September 2020

New Year and new beginnings, with opportunities to start over again. However, Rosh Hashanah is arriving at a time when the world is still in the midst of its fight against Covid 19. Covid has not only taken many lives, cost people their jobs and caused emotional and mental turmoil, it has now also cost many of us the opportunity to spend Yom Tov with our extended families.

So how does this all relate to our wellbeing?

Rosh Hashanah is about resilience, looking back at the past, learning from it, and finding the ability to move forward. More importantly, Rosh Hashanah is a perfect opportunity to take a hard look at ourselves, looking at our journey during lockdown. We should ask ourselves, what did we learn that we would like to keep? What parts of our lives were we unable to continue with, and which of those parts can we actually do without?

On Rosh Hashanah we are encouraged to look deep within ourselves, repent for our transgressions, and resolve to do things differently. Now more than ever we can take Rosh Hashanah and use it as an opportunity to make some promises to ourselves too.

In the coming days, the Shofar will sound as an alarm clock to us all, alerting us to the commencement of the New Year. Let us use the sound of the Shofar as an alarm to wake us up to the importance of taking care of ourselves and changing the way we think about things from negatives to positives.

Things may be uncertain, and unclear and somewhat unnerving, but we all need to pause, stop, breathe, and reflect and find ways to acknowledge, accept and move forward.

Wishing us all a Shana Tova with a year filled with health and happiness and self-care!

Sarah Jacobs
Wellbeing Practitioner JCAT/ PaJeS