Self-Care Isn't Selfish – It's Necessary

Uninterrupted stress is one of the greatest risk factors affecting women's health today. We have been driven for years to excel at everything we do and our To Do lists are getting longer and longer. Yet we are not on it. Uninterrupted stress can trigger unexpressed, unprocessed and unintegrated trauma complicating your symptoms.  Your past wounds do not go away; they get suppressed only to come back to haunt you again at the least opportune time. They manifest as anxiety, depression, addictions and general discontent from your critic badgering you for not living up unrealistic and inhuman expectations. It is not selfish for women to learn, practice and maintain self-care. The 21st Century has presented women with much opportunity as well as challenges. 

It is time to reconnect to the core of who you are; not the part of you that keeps you on the treadmill of survival mode. That part has you buried alive by unexpressed, unprocessed and unintegrated stress and trauma. You are covered by all those emotional issues you were going to feel: last week, last month, last year, 10 years ago or more.

Dr. Candace Pert, a neuroscientist, has shown that our emotions have a bio-molecular basis through our information highway. These information "molecules of emotion" can cause cellular changes restructuring cells on the outside and the DNA on the inside. In other words, our unexpressed feelings do not go away; they stay stored in the cells of our body until we express, process, and integrate them.

Through the acknowledging, expressing and processing of fear, one reconnects to spiritually-based Love. This Love speaks a different language than the one that has conditioned the cells of our body with guilt, blame, shame and distortion.  This Love language is from an unconditional wise knowing of the depths of our struggles to rise above the fog of our human conditioning. This Love seeks solutions. This Love teaches that to truly care for another we must first care for ourselves. It is through self-care that you can begin to decrease your stress, have more energy, find creative solutions and freely give as well as set healthy boundaries.

Woman can no longer wait for Permission.
Fear has driven women into silence. Fear has driven you into survival. Fear has driven you to stress and fighting for your life as though a saber tooth tiger was chasing you. Women need to reclaim their spiritual core. Women need to find their voices. Women need to express from a more love-based place rather than stress reactivity.  We can no longer wait for permission to proclaim our worth and value. Our world can't wait either.

What do you do?

1. Begin to observe what you do each day to nurture and care for others.
2. Notice what you do for yourself to help you recharge and regenerate. 
3. Take time to appreciate who you are.
4. Take three deep breaths and feel your body. Has it been a while since you noticed you have a body?
5. Exercise like yoga can help you reconnect to your body.
6. When you feel emotional, instead of stuffing it back down, take a few seconds to breathe through the feelings and experience them instead.
7. Add one thing for yourself each week on your To Do List. Like a massage, manicure, pedicure or thirty minutes out in nature.  Nature has a restorative and regenerative quality when we take time to be in it.
8. Have a quiet time in the morning to meditate and write down whatever comes up as a way to reconnect to your inner being.
9. Learn to say "No."

This is a good beginning to reconnect with the value of you and what your bring to the world. We can't give what we don't have. If we want more love we need to learn to love ourselves, which is the greatest love of all. From that loving place, the love we give is given with healthy boundaries of self -care and as an unconditional gift to others.