Nurture Your Empowerment

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

-Anais Nin

 

I have this quote on my wall and read it daily. It has influenced how I understand the challenges of change and growth and embodies my perspective of empowerment.

 

My desire to empower others has influenced my approach to working with people, parenting, mentoring, and counseling and is deeply rooted in my understanding of the inter-locking systems of oppression and the profound need for equity and justice in this country and the world.

 

I believe we need to shift the paradigm away from greed, exploitation, and oppression to cultivating a society that values justice, compassion, love, peace and cooperation.

 

I decided to contribute to changing the paradigm by working to empower myself and other women. For almost thirty years, I have empowered women overcoming domestic violence, sexual abuse and the impact of trauma in their lives, encouraging and supporting them to speak their truth, reclaim their belief in themselves and transform their experience as victims into survivors.

 

For many years I felt that there was something missing in my understanding of empowerment, until I identified how essential self-nurturing is in the process of empowerment.

 

You see most women tend to care for everyone in their lives except for themselves and end up feeling habitually stressed and exhausted. Over time our lack of self-nurturing results in total overwhelm, chronic anxiety, depression, illness, resentment, disempowerment and hopelessness. It is impossible to be overwhelmed and feel empowered at the same time.

 

In looking at how to address this systemic problem, I decided to focus my counseling business on educating, empowering and encouraging people to nurture themselves. I knew from my own experience that developing a practice of self-nurturing would empower women to live with more peace, joy and meaning and overtime cultivate a foundation of empowerment that would allow them to thrive.

 

I believe that committing to a self-nurturing practice is truly a revolutionary act that empowers our self-expression and self-protection. The more we nurture ourselves, the more we value ourselves, and the more we value ourselves, the more we prioritize nurturing ourselves. As a result of this self-fueling process, I have watched women over and over reclaim their lives, their choices and their own relationships with themselves to create the lives they want to live.

 

As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” 

 

So empower yourself by exploring ways you can include more acts of self-nurturing in your life by:

 

• Doing something that nourishes you deeply every day.

 

• Committing to an act that communicates the value you have for yourself, like setting a boundary or choosing how you spend your time.

 

• Exploring how you can encourage your own growth and potential by reading something inspiring, learning something new and/or watching a Ted Talk.

 

• Spreading the lessons you learn from nurturing yourself with other women to encourage and inspire them and create more ripples of empowerment in the world.

 

Thank you so much for being part of the self-nurturing revolution by nurturing your own empowerment! My hope for you is that you experience the transformative power of self-nurturing, empowering you to nurture more peace in the world from the inside out!