Self-care

 Hello to my seven followers. It has been quite a long time since I posted my last post but I have still been working on myself and traveling on the same Buddhist / mindfulness journey.

This journey has taken me to bump into the concept of self-care in a fairly detailed way. I think probably most of us have heard the term, self-care. But do we really know what that is? 

As a chaplain (I.E. a professional here to help others)  and as someone who is deliberately on a journey to discover myself; I think I now know quite a lot about self-care. 

But immediately I need to caveat that with self-care is not a singularity. It's not a checklist that's going to suit every single human being, it's not a step by step linear process that you can do and say you've done it and then stop doing. It's much more fluid, complex and individual than that. But once you understand the fluidity, complexity and individuality of self-care it actually does become pretty simple and straightforward. 

I hope that seeming contradiction hasn't confused anybody or made you think that I don't know what I'm talking about. Think of it this way,  there are two layers, one layer (and I'm reluctant to say first or second layer simply one layer), are the individual things you can do and how to do them within this broader concept of self-care. Things like eating well and exercise. The other layer is where the complexity and fluidity enters and this is knowing when to do it, how much to do it, where, why, what you are getting from it (and the reverse is recognizing what you don't currently have and therefore need, and using that technique to gain what you don't have), who should you reach out to, who should you not reach out to. 

So let me start with the simple straight forward layer of the techniques and tools. 

There's many different ways to categorize and group these techniques and tools but the way I categorize them is into the five following areas: 

Mind, body, social, professional and spiritual. 

The mind layer is getting to know how your mind works as in the thought processes you run, ruminating, optimistic or pessimistic, planner, procrastinator, perfectionist etc and also the chemicals that our brain produces and releases such as oxytocin and when and how.

The body layer is all about things such as sleep, exercise, nutrition, dental health, etc.

The social layer is all about connections, who you get energy from, who you give energy to, who you can trust with what information and when. This crosses into body and mind because a good hug with someone you care about is obviously a bodily activity and it releases some great positive chemicals. Do we set and maintain healthy boundaries with the people we interact with.

The professional layer touches on social as well because we nearly always work with somebody else. But it goes further than that by looking at how much of our life do we give to our job, how much do we identify with our profession. Do we set and maintain healthy boundaries.

Finally the spiritual layer and I'm not talking religion here because I firmly believe all human beings have spirituality. Our spirituality is shaped by and also shapes our beliefs, our values the meaning and purpose of life, how we behave, where we give our energy and time and what makes life overall worth living and getting out of bed for every morning.

One element of the complex layer is knowing that all of these things interact and intertwine like the threads of a piece of fabric. For true self-care, resilience,  thriving and flourishing we need a good piece of fabric, with all the threads healthy and strong. We might have great social connections with beautiful people that we interact deeply and insensitively with regularly, but if our job and professional life is profoundly horrible and we don't understand why we are even doing it anymore - are we truly thriving and looking after ourselves?