I CAN’T GIVE ANYMORE……but I don’t feel authorized to stop.
During a seminar I gave a few years ago in Spain, the participants were asked the simple task of taking an hour a week for themselves. They could do whatever they wanted with that time, except sleep. The reaction was surprising…their comments “No, that’s out of line! I have a family and a job! And my children?” The women presented an endless and varied list of justifications and excuses for not being able to do these “duties.” However, just by looking at them it was obvious that they were in dire need of a break from their daily obligations. They desperately needed to stop for a moment, regroup and relax.
I feel that most women know when this time of rest should have occurred since it is a meeting with themselves, a need to return home. However, they are looking forward to a mystically established date sometime in the future when they will finally be free to do something prodigious. Meanwhile, they continue to put the well-being, needs and desires of everyone else ahead of their own. I was surprised to see that some of these women still rushed home from work every day to feed their 18-year-old sons.
The idea of giving oneself this personal time seemed to represent, in some way, a threat to the women in that workshop. I have seen many times in my practice women who for a long time have been proud of themselves for how indispensable they have become for everyone. This becomes almost the only source of their sense of identity. Some women even believe that if they do something for themselves they are, at the same time, subtracting it from others.
Of course we all want to feel useful. Being useful and productive means being busy. A busy schedule gives us the feeling that we are moving forward. Although this is not always the case. Focusing too intensely on others is often nothing more than a justification for not having to clarify our own vision, needs and desires. The fact of being ourselves causes many to banish us and the fact of acceding to the demands of others causes us to banish ourselves.
How to help others without becoming servile? To do this we need to direct our own lives. When we know who we are we stop defining ourselves based on our interactions with others. Our help to others then becomes an extension of who we are, not who we are.
Most women lack adequate quiet time. If we have this time, we already give ourselves space so that new creative ideas or perceptions can emerge into our consciousness. It gives us the opportunity to balance ourselves and feel our rhythm. The famous writer Pinkola Estes said in an interview “They say that everything we are looking for also looks for us and that if we stay still it will find us.”
If you find it difficult to give yourself time off, let your family and friends know that you have decided that, for example, on Thursday from seven to nine you are not available.
Many women have transformed themselves into super women with a can-do attitude. However, there are an increasing number of these women who are neither willing nor able to fulfill that role.
Women in England, the United States, Germany or Scandinavia have understood that they cannot do everything and their partners collaborate in the same way as they do at home. Spanish men have not yet jumped this obstacle.
Caring for and nurturing others is an innate aspect of feminine nature. However, those who lack personal goals or lack self-esteem run the risk of spending enormous amounts of their time solving everyone else’s problems. These women offer help without being asked, constantly suggest better ways of doing things, and very rarely give themselves time off. I remember the wise words of a very old shaman I met in Mexico who said “I advise women to consider what it costs us in time, energy, observation, attention, vigilance, stimulation, instruction, teaching, training; These movements of the psyche are like cash withdrawals from the savings bank of the psyche. The cause of the loss of skin and the weakening of our sharpest instincts is the fact of having an overdrawn account. The lack of new deposits of energy, knowledge, recognition, ideas and emotion is the cause of a woman feeling like she is dying psychically.”
Rosa Puerto
