During the Women Celebration Month of URI in November 2022, URI MENA facilitated two one-day workshops about exploring inner strength and self-care practices for women’s empowerment. For a whole day, women in Jordan from different national backgrounds learned and exchanged different practices to make themselves stronger from the inside.
Why is it important to care for yourself and know your Inner Strengths for Self-Empowerment? These questions were discussed and explored together. Self-care means caring for yourself in your various life roles. It means treating yourself with love and kindness and respecting yourself as a human being who is both imperfect and deserving of empathy. All of us agreed that self-care and the knowledge of your inner strengths lead to empowerment. It means becoming stronger from the inside regardless of the outside circumstances and life challenges. A common misunderstanding of self-care is the assumption that self-care is selfish. But we all realized in the workshop, that only if we are caring for ourselves, we have enough energy to care for others and be role models to others for a healthy lifestyle.
The participants learned different ways to cope with stress and deal with challenges through individual self-care. Throughout the day they gained theoretical knowledge, got to know practical methods, and tried out some examples of self-care from the practice of mindfulness and yoga. For example, we tried out breathing exercises for calmness and concentration as well as some yoga practices to relax the body. Even though the participants found out that self-care practice is individual for each person, we could share our ideas and found a lot of commonalities in the things that make us happy and what we are grateful for in our lives.
The whole day was full of joy, laughter, exchanges, and inspiration to continue and find out more about self-care practice.