A Quick Guide To Self-Care

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Often, in my self-care talks, I remind people that self-care isn’t just about green smoothies. It’s about caring for yourself as a whole being, including (but not limited to): getting solid sleep, setting boundaries in relationships, taking time to play and be creative, being nice to yourself and civic/environmental engagement. 

But, it’s not NOT about the green smoothies either. I’m taking a spring self-care class with Lauren Kaneko-Jones LAc, because I needed help reestablishing my self-care practices after this last period of pregnancy and postpartum. 

Wow, it’s so helpful! Lauren is reminding me of what I already know - eating/drinking lots of greens is important during this spring transition - and inspiring me with new self-care from the Chinese medicine tradition. 

Now, I’m doubly glad I offer self-care support as my work. I see how much we all need it, even those who are teaching it to others. As always, I’m amazed by how much energy refocusing in on my self-care gives me. I’m finding it way easier to hang with the changes (like one less daycare day this week) and to show up for what I believe in (I went to a talk on zero waste loving last night, so provocative and important- more on this soon!). And now, back to my morning smoothie... 

PS - I have a couple of spaces left in my spring Self-Care 101 group that starts April 22nd. Go here to learn more and apply.
 

Latest from Instagram:

How do self-care and social media fit together? I ask myself question that question a lot, especially when I click out of my IG/FB feeds feeling like I’m falling behind in life. I do think it’s human nature to notice what others are doing. Our current ultra-competitive culture teaches us to heighten any difference as a threat. The inverse is true. Posting awesome moments and getting lots of “♥️’s” for them produces it’s own high. I know I was taught that if I looked like I had it all together and people approved of me, that was enough. It took me over 30 years of trying like hell to shine to the world before I realized that how I felt was more important that how I appeared (maybe this is basic for some people, but it’s been truly revolutionary for me). Today, I’m really happy to say that how my life looks outside and how I feel inside is pretty congruent most of the time. Finding an inner/outer balance has taken a lot of very specific self-care and a new sense of patience to allow myself to change at a sustainable pace. In short, I’m learning to give myself the space and grace to be a work in progress and I do my best to share it all with the world, IRL and through social media. On good days, I get inspired by everyone’s beautiful lives. But on a bad day, when everything feels messy, scrolling through my social media feeds can get to me. I see someone’s peak moment and compare it to my lowest low. (Or I get little sad when I don’t get as many “♥️’s.”)This comparison feels particularly dangerous when it comes to motherhood, because it’s so vulnerable and confusing to parent. I don’t think there’s an easy answer for how to not let social media inflate our egos or knock us too low. For me, being intentional in how often I share and the content of my posts is helpful. Sharing from where I’m struggling and hearing your all’s experience creates so much connection (thank you!). But some days my self-care dictates that I don’t post or scroll. I miss out on things, but I can stay connected in other ways. Alas, this is our increasingly complex world! How do you practice self-care through social media? I’d love to know. The thing I feel most sure of in this life is the power of my own presence. Think about all the people who have inspired your socks off and made you want to grow. It was something about the way they carried themselves, right? We each have that power—the power to leverage the love inside of us to uplift others and change destructive systems—but like anything, we must cultivate this power. I think this is absolutely the secret to creating such a beautiful life for myself. I’ve invested time, money and energy to honing my perspective toward joy and alchemizing the painful places inside of me. The amazing news is that this kind of self-care is win-win. You will both enjoy your life more and be able to serve others from a very full place in yourself. I think the best way to cultivate your presence is to do it within an inspiring and supportive community. For this, I created the Beautiful Life Collective, a community if women who are taking care of themselves in order to create a better world for all. Our work is deep and our work is beautiful. It’s fun and it’s real. We do most of it virtually and go on amazing retreats together. Wanna join? I’m opening the Collective for new members until January 31st at midnight. Click the link in my profile to learn more! I feel like I haven’t written directly about motherhood for a while now. That’s probably because I’m in this phase that’s intense in a way that’s hard to even talk about. Jonah’s almost 17 months