Taking time out to relax and unwind is highly underrated, but it’s integral to being a sane and awesome person. Chill days allow you space and self-love in your working week, time to give to yourself, time to fill yourself up and ‘fill up your cup’.
To be clear, a chill day is where you do absolutely nothing with your day. ‘What?!” I hear you say. ‘NOTHING?!’ Yes, nothing. Nothingness is awesome, it allows you to drop out of life’s busyness, put your feet up and enjoy just being. Chill days allow you to recharge and connect with the yumminess of the present moment, and to rest.
Chill days require you learning how to say a big firm no to anything that stresses you out. This includes people too. Tell ’em where to go, say, ‘This is my chill day. I’m hanging loose and giving myself some love.’
A master of chilling also says, ‘F**k you, email messages, I’m not checking you today. F**k you, work, I’m having a day for myself, thank you very much. See you later.’ And even, ‘F**k you, smartphone, I’m not even going to turn you ON today. I need some headspace.’
I repeat, taking it easy is an art worth mastering. It will bring you guilt-free joy and it will make you happier. I absolutely guarantee it. It requires the honed skill of pretty much saying, ‘F**k you, world, I’m taking the day off. I’m unavailable right now. See you tomorrow, or next week.’ Or suchlike. Then putting your feet up, taking a deep breath, and chilling the f**k out. Simple.
Warrior practice
Make space for a regular chill day in your schedule, ideally every week. If your job has you working 9-to-5, Monday to Friday, take a day at the weekend. Even if your schedule is tight and won’t allow you to do this every week, make it a regular happening, perhaps every other weekend. Whatever you can do, trust me, it reaps serious rewards. You will thank me for it or, better yet, you will thank yourself for it.
As part of your day, take some time to go out into nature. This can be as simple as your local park. Or anywhere that is green.
When you get there, sit down. Don’t DO anything. Play with just ‘being’. Seeing what is around you. Listening to the sounds.
Allow yourself to rest in what you see and hear. Take it all in. Notice as you start to drop out of ‘busy mind’ mode and into ‘present’ mode. Watch it happening within you. Notice the change. Begin to notice the subtleties. The little things. Enjoy them.
Now just sit (or lie) back – and see how deeply you can allow yourself to receive and experience this way of looking and interacting with the world…
When you come to leave – see if you can take some of this experience with you, back into your life.
And if the weather is inclement, you can do the same thing indoors.
Start by turning everything off, and I mean EVERYTHING. Phone, tv, computer, Wi-Fi, the lot! Then sit for a while and notice the quiet. Notice the silence. Instead of freaking out because it’s so goddamn quiet, try to go into the silence. Embrace it. Silence is not something you need to be afraid of.
Welcome yourself to the present moment. This is where you can relax and chill. Right here. There is no need to ‘do’ anything. Just indulge in the present moment.
Try to spend your whole day like this. Potter around. Just enjoy your own peace and quiet. Let your frazzled brainwaves settle, and just be.
3. LEARN TO LOVE YOURSELF
Give yourself some love. And then some more. There is no end to the amount of love you can, and should, give yourself. We’re taught to give our love away to others but, really, we could do with loving ourselves before we start loving other people. Self-love is not so widespread but is very needed.
So, what is self-love? Well, it is about being good to yourself. It’s about making friends with your own soul. It’s about becoming your own best friend and getting comfortable with yourself, because someone who is comfortable with themselves is a nice presence to have around.
It’s about softening. Softening how tough we can be on ourselves. We can give ourselves a pretty hard time, no? Let’s see if we can change that pattern and turn it around. It’s about redirecting how we have been taught to love because it seems we are pretty much taught to love everyone except for ourselves!
The trick to loving yourself is to turn that love you so easily give to others back around and direct it at yourself – 24/7, every minute of the day, loving your skin, your cells – all of you.
And loving yourself means taking care of yourself. It means giving yourself lots of goodness with zero guilt. This is often what comes between us and the ability to receive our own self-love – the guilt. We can feel like somehow, we’re not worthy of loving ourselves. Most of us will have picked up this belief in our childhoods. What rubbish! Of course we’re worthy of our own self-love!
So drop the guilt, dear soul – and love thyself.
Warrior practice
Find a quiet time and space in your day and put it aside as a time to give yourself a bit of love.
Lie down on the couch and put your hand on your heart. FEEL your heart. Imagine love coming through your hand and into your heart. Breathe it in… take your own love in – deeply! RECEIVE your own love. Feel your own goodness, your own beauty, your tenderness. Breathe love into that place. We don’t need to need someone else to do this for us – we can do it ourselves! Just practise giving yourself love. At first, it may feel painful, or a bit weird, but try this once a day (before going to bed works well) and in no time at all you’ll be totally getting this ‘self-love’ thing!
4. DROP YOUR EGO
There are pretty much two ways to live in this world: one is from the ego, the other is from the heart. And I believe that the best way to go – to follow the spiritual path – is all about living from the heart.
The ego is like a shell covering our real self. Only the world is calling out for us all to drop our egos and let down our guard a bit these days. To start living from the heart.
So, what is the ego? Well, it is our false self. The false ‘faces’ and constructs of ourselves that we present to the world. Our ego loves to make us think we’re better than everybody else. It loves to judge everyone and everything. It is critical, focuses on other people’s faults and can be such a bore. It gets off on making other people wrong. Now I don’t know about you, but I long for a world with less ego in it. Where we all learn to drop our egos and to start getting in touch with who we really are – the real us, not the filtered version. It’s about not being afraid to be vulnerable. Ego can be scared of showing its vulnerability, but what lies under our ego is our ‘softness’ and this is the good stuff, the juice.
The danger in life is that if we don’t do any inner work (see Part 3, Being Who We Really Are) we go through life adding more and more false layers to our shell. The soft, gentle, squishy bits get left behind and we become hardened to life and thus each other. The inability of people to acknowledge each other when passing in a street, that ‘looking down’ thing we all do, that’s the ego scared of showing its vulnerability.
I’d like to see this change. I envision a world where realness is the norm and where we do acknowledge each other in the street, in shops, and we don’t look down. Where we are softer to each other, more present. There is no need for so much hardness in the world. Ego and this hardness is what is responsible for so much of what is not working in the world. It doesn’t need to be this way. We need heart leadership – not ego leadership.