Self-stewardship

A guided journey on how to build a nourishing relationship with yourself by starting exactly where you are.

Welcome to this month’s guided journey together at Being in Motherhood. If you are a paid member, you have access to this whole post. If you are a free subscriber, you have access to this voice note and what the theme of the month is before you reach the paywall. I invite you to listen to the voice note below and take your time as you move through this post.

Stewardship is the work of supervising, overseeing, caring for something; a household, a group, a community. An example of stewardship is the responsibility of managing an estate or a piece of land. An example of stewardship is the act of making wise use of the natural resources provided by the earth.

This month you are the object, the thing you are overseeing and caring for is you. We will be exploring building a relationship with ourselves.

Elena Brower inspired this theme by saying…“a haven is what’s created when we manage to steward ourselves amidst chaos.”’

What does it mean to care for yourself?

What does it mean to be in relationship with yourself?

How do you create a haven inside of yourself?

I find caring for and tending to myself to be the most important work but it did not start this way. I spent most of my life (and sometimes I still find myself) defending and protecting, these ways of being were birthed out of trauma and a need to survive. I held these patterns close, the biggest one being I do not matter, which also translates to everyone else matters more than me.

I was struggling, but managing, until the early days of motherhood. After months and months of being in service to a tiny being, this belief of not mattering had to shake loose. It was painful, frightening, and exhausting. I had a choice to make… to keep living as I had, neglecting myself or to do something differently, and take care of myself.

I found caring for myself to help in mothering my son. And I find it to feel incredibly selfish at times. I struggle to feel worthy of time for myself, I struggle at times with putting my needs on the map. Even with these struggles, I find caring for myself to be more supportive of the life I desire and the mother I aim to be.

How much time or energy goes to caring for other people?

How much of what you give do you then pour back into yourself?

Sit with your answers for a second.

What you do in a day for others is going to be what pulls you away from cultivating a relationship with yourself. Take a moment to determine your WHY for going on this journey, why you desire to care for yourself, and what you long for that to look like. This will be what you come back to when those around you have needs and desires that conflict with yours.

What self-stewardship is not

This is not self-care.

Self-care has become mainstream and clutched by capitalism. There is marketing all over the media aim at trying to give you this thing you need to take better care of yourself. I love a bath, I love chocolate cake, and I love laying on the couch, but what we are exploring goes deeper than doing nice things for yourself.

Self-stewardship is about making the time to deeply listen to yourself, to hear and be with what you hurts inside of you. Self-stewardship is about being present with yourself and your experience.

Self-care often lacks presence. When the idea is to do nice things for yourself, you can do them without presence. You can take a bath, and your mind could be spinning off about what to cook for dinner tomorrow. How nourished do you feel after an experience where your mind was somewhere else?

The intention of self-stewardship is to cultivate a relationship with ourselves that is nourishing. Let’s explore how to start to nourish ourselves.

If you are not a paid member, I invite you to join us. You will receive full access to each monthly guided journey full of prompts, practices, and insights to deepen your relationship with yourself.

Start where you are

Let’s take inventory of what your current relationship with yourself looks like. Grab your journal, or return later with it, and dive in.

How do you nourish yourself? Do you nourish yourself at all? Do you spend time alone? What do you do with your alone time? How often to you feel present and grounded in your day to day life?

There is no judgement here, and please do not pass judgement on your answers. These questions are intended to help you get clear on where you are starting and where you want to go.

Now switch gears, how do you want to steward yourself? What would nourishing relationship with yourself feel like, look like, sound like? How would you spend your time? How would you pour into yourself? What would a life rooted in presence feel like, look like, sound like?

Let these answers arise within you. Do not stress about making them a reality or achieving them. This is to set your intention and envision what is possible by staying in a nourishing relationship with yourself.

Cultivating awareness

Enter my best friend, my journal. About 9 months ago, I started writing in a journal everyday. And let my be clear, this isn’t what my day was or anything with organization like that. The journal holds what is alive for me. The journal holds what truths are arising in me that I need to write down. When I look back on my journal, I often feel nourished by what I wrote because the words were arising from somewhere deep inside me.

Here is a peek into my journal…

This practice I am going to share is a simple one, but it requires your attention. Remember, everything in this post is an invitation. For the next week, write down what you notice in your journal, about your life, your inner experiences, things you see. This is much more a process of taking notes than trying to craft anything.

Come back to the senses as your guide. What do I feel? What do I see? What do I hear? What do I taste? What do I smell? When you pause and take a deep breath, ask yourself what is here and write that down.

Aim to do this once a day for a week. After the week, reflect on your notes and take some more. What did this practice bring up for you? What did you feel? What did you notice?

We need awareness to be in relationship with ourselves. That is why we are focusing on practices that cultivate awareness. I could tell you to jump into painting or writing or whatever you wrote in your most nourishing relationship with yourself. But if we do not have awareness of what is pulling us away from our ability to care for ourselves, we will keep being led away from ourselves.

Dropping deeper

The next practice focuses on doing one thing at a time. Pick one thing to do this week, folding the laundry, making one meal, preferably something you do every day and only do that. This means not letting your mind wander to something else, this means being inside of your experience.

A big misconception about being present is not having thoughts. This is impossible, our brain is wired to spit out thoughts. Being present is about bring ourselves back to our experience. Not turning off the thoughts, instead it is about not being pulled away by them.

So, doing one thing with all of your awareness. A way to drop into this one thing is to focus on moving slowly and quietly. How slowly and quietly can you do the dishes? How slowly and quietly can bathe the dog?

I keep coming back to mundane tasks because this is where our minds wander the most. This is not a practice of going a slow as possible or making no noise. This intention is like noticing our thoughts, it is about noticing how we do things and move through our day. It is about inviting a little bit more stillness into how we move about our lives.

You can record your observations as the week flows on, and at the end of the week take stock once again.

What did this practice bring up for you? What did you feel? What did you notice? What differences did you see from last week?

Meditation for connection

Enter a meditation being in the present moment, where I introduce to the process of labeling thoughts and experiencing sensations.

What did you observe in this mediation? Where did your thoughts go? What did you notice in your body?

One last note on the topic of self-stewardship.

Focus on connection before consumption. This has been helping me ground lately. Before I do one more thing, or read, or go on Substack, or answer work emails, I take a moment with myself. I place a hand on my heart and notice. Sometimes what I need is many moments, sometimes it is a few deep breaths. The more you tend inwards, the more you will learn what you need.

Sustaining an intimate a relationship with ourselves is a practice. These tools will help you be in your present moment experiences because that is the only place we can build a relationship with ourselves. This is why self-stewardship differs from self-care, it holds deeper roots in this moment. This is how we start to care for ourselves in a way that creates lasting and sustainable change.

Next month, we will explore diving deeper into the visions we created for nourishing ourselves. This is where we start.

What is coming up for you? What is your relationship with yourself currently like? Am I throwing too much at you? Please, let me know in the comments or reply to this email.

Love,

Emma