By giving yourself opportunities and support for internal self-awareness, you gift yourself self-care. Your body is having a sensory experience every moment, every day. We are always in the mode of change, sometimes necessarily and sometimes beautifully. Self-care provides the opportunity to adapt and adjust with life.
As a collective, we have become increasingly stressed. There are hundreds if not thousands of books on self-care. Everything from goat yoga to heart math, there’s a solution for everything and anything that ails you. Undoubtedly, stress plays a huge role in our health and wellbeing. The news and social media are hungry for our attention and use our primal instincts to pray upon our physiology. Navigating our stress responses becomes complicated when there are forces around us vying for our attention. So what do we do? Who is the authority on self-care? Is this another thing we have to purchase?
Some of us expend a lot of energy avoiding internal check-ins. When interoception feels unsafe, our body-mind is experiencing challenges. This is a good place to start noticing. When we are in the act of avoidance, we are overwhelmed. Granting ourselves time to process our feelings is perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves. We are imperfect in every way, having a flawed human experience. There is no ideal. There is no perfect after all.
We are our own best authorities. Self-efficacy comes with practice and time. This is different from the Guru-1-2-3 approach to self-care. Instead, this is a choose your own adventure kind of life experience. This is a soul expression. Being connected to our internal selves allows us to shift our awareness and connect to creative possibilities even amid the turmoil and turbulence.
Self-care speaks to the state of our nervous system. It is the internal temperature gauge of being in a bodysuit. We are all in a great process of collectively unwinding patterns and systems of control. Can we actively examine our stories about self-individualism and self-righteousness? And as we become more and more aware of our interior conditioning, can we go within and create self-awareness?
Integrating our insights includes the whole of our body, mind, feelings, and behaviors. The more we practice paying attention to ourselves, the more we grow our capacity for paying attention. And paying attention to our own selves, how we respond, and how we behave is how we create emotional intelligence. We are in the process of becoming.
These are new ways of operating that are outside the perceived norms. This isn’t something to go buy or consume. Instead, this is an invitation to go inward, to embark on an adventure, an investigation, an act of brevity, and perhaps create the capacity to change from within.