old and is most definitely not a baby anymore. He walks on his own, quite well, and has slept through the night for almost seven months (praise be!). He know animals sounds and can point to his nose and his ears. He gives hugs and has a really well developed sense of humor (with a preference for physical comedy). He also needs a lot from me! He wants to be lifted up high to see what I’m cooking and helped down from every last piece of furniture he climbs up. He falls, and then cries, so many times a day. He eats two bites of the food I make and then throws the rest on floor and then will only eat cheddar bunnies (please tell me this is just a phase?). He’s adorable and he’s consuming. I’m hanging in there, but I also feel like I’m stretched to maximum capacity most of the time. Especially in the cold weather, there are days I don’t leave the house because I’m taking care of Jonah or, while he’s in daycare, catching up on work. I have a strong urge to hunker down and hibernate and instead I spend most of my days doing the opposite. Mothering is intensely intimate and also really isolating. Its the biggest teacher I’ve had yet. I hope this doesn’t come off as complaining, because I feel so much appreciation for what I have. I guess I just wish our culture were more family-friendly. I wish we worked less and played more. I wish we could be more connected to nature, especially us city folks. And I have a much greater appreciation for what every mother has had to do to bring a child up in the world. You all have my intense admiration. I wish you all were leading our world. I think boundaries (which come from the inside of us) are quite different than rules (which come from the outside). Rules are necessary, of course, but becoming overly dependent on them makes self-trust (which is essential for setting boundaries) even harder. This is the difference between eating less sugar because you should to be “healthy” versus eating less sugar because you feel better when you do. Authentic self-care means carefully examining rules, really tuning into what you want and need and finally, doing the very hard working of setting a real limit (with yourself and others). More than anything, I think this boundary-setting work is what we need to grow as a society and yet, we usually aren’t taught how to do it (I sure wasn’t!). If you want more support in setting real boundaries, sign up for my upcoming free training Five Self-Care Shifts to Save Out World (link in my profile) this 1/21-25. I’ll break down the five self-care shifts that will revolutionize your life and our world. This one is going to be good, hope you can join!
I don’t think there’s any way to sugar coat this moment in time. Personally, I’m so sad thinking of every person affected by the the US government shutdown, every person trying to make a better life for their families at the border and for every person, no matter what side they are on, who thinks everything is falling apart right now. I see us getting stretched to our limits as a nation, and it’s really, really uncomfortable. I still have lots of hope (that’s a constant choice I make in my own mind), but I also have to be extra careful in my self-care right now, especially around numbing behavior. One of the most mind blowing selfcare discoveries has been the difference between self-care actions and numbing activities. Numbing, while looking a bit like self-care in the moment, (online shopping as a habit, nightly wine and Netflix when you’re exhausted, the afternoon splurge of a brownie when you’re stressed) only serves to turn the volume down on our problems. Self-care is much more about facing those problems head on, changing our behavior to create less suffering and being gentle with ourselves in the process. The less we numb, the more energy we have to advocate and change our system. While we will always numb to some extent, I think it’s a brave act of self-care to stop pushing our problems down, get the support we need and start feeling fully. (Your very intelligent feelings are also where the bigger solutions, for yourself and our world, are waiting for your attention.) *** If this difference between numbing and self-care feels important to you, please sign up for my upcoming free training, Five Self-Care Shifts to Save Our World. From January 21 to 25, I’ll send you an email a day teaching you the five essential differences that will take your self-care, and thus your ability to serve others, to a whole new level. Link in my bio, hope you sign up! Deadline news! Today (Wednesday) is the last day to preorder your copy of “Selfcarefully,” my upcoming collaborative book with @thickpress @ipsybipsystudio and @maninoush (Maria made this lovely photo mashup at the meeting when we arranged the order of the 30 illustrated “self-care and ...” essays that make up the book, along with interviews with three of my favorite people.)