Dearest Readers,<\/p>\n
Over the weekend I was speaking with a friend who has a lot going on in her life right now. After telling me about a particularly intense experience I said to her, “Never a dull moment.”<\/p>\n
Her response to my statement was, “It would be good to have a dull moment or two around here,” to which I said, “Yup, we have to welcome the dull moments.”<\/p>\n
Not everyone may have a the kind of life which necessitates inviting dull moments to come in but for those of us that are overachievers, perfectionists, workaholics, busy bees, or stimulant junkies it’s a pretty sound piece of advice.<\/p>\n
It took shingles for me to learn how to welcome the dull moments. For those of you who aren’t familiar with shingles, it’s a viral disease, the same one as chickenpox, and it travels through the nervous system, bursting through the skin in a painful rash of blisters.<\/p>\n
When I was diagnosed, I was told there are three causes: age, compromised immune system and stress. Since I was in my early thirties and my immune system was healthy I had to accept that stress was the reason I now had what felt like small knives stabbing repeatedly into my back.<\/p>\n
Because shingles can recur, my body now has a built-in stress-reducer. If I don’t ever want to experience the pain of those blisters again, and believe me I don’t, then I need to be careful about how much stress I invite into my life.<\/p>\n
The key word in that last sentence is “invite”. What I learned from the shingles experience was that I was actually creating the experience of chaos in my life. It wasn’t happening to me<\/i>. I was making it happen. <\/p>\n
This was a big wake-up call. Not easy to accept at first, certainly, but once I did I could then begin to make the necessary changes.<\/p>\n
The biggest change was learning how to welcome the dull moments. Learning how stop, to rest, to say no to things that caused stress or burn-out or exhaustion. I learned about self-care in a whole new way. Today, my well being comes first, period.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, I do not do this perfectly. I can still tend toward workaholism and over-stimulation but I am light years away from where I was when those blisters burst on my back and said, “Celia, we need a break.” <\/p>\n
Thank goodness they did and thank goodness I listened.<\/p>\n
Inspiring Message of the Day: Today I will welcome the dull moments. In the dull moments the Silence awaits us. In the Silence there is Peace. I deserve<\/i> this Peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dearest Readers, Over the weekend I was speaking with a friend who has a lot going on in her life right now. After telling me about a particularly intense experience I said to her, “Never a dull moment.” Her response to my statement was, “It would be good to have a dull moment or two…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,251,250],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration","category-motivation","category-shingles","category-welcome-the-dull-moments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}