How Holistic Methods Help Female Entrepreneurs Maintain Balance
Recently I was interviewed by Dr. Sandi Shaw from Live Well and Enjoy Life about how holistic methods help female entrepreneurs maintain work-life balance.
Now you don’t need to be an entrepreneur to benefit from these tips. If you are a busy mom or professional (especially if you are a teacher, in healthcare, or the service industry) these tips apply to you as well.
Read on to learn more about holistic psychotherapy and Ayurveda…
How your mood can improve with holistic psychotherapy
How Ayurveda helps nourish the mind, body, and soul
Why essential oils are also good for animals
What happens when work-life is not in balance
Here's how the interview went…
Why were holistic practices important to you?
My mom always looked to natural solutions to relieve symptoms or to solve issues growing up, like wound care, headaches, even losing a few pounds, and this became ingrained in me. So, incorporating natural healing approaches into my practice was essential to me.
Something very few people know about me is that at the age of 16 I left home to join the Canadian Military full-time (I didn’t want my parents to shoulder the burden of a higher education). While training and studying at the military academy I broke both of my femur bones! It took 2 years to heal completely and boy did I learn a lot about myself and my desires in this period of deep healing and reflection. This showed me many things including… when one door closes another one opens…. and listen to your intuition.
How can holistic psychotherapy help women who are dealing with stress?
In general psychotherapy can help women…
Find new ways to cope with stress and anxiety or to manage anger, depression, and other emotional pressures.
Improve communication skills. Learn how to listen to others, and have others listen to you.
Get ‘unstuck’ from past relationships and family issues. Break old patterns and develop new ways of dealing with old issues.
Heal old psychological wounds. Repair damage from the past.
Discover creative ways to problem solve.
Improve self-esteem and boost self-confidence.
Increase ability to love yourself and love others. Enrich your relationships with a greater capacity for respect, compassion, and joy.
Holistic Psychotherapy achieves the above results by combining a whole person perspective including the 4 layers of life- body, mind, heart, and soul with traditional psycho-dynamic and cognitive-behavioral treatment modalities.
Holistic psychotherapy blends eastern and western healing practices and aims to address the root cause of issues, not just symptom reduction.
What can Ayurveda do to help women entrepreneurs maintain a work-life balance?
Being 5000 years old, Ayurveda is the oldest medical system in the world still practiced today. It seeks to harmonize our minds, bodies, and souls for optimal health and life fulfillment. It is a complete and profound system that helps women entrepreneurs discover their own unique mind-body type and recommended Ayurvedic healing tools to balance and prevent illness.
It’s a wisdom tradition that offers a proven guide for a life of happiness, vitality, love, and purpose. From an Ayurvedic perspective, human beings are not viewed as mere thinking physical machines, but rather as fields of intelligence in dynamic exchange with the energy and information of the environment.
Health is more than the absence of disease.
Ayurveda sees health as a state of vibrant balance in which all the layers of one’s life are integrated. Ayurveda provides tools to enhance your physical and emotional well-being via conscious choice making, and enlivening and nourishing the connection between mind, body, and soul.
Ayurveda has been essential in helping me heal from my own burn-out as a professional and instrumental in keeping my work-life balanced for over 20 years now. As well, Ayurveda is the foundation that I base my signature 4-layers of life framework on when helping female entrepreneurs.
How did you start creating your own blend of essential oils?
Back in early 2000’s I decided that I wanted to live on a farm with donkeys, goats, and dogs as pets – my favorite animals. I had the barn and pastures all planned out and was really excited about it. I wanted to treat them all naturally of course, without vaccinations, using only natural medicine. So I went back to school to learn how to take care of animals holistically. One of the courses I took was an aromatherapy class for animals – and I fell in love.
I became enamored and consumed by the powers of essential oils and began making my own line of products for animals called Hoofs n’ Woofs. I made ear cleansers, shampoos, tick and flea repellents, anti-biotics (yes siree ), itch remedies, wound care products, calming products, and on and on. This became so popular around family and friends that I was asked to start making blends for humans, too. And so, I went back to school again to become a certified clinical aromatherapist to really do no harm. In the process I forgot about my farm dream and instead pursued the aromatherapy dream.
Today, I make and sell essential oil blends for sleep, anxiety, depressed mood, hormonal balance, meditation, and so on.
And I teach classes on using essential oils safely and effectively around your entire family, so folks don’t have to go to school to get a certification in aromatherapy. I’ve simplified the teachings and include the important and fun stuff only.
What’s your morning routine?
I’m the queen of self-care. In fact, this is one of the main teachings I impart to all women entrepreneurs I come in contact with.
You must take care of your well-being before you can take care of the needs of others.
I learned this the hard way and burnt-out, so for the past 20 years my morning routine has been this…
Wake up, relieve myself, scrape my tongue, drink water, and then engage in the self-care practice of my choosing for 1 hour. This can be yoga, meditation, a walk in nature, journaling, or muscle strengthening exercises, or a mix of them…. Whatever I feel I need so long as throughout the week I’ve attended to the needs of my body, mind, heart, and soul. Then I shower and release my self-healing inner pharmacy by engaging in an Ayurvedic massage. Then I take care of the dogs, eat breakfast, and prep for work.
Every day, I feel good knowing that I have taken time to attend to my needs. This helps me keep a great work-life balance. It has staved off burn-out for over 20 years now.
What are 3 implications of not maintaining a work-life balance?
There are many…but if I were to choose just 3..
Lack of presence in your life – you’ll miss the important stuff because your mind is busy focusing on work all the time. This disconnects you from your spirit and leaves you feeling unfulfilled.
Exhaustion. We all need time for rest, time to play, and have fun. When our emotional well gets emptied without replenishment we end up feeling drained and may develop deeper mental health problems like anxiety or depression.
Conflict in relationships – over-working creates internal stress and makes one more reactive and less patient in relationships. This results in tension and conflict in relationships and may lead to divorce or children developing stress symptoms as well.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to female entrepreneurs struggling with stress?
Take the time to practice self-care everyday by making your needs the priority. Your well-being is your job!
After-all, self-care is not selfish… it is non-negotiable.
And check out Dr. Sandi Shaw for her wealth of knowledge helping women entrepreneurs along their wellness journey. Or follow her on Instagram or Facebook!
If you’re interested in becoming a holistic psychotherapist but don’t want to take a conventional path, check out this video that outlines the path I took to get there on my Youtube channel HolisticKarine → How I Became a Holistic Psychotherapist.
Karine Johnston, LICSW CCA