A client last week was filling out a daily journal and mentioned that a mantra, in a Yoga for Adrienne video, was really sticking in their brain:
Breathe like you love yourself. Move like you love yourself.
And as I often do, I joked around and said "Thesis like you love yourself! Schedule like you love yourself!"
And it happened, as it often does, that the phrase stuck with me. I spent the next week walking around, and it would pop into my head: schedule like you love yourself.
What would that look like? What does my schedule look like right now? If someone saw my day to day rhythms and didn't know me, would they look at it and say "there goes a person who really cares about themselves!"
There are definitely elements that suggest I love myself! I have a pretty strict bedtime, I have dates to catch up with friends. I have some workouts in there - I have days off.
But some things in there are a little dicey - some days I'm scheduled all the way from breakfast to lunch with very little downtime! I often don't get to my workout until late in the day - not because I couldn't squeeze it in, but because I feel like I have to earn it.
And I DEFINITELY know that there have been seasons of my life where if you looked at my schedule, it would have been 92.7% work, and 7.3% collapsing from exhaustion. It would be difficult to have anyone look at that and say yes, that is a schedule of a person who loves themselves.
But, there's also something deeper at work in the structuring of the phrase: schedule like you love yourself.
What a beautiful work, like! Because it actually gives us the freedom to separate how we might actually feel from minute to minute (I don't know about you, but the relationship between me and my other selves is evolving and changing and not all sunshine and joy all the time!), from how we schedule. It's not "love yourself first and then schedule like it!" It suggests that if we schedule in activities that make it easier to care for ourselves, then we might just have an easier time caring for ourselves.
So if it feels like a little bit of a stretch, in this season of love and romance and hearts, to start from the self-love and care and move outwards, try scheduling first, and see if that doesn't invite a little more of it in.