What Lights You Up?

I have been ruminating on the pressure we can feel to take care of ourselves, the exhaustive lists from the wellness world telling us what to do, and then wondering how I fit it all in. The lists turn into I must, I should, I have to… and it all starts to feel a little bit (or a lot) overwhelming. It feels like yet another chore, another demand, another thread that needs to be woven into our lives. It feels like pressure, not pleasure.

Pressure Or Pleasure?

I would really like us to feel into that word, ‘pleasure’. Because taking care of ourselves has to feel pleasurable, surely?! But how do you speak to yourself about your self-care, your health, your fitness? Is it pressure or pleasure?

There is a quote by Rumi — “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love, it will not lead you astray.” 

This sits at the heart of our coaching philosophy. We are not here to prescribe but to work with you to explore what lights you up. To ask, ‘What do you want? What can you try? What can you experiment with? What would be fun that you can try and say with grace, that’s not for me?’ As a coach, we work with you and hold you accountable to finding something that genuinely looks after you for this particular time of your life.

And that is something I want to point out – what you need right now may not be what you needed in the past, and it may not be what you need in the future. So we don’t have to lock in our wellness and wellbeing and say this is it until the day I am no longer. We can have the freedom and the flexibility to change our minds.

Moving Towards Pleasure

I also want to bring to our awareness that the body naturally wants to move toward pleasure and away from pain. We want to move towards the things we really love, as Rumi so eloquently observed. Yet if we see our wellness as a chore, a body to optimise with a gruelling list of things we just do not enjoy, then our sneaky friend resistance pops up and says we are not doing that; instead, it says, ‘Have a cup of tea and a few biscuits while you’re at it!’ We move towards whatever we label as pleasure.

Now, granted, I would say not all of our wellness habits are pleasurable in the moment. A gym session when you’d rather sleep, the salad when you’d rather eat cake… and this is where your discretionary mind comes into play – what do you really need in the long run? Perhaps you do need rest and cake, or perhaps you need to delay the gratification and understand the reward of a later pleasure – the endorphins released after a gym session that make you feel good, the muscles building in your body that make you look good, and the food that gives you sustainable energy over a period of time. This delayed pleasure can help give you a quiet satisfaction in consistently showing up for yourself.

Pleasure As Your North Star

Let pleasure be your north star in deciding your wellness habits. Allow it to guide you towards taking care of yourself in the most exquisite way. Ask yourself:

Make a list and start to incorporate some of those things into your life. As you do, notice what they do to your body, to your mind, to your energy. Do they light something up in you that makes you want to continue doing them, or not? Although before you quickly dismiss that your new wellness habit doesn’t work, the scientist in me does say we need to do things a few times to get good data to decide if they work for us or not.

Have fun exploring and creating your pleasurable wellness routines.

And if the idea of helping others discover what lights them up resonates with you, this is something we explore throughout our Health & Wellbeing Coach Training. Rather than prescribing what people should do, we learn how to ask the right questions to help clients uncover what genuinely motivates them and create habits and self-care routines they actually want to sustain. To learn more about our curriculum, please click here.