Men, out there, stay with me. This is most definitely not a women-only situation.

It’s all about making time for self-nurture or, as Abby describes it, accessing the ‘deep river’ within us all, the inner resources we all have for nurture, creativity, calm and revitalising rest.

I love Abby’s metaphor of the deep inner river. It’s so much more powerful for me than, say, the image of a reservoir or a deep well. I like how the idea of an  inner river feels. It’s flowing, quickly or slowly, it’s both continuous and ever-changng and it feels as if it connects me somehow with an endless source of beauty and wonder, with the rich resources of the world around me and those of other people as well as with my own inner self. (The deep river is the perfect metaphor for psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow experience.’)

In her book, Abby talks about some of the blocks that can hold us back from spending time dipping into the deep river. One of these blocks is our own ‘busy-ness’ and another is our fear that time alone will be, well… lonely.

I know that I do the busy-ness one. You know, all that ‘faffing,’ as one of my clients put it recently. It’s late, you know you should be winding-down but there is always More To Do. You’d be so much more productive tomorrow if you just allowed yourself to rest now, make the transition to calm, prepare for a night of deep sleep, but somehow you find yourself still ‘busy’ Doing Very Important Things. Just noticing how I do that has helped me to stop doing it. It’s helped me to place a clear boundary around my evening, my resting time. It feels good.

And then there is the fear that so many of the people I work with experience – the fear of feeling alone in their alone time. This can feel particularly poignant at times of change – after a relationship break-up, or when the children have grown-up and left home, for example. What do we do with ourselves now that we have some time and no excuses left to prevent us from truly being with ourselves? Who are we, when we’re not being partners, lovers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, daughters, sons? Who are we really?

Self-hypnosis can be a wonderful way to begin to spend some time alone with yourself. When I give my clients one of my self-hypnosis audio programmes, for example, they are often concerned about making the time to listen to it regularly or concerned that their mind will flit all over the place and they ‘won’t be able to relax’ or they are worried about ‘what will come up for me when I go inside myself.’

And then they find that it is very helpful to have the structure of an audio – just twenty minutes or half an hour – to being to enjoy the process of connecting with themselves, noticing how their body feels, noticing sensations and images and sounds inside them and around them, noticing their breathing.

Self-hypnosis can be the entry-point for a reconnection with our own resources – or the deep river – within ourselves. It’s exciting to see people discover that, rather than feeling lonely, they begin to look forward to some alone time and they begin to feel more confident about slowing down, taking a walk alone, writing in a journal or just gazing out of the window and breathing in the view.

This weekend, I wish you time to breathe, to slow down, to be with yourself. If you haven’t done that for a while, why not begin with, say, ten or twenty minutes? Find out where it takes you.