Self-Care starts with your Internal Voice
Friendly reminder that the first step of self-care has nothing to do with anything external. It starts with your internal dialogue.
It starts by listening to how you speak to yourself. It starts with noticing those hurtful patterns, those wounding lies you tell yourself but would never say to your best friend or child.
Self-care has to start there. No amount of vegetables, or bubble baths will be able to counteract an internal voice that has gotten into the pattern of breaking you down, and in-turn, giving others permission to do so as well.
Are those bubbles baths and micronutrients important? Absolutely. But not if they are done from a place of destruction.
Remember self-care is BECAUSE we want to show love to ourselves not SO we love ourselves.
External actions are wonderful and can help us feel less alone when we can call a trusted friend or feel the community of a yoga class..but unfortunately those destructive words can so easily show up there too.
In this wellness era we are living in, self-care can quickly turn into an industry playground or a weight loss scheme.
Your health is absolutely an act of self-care, but “wellness” isn’t just something that can be seen by the naked eye. Wellness has to begin deeper, and work outward.
I just wanted to say, on the day before a holiday, be gentle, listen for patterns, and when those patterns start to show harmful self-talk, find a system that works for you to stop them right then and there.
Creating new habits can be really uncomfortable and feel like a never ending circuit but I promise, the more you can stop those patterns before going down the rabbit hole of self-loathing, the less they will come up.
Some tactics I currently use for myself on the daily to break the patterns are as follows: change my posture, workout/movement (not as punishment), talk to myself and say “We aren’t speaking that way anymore”, get on my mat, SCREAM, turn on a great song, re-phrase the sentence, journal, ask the question
“DO YOU TRUST ME?” - this voice might be God, future you, the bigger “I”, the universe…up to you, the question is the same “Do you trust me?”
Do you trust this journey, do you trust this path, do you trust I have a plan for you, do you trust there is a purpose for everything, do you trust you are held, do you trust that you are loved, do you trust that you are not a mistake, do you trust you are not alone?
It isn’t perfect, but I’m personally so damn tired of wasting energy tearing myself down, when the world tries to do that enough.