know that we were all nurtured to some degree as children, or we wouldn’t be here today. However, the type of nurturing you received, and the way you experienced it will have had a tremendous bearing on the way you now allow yourself to receive nurturing. Your early-formed beliefs about nurturing both direct and restrict your behaviour today, just as a computer program directs and restricts what you can do with the computer.

Out of some of your less-than-perfect nurturing experience you are likely to have formed some ideas that limit the ways you currently allow yourself to be nurtured. Perhaps you relate to some of the following statements or to others like them.

• I don’t deserve nurturing
  
  
• I’m very self-sufficient; I don’t need much nurturing
  
  
• People only care for me if I take care of them and do things for them
  
  
• If I can’t get real nurturing, I can get by with … (food/sex/chocolate etc)
  
  
• The only time I can get nurturing is when I’m sick/upset
  
  
•  My need for nurturing is a bother for other people
  
  
• If I’m doing something for my own pleasure, I’m being lazy
  
  
• I can’t ask for what I need

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Getting Better Nurturing For Yourself

Ideas (beliefs) you have thought to be ‘the truth’ can now be seen to be simply the conclusions drawn by a very tiny child with a very limited experience of the world. Now that you have many years’ life experience behind you it’s time to release your limiting beliefs and allow yourself to get what you need for your emotional, spiritual and physical health.

Consider the following questions: 

• What are the main ways you stop yourself from receiving the nurturing you need?

• What limiting beliefs underlie how you stop yourself receiving the nurturing you need?

• What could you do immediately to receive more and better nurturing?

If you need help to identify and ‘undo’ some of those restrictive beliefs and change your nurturing patterns, find a counsellor or another health practitioner with whom you feel comfortable to discuss these matters. Then discover how great you feel when you begin to treat yourself with the care and consideration that you truly deserve!!

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