! If you buy an early copy then you’re invited to a special virtual book unveiling where our team will discuss what it means to collaborate, what it means to work slowly and why we believe people still value something beautiful that they can hold in their hands. It was an amazing feeling to step into 2019 knowing that “Selfcarefully” would go out into the world and share an updated, and I believe, much needed definition of self-care. Thank you for all of your support and for helping us meet our crowdfunding goal so early. Thank you for becoming part of our self-care revolution. We are in this together, one day (and page) at a time. Crowdfunding link my my profile. Photo by @maninoush Happy 2019 to you! (TLDR: You’re invited to a cozy self-care retreat this February 8-10th in West Virginia. Link in my bio. Really hope you can come!) Ahh, we’re just home from a week visiting family in Asheville (both Micah’s and my mother live there - another crazy twist of fate). We can home exhausted and thus we spent the last evening of 2019 watching “Maniac” and were fast asleep at midnight. Traveling with a toddler is no joke (he did fine on the flights but they were still stressful), and although it was great to be with family, I’ve found that caring for a 16-month old makes every occasion about ten times harder. Before motherhood, I heard people say that you don’t really know love until you have a child. Personally, that doesn’t feel true to me. I could love just fine before. What feels much more true is that I didn’t quite know sacrifice until I engaged in this kind of caregiving (which one does not need to have children to experience). It’s so hard and it’s so rewarding. What makes it work for me is being extra intentional in my self-care. Otherwise I get resentful and take it out on the people I love. Going on retreat is always such a powerful way to fill my well, which is why I’m so excited to lead a cozy self-care retreat in West Virginia from February 8-10th. Won’t you join me? You’ll walk away with a download of self-care that will sustain you through the ups and downs of 2019. More info in my bio. Early bird pricing before January 15th! (Photo by @unsplash.official) (Another amazing photo by @annmarieloveslove - if you’re in DC hire her for a family shoot!) Guys, thank you! We completed our crowdfunding goal on Friday night, just a couple of hours before I turned 37. I checked my phone and found out about the funding while Micah was dishing out ice cream to me and Molly, one of my best friends who was spending the night with her kiddos. I had that surreal feeling of all of my dreams coming true. The next day I woke up and instead of my typical birthday angst (I’ve gotten it ever year I can remember), I still felt grateful and soft-hearted. As the rain poured down that day, I kept thinking about all the people I’d lost over the years, either in death or we’d just fallen out of relationship. I felt quiet, internal and gentle with myself. Micah made us dinner that night and we spent the meal talking about death: our fears, our experiences and all that we don’t know. I know it might seems strange that this joyous moment of life would bring up such heavy thoughts, but this has always been my life experience. Strong feelings of happiness will also bring up sadness (hello weddings!), celebration will evoke grief, and love will bring out the violence - however subtle- in us. This is how the polarity works. To feel whole, we must embrace both and dance in the nuance of it all. For me, opening to my own wholeness is such a radical form of self-care and one that I wished we talked about more. If this is interesting to you, please consider preordering your copy of “Selfcarefully”, my new collaborative book project with @thickpress @maninoush and @ipsybipsystudio where we use nuance as a way to uncover a whole new layer of humanizing self-care. The link is in my bio, crowdfunding is open until early January, thank you and thank you again. Exciting news in our most backward of romances! After seeing the plus sign on the pregnancy test after only dating two months (whoops!), crazily deciding to go for it, falling in love with each other in the midst of midwives appointments, birthing classes and moving into our rental, buying a house when we had to move out of said rental after one year, Micah starting a new job and me overhauling my whole business, and more than 15 months of parenting, we’ve decided to get married! It turns out that doing everything out of order can still lead to the most romantic of partnerships. I couldn’t ask for a more supportive, hilarious and emotionally-mature partner with whom to go through the craziness that is parenting and life. We are very torn about wedding plans, so expect more thoughts on what it means to get married as we move into 2019. In other wonderfully exciting news, our crowdfunding for my upcoming collaborative book “Selfcarefully” is more than three-quarters filled in a week. Wow, I’m so grateful and humbled for your support! If you’d still like to preorder a book, check out the link in my bio. Oh, and my birthday is tomorrow so you can call it a birthday present for me and hopefully the gift that keeps giving for you! 💜 (Also, the second family photo is by the wildly talented @annmarieloveslove )