Not Another Post About Self-Care - It's Not What You Think, I Promise

recent epiphanies on caring for Self and how this changes everything about why I do what I do

A NOTE ON A CHANGE IN MY SUBSTACK:

Hi, hi! You may have noticed that I’ve slowed down my posting a bit. I’m now aiming for twice monthly posts as I take on a new writing project and intensive supported work to get my coaching practice up and running. I’m not going to do paywall posts at this point so please, note, if you’re a PAID subscriber and you wish to have your payment refunded for a partial refund, please get in touch with me. It’s all good on my end. I value integrity and as I evolve here and elsewhere, I want to be clear so that you know what you’re receiving or not when you offer a monetary exchange for my efforts.

I’m leaving the paid subscriber option up though as I know there are some folks who appreciate the opportunity to support what I’m up to here regardless. These posts are my process ‘in-process,’ and there’s a fair amount of emotional labor and vulnerability that gets me to the words on the page. i give it freely. I do it because I want the world to know. But if it happens to resonate with you moving forward to support that for your own reasons on a different level, well then, there’s the option to become a paid subscriber and I thank you from my whole heart.

Regardless, I’m so appreciative for anyone who sits down to read and contemplate my writing to any degree. No favoritism here. I love working out my life and my writing craft here with all of you to become a better communicator of this subject that I feel so much passion about. Everyone is welcome.

On with the post~

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I live in Colorado. This is the lake by my house. Yes, these are PELICANS! They summer over at our lake and winter in Mexico. I just had to share. They’re beautiful, mystical creatures and I love when the return every year.

As an avid self-care hobbyist, I’ve recently come to a couple of significant epiphanies about the subject of “self care.”  It’s definitely a ‘thing’ in our culture that has lots of charge, myth, judgment, and curiosity.  

For my whole life I’ve been trying to find peace in my nervous system.  I didn’t consciously become aware of this drive to change my incredibly anxious nervous system baseline until around 2013 when I started training in a specific energy medicine practice that connected some dots for me.  The name of the modality isn’t important as much as the fact that it started to validate the interconnectedness of the mind and body in ways that I knew intuitively but had absolutely no language to articulate.

It sent me on a journey that continues to offer me the opportunity to discover more and more about myself, my history, my patterns, and my practices, both intentional and unconscious.  I have experimented with so many practices to find greater peace: yoga, energy medicine modalities galore, coaching, wearable technologies, aromatherapy, meditation of all kinds, journaling, exercise, reading countless books, going on retreats, supplements, spending time in nature for short and extended periods, bodywork, psychotherapy, medical intuition, the list goes on…

Almost all of these practices and techniques have been incredibly helpful in one way or another.  And yet, I started to recognize that the more I do, the more I need to do…or so it seems.  It becomes difficult to know which practices to do, when to do them, how to rotate when the tool box becomes really full, and how to work everything into the day, evening, and night.  At times, I have spent upwards of three hours a day immersing myself into self care practices, with the ultimate intent of healing my nervous system, but for the longest time, not realizing that that’s what I was aiming towards. 

And yes, practices are helpful and important and I still do them regularly, especially for rewiring purposes to help my physical, emotional, and spiritual recovery.  But before my acute “falling apart-together” episode last summer that literally knocked me off my feet, the practices became a sort of mandate that furthered a sense of false protection that clearly was misguided.  Self care practices can even become a trauma response as they did for me before last summer.

Here’s the two recent epiphanies.  It feels a little vulnerable to share…I might be the last one to get the memo on these concepts, but maybe not:

1. There's no amount of self-care I can do that's going to help me to feel safer in my life. 

2. Self care isn't something I do.  It's something I AM.

I've had self-care backwards. It's not something I primarily do, it's something I am, meaning, at the end of the day, it’s about personality, not practice. The practices and the doing of self-care flows from the being of caring for and about self. 

Literally, am I caring for and caring about myself? How do I really feel about myself as a human being?  What thoughts are permeating my days internally and how do I respond (or react) to them?  

I put the cart before the horse on this for years and only recently recognized that the foundation of self-care is about who I'm being. Am I showing up for myself? Am I abandoning myself? Can I actually experience a sense of my own worthiness? Do I believe that I deserve to care about me? This is really the crux of the issue.

This recognition came on the tail end of a recent recognition of my own sense of worthiness.  Really?  You ask.  Yes.  I’m a grown-ass woman who is only recently waking up to a deep sense of her own worthiness.  And, based on many recent serendipitous conversations with friends and colleagues, I know I’m not the only one.  

Maybe it’s a timeline of the planet thing.  Maybe it’s a perimenopause thing.  Maybe it’s a nervous system healing thing.  I suspect that it’s a little of all these ingredients and more that have brought me to this point of awareness.

I've engaged in bajillions of self care practices and during an intense period spent hours a day doing them. However, without the foundation of actually caring for myself, caring about myself, and knowing who that self is that I'm caring about, all the self-care practices in the world won't get me in the direction I’m wanting towards greater love and vitality, devotion to life, and wholeheartedness.  I know this is nuanced, so I hope it’s landing in some form if you’re still with me here.

I can't love a life that I'm not living, and I'm not meant to live a life I don't love. 

To reiterate: I can't get there through behaviors that aren't rooted in a foundation of caring for me, caring about me, and knowing the ‘me’ that I'm actually caring about.

To be clear, practices can absolutely facilitate these ends, but in and of themselves, they are not even the means to that end without some additional magic; rooted in awareness, holding space for one’s own experiences, energies, and emotions, and building the nervous system capacity to hold oneself in the midst of ‘said’ emotions, which can sometimes be stormy and turbulent, just as much as they can be bigger and more joyous than one’s current capacity can hold.  Note the avoidance of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotional language for me - a newer and more helpful experience that we’ll dissect at another time.

I’m not suggesting that anyone throw their practices out the window in response to what I’m saying.  But, I am suggesting that if you feel like you keep piling on the practices so much so that you actually feel one of the following experiences, it may be time to re-evaluate why you’re engaging in them (all of which I’ve had):

• You feel a false sense of completeness around the issues in your world, like a false ‘cloak of protection’ because you did the practices.  But later in the day, it all seems to persistently fall apart.

• You feel more stressed trying to complete “all the things” you think you’re supposed to do with your self-care practices to feel good about yourself and your day.

• You complete the practices to give yourself a dopamine hit about having completed the practices.  This is actually an addiction loop from a nervous system perspective.  The brain likes it, but if, in the bigger picture, the practice or practices you’re doing aren’t leading you where you want to go with your way of being authentically in the world, then it might be time to consider the ‘why’ behind some of them.

• You’ve just flat out forgotten why you’re doing them or what purpose they’re serving in your life and genuinely caring for who you are and about how you show up in the world.

There’s a fair amount of nuance and discernment required in understanding some of the above and where you might land with it.  I think that those of us who are more prone to engage in the behaviors of perfectionism, over-responsibility, and self-judgment may be more likely to experience some of the issues I’m talking about here than others.  And that’s OK.  

It’s the water we’re swimming in.  We don’t know until we know, at which point the most compassionate thing we can do, that I am doing, is to sit with myself and my parts to understand how I got here and where I want to go next in service to creating a life that I love living in.

I’m curious to know if anything in this post resonates with you.  Feel free to comment or respond to this email with your meanderings on the subject.