As the Founder and CEO of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists, I have no hesitation in recommending Abundant Wholeness with Elke Blight as having highly recognised training and qualifications. I’m proud to have them as a member of our professional body for natural therapists. – Lawrence Ellyard
Recovery Is A Journey!
Recovery is not, or should I say rarely, a done and dusted, struggle over, never to return event.
Recovery instead is a journey, a path of ups and downs, sometimes U-Turns and sometimes express lane progress. The key is to embrace where you are but not to set up camp there. If you hit a pot-hole, move on. If you make a wrong turn, know that you will be back on track soon. If you are hitting win after win, celebrate them.
So often in life, and even recovery, we are drawn to the next step and as a result, we miss all that we can learn from the one we are on.
It’s only natural when we are struggling to want to rush through the pain and move on, yet there are lessons for us in the struggle.
In the rush of life, or with our goal ahead, we push past the wins because we still have far to go. We rob ourselves of the victory along the way because it’s not “The Victory”.
If we can separate the emotional attachment and mental chatter from what is and learn to see it “just as it is” we are able to see things more clearly and not be burdened by them. “This Just Is” enables us to work through the challenges and celebrate the wins without losing them in judgment, guilt, shame, or how far we still have to go.
Recovery is a journey best shared with others, “two are better than one, if either falls the other one can help them up, and a three-corded strand is not easily broken”.
Recovery is also a journey not intended for us alone. The lessons we learn are to be shared, they are a guiding light and encouragement to others as they walk their own paths.
I look back on the many “potholes” of my life and wonder why I still struggle at times. Why do the voices of fear and doubt, of guilt and shame threaten to overwhelm me when at other times they are conquered “never to return”?
Maybe it is to keep me humble, or maybe it is to keep me accountable.
I know how easy it is to become neglectful of soul care, to let little thoughts back in and let them take root, to stay up late and not eat well, it is easy to push aside the things that gave us freedom when we are walking free.
But that is the key.
We can’t eat healthily, exercise, get good sleep and meditate once and think we are looking after ourselves. Just like we can’t service our car and fill it with fuel once and think it’s good to go for years. So why should we, once we’ve experienced a breakthrough, think it’s over and we can leave the very things that brought that breakthrough behind?
Staying accountable to the small things that brought us victory is just as important today as they were then. It is staying consistent with the little things that over time will have us walking in victory more and more.
The foundation of WRC is vital to anyone and everyone, we all need to know there are others who have our backs and can lift us up when we fall. It is not weakness to be vulnerable and it is not weakness to need others, we were not born to be islands, we were born into “family” and however that looks WRC is family!
The Women’s Recovery Community is for all forms of recovery. If you are suffering from any trauma, addiction, disorders, mental illness, depression, anxiety, physical ailment, grief, disability and so on… then this is a community you can rely on. Our mission, to support our members and hold events that promote fun, safe and facilitated recovery, healing and fellowship for women. If you or anyone you know could benefit from support, networking, learning, growth, inspiration, recovery events and a lot of laughs. Join, recommend, and share.
Blessings
Elke
Abundant Wholeness
Mother’s Day Ponderings!
What does Mother’s Day mean to you, either as a Mum or as a Child?
As I ponder on the thoughts shared towards others and the comings and goings of my own Mother’s Day celebrations it occurred to me how vast our individual experiences can be and how our expectations around one day can either make it or break it.
When you hear all the media messages Mother’s Day is all about relaxation, pampering, spoiling, honoring, gifts, flowers and a huge amount of love.
Was this your experience?
Many years ago I acknowledged that my main wish for Mother’s Day was to simply be with my children and in that, I have great contentment.
When I created other expectations all I did was set myself up for disappointment and my self-talk played a huge part in that process.
Mother’s Day means so many different things to so many different people, from new Mother’s to old, near and far, to those who have passed away and those who are distant for other reasons. From natural Mothers to adopted Mother’s and those friends who are as dear to us as Mother’s. We have Mother’s who do it tough and those who it seems to be a walk in the park, and we have Mother’s who are no longer with us who we wish we could hold just one more time.
Being a Mother is the most rewarding and soul building experience that you can ever encounter that you will never grow out of. It has the power to make you so filled with joy you could float on clouds and at other times bring you to the depths of despair as we question and doubt ourselves constantly over the lives of our precious ones.
My Mother’s Day was supposed to look like this:
Join my daughter for church, head to the beach for some fresh air and sunshine whilst letting the grandchildren run off some energy and we have some mother/daughter time. Head home to catch up with my boys and do “something” before sharing dinner with everyone.
This is what my Mother’s Day turned out like:
I missed church as my daughter was having a hard mummy morning with rambunctious children, helped my baby finalize the details on purchasing his first car which took all morning. Head to the shops to buy supplies for dinner, arrive home early afternoon to have breakfast and pick up the pieces of my daughter’s Mother’s Day whilst enjoying some sunshine and fresh air on my veranda. After preparing for dinner I shared a beautiful meal with ‘everyone’ which included 5 children, 2 daughters-in-law, and 4 grandchildren. My table was full and my heart was blessed to overflowing.
