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What Is Your Personal Self-Love Language?

How do you best respond to acts of love done by you for you? Most of us run through our days checking off our to-do lists. Ensuring that the needs of everyone else are met. By the time the day is over, you may be feeling tired or drained. Maybe even overwhelmed by the never-ending list of tasks that are yet to be completed.

Unfortunately, living like this is not benefiting your health or your relationships with;

Family

Friends

Children

Neighbours

Co-workers

It is time to tune in to what your self-love language is and start showing yourself some love.

Make Yourself A Priority

The five self-love languages are the same as what we listed above. However, you are going to be tending to the most important relationship you will ever nurture, the one with yourself.

This concept might feel strange at first. Especially if you aren’t used to focusing your attention on yourself. But I encourage you to power through those feelings. Really work hard on filling up your own love tank so that you can be a more grounded and happy person.

Find Your Self-Love Language

Let’s take a look at how these different types of self-love languages could be applied to our lives.

Words of Affirmation – The inner dialog that you have going on with yourself is vitally important to your health and self-image. Spend time everyday saying nice things to yourself. While you brush your teeth, or in the car on the way to work, tell yourself 3 things that you value and love about yourself. With each passing day this task will become easier as you become more comfortable with having this type of dialog with yourself.

Acts of Service – To perform an act of service for yourself, look at ways to fill your heart with joy. It may be delving into your faith or volunteering at a local charity, or donating something to someone in need.

Receiving gifts – Set aside twenty dollars per week (or whatever you can afford) to use to buy yourself something that you have always wanted, or invest in a hobby.

Quality Time – Spend time doing something that fills you with joy and relieves stress. It may be taking a yoga class, learning how to do a hobby, reading a great book, or it could be as simple as taking a rejuvenating nap.

Physical touch – To show yourself love through physical touch, you could get a massage, a manicure or pedicure, get a new haircut, or get a reiki treatment. Other options would be to sweat it out at the gym or your favourite workout class.

Whatever your self-love language may be, start today by making yourself a priority.

It’s Spring!! It’s time for spring cleaning of the body, mind and spirit. And it’s also time to clean out your yard and gardens to prepare for the new season.

Have you ever wanted to grow your own fruit and vegetables in your own backyard?

It is super easy, a critical skill to know how to grow your own food and is actually very enjoyable to be outside in the warm summer air tending to something that will bring you such joy, nutrition and flavour in just a few short weeks.

Here is how to get started:

If you already have some garden space, move the soil around as well as you can with a hoe or a rototiller. This will break up the hard soil that has gotten hard over the winter months.

If you do not have a garden yet, choose a space in your yard that has the most sun possible and dig the layer of sod off the ground until you reach your desired space. Then dig the soil around, remove any large stones, rototill the soil or use a hoe to break up the hard soil so that the roots of the plants and seeds you will be planting can actually reach down and root themselves easily.

You can add compost or fresh top soil to the earth that you have just turned over to provide fresh nutrients for your plants to grow.

Choose a garden layout that will allow you to walk easily through your garden or be able to reach everywhere from being on the edge. I always plant my garden in rows because it makes it much easier for planting, weeding and harvesting. But some microgardens do well growing in pods rather than rows. It depends on how much space you have.

The easiest vegetables to grow from seed are carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, kale and herbs. They are very hearty and produce decent crops with little tending.

However if your looking to make the most out of your garden, click here to read ‘Backyard Medicine – Grow Your Own Natural Remedies”, before choosing what to plant.

Once your soil is soft and you have chosen your seeds, make a shallow row, approximately 1” deep, for your seeds to drop into.

Plant your carrot seeds about 1” apart in the row, as you can imagine how much space each carrot needs to grow and expand to become full sized.

Beets need a little bit extra space because each beet seed will produce 4 beets.

For the lettuce, it depends on the type you are growing – leaf lettuce can be planted fairly close together because it grows just as leaves, but romaine lettuce will form into heads and needs a few inches of space.

The important thing is to keep in mind the amount of space the vegetables need to become full sized (like you would find at the grocery store) and give them that much space to grow.

Once you plant the seeds, cover them with dirt and pack the dirt lightly. You can water them every day until they start to sprout and then keep watching them. Once you can see the actual rows forming, then you can begin to see what each of the plants look like and you can decipher the vegetables you want growing from the weeds that will also pop up!!

Pull out the weeds so their roots don’t crowd out your vegetables’ roots and keep watering them regularly throughout their growing season.

You can also plant already growing vegetables such as tomatoes, because they need a longer growing season than our climate allows for. By purchasing tomato plants that are already well established, you can enjoy their fruits in mid-late August. This is the same for pepper plants, but they are often difficult to grow!! (Or at least I don’t seem to have much luck with them!!)

Good luck with your garden adventures, and be sure to share this hobby with your children. There is no better way to spend the summer months than being outside and enjoying time with Mother Nature.

Jo-Anne Richardson, RHN

Jo-Anne Richardson has almost a decade of experience managing a chiropractic office and educating patients on how chiropractic can allow your body to express optimal health. She is a Registered Holistic Nutritionist and holds a Degree in Communications. She loves to experiment with raw vegan recipes, loves to salsa dance, travel and learn new holistic health information to share tips with everyone who visits the office.