Caregiver Refresh: Creative Breaks For Self-Care And Stress Relief

In this 3-day course, caregivers of all types, but especially family caregivers, will explore how to make time and space for their needs, using spoken word poetry and affirmation meditation to inspire their creative self-care. Creative self-care encompasses many activities and experiences and utilizes the power of your creative passions to carve out time and space (even as little as 5-10 minutes) to engage with activities that light you up inside. You’ll be guided through spoken word poetry and affirmation meditations that call forth your creativity to nurture your inner well-being, helping you transcend your everyday worries and tasks. These teachings will show you how to establish intentions and protect your creative time by setting boundaries, readying your creative space, getting into creative flow, holding grace for yourself, and reducing judgment when dealing with caregiver stress and disruptions to your self-care plan. The poetry, music, and affirmations help establish a safe and self-affirming space for caregivers to explore meaning as they seek to replenish themselves through their creativity.

Lección 1: Creative Self-Care For Caregivers: Inner Listening And Intention Setting

In this first lesson, we’ll set intentions to include creativity as a pathway to our self-care by tuning into our inner voice and asking ourselves what we need and want. We’ll listen to this inner voice with a sense of patience and open-mindedness and establish boundaries to begin to protect our time and energy so we can preserve some of it for our creative self-care sessions. In the affirmation meditation practice, we’ll affirm our intentions and create a facilitating mental and physical environment that will empower us to make time for our favorite creative activities. This inner listening, intention setting, and affirmation meditation practice, will help us hold grace for ourselves and find balance when the stress of our caregiver role overwhelms us. We’ll explore how creative flow can bring meaning and purpose to our lives, and ways to overcome periodic breaks in our self-care necessitated by our caregiver role (without giving up completely on self-care). Throughout this course, we will focus on creating a judgment-free mindset where our needs are allowed to take center stage.

Lección 2: Discover Creative Self-Care: Visualization And Affirmation For Caregivers

In lesson two, we’ll journey through a fun visualization to explore what creative self-care is, what types of creative activities we might want to engage in, and how creative flow states can help revitalize ourselves as we reduce self-consciousness while engrossed in creative play. In the affirmation meditation, we’ll affirm how we will make time and space for our creativity, as well as the practical considerations of scheduling it and setting boundaries to protect our creative sessions. To accomplish this, we’ll use a visualization that evokes the freedom and majesty of rooms within a castle.

Lección 3: Sustaining Creative Time: Practical Self-Care For Caregiving Stress

In lesson three, we explore the changing nature of our caregiver roles as we deal with the most challenging aspects of our lives: tumultuous/unpredictable events, emotional and physical overwhelm, and a lack of balance in the caregiver/self-care equation. We’ll explore some practical tips for establishing lasting habits that protect our creative time from the obstacles, stresses, and unpredictable nature of our caregiver roles. In the affirmation meditation, we’ll focus on 1) grounding and using our senses to affirm the present moment, 2) exploring ways to use the three-breath journey (my thanks to Gil Fronsdal for the inspiration) as a means of anchoring ourselves with the breath, 3) taking a refreshing sensory pause to experience calmness and 4) showing loving-kindness to ourselves as a means of coping with acute stress and the demands of the caregiver role.

Reviews

This was a beautiful course! I love your spoken word poetry! As a mother and therapist, I found this very restorative. Thank you! 🙏

Loved this course so much! Jill has such a a unique way of connecting, with poetry, visualizations and affirmations. I highly recommend!