The key to blessing over disappointment rests in mindset!
If I had judged my blessing on being spoilt by things, the degree to which I ‘relaxed’, or any other worldly measure, I would have been left feeling disappointed. Yet when I step back and see my day was actually filled with what it means to me to be a Mother; helping my children grow up in this world and take on new responsibilities, being there to support, encourage, and share the load when things are tough, prepare a meal with love and care, and be able to watch my grandchildren crawl after each other around our feet whilst laughing and smiling. Then my Mother’s Day could not have been any more perfect and for that, I am truly grateful.
If your Mother’s Day was less than you had hoped please know that it is not a reflection of how dearly treasured, needed, and vitally important you are to those around you. May you feel supported, encouraged, and truly loved by the collective spirit of all Mother’s today and always.
Blessings
Elke @ Abundant Wholeness
When too much choice is a bad thing!
Meal Planning – love it or hate it?
A quest to re-invent my meal planning with more nutritious and wholesome recipes has been a dismal failure for the last 12 months, and I now realize why.
My recipe files are overflowing with the latest back to basics, wholefood trends, and I have been overwhelmed by CHOICE!
As my health journey progressed my attention to new wholesome recipes became an addiction. The problem is out of the hundreds of recipes I have printed I have probably only tried a handful and the reason, apart from spending all the time printing out new found “favorites’ rather than cooking them, is too much CHOICE.
The internet and Facebook pages are full of delicious, wholesome, gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, vegan, paleo, low carb… (insert your preference) recipes and they all look amazing but how will I ever know if they truly are delicious if I don’t actually get to make them?
I realize that my regular meal plan was perfectly fine to start with but the desire to “re-invent” it, “super-charge” it, and “inject new life” into it totally backfired. Amidst the “what’s for dinner?”, “not something new again”, and “what happened to our old meals?” from the kids, I was drowning in 50 recipes for Spaghetti Bolognaise [slight exaggeration but you get what I mean 😊] so I fell into paralysis by analysis and then I would find another “must try” recipe to add to the pile.
As I coach others on making meal planning easier it has helped me to step back and look at what worked for me, what clearly hasn’t, and come up with a simple strategy to cope with the influx of tempting delights we see daily.
TOP TIP – Keep it simple
- Start with the BASICS – utilize the family favorites first
- Choose ONE DAY for your “new” recipe
- SAVE your recipes into files online or on your computer for quick reference. Beef, Chicken, Vegetarian, Salad, Baking, Basics, etc. whatever works for you. Fill up your hard drive, not your bookshelf. Let’s face it, it is actually easier to find a recipe if you’ve saved it to a file rather than searching through 100’s of printed recipes even if your filing system is immaculate.
- Choose ONE RECIPE – When it’s time to try a new recipe, search it up and just choose one, test it out and if it’s a success keep it for next time and add it to your regular meal plan. If it’s a dud, not the right fit for you or the family, delete it. It might look great but take too long to prepare, the ingredients might be too hard to find, too fiddly, too spicy, too bland, too crumbly, whatever it is, accept it just isn’t the right fit for you and move on.
- LIMIT yourself if you need to so the overwhelm of too much choice, too many options, doesn’t take hold.
- COMMIT to it, add it to your next meal plan so you try it while it is fresh in your mind, the longer you “keep it” the more likely you are to forget and find another just like it.
Confession time! I really need to tame my recipe files, I now have a “new recipes to try file”, and a “must try first” file, not to mention a few others which are saved by the author. I think I need a recipe detox!
Time to get back in control and tame the recipe monster!
My latest attempt at organization includes a cheap simple Display Book with my meal plan in the front and the shopping list second, followed by the recipes I need for the meal plan. I have two recipes for snacks and two for extras like granola, or freezer recipes, whatever my focus is on that week. When I’ve tested them they either stay as a new favorite or they go. Less choice, less distraction.
What have you found works for you?
If you are like me, preparing nourishing food for your family is important, it is part of caring for your family, loving your family and being a homemaker. Yet you want to keep it exciting, add variety, introduce new fresh wholesome flavors to expand the taste buds, all while maintaining our sanity and juggling however many other responsibilities we have, not to mention cater for everyone’s tastes or dietary needs.
With the endless variety we have available to us today it is easy to “want to try them all” but there’s no use wanting them all when we don’t have the time to follow through with even one or sacrificing the nutritious plan we had with the aim of creating something better and it all falling apart.
There are many ways to prepare your meal plan for the week and I’m sure many people “wing it” each night as the “what’s for dinner?” call echoes through the home.
What works for me and my family might not work for you, this is my latest attempt.
Are you looking for some meal planning and food preparation tips?
Are you ready to get serious about meal planning but not sure where to start? I just learned that @RealPlans, my favorite meal planning app has a brand new 10-day meal planning challenge…and it’s free! Sign up to get daily tips and helpful worksheets that will take your meal planning skills from basic to guru-level in less than two weeks. Register HERE for Free!
