How to radically care for ourselves

One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others ... And I add, do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
- bell hooks

In the world of human activity, 2020 and 2021 were years where stitches came undone, wounds were exposed, and the crises brought opportunities to observe more clearly behind the curtain of our poor performing and destructive global systems, heartless inequities and unchecked power structures. With current events in constant flux, we feel grief, heartache, instability and uncertainty in regular intervals. We have entered a bridge time for humanity, and it will get more messy before it gets cleared up. We each have a part to play. 

How do we cultivate wholeness and healing in ourselves when the ache is real?

On a personal level, we are processing grief, sorrow for things, people, places and experiences we’ve loved and lost. Some of us are also experiencing ambiguous loss, experiencing sorrow for people and experiences that have no closure, and it may lead us to search for answers ad nauseam. I know this in myself. Examples of this are abandonment of a family member or friend, structural racism that systemically ignores the experiences of people of color in society, immigration and adoption. This kind of grief can become unresolved grief as we search for answers that may never arrive and we continue to churn. While grief is a very normal process for humans, our family systems may not have given us tools to face our personal and collective challenges. How can we support ourselves through this evolutionary gate?

Observe and Interact and Radically Care for Ourselves

We are learning to drop out of the reactionary head and connect with the compassionate, deeply dialed and infinite heart to presence and acknowledge, face and tend to ourselves in this unprecedented time.

Some steps towards radical self-care:

1. Take some time to name your feelings around something that triggers, insults, or causes you suffering. The thinking mind and its assumptions may be reactionary, angry, exhausted, blaming, bypassing, protective and unprocessed. It is all okay. Allow yourself to sit and digest what needs to come out.
   
2. After, allow yourself to acknowledge your courage, and listen with your heart, the space of your center, to be with what’s painful instead of trying to fix it. In this way, you honor the wound, the pain, the betrayal, disappointment, grief, and you let the heart, in its infinite wisdom and empathy, cherish the pain internally. This pause can launch a huge resistance in oneself to fight and act now. Observe your mind, let it speak, then there will be an opening to see the hurt, and a softening. Can you slow down to be with the heart to tend to your feelings so that the wound doesn’t perpetually ache?     
3. Sit with yourself until the feeling abates. Appreciate yourself for meeting yourself in this vulnerable and intimate way in service to your greater healing. 
4. Move from a place of clarity after tending to your vulnerability and ask your heart what is the next, the most simple step.
   

Healing is a spiral. It will be messy and uncomfortable before it gets smoothed out and finds resolution.

Be forgiving and trusting of yourself to learn emotional tools to be with the parts of you that ache so you can be available to what gives you life.

With grounded empathy,
Keri