Checking In: What’s that when it’s at home?
How do you check-in with yourself in a therapeutic context? Do you hold space for yourself and your mental health and what does that look and feel like?
We often ask the question of others ‘how are you?’
How often to you ask yourself and allow space and time to interpret the response.
Check-ins don’t just provide you with a chance to assess how you’re feeling, what’s weighing on you, and how your coping mechanisms are managing in the environments you are in. The process helps us improve our overall wellbeing and supports the relationships we have with others.
We know that mental and physical health are closely intertwined. Addressing mental health concerns, with check-ins on a regular basis, as our life and the people in it changes, can lead to improvements in sleep, energy levels, and overall physical well-being.
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Benefits:
• Catch symptoms before they get worse
Early intervention is often the key to effective treatment. Checking in will allow you to see any symptoms. If you journal your check ins, it will act as a great tool for seeing how much you’ve improved, or perhaps sometimes declined and noting these times can prevent it becoming unmanageable.
• Build emotional awareness
Asking ourselves how we feel about things such as events in our life or themes circulating in our community, can help us to gain insight into our emotional patterns and behaviors which leads to healthier coping strategies.
We have a term ‘Samskaras’ in yoga – this term describes the subtle impressions of our past actions, or the imprints left on the mind by past experiences. When our habitual patterns become so ingrained that they alter our body chemistry, it can be called addiction. When they become strong enough to alter our thinking process, we call it “samskara.” It’s like a deep groove in our mind patterns.
Remember though, just as habits are formed through repetition, they can also be transformed with conscious effort and awareness.
Yoga teaches us that through awareness and practice, samskaras can be shifted, helping us cultivate new, healthier responses. Checking in on a regular basis, we become increasingly aware of our own patterns, learn responses and triggers that affect us day to day.
• Build Long-Term Coping Skills
Checking in in a therapeutic context isn’t just about addressing problems; it’s about building long-term emotional resilience.
Whether you’re navigating relationships, work pressure, or on a path of personal growth, consciously checking in with yourself can go a long way in supporting wellbeing.
What does it look like?
Even when life is relatively calm, we are still processing emotions. Checking in, is always useful – as a proactive means of wellbeing and as a reactive tool for healing and transformation.
• 1:1 talking therapy is one of the best resources for checking in, providing a held, consistent space and professional space. Therapy sessions are a proactive way of understanding yourself and the world we live in and can be extremely helpful in helping us build an emotional toolkit to navigate life’s ups and downs with more ease.
Yoga classes, 1:1 holistic therapies, immersive workshops or retreat weekends can help us find clarity, focus and ‘head space’ that we need to create a suitable environment for checking in with ourselves. In classes we are often guided to observe, feel or connect to our ‘self’, while the movement and breathing exercises help us release tension held in the body.
• Mindful practice in group or 1:1 class support us in observing the coming of thoughts and emotions without becoming lost or stuck in their narratives. The practice of witnessing, without reaction creates a space for conscious response rather than reactive or learnt conditioning.
• Sound Therapy like mantra – a sacred sound, singing, gongs and bowls help break through layers of our emotions, or we could say disperses stuck energy helping us own the space again.
Chanting sacred sounds or mantras creates resonance within the mind, loosening the grip of deeply embedded imprints which helps foster a sense of inner shanti.
• Journaling is a written tool for self-reflection, and it gives us a tangible means of bringing patterns to the surface, allowing for a conscious measure, or observation.
Checking in is a great thing to make a habit with – but don’t be disheartened if you don’t have a regular practice, or if you slip out of doing it often.
It’s a very intuitive practice – tools we can pick up, when life hands us a reason too.
The hard thing of course is committing the time to it.