5 Spiritual Self Care Tips

During our most recent Safe Haven Fireside Chat, Valerie Sargent shared spiritual self-care strategies to help us reconnect to our inner peace and find gratitude despite the stress of our modern lives.

Valerie Sargent is a certified hypnotherapist, Akashic Records reader, Transformational Healer and Intuitive Artist. She has been practicing Reiki and other healing modalities for over 20 years and has been working within the Akashic Records for over 15 years.

1. Start Your Morning Mindfully

Valerie opened our conversation with thoughts on starting your day in the right mindset. She shared that starting your morning in a state of gratitude is essential for maintaining a state of ease and wellbeing.

“Wake up and be mindful of your first thoughts. Pay attention to how you feel in your body while still lying in bed, or shortly after rising.” She starts her day by thanking her body and moving into a sense of gratitude. She begins with her feet, and moves up her body, silently acknowledging it for all that it does.

Thanking our bodies for staying healthy and for self-healing, helps us get to a place where we can accept ourselves as we are. When you thank your body for the hard work it does each day, and offer it compassion, it’s going to respond in kind. This practice, over time, makes it easier to love yourself wherever you are in life right now.  

When you thank your body and give it compassion, it will return in kind.

By finding something to be grateful for every day, you set your vibration higher. This enables you to better handle whatever comes your way. The benefits of this practice is amplified the longer you do it. Results may not be immediate, but can invite miracles into many areas of your life over time.

2. Detox From The News

Valerie explained that she doesn’t watch the news very often. She suggests monitoring how much news you watch and how much media you take in. These days, information on media platforms like TV and social media can be a trigger for many of us, and send us into fear, confusion, distraction or anger. Media is designed to keep us in fear, so her suggestion is to limit the amount you watch. 

She suggests to ask yourself “What about the news, or what about your watching it is triggering you. How does that make you feel?”  

“Step into a place of neutrality about what you’re hearing. When you fall into fear or anger, that’s the energy you’re putting out and getting back. If you can drop into neutrality and question what it’s bringing up in you, you can approach these feelings with more compassion and ease”

Drop into a place of neutrality and ask, what is this bringing up in me?

How to Neutralizing Negative Feelings:

• Breathe deeply, especially when triggered. Pause and breathe.
• Drop into a space of gratitude for the simple things around you, like oxygen to breath and ground to stand on.
• Ground yourself, and spend as much time in nature as you can.
• Use the “All is well” mantra. 

3. Yoga and Nature

Valerie shared with us, “Over the last year I’ve started practicing daily Yoga outside, and it’s been an amazing experience. Yoga is good for your body, but doing it outside in nature, in all seasons, has changed me. 

I find it very easy to connect to the earth now, and ground, I find that to be amazingly healing. It’s amazing to watch the change of the seasons while doing yoga outside.”

Being outside in nature is a powerful way to connect to your spiritual self. Just going outside and breathing deeply or standing in a mountain pose can reset your energy and emotional body. 

Valerie recommends, “When, standing on the ground, imagine your feet sending energy deep into the ground, connecting you with the roots of the trees, and the crystals deep in the Earth. While grounded into the earth in this way, almost as if you have grown your own roots into the ground, you are intentionally receiving energy and infinite wisdom from the earth.”

4. Clearing Energy for Peaceful Sleep

Valerie recommends that before bed, we clear our energy fields from the day. We pick up a lot of negative energy throughout the day and need to reset and ground ourselves before sleep in order to have a healing and peaceful night’s rest.

She suggests that you can keep it simple, or make it a ritual. You can just clear yourself or clear your whole room or house. Just be intentional about wanting to do it.

First, drop your focus into your heart center, connect to the present moment, and state the intention to clear your energy field of any negative or discordant energy, and any person or event that caused you to feel angry, frustrated or fearful. Invite white healing light into your energy body. You can then move that intention statement out to your bedroom, then your house. You can take it as far or wide as you want to.

This sets the tone for peaceful sleep.

Other “Energy Clearing” and Grounding Rituals

• Add epsom salts, flower petals or essential oils to your bath
• Dry brushing
• Wear white or light clothing
• Diffuse essential oils
• Shake your body like animals do to relieve stress
• Dance around to clear the energy consciously

Valerie shared another light-hearted way way to release stress and clear your head/energy before bedtime:  Flip your head over in front of you, and beginning with your finger tips at the base of your skull, use quick but gentle circular motions to massage and release tension all over your scalp. If you let your hair hang down while doing this, it feels magnificent.

Another bedtime ritual she mentioned is to light a candle, giving you something to focus on. Then offer a prayer of intention to clear old energy, a moment of gratitude for all that you are and all that you have, and an acknowledgement to your body for its work in keeping you well. 

5. “I Am” Mantra Meditation

Valerie closed our conversation with an “I am” mantra meditation. Some of the most powerful words you can say are, “I am…”. Any words you say after that are what you want to manifest. She explains that “this is a great way to nurture yourself with compassionate and powerful statements.”

We went through a long series of “I am” mantras and ended with, “I am safe, I am healthy, I am peaceful” and an intention to reconnect with our heart center. 

This is an easy technique to raise your energy and emotional state while in the car or waiting in line somewhere less than inspiring.

When you’re in your “I am” presence, or, your heart center, you’re putting that energy out as an unspoken invitation to those around you to raise their vibrations too, which makes this a beautiful practice to assist the world in healing alongside you.