Showing Up With Love

Mornings are sacred. Sacred because of the birds that wake up early with me, sacred because of the freshness of a new day. What's become important to me in the morning is creating a tone - the tone of a morning follows you throughout your day, your week and your life. We all know that we have the power to shift our state of being, but few of us take the time to do this regularly. We don't know how, or we're tired, or we're distracted.

I am often of this feeling, too.

What I love is to greet myself with loving thoughts for the day. They don't have to be complicated, they can be anything, like simple words you would speak to a child. I look in the bathroom mirror and say something straight into my green eyes like, "Good morning, you are so beautiful. I love you. I'm so happy to share this life with you." Words like this have not always been easy for me, and more than half the time I haven't really believed them anyway. But I have gotten better at it, and in the good moments the dull repetition of a forced kindness has flipped into a joy and glow.

I don't think we should sell self care as something that is easy or cheap, or that comes in a bottle or even in an affirmation that someone else wrote. Self care is presence with oneself, a willingness to be here with ourselves when no one else will or perhaps when no one else has before. Self care is believing in our own capacity to show up for ourselves.

Yes, it's true: you can make a smoothie, you can take a bath filled with rose petals (and I'm not saying that you shouldn't!). You can use your favorite scents to comfort yourself (lavender, geranium, vetiver, and rose are mine). But we have to realize that self care has more to do with our relationship to ourselves, and the kinds of thoughts we hold inside our minds, the kinds of unspoken attitudes we harbor in our hearts. These are the things that set the tone of our mornings, our days and our lives. They are the things that allow us to achieve our dreams, or tell ourselves that we are failures before we've even begun.

Yes: it's good to start small - with little things that we can control, the small luxuries that don't necessarily require money but that bring us a loveliness and joy (like scents, listening to the bird calls, a soft blanket to land with at night, a good book or a story). But if we land in the bath, in some expensive vacation, in a product, anywhere with the same type of mind? We are in the same place. We are not caring for ourselves.

What I'm talking about is the thinking mind, the stories we tell ourselves - sometimes our negativity comes from trauma or our parents or our friends, or the lack of all those things - from poverty, hardship, emptiness - or from whatever. The reasons for us humans being the way we are are complex and varied - and of course some of us struggle more than others or have endured harder circumstances. It's so vital that we learn to work with our minds, and to see it as work that is ongoing and changeable, rather than static. It's not something we do once and then say we're done. Our lives and minds are not an easy fix. Some of the practices I work with weekly, if not daily, include gratitude journaling (barf! I know) and dream gratitude journaling, and meditation.

I was so resistant to gratitude journaling but I've since been addicted to the habit, because it allows me to be grateful for not just what's beautiful, but all the varying states in my life - it allows me to see myself clearly. I suggest starting with a page per day, and doing it first thing in the morning.

GRATITUDE JOURNALING:

Write for one whole page, and write it out in full sentences rather than a list. After awhile, you'll begin to notice that you will need to stretch yourself on things to be grateful for. You can only list the sun and the sky and your mom so many times. You will likely have to start digging for why you are grateful for the hard things. (Caveat: there are some things you don't have to be grateful for, and that's okay).

DREAM JOURNALING:

I often do this right after gratitude journaling, for another page. On this page, you continue to write what you are grateful for, but this time you're writing about things that haven't yet come into your life. Say for example you long for a partner, you can write "I'm grateful for true love" and see if you can feel what that would feel like in your body. Or: "I'm grateful for finally having all the money I've ever needed." With dream journaling, you are creating a new knowledge in your body of already having what you want. I've found it's too much of a leap for our consciousness to go straight into these feelings, when these are things we've perhaps never experienced before - doing a gratitude journal beforehand eases you into the feelings.

YOGA / MOVEMENT :

I love Yoga with Adrienne, which I do ritualistically and obsessively. :) What I appreciate is her kind and gentle attitude, and the fact that I can do it from the comfort of my home and choose the pace, length and style that my body is open to that morning. Sometimes I'll do a calming yin practice, a short core practice, or a flow practice. Even only 10-20 minutes makes me feel so much more engaged with my day. As someone who rarely drinks caffeine, this is how I wake up.

TEA + BREAKFAST:

I love to cook and my breakfast routine changes depending on my mood and body, but I always try to have at least a little bit of protein and big mug of tea (or two!) Lately I've been making homemade muesli (oats, coconut flakes, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, walnuts, crispy rice) and pouring it over with unsweetened hemp milk and whatever fruit is in season (in summer blueberries and raspberries!) I love decaf black tea (the flavor reminds me of a trip I took in Bali), Dandy Blend, and Tulsi with Rose.

MEDITATION:

So I'm not a habitually perfect meditator (tip: if you have this problem just use meditation to observe your need to "get it right" which is just a delusion anyway) - but I usually do a breath mindfulness meditation, though I have also worked with TM meditation and using mantras. There are lots of great YouTube videos and articles out there, but finding a teacher or taking a class is worth the investment if you can. Meditation shouldn't cost a lot, anyone can do it (and no, having a "busy mind" doesn't mean you can't meditate - it doesn't matter!), but it's good to have some instruction. I recommend using a mantra or breath based meditation. Guided meditations can be relaxing, but they don't require the same type of focus of the mind, and they don't have the same effect.

CREATIVITY:

I try to do something creative each day if possible, even if it's something silly like drawing a little picture, writing a poem, or cooking something new. I'm a musician, so if I can get a writing session in or work on a song, or work on a larger body of work it's great - it calms and relaxes my nervous system, but more than that it helps me connect to a feeling of purpose. Even if you don't think of yourself as a "creative" you can just follow your curiosity. We want to turn off the sense of a critic or of the need for achievement or being "good", because that's not the point - connection to your creativity in whatever form it takes is connecting to yourself.

Which brings me back to my original point - that self care is the act of loving yourself enough to show up and be there for yourself. To have your own back always, and to know that you're enough no matter what, even if you don't feel like you are. We all feel that way, but it's up to us to not believe the voices in our heads - and to train our focus on larger truths.

Self care is the act of being there for yourself.