When I realize I am not self-caring

Hi beautiful,

We could talk about self-care in many ways.

For one self-care is a subject that is not easy for me. I guess that not being taken care of, very well as a kid means that I wasn’t going to become a very good self-caring adult. For the longest time I didn’t even know I wasn’t taking care of myself.

So how was I not taking care of myself?

For me a ‘hard’ life was the norm (this is something I realized recently). So I was not taking care of myself by staying in the comfort zone of ‘hard’ and creating a hard and difficult life for myself.
I was obviously unaware of this but, could we argue that at some level I was taking care of myself by keeping myself safe in the ‘known’ (hard life)?
I’d say yes, that we could, only at that ‘unaware’ level. Because I sure wasn’t happy, even miserable a lot of the time.

So going in that direction we could say that there are two levels of self-care:

• The ‘unaware’ level (upbringing, programmed)
• The ‘aware’ level (recognized, chosen)

You can be both unaware of not self-caring as well as of  self-caring. We do lots of self-care stuff without being aware of it. Because for us it’s normal stuff that we do. But isn’t it delicious when you learn new ways of bringing sweet self-care to yourself. Or like me when you actually start to care for yourself, period.

And once you become aware you start recognizing these times you do take care of yourself (and it’s wonderful!) and the times you do not.

And we are not to feel bad about not taking care of ourselves because in itself that’s added non self-care. We need to be there for ourselves with love and support when we are recognizing that we have not been really self-caring for a long time or in specific areas of our lives. It’s actually quite sad and painful when you become aware of a new way in which you haven’t been taking very good care of yourself. So let’s be gentle. And that will give us the space to also appreciate that this means we’re ready to make a change for the better – for ourselves.

Can you look in your life at how you bring self-care to yourself and where you don’t? And before looking at the ways you don’t, can you prepare a big open heart at the ready with much love to give to these parts of yourself that have yet to learn how to receive it – from you?

 

 

I love this and I will do the same, like I said at the beginning I have not been very good at self-caring, it’s changing, I am becoming more and more aware, and bringing self-care to myself one dose of self-love at a time.

♥

Sweet and healing self-care to you my friend.

With love,
Julie