TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. NOW IT’S THE MOMENT
“Take care of your home, of your body, do not lose the spiritual dimension of this crisis, become like the eagle that sees everything and sees more widely. Through joy one resists.
Have faith, you have been prepared to overcome this crisis.
When the storm passes, you will be very important in the reconstruction of this new world, you have to feel good and be strong.
For this reason, it tries to maintain a high, happy and bright vibration. Take advantage of this time to exercise your vision and seek your rituals. This is what you can do: serenity in the storm. Establish a routine to meet the sacred every day, good things emanate what you emanate, now is the most important thing. Sing, dance resist through art, joy, faith and love. ”
Message from White Eagle, Indigenous of the Amerida Tribe.
If you are been looking for a good reason to Treat Your Self, you probably don’t do it often enough.
A 2-month holistic yoga retreat isn’t necessary either.
You can get nourishment simply by putting on the radio and shakin’ what your mama gave you for a few minutes.
Putting “me time” on the back burner is a big part of why we can all feel run-down, frenzied, and overwhelmed. Enter self-care, who cuddles you and tells you everything’s alright.
Even during COVID-19, when many of us have more free time than we know what to do with, self-betterment became difficult after the seventh day in pyjama bottoms.
It seems that 21st-century life revolves around working ’til your eyes bleed or spending months on lockdown with nothing to do. However, it’s more important than ever to be kind to yourself and make self-care a priority.
What’s the deal?
Often ignored but totally necessary, self-care is any action or behaviour that helps a person avoid health problems. We forget to listen to our inner voice: we forget what our real needs are, what are our aspirations, our talents, we give up our dreams. We forget ourselves and struggle to make the difference between what feeds us and what makes us more and more lazy, tired, unhappy.
We often remember ourselves when the mental burden becomes too overwhelming, when the body collapses, when the heart, wounded and exhausted, falls in front of the last loss. We remember too many sacrifices made when it is too late or when it hurts.
Excessive stress may increase your risk of heart problems, for example. So, by definition, stress relief can help someone keep their ticker ticking.
Self-care also helps us sharpen our mental and physical health through better self-esteem, stress management, and overall well-being.
These behaviours help provide balance in an increasingly overstimulating world. Self-care forms an essential part of a lifestyle that keeps us healthy, happy, and more in tune with our minds and bodies.
It’s easy to confuse self-care with self-indulgent behaviour. This mentality might make us feel guilty for thinking we need to take a break from our lives to do something that, simply put, makes us feel better.
However, it’s also important not only to be kind to yourself and allow good, nourishing things into your life but also to know your own line. Self-indulgence involves little quick fixes that feel better temporarily.
These are fine in moderation, and who doesn’t love a treat? But quick bursts of indulgence are not a sustainable route to health and happiness — and they can affect others too.
A 2019 study, for example, found that student nurses may neglect their own health and wellness needs while training to look after others — and this might, in turn, reduce their effectiveness when providing care.
That’s why taking the time to check in with your mind and body isn’t a bad thing.
In fact, the pursuit of health and happiness is far from selfish.
When we take good care of ourselves, we’re likely to see an improvement in many aspects of our lives, including our physical health and relationships. And this puts us in a better position to serve as a pillar of support for people we love.
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be sure you can improve, and that’s you.
-Aldous Huxley-
We can return to inhabit ourselves, to inhabit all that we are, to fill our lives with our presence
Our needs: the Maslow pyramid
In psychology, the need is the perception of the lack of one or more elements that constitute the well-being of the person; not responding to needs implies undermining this well-being, but what are our needs?
Around the 1950s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow conceived the hierarchy of needs, which he represented schematically with the pyramid that still bears his name today: Maslow’s pyramid.
The Maslow pyramid consists of 5 levels of needs:
– First step: Physiological needs (food, breath, etc.).
– Second step: safety and protection needs.
– Third step: needs of belonging.
– Fourth step: needs for esteem, for success.
– Fifth step: needs for fulfilment.
But in addition to Maslow’s pyramid, there are other models of representations of needs, including Virginia Henderson’s grid of 14 fundamental needs, which takes into account not only the needs mentioned by Maslow but also the desire for freedom of the person and his individuality: each of us has different needs.
Virginia Henderson’s grid is still used today in nursing care.
“While it is important to establish that there are needs common to all, it is equally important to realise that these needs are met according to the different ways of conceiving life, of which there are infinite varieties.
(Virginia Henderson)
So there are many ways to take care of yourself, but all emerge from the same matrix, that is, to respond to your needs.
The needs of a being are not limited only to the physical, material sphere, such as having what is necessary to live healthy, safe, protected; the real needs of a human being range from feeling loved, respected, a member of a peer group, feeling to have a place in the world, a useful role for the community, being able to live new experiences that broaden the spectrum of his perceptions, being able to rely on intellectual stimuli, etc.
Each of us has specific needs and ignoring them can lead to not living well, not feeling complete and fulfilled.
The mistake is to confuse the minimum necessary to live well with exclusively material needs (the first step of the Maslow pyramid) because they are the most concrete and visible, and consequently, to forget that we are beings made of emotions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, creativity, instincts.
You can always start to listen to yourself to make up for it, you can always start to find the middle way between your concrete needs in everyday life and your inner needs, to get to know you better, to respect and love you in your plural being and to walk with dignity in the world. With kindness and attention to your being.
Taking care of you is the first step to make in order to live well
You can take care of yourself by also observing the nature around you: trees do not give up taking from the earth what they need to grow strong, vigorous, trees do not take the narrow-mindedness essential to survive (barely); they take what they need to live well, to grow and bear fruit.
“Take care of yourself.
Whenever growing up, you feel like changing the wrong things into the right things, remember that the first revolution you have to make is the one inside yourself, the first and most important. Fighting for an idea without having any idea of yourself is one of the most dangerous things you can do.
Every time you feel lost, confused, think of the trees, remember how they grow.
Remember that a tree with lots of foliage and few roots is uprooted at the first blow of the wind, while in a tree with lots of roots and few foliages the sap hardly flows. Roots and foliage have to grow in equal measure, you have to stay in things and stand on them, only then can you offer shade and shelter, only then can you cover yourself with flowers and fruits at the right season. And when many roads open up in front of you and you don’t know which one to take, don’t take one at random, but sit down and wait.
Breathe with the trusting depth with which you breathed the day you came into the world, without being distracted by anything, just wait and wait and wait. Be still, silent, and listen to your heart. When it speaks to you, stand up and go where it takes you.”
(Taken from the book “Go where your heart takes you”, by Susanna Tamaro)
It is very likely that when you come back to answer all your needs, to take care of yourself, you will feel a subtle joy: not the one you feel in the absence of problems but the one you feel despite the problems.
