There's a lot of encouragement, support, and perspectives about self-care these days, with the pandemic I think we're reaching our wit's end much sooner than ever, ripping our frazzled hair out along with our stifling face masks at the end of each day.
I think a part of this pandemic can serve as an awareness for the need to nurture self-care more than ever in these times we are facing.
To be brought back to tenderness after all the fears, anxieties, and commotion swirling around the air. To give us all opportunities to develop and exercise our ability to handle pressure, handle the overstimulation, handle the added weight of responsibilities with patience, compassion, and love. The kind of love that pulls you through all the challenges and grants forgiveness for any reactive behaviors of others that stem from all the stress.
Now in grateful hindsight to apply it for myself these days, but also to impart this to you - I learned the importance of self-care when overcoming postpartum depression a few years ago, for it was by nurturing my well-being through self-care that helped me crawl my way out of my hell hole.
MY SENSE OF SELF-CARE FROM EXPERIENCE
1 | Not selfish when your wellness leads to everyone's wellness around you
2 | Not a self-absorbed way of operating, but knowing your limitations and setting boundaries that protect yourself from becoming depleted or abused.
3 | Self-care is not just doing what makes you feel good, or temporary fixes for a high to escape the lows. It is knowing oneself and operating in true care to replenish the soul.
For when you are replenished and in a state of well, you can then contribute to the lives of those around you effectively.
Self-care is a trendy topic in which it is being portrayed as taking bubble baths and sipping on wine at the end of a long day. This is a luxury that I myself do enjoy indulging in when I am able to find the time and space to release stressful, jam-packed days as a working mother.
However, as beneficial as this ritual can be to contributing to one's wellness after such a day, self-care is taking care of oneself because the world's way of being, is sick and depleting - parasitic in how it operates in an imbalance of give and take. Temporary bandages to cover over issues and when the problem swells to resurface, we operate in finding a distraction to avoid having to solve it at the source.
You are awakened to the need for self-care when you have been brought to an ugly breaking point of depletion, where you come face to face with all your scary parts surfacing in the form of anger and hatefulness from all the stress and overwhelm. To bring forth the monster you didn't think was inside of you, to be released so it can be tamed once more with tenderness and love. When you reach that point of needing self-care, it is usually a dark place where your soul is desperately searching for the light of wellness again.
When you know how it is to be taken advantage of, to be abused, to be taken for granted, to be on the giving end only to be depleted - it will wake you up to not give of yourself so freely as some may not value what or how much you have to give. They will continue to take and fill up their reserves as you continue to catch up on filling yourself up, all while still being taken from. This is where you will learn to develop your sense of self-respect, self-worth, boundaries, expectations, and stand tall so as to not allow others to walk all over you.
Self-care is the result of self-love.
When you start loving yourself, you will treat yourself kindly first and foremost as you once so eagerly did first for others, for you understand that when you are kind and compassionate to yourself - you will then be full again to give it back out without draining yourself into a place of lack.
It might be uncomfortable and surface in the form of guilt when you start putting yourself first - but I assure you that you are not being selfish when I know that as the giving person you are, you will resume to give of yourself in kindness once again, but in a place of replenishment and wellness. So by caring for yourself well, you have more to give and quality to offer your beneficiaries.
The key is to not allow yourself to reach a point of depletion.
You are empowered in learning the process of self-care as you begin to understand how to take care of others by how you treat them in a way that produces positive, uplifting, and filling effects. Not needing anything in return from what you are able to give, whether it be intangible or tangible. The value is in the effects you spread after you have walked away.
Within masking distance or not - may we all take a deep breath in wellness, together.
With LOVE. Always,
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