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Teacher Self-Care: Saying Yes to Saying No

Teacher Self-Care:  Saying Yes to Saying No

Self-care is what keeps us feeling good, both mentally and physically.  When you feel both physically healthy and mentally strong, you are able function at a level that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.   I’ve written before about why self-care and self-advocacy are not selfish.  It allows you to effectively and resiliently support all the people in your life who are counting on you. 

How, then, do we introduce more self-advocacy and self-care into our busy everyday lives when we’re so often focused on everyone else?

How to Cultivate Self-Awareness for the Big Game of Everyday Life

How to Cultivate Self-Awareness for the Big Game of Everyday Life

Just yesterday I was sitting on a metal stool, eating my lunch at a counter.  Everything was fine, and then I got a sharp pain in my left leg that felt like a bug bite.  That was manageable, but the pain caused my leg to jerk to the side, thereby whacking it on the stool leg and creating way more pain than the original sensation. 

I swore like a sailor (because profanity is one of my guilty pleasures), rubbing my leg until the pain lessened adequately, and continued eating my lunch.  Then, as I was finishing up, I took a swig of my seltzer and some of it went down the wrong tube, resulting in that kind of coughing that is more reminiscent of eye-watering and gagging noises than anything else.

Then the burst of rage came.