Understanding Self-care

Becoming Authentic. To become your authentic self begin by knowing yourself. Understand: human nature, what you can change and what you cannot, your own personality traits, learned behaviors, and your values, beliefs, sense of justice, needs, goals, and motives.

Self-love means freedom to me. It’s about the journey to who you are now and every time you heal different aspects of yourself, the self -love level goes up. Self-love means self-awareness; the act of mindfulness.

No matter how you celebrate self-love, a common denominator is that self-love is about self-acceptance.

“Self-love requires you to be honest about your current choices and thought patterns and undertake new practices that reflect self-worth.” ~Caroline Kirk

Self-love is.... 1. Choosing ourselves, even if it means upsetting others and not being popular anymore. Even if it means we leave a party before anyone else because we feel tired, overwhelmed, or just plain feel done with the crowd. 2. Telling what is true for us, not swallowing words that express what we truly feel, think, or want to do. 3. Giving our body the nurturing, rest, exercise, and comfort it needs to the best of our ability. 4. Wearing clothes that make us feel good and fit our personality instead of wearing clothes that are in fashion that we use to impress others. 5. Building a life that we love while we are single instead of waiting for our prince/princess to show up to explore life and to be happy. 6. Accepting ourselves with the good, the bad, the ugly, the sexy, and the smelly—all of it—and appreciating ourselves as whole people. 7. Making time to do whatever we love, just to play, without worrying about wasting time. 8. Owning our inner and outer beauty and complimenting ourselves without feeling guilty, arrogant, or entitled. 9. Not rehashing our past mistakes and dragging ourselves to a dark place when we know that we can only learn from the past; we can’t change it.

10. Not labeling ourselves with others’ opinions of us, while having the courage to look inside to see if there might be some truth to them.

11. Learning to set boundaries that protect and nurture our relationships, with ourselves and others. 12. Allowing ourselves to make mistakes and not berating ourselves for making them. Instead, choosing to appreciate our desire to learn and grow.

13. Taking off the MASK!!

If you’ve lost touch with your own preferences and feelings, spend some time asking yourself what you really think and feel. Keep asking and keep experimenting–it will come back to you. Consider keeping a journal, writing down what you liked and didn’t like each day. Accept your feelings and trust that they will pass.

Masks provide some emotional protection in the short run. But the costs of wearing masks are high. When you wear a mask, you don’t really feel the warmth of belonging because others don’t really know you. One of the most basic needs people have is to feel connected to other people and that can’t happen when you are hidden.

Almost any emotion/behavior can be used as a mask. Maybe you mask insecurity by disliking others or mask sadness by being the life of the party or mask fear by being perfectionistic. Putting on a mask is a way of disappearing–being invisible.