5−Minute Self Care Practices to Connect with Nature
As a self care coach, I help women set up healthy self-care habits to maximize well-being, creativity, and productivity. Self-care is all about really getting to know yourself, your needs, and your potential. This requires that you become aware of your limiting beliefs and your negative habits that stand in the way of your happiness and well-being. You may have heard this phrase before and it’s true: the only thing standing in the way of fulfilling your true potential is YOU—and the habits you have created.
Your habits include lifestyle habits such as your diet and work-rest-play patterns. They ALSO include internal habits such as your thoughts and beliefs about yourself.
That’s why self-care has many layers to it. You can practice self-care by creating new and positive habits, make changes to your lifestyle, and include supportive rituals and routines into your daily life.
However, when you’re not good at taking care of yourself, there often is a deeper cause too. This usually traces back into childhood where you either didn’t learn HOW to take care of yourself or where you learned to make yourself small.
This then results in issues later in life such as:
- Low self-esteem
- Dependency
- Toxic relationships
- Lack of boundaries
- Anxiety
- Over-achieving
- Being very hard on yourself
- Lack of self-love
- Depression
- Burning yourself out
- Stress
One of my favorite activities is to go for walks in nature and get out of my mind.
Nature has a supportive and nourishing energy that helps us deal with our challenges and balances our energy and mind. I have many times turned to nature in times of sorrow as well as in times of the most immense joy. So many people live cut-off from nature these days. We tend to live inside our minds, occupied with projects and e-mails. And while the mind is a great tool, it should be just that: A tool to express our creative power.
When you get stuck inside your mind and get disconnected from your body and breath, you’ll find your head spinning with thoughts, feel more stressed, overwhelmed, irritable, and depleted.
The remedy can be as simple as putting your thoughts aside and going for a walk in nature.
- Looking up at the sky broadens our perspective and opens the mind to new ideas and possibilities.
- Talking to or hugging trees takes away our sorrows as these ancient beings seem to transmit their wisdom to us without using words.
- Lying on the earth relaxes and grounds us. It reminds us that everything is ok and that there is only the here and now.
My 5-minute self-care practice to connect with nature!
If this message spoke to you, it’s likely that deep inside there is a part of you that wants to re-connect with nature in a more meaningful way and feel the deep harmony and inner peace that nature can bring us.
Get in touch with nature for at least 5 minutes every day:
- Go for a walk
- Consciously breathe fresh air
- Gaze at the sky
- Hug or talk to a tree
- Walk barefoot
- Lay on the ground and soak up the sun
- Listen to the birds
- Water your plants
Use these 5-minutes as a moment to drop your mind and become really present with your surroundings. When we’re stressed, we’re very locked-up inside ourselves. Shifting our attention to our surroundings and our senses is incredibly calming and therapeutic.
Enjoy these gifts of nature!
Deniz
Deniz Aydoslu, MA, is an advanced certified yoga and meditation teacher and expert in the therapeutic application of yoga and somatics for mental health. She helps women heal emotionally and restore their connection to Spirit by integrating the body, heart, inner child, and soul into a meaningful whole. She offers deeply transformative work as well as simple tools to improve well-being, creativity, and productivity through fun, easy, and nourishing self-care tools.
As an experienced yoga and meditation teacher, somatic educator, and shamanic psychotherapy practitioner, she infuses her work with the healing power of love and the value of nature as medicine.