how to practice healing self care
Self care has become trendy in the wellness field. Images of luxurious candlelit baths, quiet meditations, and getaway retreats fill our social media feeds. But you and I both know two things:
…those once-a-month escapes aren’t sufficient to sustain and nourish your well-being on a daily basis, and
…you could be doing all the fun, luxurious, pampering things and still feel sad, sick, and dis-eased.
How do we practice a truly healing self care that nourishes our bodies, soothes our emotions, and grounds our souls? Here are a few keys that could help you find deep healing through your self care practice.
Self care is less about the action, and more about the energy.
You could be doing all the right things but treating yourself in a way that keeps you stuck, unwell, and under pressure. Here are a few examples:
You take the epsom salt bath (and even leave your phone in the other room!) but the entire time you’re reminding yourself of how little you accomplished today and how you don’t have time for this bath
You go on that destination retreat but while you’re there, you restrict yourself from eating any sugar (you’re trying to be “better”). Instead of feeling healthy, you feel irritable and deprived
You honor your body by leaving work early but feel bad about it, like you’ve done something wrong
You allow yourself a more gentle, restorative movement practice on a day that you’re undernourished and underslept, but you feel guilty and behind instead of refreshed.
In each of these examples, even though your intention is to take a healthy action, the way you’re treating yourself gets in the way of the health benefits of those self care practices.
When you meet your caring actions with guilt, shame, blame, resentment, unworthiness, criticism, and other subtly antagonizing, self-harming emotions and behaviors, you create (unknowingly) an environment of dis-ease in your body. Yes, the caring actions can still help create healing. But all the negative emotions (to put a simple label on that bunch) cause a stress response in your nervous system.
Yes, shame can actually trigger a danger response in the body, as if the body is responding to a threat—because what’s more threatening than being inherently wrong or bad as a human being?
To move toward healing, fullness, vitality and liberation through our self care practices requires not just caring actions but caring beliefs, stories, emotions, and responses to fuel those actions.
An action fueled by love and an action fueled by fear can yield profoundly different outcomes.
Self care must include the basic foundations of health.
Does your self care involve attuning to your bodies basic needs like eating, sleep, voiding, and playing? On a consistent, daily basis? Healing self care requires you to get to know your body’s basic needs.
Candlelit baths and destination retreats are far more glamorous than eating 20-30 grams of protein at breakfast. Or committing to an earlier bedtime. Or honoring your social media limits. Or getting creative with incorporating more movement into your work day.
Our bodies crave the self care that actually helps us become a well-fed, well-rested, and well-connected—fully nourished through food, clean water, rest and sleep, play, connection, movement, sunlight, fresh air, mindfulness, emotional expression.
If you’re giving yourself nightly baths but also regularly skipping meals (for example), consider your definition of self care…Do you want self care to give you a break from your daily life? Or do you want to practice healing self care that makes your life and your health feel better on a daily basis?
Your self care reflects your unique body, needs, life, and desires.
There is no universal way to practice self care. To heal through self care requires you to intimately know yourself. What does your body need on a daily, hourly, and moment-to-moment basis? How do your needs change across your menstrual cycle? What makes you feel most alive? What helps you to process stuck emotions? What does health mean to you? What’s the hardest part about prioritizing your health? When, where, and how does your body and mind feel most well?
Your answers to these and other questions will help you discover what healing self care looks like for your body.
For example, one woman might need snacks between meals to prevent low blood sugar during the workday at certain times, so she’s focusing on making sure she eats enough. Another woman is practicing feeling her emotions without turning to food as a coping mechanism, and she doesn’t get low blood sugar like the other woman does, so she’s practicing tuning into her sensations before reaching for a snack.
Here’s another example. One woman gets overwhelmed by too much extroversion during the workday and needs to take a few minutes to lay down between meetings; this is a completely new perspective and her intention is to understand when her body is asking for this break. Another woman works from home without any coworkers and needs more social time to feel grounded; her intention is to call or text a friend each day for support and community.
All of these examples reflect self care that emerges from knowing yourself and your body.
Deepening into your version of a healing self care practice is not a linear journey, but a spiral.
With time and intention, you will grow to know yourself more and more deeply through your self care practice. You will likely come back around to the same blocks that have gotten in your way before, but in different ways, and you learn how to navigate and overcome them with practice.
With time you learn that your actions without love feel hollow, giving yourself extravagant gifts without meeting basic necessities are superfluous, and one-sized-fits-all recommendations don’t ever fit quite right.
If you craft your self care around taking loving, responsible, devoted action to your sacred body, your self care will begin to heal you.
Wanting to overcome resistance and up-level your self care? This is one of my all-time favorite topics! I have personal and professional experience navigating the unpredictable waters of the internal healing process. Click below to inquire about working together one-on-one.