"Settled in Openness" - Making soothing art is part of my self-care.
Thanks to the wonders of the online world I interact with many lovely people each week. One thing I notice consistently is that most of us could do with more easeful permission to self-care. I am delighted to write about that today.
Permission to Self-Care
Self-care is a mindset which starts with a response to ourselves and to life: an attitude of listening and responding accordingly. I am a great fan of self-care rituals and super habits and write about them regularly. But I am also aware that when I was not learned about self-care and didn’t know myself well, anyone could have told me to do this or that for optimal self-care and I would not have been able to sustain it or integrate it into a caring lifestyle—because my mindset was not balanced and not aligned with my best interest. So I think it’s important to start there: really focus on clarifying our beliefs and attitude. From there, perfect and balanced self-care occurs naturally, merges into our lives seamlessly instead of feeling like an endless list of extra chores or a selfish pursuit.
A resting corner with one of the first nature-inspired comfort shawls I made.
What it Takes
Deciding to prioritise self-care is not an overnight step where suddenly it is easy to be kind to ourselves and do what is best. It is a complete unlearning of unhelpful patterns that takes openness, time, gentleness, clarity, perseverance and a huge amount of patience and compassion. Most of all, for me it takes much support, specifically to address my belief systems and ingrained patterns of unworthiness, fear and neglect.
Permission to self-care is a muscle that we train. For some of us, we have to reach a point of being completely fed up with our unhelpful patterns in order to make a change. For others, something might happen that leaves us with no choice: either we give permission to self-care, or we self-destruct. Such has been my path, and it has been very humbling and illuminating.
Understanding real self-care illuminates all areas of life.
Beliefs and Attitudes
My lifetime barely spans four decades so far, but I can detect that things keep going faster and faster. For many of us, once we start any kind of venture, we are only ever encouraged to do more of it, to take it further, to expand, to diversify, to grow it into an empire without a care for our mental and physical wellbeing.
I have been in many environments where just mentioning wellbeing was considered utterly ridiculous, insane and irrelevant. Nowadays even hobbies have to be monetised and exalted to the heights of excellence and unheard-of originality. Just thinking about this kind of language and culture makes me feel exhausted. The absurdity that we must do all this while pretending we don’t have needs is disconcerting to say the least.
Remembering to take small breaks is a wonderful super habit. Embroidering is one of my breaks.
I certainly need to regularly give myself permission to slow down and self-care. Imprinted in my way of being is the deep belief that I never do enough and that I can always do it better. I started to challenge this set of beliefs when I became too ill to function by the rule of “grin and bear it.” When I was in my 20s, a multi-passionate perfectionist always trying new things, multi-tasking and supporting others before I would help myself, never listening to the debilitating pain in my body, there was suddenly no choice but to prioritise self-care when one day I simply collapsed at work and spent the next few years confined to bed. It was a rude awakening and a complete change of lifestyle which taught me crucial lessons.
Collapsing eventually redirected me to find my true passions, such as painting soothing art.
Not just Bubble Baths
In its essence, self-care is not about pampering and relaxing. Of course, it can include that, but merely doing those things because we feel we have to embrace the shallow “self-care” and “self-love” trends just makes it another item on our already impossible to-do lists. It makes us do those things because someone told us to, instead of being a spontaneous inner movement towards deepened self-respect.
Many people do not have the time or resources to have a bubble bath every day. A lot of my friends are young parents who work full time and rarely have a minute to themselves. We need to be realistic instead of looking for some ideal vision of whole days or hours to take care of ourselves, and find practical ways to pepper each day with deeply helpful and simple things. Let those be the topic of a future blog post.
Playing in my mini zen garden takes just a couple of minutes and really clears the mind.
What Self-Care Really Is
It is my experience that real self-care is simply knowing ourselves well so that we know our responses and triggers in various circumstances, and in turn we know how to care for ourselves in each of those situations. Like we would for a toddler: “Oh, he/she is always scared of pink hats;” “Oh yes, he/she gets grumpy when hungry and tired.” Let’s develop the same database for ourselves!
For example, knowing that being misunderstood and judged by people triggers a lot in me helps me to support myself better when it happens: I know it is unavoidable to be misunderstood and judged, and I know I will likely be upset when it happens. I can select the best way to support myself through that from my self-care “toolkit.” In that particular circumstance, it helps me to look after my plants and to paint. Great to know! Next time it happens, I can be of great help to myself and not squander my energy. Let’s be good parents to ourselves, regardless of our age.
Plants, threads and books... 3 of my superb self-care tools.
Finding the Right Support
At the core of it, I believe the best way to learn self-care is to learn self-knowledge and to really address the reasons why it is not a natural part of our life. Personally I do that with a hypnotherapist, and a coach. These amazing beings support me with incredible kindness to look at any way in which I might have self-sabotaged. Gradually it is revealed how I can be here for myself in the most supportive way while life happens.
My heartfelt advice is that if you struggle, try some support and don’t stop looking until you find the perfect fit. It is not a sign of weakness; on the contrary, it takes great strength to ask for help, look at ourselves squarely and decide to do things differently. Finding the right support is one of the best decisions I have made, and it has never been easier thanks to the internet. It all happens from the comfort of my fireside armchair.
Embroidering kindness was a self-care meditation on this favourite quality.
Once and For All
Once and for all, let's clarify that self-care is not egocentric over-indulgence. The self-care I am talking about and which I practice stems from wise clarity and is powerfully realistic. It comes from assessing real needs no matter how uncomfortable. I have soooo many special needs! Real self-care invites us to stop glossing things over—a well practiced, lifelong habit of mine, slowly deactivated. I can only get the right type of support and give myself the right kind of care if I am totally clear about where I am at and put my pride aside. One day at a time, giving myself permission to be my very best.
I painted this for my love of beautiful streaming leaves in the Autumn, a reminder to shed unhelpful patterns.
The Perks
How scared are we to shine bright and really do what we yearn for? Coming out of that tunnel is what I am most proud of. Self-care supports us to give our best even when we feel our worst. There are many days when I feel at my worst due to long-term illness, yet on those days my self-care protocol still kicks in because it is coming from the right place, so I can give my relative best. It might not look like very much, but for that day, it is the best I can do, and I give myself full permission to self-care, therefore maintaining a better balance throughout my fluctuations.
Reassessing Real Life Circumstances
Recently as my health took another dip it took me a while to see I was involved in way too many things. I had to do the uncomfortable: look clearly, reassess, give permission to say “no,” to say “sorry I have to stop this,” and to take more rest, include more super habits, cancel stuff and reshuffle everything. It was uncomfortable, but it really helped me to find a new balance within a new circumstance and to choose just a few things to truly focus on—and do them well.
That is a blessing, as thoroughness and completing things are two important values for me. By giving myself permission to self-care and adapting my activities as much as realistically possible, asking for support and being very clear, I am able to continue giving my best within what might have felt like an added limitation, and to actually embrace my core values even more. It looks different from what I had envisaged, but that is ok. Learning to relax with uncertainty is a crucial part of self-care, and might actually reveal our best life.
My poppy field stitching can remind us that self-care nurtures our lives like the most fertile soil grows vibrant flowers.
Let's restore self-permission when it comes to making entirely personal choices, especially those pertaining to our wellbeing. Let's practice clarifying this habit of fearing what people think of us and give ourselves the permission we need instead of asking it from external sources because we are so afraid of being judged by others. We are the best person to decide what we need, and that self-authority and wisdom is completely allowed.