Liberation for Midlife women: Totally, Fantastically, Revamping selfishness

What is selfishness?

Paying attention to yourself at the exclusion of others?
 
Others may balk, argue with or judge your new behavior, if they’re accustomed to being the focus of your loving attention and care.
 
It may feel to them and to you cruel and drastic – but is it? Or is it just a shift in how you use and direct your precious life force energy?

​This can be challenging and it can be healthy, too – rebalancing the equation.

Rebalancing the equation so that you’re in it and weigh at least equal to others.
 
You may have come to a place of burnout in various ways. Burnt out from focusing on others and tending to their needs, desires and comforts. But what about you? We all know that giving and giving until you’re running on fumes and adrenaline isn’t sustainable nor healthy; though the energy surge can feel exciting and oddly enlivening for awhile.
 
But at what cost?

Now’s the time to care for you, to tend to your needs, desires and even comforts.
 
All the inherent feminine gifts you’ve shared with others live within you, and you deserve to be recipient of them as well.

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​Don’t dry up and be a wrinkled prune.
 
Our skin might be changing on the outside, but self-care and juiciness is holographic – across the board.
 
You’ve arrived at the stage of life where your thirst, your inner dryness, is calling to you and doesn’t want to be thwarted.
 
If you’re worried about focusing on you now to find out:
Who am I now, really?
What do I long for, crave and need to feel juicy and alive?
What will I regret if I never do it?
What kind of model do I want to be for the future women and even crones?
What do I wish I had been modeled by elder women when I was a younger woman?
What legacy do I want to leave?
 
These questions and so many more can help you see and feel what you need.
 
In order to have the courage and willingness to step forward onto this new path revealing itself to you….

What gets in your way?

If you’re like many midlife women, the answer is “guilt.”
 
Guilt at paying so much attention to yourself.
 
Fear that others will disapprove.
 
Anxiety at the risk of loss – of the status quo of comfort and relationships.
 
That they’ll say you’re SELFISH.

But here’s a different perspective for you:
 
What if this looking within and tending to who you are and what you want and need now, in order to feel complete and satisfaction with your life is different that what you’ve been taught and thought?

What if we do two things right now?

1. Reframe selfishness
We can erase the connotation of selfishness as being a negative act and replace it with another option: Selfishness can be redefined now as 

• Paying attention to your needs
• Tending to your longings and dreams
• Giving yourself the time you need to develop different aspects of yourself calling for attention
• Spending money/using some of your resources on activities that will be educational and nourishing for these new (or old) parts of you asking for recognition and to be valued.
• A healthy attitude recognizing and valuing your unique place and role on the planet

 
2. Consider selfishness as not only an act of self love, but of responsibility.
Because, you’ve been given the body, upbringing, learnings, gifts and passions that you have and nobody else on the earth has exactly what you have. No one. It’s uniquely yours.
 
And so, why not embrace your you-ness and allow it to flourish?

Not only allow it, but nourish it, help it along to it’s fullest, most exquisite and embodied expression.

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When the two come together – it yields

• Bliss
• Empowerment
• Connection to your essence and simultaneously Divinity

 
Not felt all the time, but when you experience it – there is nothing, in my experience, more satisfying. When I am in this place, doing what I feel called to do, which I can do, which I love to do – there is a feeling of timelessness and completeness. Satisfaction and profound gratitude.
 
And I bet that you’d agree – experiencing that is well worth the cost of embarking on your glorious, well-deserved, timely and appropriate path of healthy selfishness.

This is where there is joy. And this is where there is service.