Spiritually healthy people are those with the ability to look at themselves with fearless honesty. They’re not afraid to admit they have an ego because they recognize that they are human. Rather than saying “look what all of these people are doing wrong”, they say “I’ve been wrong too, and that is why I have been able to do better.” The times of greatest growth occur when we are at our worst. Character is determined by the way in which we are able to learn from our pain, and most importantly, our mistakes. Too many people are afraid to admit that they are less than perfect, especially regarding spiritual matters, which saddens me because it creates a community that is fixated on perfection. What these people don’t realize is that denial is the greatest perpetrator to spiritual sickness.
Please, keep looking. Not for a person, but for your passion, your love, your courage, your goals, your dreams, your happiness, yourself. Keep looking. Explore yourself before you explore another. Know your worth, know yourself. Only then will you know what you need over what you want. You need yourself to become your own.
It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.
A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.
It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.
It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.
It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
Honestly I think one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to separate your negative qualities from your identity.
Instead of saying “I’m lazy,” saying “I’ve made a habit of not doing work unless it’s absolutely necessary.” Instead of saying “I’m a bad friend,” saying “I haven’t communicated as much as I should with the people I care about.”
By being specific about your problems, and by framing it as an action that you are consciously either working on or ignoring rather than an unchangeable part of who you are, you allow yourself to accept your mistakes and work constructively on them instead of pretending they didn’t happen or wallowing in blaming yourself.
In 2018 I’m done asking why I don’t matter to people. This year my mantra is
I matter to myself.
my teacher says “all self improvement is doomed, because all self improvement begins in self loathing.”
Here is what she means: if you try to get into a yoga pose for the first time and you are intent on doing it perfectly, the body itself will prevent you. you may try to straighten your leg, only to find that this brings your pelvis out of a square position. or you may find that you try to strain forward to reach your toes, only to bring the belly away from the thighs and shorten the spine– making you further from your goal the more you reach for it.
the body makes these adjustments to prevent you from injury. your muscles could not take the strain of doing something perfectly the first time. if you were to push through these adjustments and insist on forcing the leg straight, forcing the pelvis square, forcing your hands to your toes, you would likely get hurt. but the body is wise and good. and if we listen to it we will not get hurt.
the mind is the same as the body and so it is also wise and good. if you are not practiced enough to hold your discomfort, the mind will find ways to protect you from pain: the mind will deflect blame onto others, the mind will project, the mind will justify you in your behavior. the mind does all these things not because it is bad, but because it is wise; because the mind, like the body, knows it cannot take the strain of doing something perfectly the first time it is asked to.
you cannot improve yourself on a set timeline. you cannot say: i will be a better person in six months to a year. you have to trust your body-mind to be your teacher, and trust that it knows the correct pace at which you can heal.
when you allow yourself to be as you are, and to take care of the body-mind you have, to nourish your needs as they are (instead of as what you want them to be), to allow yourself to exist without applying force, you will organically get better. the instinctive things you do to protect yourself from malnourishment and and from shame and from fear and from vulnerability and from wounds and from the past will fall away on their own. because you won’t need protection anymore.
During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.
After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on.
While, at first, I thought these weren’t going to work out, I was very surprised to see just how easy they were to use . My homework at that time was to identify which sort of thinking I used on the regular and which ones would best challenge them for me.
So, what do you think? Do any of the maladaptive thinking patterns sound like you? which ways would you like to untwist your thinking?
Detachment is an often advised quality to cultivate on the spiritual way. But this advice is frequently misunderstood as remaining cold, aloof, and indifferent toward life. It is anything but.
Real detachment may be recognized by the arising of joy. Detachment, happiness, and contentment are one and the same.
Suppose you really love strawberries and currently have a massive craving for strawberries. It just so happens that you discover a fresh and beautiful carton of these berries in your refrigerator. So you sit down and savor them, one by one.
Someone comes and offers you chocolate, soda, popcorn, all sorts of snacks. But you don’t feel any desire toward any of that because you are so filled with your enjoyment of the strawberries. That is like true detachment.
But that detachment doesn’t come because of strawberries, or anything for that matter. It comes when you discover that your happiness, your peace, your joy, are nothing else but your Self and it is found nowhere else but within.
Then detachment naturally happens toward the transient play of this world and body. It doesn’t mean that you have distain for them or aloofness or rejection. It simply indicates that you are no longer seeking the right things in the wrong places.
In your own company, before mind, body, and ego, shines the company of all beings as the Self; One without a second. Therein is always peace, freedom, and happiness.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t have compassion and love toward the people you meet and the events in life, but you do not depend on them for any form of happiness. Then you can really enjoy what comes since there is no element of need or insecurity involved.
Practice detachment. Remind yourself that all of this need not be taken as the end all be all of existence. Go within, practice meditation and mindfulness throughout your day. Discover the joy that is your awareness endlessly beholding itself.
Then detachment is found to be a blessing beyond all blessings.
I was going through some of my notes, and at the top of one page it says, Lean into the discomfort of the work. This was written in the context of the work being done within my career field, but I find it to be applicable to any area of life. “Work,” be it self-healing or recovery work, achieving personal goals, evolving.. it is not always comfortable. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort of it all, acknowledge it.
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