Are you nibbling the crumbs or ‘having your cake and eating it’ in life? How often do you accept less than what you can have on your plate – literally and figuratively?
Here are some examples of how nibbling the crumbs rather than cake-indulging may look in YOUR life!
- Your kids, husband, family members or people you live with spend hours each week doing stuff they love. You slot “me time” in only after you have driven the others somewhere, attended their activity or done the housework!
- You serve everyone at the table before yourself, buy something at the cafe for the others but don’t have anything yourself, you calorie count everything rather than giving your body the nourishment it needs, or you order the least expensive plate on the menu while others choose exactly what they want.
- Money goes on the bills first, then on others and lastly on you. Others have new clothes, for example, and you are still wearing your stock-standard classics from years back.
- Everyone else in the house has an interest or two. You don’t think it’s possible to head out mid-week to attend a class, have a social night out or pursue an interest or sport. After all who would look after everyone and how would you fit everything in?
- You wait for ” Mr Right” or “Mrs Right” to come along and miss the opportunities of what “people in the meantime” might offer you. Or you settle for second, third or even 100th best in the “relationship” department.
- You are waiting for something in the future to occur (eg kids leaving home, retirement, enough money, lotto win, better health…) before you “indulge” in some of your pleasures.
- Think of your own examples…A clue here is thinking about the things you feel that you are “missing out on” (crumbs) while others have it all, or appear to! (the cake)
Here is some food for thought for us generous, giving, selfless, motherly, hard-working and often martyr-like women. Yes I too am often guilty of nibbling on crumbs!
- Guilt creates ill-feeling – literally and figuratively. We don’t feel content, and we don’t get what we want. We also get ‘sick”. The predominant emotion of martyrdom is resentment. Both guilt and resentment eat away at our spirit and energy levels and we become not fun to be around!
- Nourishing ourselves with good food and drink is important for our energy levels. Stop restricting, denying, overindulging, calorie counting or being excessive. Listen to your body’s cues for hunger, thirst, rest, sleep, sex, pleasure, creative urge…
- Money is about flow. When we learn to spend money on ourselves and things we love, we naturally “light up” and attract all sorts of things, people and experiences into our lives. We become like a magnet.
- Denying ourselves of pleasurable things, interests, experiences or avenues for creativity and self expression is like a slow death of our spirit.
- Be Mrs (or Mr) Right for someone. This comes easily when your own pleasure needs are met because you are not waiting for the other person to make you happy. You are happy anyway!
- You can’t go back in time, but you can determine how your time now and in the future is spent. Regrets are never positive. Instead of regrets, how about a good dose of selfish indulgence? (better labelled as self-giving indulgence.)
- Doing everything for everybody but yourself is poor tithing! As my partner’s t-shirt reads, “I give 110% to everything. 100% to myself. 10% to others.” Perhaps this is more effective and happiness-making tithing!
“Let us eat cake.”