Part One.
Self-care for many is superficially indulging in luxuries or fantasies to escape the stress of everyday life. We even use it as an excuse for doing things we generally feel guilty for and in doing so trick ourselves into things we know are bad for us.
Whether that be with; self-pampering, overuse of healthy food and exercises or on the flipside eating ‘treat’ foods e.g. ice-cream, even though we know they’re bad for us.
And then complaining about it 5 minutes later.
This is not really self-care, but more like self-harm.
To self-care we need to consider the whole picture.
Doing skincare every morning, seeing a psychologist every week or going to the doctor every month doesn’t mean you’re taking care of yourself. These are often just band-aids covering up the real issues of harmful behaviours we ignore.
Then self-care becomes about trying to fix the damage you’ve done to yourself, rather than stopping doing the damage in the first place.
That’s like crawling into a doctor’s office with a bullet wound in your arm and the doctor giving you a band-aid to cover it up. You’ll have to come back tomorrow for another band-aid, because that won’t fix the problem.
Eventually, you have to dig deeper to find the bullet and remove it. Only then can you really heal. It’s the same with harmful behaviours, you have to dig deeper to the source of the behaviours and end it there.
For example;
Rather than just doing your daily skincare and assuming that’ll clear up your acne, go to the source of your problem and look at the bigger picture of your life. What food are you putting into your body? What thoughts are you thinking about yourself? Are these harming you? Or helping you?
I’m not saying don’t do your skincare or don’t go to the psychologist or the doctor. Just don’t try to cover up your harm with a so-called simple solution. Look at the full picture.
Our problems or issues, or illness cannot be changed or cured by us trying to cover them up or fix them. We need to stop the harm.
Make meditation a priority
How you feel inside affects your thinking, how you see things and how you behave that day, so this is where all the harm starts.
To meditate you are taking the time to stop everything and come back to what it is to be you. Without judgment or criticism or trying to change yourself in any way.
Because these are the basis of self harm.
This is why daily meditation is the most important thing to help you to self-care and stop the harm at its roots.
When we try to change how we feel, or how we are, this is also harming ourselves. Because we are overlooking who and how we actually are.
So to incorporate daily meditation into your life will help you return to a deeper sense of you in the body. Letting your thinking and daily stresses take a back seat for a while. Thus, letting any overreactions or thoughts about life and yourself decrease.
This allows you to purge and release the build up of daily tensions, taking you deeper and further into your meditation.
If you find yourself struggling with the motivation to meditate daily, you can use Undo’s guided meditations. These will not only help you stay focused whilst you get the hang of meditation, but will also deepen your understanding of meditation and therefore yourself.
And using Undo’s natural meditation daily isn’t you trying to put a band-aid over a bullet wound.
Meditation isn’t about fixing a problem, applying a technique, medicine or effort to fix that problem. It isn’t about an end result or goal to strive for. It is taking all of that away and leaving you with the source of the problem itself and allowing you to feel it within you so it can dissolve naturally.
And this way, it will.
Once you allow yourself to just be you without those intentions to change yourself in any way, you will start to heal – naturally – without even knowing.
Until you notice how much better you actually feel, just being you.
And believe me, you will.
Listen to your body
Hear me out.
We spend our whole life listening to our thoughts, what we think we want, what other people tell us we want and we never really pay attention to how we feel, our so-called ‘gut feeling’, until it’s too late.
For a simple example:
We all know that ice cream is unhealthy and makes us feel sick, or that we eat it to escape what we don’t want to feel, but we still eat it because we think we want it.
And in eating it, we ignore our gut feeling which is telling us it’s not good for us, that it’ll make us feel sick.
Remember what I said above about ‘stopping the harm’. This is what I mean.
Rather than harming yourself – by eating the ice cream – and then complaining about the harm you just did, just stop listening to your thought processes and pay attention to your body, your gut feeling, and in doing so; you will stop the harm.
And if it happens too quickly and you habitually start to harm yourself, as soon as you notice it, stop it. Take a moment to feel the harm, and then stop it at its roots, by feeling the underlying urges for doing what can harm you.
The more you do this, the easier it’ll be until you stop it altogether.
Our body never lies. We just don’t listen to it. We listen to our clever thoughts, which manipulate us and trick us into harming ourselves.
Our body is what we are and therefore knows us better than our thought processes.
Our body isn’t influenced by outside ideas, social norms or advertisements like our thinking is, our body is smarter than that.
Our thought processes cannot feel, sense or understand what we are going through, or the harm we do, or what we really need.
If we feel sick, we feel sick in the body – this is how we know we’re sick, and all our thought process can do is complain about it or try to ignore it.
If we feel disturbed, the body feels disturbed, all our thought process does is suppress it.
Not only does the body know more than the thought process, but in feeling, sick, disturbed, tired, etc it is warning you of something.
If you feel sick because of something you ate, this is your body telling you to avoid eating it again.
If you feel disturbed when hanging around a certain person, this is your body telling you to avoid that person.
If you feel tired, this is the body telling you, you need to sleep …
It’s as simple and straightforward as that.
I have discovered this all from my own personal experience, from my own trials, errors and because I was ignoring my body and gut feelings, falling flat on my face too many times.
My gut feeling is always correct, and why I say that is because so far it always has been.
It took me years to work it out, but it wasn’t until I went travelling solo around Europe at the age of 20 that I realised how important it was to listen to my body.
I was going into an environment and situations that I had never come across before so my thinking was completely out of its depth. It had nothing to refer back to, just thoughts and ideas based on what I had heard about travelling or my dire need to not miss out on any situation. This therefore clouded my judgment of situations and people.
So in the end it came down to how I felt, no matter the situation, person or environment. My ‘gut feeling’ was what I had to listen to and it was because of this that I managed to travel through Europe for two years with no issue.
However as I stated above, my thoughts about situations were tainted by what I had heard from other people, and in not realising this they would influence my decisions.
So I needed – and so do you – to tell the difference between my ‘gut feeling’ and my ‘thoughts’ over exaggeration and being influenced by ideas from others.
For example:
If you know of a friend that was mugged when travelling and you start to panic and worry that that will happen to you, and those panicked thoughts turn into a panicked feeling then this is your feelings being influenced by your thinking.
Can you see how this is then a completely fabricated, imagined and false feeling?
Whereas the feelings that you physically feel in your body, any disturbances that pop up out of nowhere, are not caused by your thinking because they are from a deeper sense in your body.
This type of purely-sensed disturbance you need to listen to, because this is your body picking up on something and setting off alarm bells.
False feelings start from thinking.
True feelings begin as a sensation in your body.
Listen to your body, it is always right.
So self-care is about the full picture. You need to look at everything you’re doing in life and address each thing that could be causing you harm. Rather than just slapping on a ‘quick fix’ and wondering why you’re still so miserable.
Meditate daily, listen to your body and start responding to what you need, rather than what some viral trend says.
