Welcome to day 1 of the 9:09 is Nurture Time challenge! I know you are ready to let go of some stress and take a moment to feel good. The word nurture means to care for and to encourage growth and development. That’s what you’re doing right now and we’ll continue to do it for the next 21 days.
Before we get started I want to give you an overview of what we’ll be doing.
We’re connecting to and nurturing love of our true natures, with the intention to balance any self-criticism or negativity. Not only does negativity and criticism cause us to hold ourselves back from offering the world our natural gifts and talents, it impacts our relationship with friends, family and our own individual selves, too.
I’ll use an analogy to nature throughout these next days. Nurturing and caring for our selves is similar to caring for a garden. For each of you that just panicked because you believe you lack a green thumb, nurturing is a practice we learn and get better at over time. No green thumb required.
Nature provides us with wonderful examples of nurturing – and acceptance of growth and change – and expresses its own inherent natural beauty with grace.
We’re going to follow a gardening plan of sorts. My mom Karen found a wonderful description of nurturing a garden in a blog post from Azure Standard. I’m going to loosely adapt those steps to help you nurture the way you love yourself.