National Wellness Month

A comforting herbal brew, the perfect book and something green seems a simple and fitting way to open the topic of wellness.  And yes, the month of August reminds us of the importance of wellness, fostering ideas and opportunities for self-care.  We all need shelter, safety, nutrition, rest and a range of healthy habits for mind and body and the important attention to physical fitness.

Most of all, attending to our inner self, our management of stress and our mental health gained from work/life satisfaction and balance, meaningful companionship, recreation, fun and laughter, the gift of love, care for others, the search for peace of mind and development of the spiritual self.

The following words I recently discovered on social media.  I’m not sure whose original thinking brought this concept into being but I’m grateful for the opportunity to share it … another example of attending to wellness.

You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you, causing you to spill your coffee everywhere.

Why did you spill the coffee?

‘Because someone bumped into me!’

WRONG ANSWER!

You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup.  Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea.

Clearly whatever was inside the cup is what will spill out!

Similarly – when life comes along and bumps you or shakes you (and this will certainly happen), whatever is inside you will spill out.

Now, it’s easy to fake it and pretend all’s OK – until you get stressed, rattled, overwhelmed.  Clearly, it’s important to ask ourselves ‘what’s in my cup?’

When life gets tough for me, what spills out?  Will joy, gratitude, peace and humility spill out?  Or will it be anger, bitterness, victimization and the desire to quit?

Life provides the cup for each of us.  It is we who choose how to fill it.

So, from hereon, let’s work on filling our cups with simple beauty:  gratitude, forgiveness, joy, affirmation, resilience, positivity, kindness, gentleness and love for others.