Balancing The Scales of Self-Care.

I work best when I wake up at 5 am.

Undoubtedly, I always have a better, more productive, less fearful, and more satisfying day when I wake up before the sun and take a solid hour of time to myself. Usually, I do movement, make tea, and get to my meditation before my thinking brain is awake enough to take over and convince me otherwise.

I do this about twice a month.

Why that few times, you might ask?

Because I can think of 1,000s of reasons why I shouldn't.

I will stay up late to watch a movie with my son, be tired from a stressful day of working and dealing with the other humans in my life, decide that I need more sleep than I probably do, and all told feel like waking up for myself is a burden instead of a joy.

What is with that?

I started poking around at this idea that I will show up for others always (like seriously, this is my absolute best/worst quality) but I struggle to muster the desire to show up for myself.  And I came up with an accountability strategy that I want to share with you today.

First, we need to identify the challenge.

 There are a lot of factors at play with how we show up for ourselves, and I want to talk about two of them.  Shame and sacrifice. 

Earlier this year in the blog I shared that my current motto for the year is “no more self-sacrifice”.  This means saying no to things that take more from me than they give—even if the result feels embarrassing, shameful, or isolating.  Because those are just feelings, and I can work my way through them in order to find something useful. 

This idea of not sacrificing myself was a hard one.  I was taught from very early on that if I needed less, worked more, and shared so much of myself that it hurt I was safe and rewarded…well, sometimes.  So I took that into adulthood, sharing and sacrificing whenever I needed to in order to be considered the “good”, “polite”, “agreeable”, or “competent” person in the room.  If I am being honest, for the most part, it worked.  I am a person who has a high capacity to think and do, so sharing so much of myself didn’t feel like a burden, it felt like something that someone like me should do in order to be successful.

But 2023 has asked for something different from me.  It has asked me to stop this practice of self-sacrifice, so I can truly and deeply become the woman I want to be.  That requires the ability to show up for me in equal measure as I show up for other people.

There is a lot of shame attached to the idea that we aren’t taking care of ourselves in a way that is working, helping, fixing, etc., all the things we need it to address.  Especially for those of us who work in the wellness space, like me, the idea that we might need help in helping ourselves feels like a dirty secret nobody should say out loud. 

There are a lot of reasons why shame creeps into our conversations about self-care, but the most important thing we can do is say out loud that the feeling is there.  We can talk about the fact we feel this way, and that is the first step.

The discomfort.

Then come those first few times of discomfort as we attempt to start showing up for ourselves more.  We maybe don’t find our own company easily, we maybe will find another reason why we need to show up for other people (ie. “if I have another hour of sleep I will show up better for my kids”), or just the simple fact that we don’t want to do it.

Showing up for our own care is hard.

It is difficult to put ourselves first in self-care because the idea feels large and non-specific.  The “non-specific” concept is the main reason why I started this blog.  Self-care seems amorphous, like something that can’t be pinned down.  A cloud, a whisp, a wave.  You get the idea. 

So how could we possibly expect to be good at something we really cannot define?  That feels impossible, and impossible certainly doesn’t get us out of bed at 5 am. 

Balancing the scales.

Here is the one rule of life that Sunlight’s theory of self-care lives by.  You must care for yourself to the same degree that you care for other people.

If you are in a caregiving role, like a stay-at-home mother, yoga teacher, educator, caregiver to family, healthcare worker, social worker, or therapist, then you have to self-care as your life depends on it.  Because, to be quite frank, it does.  Burnout is real and can have heart-wrenching consequences for years for those who do it for others as a job.  So self-care like you’ve never imagined possible.

For the rest of us who lead lives where the constant care for others is not a factor for our working selves, we just look to balance the scales.  Every time you care for others in a meaningful way, care for yourself.  There might be times when your family or friends need more of you, so you have a lot of deposits on the “care for others” side of the scale.  So you now know you must make deposits in the “care for me” side to balance things out.  It sometimes takes a while to balance those scales, but don’t despair and give up. With time and consistency, it comes.

But How?

I know you have heard this before, but I will reiterate this here again.  Consistency is key.  Pick one thing; like maybe you want to get up at 5 am once a week to do some movement.  Maybe you want to be a person who is outside for a walk every week. 

Pick that one thing and do it until you are ‘it’.  Do the thing until now you are the person who gets up at 5 am and does yoga. Do it until you just are a person who is outside hiking once a week.  That’s you now.  You’ve moved past the discomfort, the dip (the moment when you don’t feel as good doing a thing as you did in the beginning), the chaotic energy that comes (100 things happened this week so I didn’t get outside!), and now here you are.  You are the thing.

You are a person who writes a blog. Takes hikes. Makes coasters. Does the thing for themselves with no other motivation than it is something they want to do to care for themselves.

And that, friends, is magic.

Come find us for this content LIVE at our virtual retreat July 28-30, 2023!  Grab the link here, we can’t wait to see you.