What Do You Think of When You Think of Self-Care?
Do you think of luxurious vacations at resorts or retreats where you have no cell phone reception and someone is cooking and cleaning for you; where you have days completely open for massages, or to take classes, naps, or just to go for a walk? That sounds really delicious, right?
Realistically, however, we may not have the time or money to make these kinds of things our regular self-care practices. But just because we can’t go away on a retreat for 10 days doesn’t mean that we should give up on the idea of self-care completely.
Instead, we can start to look for the opportunities to feed ourselves throughout each day. Self-care doesn’t have to be fancy – it could be as simple as closing your eyes and sitting and breathing quietly for a few minutes; it could be taking a walk; it could be just sitting and eating without checking your emails or texts; reading a book before bed; turning off your phone and computer by 9pm and going to bed early. Basically, it could mean doing anything that you LOVE and that FEELS like it is refilling your well. Anytime we do something good for ourselves, it is an act of self-care; if it feeds you mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, it is an act of self-care.
I feel like self-care has gotten a bad rap: like somewhere along the way we decided that caring for ourselves was in some way selfish – and that couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, self-care is vital to our well-being. If we don’t take radically good care of ourselves, who will? And how can we begin to offer ourselves as support for anyone else if we aren’t taking care of ourselves? We won’t have anything left to give if we are dipping into a well that is dry.
If you are wondering where to start to bring a little self-care into your life, try this:
Take one moment right now to jot down 1 thing that feeds your soul – just 1 thing.
Find one day this week, and even if it's for only 5 minutes, make a commitment to yourself to do it! Put it in your schedule so you remember to do it, and then once you’ve done it, note how you feel, and then schedule it in for next week.
Feel free to add in more things that feed your soul as your schedule allows!
– Beth Tascione