Repost: Protecting and replenishing your energy

Q: How do you manage your energy?

Kinnari’s Dialogue

I’ve been on the go ever since I returned from Europe a few weeks ago. I spent last week in New York on a work trip. That was followed by a weekend family camping trip with a DJ collective that we've been a part of since 2019. All this time away from home has resulted in me falling sick. My body reminded me that I haven’t been very good at protecting my energy. So this week I made zero social plans, prioritizing being in bed by 10 pm and going back to doing the energy exercise I wrote about last year.

We are reposting one of our earlier dialogues on protecting and replenishing your energy below. I hope that the exercise I reference in that post is as helpful to some of you as it has been to me. 

Mitali’s Dialogue

The past 3 months of traveling have been disruptive to my routines. Well this past week I was forced to slow down. With a toe injury that prevented me from being active, now was a good time to revisit my daily habits. Simple family rituals can help ground me as I described in our post from last year. 

This past week I started to put some rituals back into practice. The gratitude practice at the dinner table. The family picnics on Sunday. And I noticed that everyone in the family started to feel more grounded. Last night for the first time this school year, all four of us were at the dinner table on a school night. My high schooler, who has daily football practice after school and has been coming home each night after we finish dinner, made an effort to get back home in time to join us at the table. It was a wonderful feeling to have all of us back in sync again.

Rhine Falls, Switzerland

Posted on Nov 24th, 2021

Kinnari’s Dialogue

It’s 4.30 am on Saturday, November 20th. I’ve been up in bed for the past three hours, reading articles, browsing Instagram, and chatting with Mitali (surprisingly she has been up too).  I finally give up on the idea of going back to sleep and get out of bed to write. 

So let’s talk about energy. How do I ensure I don’t run out of it. Because I know that I don’t perform well when my bucket is empty. These last two weeks have been full, very full. I have…

— launched disco dialogues with Mitali,

— had anxiety about, but met post-covid social obligations,

— hosted my uncle and aunt at home for a couple of days, 

— tried to help my parents through some problems they were having

— celebrated my birthday which included two dinners out and one evening at the theater

All of this while working on my day job, and being a mom. So yes, my body finally gave in last night and I fell sick. So it makes sense that I’m writing a post about protecting my energy at this time. I haven’t figured it out yet. But I wanted to share an exercise that Mitali recently introduced me to that I think is quite helpful.

Consider the areas of your life that are significant to you right now.   Write a brief “headline” for an area of your life where you are gaining, draining, and investing energy. So here are mine:

• Gaining energy: from being creative, from launching disco dialogues

• Draining energy: from trying to meet all the post-covid social obligations 

• Investing energy: deepening my meditation practice, sleeping on time, and making exercise a priority. Basically real self-care. I haven’t been prioritizing this in the past two weeks, hence I’m picking this as an area I want to invest my energy into. 

This exercise helps me think about my energy and how I want to prioritize my time. 

Mitali’s Dialogue

When I took a break from work 2 years ago the idea was to focus on my health and my relationship with my family. As I started to get older, and saw my kids go through different phases in their school journeys, these priorities became non-negotiable to me. 

The pandemic brought these priorities into stark focus as I was forced to pause and give my full attention to myself and my family in 2020. In the process, I started to think of habits that I could bring into our lives that would stick and survive once I decided to go back to work. Over time my self-care habits turned into rituals that helped me feel more grounded with myself, with my family, and with my friends. Some rituals were as simple as having an order in which I do my skincare routine in the morning. Some required a bit of effort like doing family picnics every Sunday at our favorite local park. Other rituals have been more deliberate like making time for meditation and consistent social connection with friends that replenish my energy.

This article on the surprising power of daily rituals (BBC Future) made me realize how these rituals have been key to my mental health during the pandemic and hopefully beyond. 

“...the benefits of rituals also extend beyond the individual – they're evident in groups of people, too. Ritualistic behaviour can improve social bonding when we practise it collectively. "Having social networks has frequently been linked to wellbeing, and it is thought that rituals – frequent group gatherings – are particularly good at facilitating such networks," says Valerie van Mulukom, a psychologist at Coventry University in the UK and co-author of a study on the effect of secular rituals on social bonding.”

As I enter the holiday season and things start to get hectic again, this is my reminder to take care of myself first. Because my energy defines how my family functions through these crazy/busy times. #mefirst

If you are looking for inspiration, this article has some simple, practical ideas to help ground yourself and replenish your energy.