The New ‘Self-Care’

Self-care is a positive light force that reflects onto others.

Rethinking ‘Self-Care’

Most people think of ‘self-care’ as the material basics, e.g., eating well, exercising, time-out or quality sleep, or engaging in more nurturing pursuits, such as massage or a beauty treatment. In our fast-paced, fast-changing world that is jam-packed with powerful transformative events and relentless pressure, ‘self-care’ needs to be so much more.

We need to expand the material or physical focus of self-care, and instead, begin to see ourselves as an entire intelligence system in a state of perpetual growth with inter-connected needs and possibilities. The old ‘matter-based’ notion of self-care, is akin to booking the car in for a 6-month service with some expectation of ‘minor repairs’. You put it back on the road and subject it to all of the same life conditions. Routine maintenance fails to address the need for real growth and change.

Self-care requires astute dialogue and genuine exploration. At times of change or transformation, this self-enquiry must deepen even more. Expect that you may not always know what your own evolving needs demand, or how life itself needs to change to support your evolution. Expect, instead, that ‘care’ requires work, curious discovery and illumination. There is no ‘quick fix’: you already know that all forms of care require commitment.

Self-care starts with building ‘awareness’. Awareness not a mental process that you can negotiate through ‘reason’ alone. The mind will try to retrace what it has always done and may even stubbornly repeat past solutions, be it with refinements or slight clarification. Approaching self-care as a mental exercise is the reason self-care has become a ‘matter-based’ management program rather than springboard for honest, deep and sustainable change.

1. The process of building awareness requires you to remove yourself from time constraints.
   From the outset, we’ll use the words, ‘reflect’, ‘sit with’ or ‘consider’, because this change in language allows for the free-flow of revelation to travel and connect to all of your complex intelligence fields. Awareness is a ‘space concept’, not a solution-based response.
2. Give yourself space. Shut the door on distraction.
   To say that you ‘can’t’ or you ‘haven’t got time’ for this part of the process can be telling. Failure to create distraction-free space traps you on the treadmill. If you refuse to get off the treadmill, or continue to justify the treadmill itself as a mode of transport, you will never be able to abandon old cycles.
3. ‘Sit with’ the big questions of ‘your relationship with the ideas behind the challenge’.
   Sit with the bigger issues behind the apparent challenge. This will reveal how your values may be changing; how they may need to change; or how you may have been neglectful of that which is important to you. For example, consider your own garden. Reflect on a bigger question such as: ‘How does my garden reflect my relationship with growth and beauty?’
   
   

   As you clear your own garden, you begin to see plants that were once covered. As you give them the light of day, you know that you too, need to re-emerge from the shadowlands. Beauty, if hidden, can never be recognised by others. The whole process reveals to you not ‘just what needs to be done’, but that which you need to feel beautiful, seen and nourished. Self-care reveals to you what your real needs are and that it falls on you to make sure those needs are clear, recognised and truthfully honoured.

4. Sit still and be quiet.
   Stillness allows you to reach revelation without judgement. Be quiet, and do not defend yourself or your past actions. Turn off the noise and turn your back on chaos. Be still and listen deeply, uninterrupted. At this point, you may begin to feel vulnerable or even tearful, but you also start to become clearer, and soon, more resolute as self-truth lands. Clarity lightens the load and illuminates the road ahead.

Self-knowledge is not just about ‘what you want/or what you should be doing’. It is about who you are; how you want to ‘be’; and how you want to be seen. As you sit with the garden metaphor, it may dawn on you that your sense of beauty, creativity or what you regard as beautiful and valuable has changed. This may have come through changing life-cycles or life-changing circumstances. Now self-care is not just about spending more time in the garden or treating yourself to a bunch of flowers, but has posed a deeper question that demands attention: What adjustments do you need to make to yourself that will reflect your growth and evolving sense of beauty and value?

Self-care is not merely a ‘to-do’ list or maintenance program that you can drop and return to throughout life. Self-care is about how you nurture, acknowledge and project your changing and evolving identity.

The evolution and attention you give to self-care becomes particularly prominent at times of key or profound changes in life, e.g., job loss, career crossroads, relationship breakdown or life-changing rites of passage such as becoming a parent or the loss of a loved one. These life changes impact your identity. External change outside your control (e.g., pandemics, war, forced migration, bushfires, floods, disease or illness) are also catalysts for major personal transformation. All of these examples demand a reflective period in which to examine your identity-evolution. Self-care is part and parcel of life-transformative processes that give you the power to re-imagine your self-portrait.

