I can absolutely relate to how much work it can be to be "off" sometimes as you have to take care of things that you just don't usually have in your normal routine like the holidays. You get so much cleaned and cooked and decorated and you wish you had a day off from your day off. So maybe you decide to take some time on the couch to relax and you are enjoying yourself thoroughly.. before that old familiar feeling of guilt starts to creep in. You start to hear the same old messages beating you up about how lazy you are, how much you should be doing and how bad you are for being so indulgent.
This is just sad to me. Again, I can relate, but I think many of us do that to ourselves. It is absolutely okay to take time to relax and you really have to protect your ability to do that sometimes.
We value productivity so much in our society that it often is closely connected to our personal feeling of worth. If we have low productivity, we feel worthless and that is really a shame if you think about it. We also value concepts like unconditional love and acceptance, but we don't really follow through with that many times. This world sort of simultaneously teaches us not trust the place that we live in as we begin to realize from a young age that just because the world tells you that you are 'enough' just the way you are, it also expects you to be more and more and more and more, leaving you feel like you are NEVER 'enough'.
This is why it is so important to cultivate a strong inner voice that starts to really examine why we are getting these mixed messages and thus, what messages are really worth trusting and which should be thrown out.
When I mention examining these messages, you start doing this by looking at why these messages would be set up in the first place. If you are more productive, you are doing more for others, you are needing less from others, you are more independent, you are producing more for whoever benefits from that production. If there is a part of this message that possibly comes from a way of life where a small portion of the world (business owners, decision makers) needed the masses to work tirelessly to make them money (working class), then it starts to sound like something you need to question a bit.
That being said, I'm not against hard work at all! We need to look out for the world that we live in, we need to take care of what we are able to so that we continue to have a positive place to spend our lives and this has a lot more to do than the physical environment. A sense of community, fairness, and having things produced that we need for daily life are obviously important things. So, I'm not trying to suggest that we should all do nothing all day :) just that you might want to ask yourself where this external message is coming from that is filling you with shame and guilt that is connected to letting yourself relax.
That is why affirmations are so great. They start off feeling a bit odd at times and I think this is connected to the fact that we are trained not to believe positive things about ourselves most of the time (at least from the world, overall). So at first, when you start telling yourself that you are strong, your inner doubt will speak up and tell you that this is nonsense that you should discard, that believing that would be arrogant or naive, etc.
Eventually though, the more you focus on this, the stronger THIS voice becomes and you start to see your entire world in a different way. How exciting is that?
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