Happy meal planning 🙂
Elke @ Abundant Wholeness
The Body Whispers Before It Yells!
Illness starts in the body long before we start to experience symptoms!
Did you know that 75 to 90% of all visits to a health care provider are connected to stress-related conditions?
- Backache
- Headache
- Eyestrain
- Insomnia
- Fatigue
- Dizziness
- Appetite Disturbances leading to weight gain or weight loss
- High Blood Pressure
These are all warning signs of a more serious dis-ease in the making.
Do you experience any of the above?
“The body whispers before it begins to yell” – Lissa Rankin MD
Our bodies are strong and resilient in our 20’s and 30’s yet we hit 40 and things begin to come unstuck, symptoms begin to surface, and we wonder what happened.
The body gets tired!
It is how we live every day that sets the pattern for living a long healthy and vibrant life.
Learning to listen to our body’s whispers doesn’t happen overnight yet when we take the time to create awareness it can teach us valuable lessons about lifestyle, diet, relationships, and more.
As well as alerting us to stress our body signals important messages about the food we eat, what nourishes us and what causes inflammation.
When we eat the right food our body responds with energy, clarity, vitality, and strength.
When we eat food that stress’s our body it is tired, weak, we have brain fog and even pain.
This may prompt you to ask, “what is the right food?”
That is a really good question because this is where learning to listen to our body becomes really important. Despite what the media try to make us believe, and popular diet trends try to make us follow, there is no one diet that fits us all.
“One man’s food is another man’s poison.”
Learning to listen to how certain food makes our body feel will help us find the right foods for us much quicker than following someone else’s diet that worked for them.
When it comes to food our body sends us signals or whispers in many ways, whether we experience bloating, stomach cramps, indigestion, nausea, fatigue, constipation, skin rashes, or headaches, just to name a few, we need to learn to pay attention.
I’m finally learning to listen to my body, this has meant learning to be aware of two main areas: One is noticing how certain foods make me feel and the other is learning to ‘s whispers rather than ignoring them. When I am tired, I am learning to rest instead of pushing through. I am definitely not perfect in this area, but I’m better than I used to be. When it comes to change very rarely does it happen overnight, it’s normally the small steps that lead to change success.
Forward is forward no matter the pace!
Take some time to listen to what your body is telling you about energy and its need for rest, about tension and it’s need for relaxation or movement, about the food you eat and how it makes you feel. It will thank you.
Share in the comments some lessons you have learned from your body when you have taken the time to listen!
Blessings
Elke
Navigating Relationships as a Parent!
Love is hard…
Relationships are hard…
And, being a parent is hard!
How do you guide your children through relationships with the right mix of caution and excitement?
How do you teach them to “guard their hearts” yet not live expecting it to fail?
How do you calm the flames of young love rather than fan them or push our children away?
“Young love” is not just for the young, it is for any age, young or old and anywhere in-between. I would suggest all “young love” has the same excitement, the same rose-colored glasses, and the same intensity no matter how old you are.
My history of relationships is more like a train wreck than a love story and as I raise my children I sometimes find it hard to share the right mix of motherly wisdom over warnings birthed in my own story.
Each conversation is tinged with a mix of happiness and caution…
I want my children to find partners they can build strong, healthy relationships with, relationships filled with love, respect, courage, tenderness, and joy. I want them to feel supported and free to grow in who they are and pursue what’s important to them. I want them to find someone who will challenge them to not settle with mediocre but that inspires them to reach higher.
How do you share all this without sounding like you are “raining on their parade” or instilling boundaries that just aren’t realistic? This is not a matter of trust, I trust my children, however with matters of the heart I know it’s not that easy.
“Young love” is wonderful no matter your age, the “honeymoon” phase of intense emotion, endless thoughts of one another, happiness and seemingly endless conversations are a blessing and we all think “this will last forever!”
How do we share with our children, when they are experiencing the peak of “young love” that honeymoons don’t last forever, no matter how hard we try, and nor should they? Eventually, every relationship will come down to how well you have built the foundation of relating.
If there is one key above all others I would say it is COMMUNICATION, free, open, honest, communication. Both the good and the hard stuff, the happy and the sad, hopes, dreams, frustrations, and pains. When you know you can share everything in truth the rest you can navigate.
My heart for my children is that they have relationships built on trust and honesty, respect and honor, support and inspiration. I want them to challenge each other to grow into their destiny, to encourage each other to become who they were created to be and to not settle along the way.
Life is a journey of learning, loving, growing, and what better travel companion than someone who walks by our side opening our world to what we haven’t seen of ourselves.
Today I have shared more questions than answers, but then maybe the questions themselves for answers because when it comes to matters of the heart there is no hard and fast rule. Sometimes the lessons we must learn are just that, lessons we must learn, and although we can do our very best at guiding our children they too will navigate this road through their own choices. In the end, we love them, support them, and celebrate the good times and provide comfort when required. Just like love, parenting is also a journey of learning, growing, and adjusting.
BLESSINGS
Elke