The Journey To Caring for Myself (Part One)
There is always another reason why you cannot get to the gym again today. My excuse for a while was that I was exhausted. I was a caregiver, prioritizing my mother’s health plan, which meant there was no time to invest in my own.
I go deep into things. I consider myself a 700% person. I am REALLY in, or I’m out.
It was like this with work - while building a business, I became a workaholic.
It was like this with relationships - every time I felt potential, I would push and push.
And it was like this with caregiving my mother.
I studied what options, especially non-traditional ones, might help my mother. I was diligent in following up with doctors, organizing therapies, and maximizing every potential there was around. Despite all the efforts, she passed away in May of 2022. It marked the end of two solid years of almost full-time caregiving while full-time working, and when grief took over my life, it started with my body.
When my mother was gone and there was no more organizing, studying, searching, or monitoring to do... What was I supposed to do? And more importantly than that, who was I supposed to be?
Discovering Guidance
Throughout 2020 and 2021, I had every minute scheduled - working on my business from home, advocating for my mother, coordinating, and often doing her care. In the afternoons, when she would rest, I would try to as well - this is when I found the teachings of Ram Dass and started looking into him.
Sometimes I went for a walk, but formalizing exercise was just way too much for me to wrap my head around. I was looking for calm and direction, and Ram Dass became a sort of guide for me. I used his meditative practices to get grounded and manage the stress that I was absorbing and carrying. At the time, I had no idea how heavy it all was; I simply knew it felt good to engage in those practices. While I was in it, I did not consciously feel the weight of this, but my body did. I started feeling that my body was compensating for me; it was taking care of me. In the time I was taking care of my mother, I do not remember feeling any of my aches and pains, I was so hyper-focused on her case that I did not even consider that mine was building.
Awakening Through Grief
Grief does a million things to you and one thing it did for me was bring clarity.
I had made a care plan for my mother which included a life plan for myself for the next 10-15 years. The instant she passed; the plans were all invalidated. I realized this immediately, but my body had no idea. I stayed in bed for hours and hours - I was not sleeping in 2-hour intervals, and I wasn’t up before dawn sitting at a computer, hoisting a wheelchair into the trunk, or running around cooking and cleaning. My body was confused, then it started to relax. I began to be able to rest, and this was a shock. I think my body was so relieved to rest that it just let go - it stopped compensating and just let loose. I imagine my body thought: “OK, now you carry me.”
And what happened next was what led me to InsideOut Health + FItness.
By: B. Silva