All life requires care in order to grow and flourish. Self-care starts a necessary reflection of your own life cycles and growth commitment.

The Value of Respect

By getting to know a new, preferred or evolving identity, your self-respect and self-esteem will strengthen. As your relationship with yourself deepens, timely detailed action plans will begin to flow.

Developing road maps that lead somewhere

1. Listen to yourself. That means - don’t talk back. As your awareness grows, you begin to like what you see and may even become curious about your life-path and the path ahead. You, and the circumstances in which you find yourself, begin to make sense to you.
2. Get to know your emerging identity that comes with a new, revised and recognised set of values and priorities.

This is the fun part. Start to implement small, ‘bite-size’ ways that add detail to the emerging picture. Bite-size action creates momentum for bigger changes. Drive and excitement will strengthen and accelerate.

Break it down and build it up

What are little things you can do that will add to the whole?
This may be a hair appointment but now, activities provide a point from which you can add other activities that layer meaning and drive the transformation process.

Turning awareness into commitment.
Kick-start your self-care program by adding one new action every week. This turns self-care into an evolving program to which you can commit, implement and later, even refine.

Self-care is consciously connected to an identity shift and is therefore, a commitment to real change. Conscious commitment to change is self-affirming. As you care for and know yourself consciously, you align with change itself. It moves resistance from your body, thoughts, actions and even circumstances. This fundamentally changes your relationship with change so that change itself, becomes easier for you. Self-care drives resilience, adaptability and power.

Awareness starts with space, stillness and quiet reflection. Give yourself the time and space you need to create long-term change.

The real ‘AI’ is ‘All-Intelligence’.

The new self-care is not simply managing a ‘to-do’ list that has fallen by the wayside: it is a holistic and conscious commitment to work with yourself so that you can actively recognise and embrace life’s changes and cycles.

Natural Energetics

The reason why so many commentators and experts cite reflective practices such as meditation and yoga, or connection with nature, as effective tools for self-care and self-discovery, is because these practices align with:

1. SPACE: All create internal space and inspire stillness. You can never escape yourself- but to really know yourself, you need to be able to escape distraction.
2. INTELLIGENCE: All of these practices take you away from the mind’s dependence on rationality and reason, and instead, put you in a creative, non-temporal scape. These practices connect with greater fields of intelligence still being discovered.
3. NATURE’S WAY: Connection with nature and her life cycles teach you about your own authentic, organic life cycles. Nature connects you with your primary senses- smell, touch, sight, hearing and taste. When used, grounded and trusted, these primary senses open access to extra-perceptive fields which connect you to greater wisdom and knowing.

The magic and mystery of self-care is that it is not just about you. Dimensionally expansive, your embrace of self-care will impact others positively too.

The Soul Connection

Self-care ignites a life force that connects to other people, animals, plants and the Earth. Your own life force becomes a part of the complete energy system. This is why ‘self-care’ matters: when you connect to self and your own life, you contribute to life itself.

Start Now, Start with Self and Start Simple

To align with change and get to the really high altitudes, ask yourself a different question: ‘How can I show that I care and honour that which I truly value? Then- start with yourself- implement the self-care steps, and roll with it.

Self-care is the starting point for nurture, care and nourishment. Self-care doesn’t mean, ‘that no-one cares and you have to do the work yourself’. Self-care is a recognition that we all have the responsibility to put ‘care’ on the agenda. It is the opportunity to move from a ‘take’ economy, and help create a world that truly values care and compassion. Self-care is a commitment to a true ‘care economy’. It just so happens that the easiest place to start is with yourself. As you do, care as a core consciousness, will gather momentum.

Self-care is Love Shared

I had always wanted a perfume from Saudi Arabia. I discovered my signature scent on a trip to New York pre-COVID, but had never gave myself permission to purchase the item. Inspired by the recent Middle Eastern Film festival in Saudi Arabia, a tapestry of original art and artistry to which I identify, I ordered the smallest bottle imaginable of my coveted signature fragrance. Self-care is not just love of oneself, but is an act that validates your emerging identity. Self-care is a receptive energy that opens the heart to love and change.

1. Start with yourself.
2. Build on it.
3. Let it flow.
4. Roll with it.

We all have a responsibility to self-care. It is a starting point from which to become a contributing member of the care economy. Self-care may start with you, but it quickly spreads, evolves and connects you to the greater whole. In this way, self-care works powerfully to pull you out of ‘the isolated/alone’ framework. It is a true and trusted connection.

Self-care creates a loving environment that supports your changing identity. May care, be shared.