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Self-Care Tip #177 – Discover your connections to others.  Be a friend to yourself.

Every Sabbath in my son’s class, the teacher prays for the offering,

Please help it bless all the little girls and boys all over the world to learn of your great Love.

It hasn’t been until the more recent years that my own prayers have felt invited in by those type of prayers.  Where my thoughts go are to the abused kids and instinctually I count my children’s heads, heard them and cluck.  Walking down Powell Street in San Francisco, my husband kept urgently telling me,

Watch the kids.  Don’t let them out of your sight!  Anyone could grab them!

He had just read Middlesex and felt the threat of child abduction crawling up his skin.  When he gave me these warnings, I heard the words of my son’s teacher again.

Please help….

There is so much yuck, and the yuck is so loud and awful that seeing the help around might be missed.  We are distracted by suffering.  We are distracted for good, bad or somewhere in-between.

Today, Darcy Delaproser introduced me to a couple people she’s advocating for, as seen on YouTube.  Watching these videos, I prayed, “Help.”  I met Darcy, aka @PrincessDelap on @Twitter and am drawn to her tenacity and beliefs.  She is a human and civil rights advocate.

The other day I met Cindy Chaisson, from Custom Canine, who volunteers her time and expertise to train service dogs and use them to find abducted children through the Amber Alert program.

Tonight, I was supposed to get to bed early, but I got swept up in all the research on this topic.  There is too much to lay out and more than I read about in the last couple hours.  There is help.

The connect self-care has with all of this is where we turn our posture to.  Where do we place these victims, their past, their future and the perpetrators?  Our self-care includes contemplating what our connection is to them.  For some of us, obviously, the connection is immediate.  For others, the connection is more distant, in the shape of theory or information: data on the Amber Alert screen.

Freedom to do self-care includes this:  Choosing who we will call our own.  Choosing whom we will spend emotional energy on.  Time.  We are free to connect or disconnect.  In those ties or un-ties, we find the climate of our own self-care.

Please help it bless all the little girls and boys all over the world to learn of your great Love.

Questions:  How are your connections a form of your self-care?  How do you see connections being a part of self-care?  Please tell me your story.

Related Articles

• Facebook will broadcast Amber Alerts (sfgate.com)
• Justice Department Honors Amber Alert Coordinator of the Year, Charles Fleeger (prnewswire.com)