Self-care for Self energy

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Self energy and Self-care. I’ve taught a Self-Care project to students in my Gender & Health classes for many years, and in that unit, I always emphasize that there’s a difference between self-care and self-improvement. So often in our culture, self-care is understood as another way to better yourself, whether that’s by losing weight or building muscles or mastering a skill or just being an overall better person. There’s a lot of striving energy in this approach to self-care, and it takes so much energy. There’s a sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle promise that if you just do x, you will be worthy of love. It’s not that my students would phrase it like that, and I imagine if I suggested to them that they were trying to improve themselves into being more loveable, many would rightfully laugh at me. But I could feel the belief there anyway, in the way they’d tell me that their self-care was to run 5 miles a day or they wanted to clean up their diet. The reason? To feel better. To feel better about what? Often: themselves. With some students, we’d go back and forth for awhile until they found a self-care practice to put in place for two weeks that felt reasonably caring towards themselves. I would remind them that self-care sometimes was no fun; it was handling your finances or doing the dishes or having tough conversations when you’d rather take a bubble bath. Some students would take up reading, even for just ten minutes a day. Others would focus on trying to drink water, any amount. Others would engage in stretching or yoga practices. Many sleep-deprived, overworked students took brief naps or chose a set bedtime. Others would dance or listen to music. Some would tidy their rooms. Others would knit or play video games. One practiced not looking at the clock except when absolutely necessary to get somewhere on time. Another student sat in the car and breathed for just sixty seconds before heading into a stressful work environment.

I never used IFS language when teaching this project. My students didn’t know about Self or parts. But recently, I started understanding my Self energy as a flame. I began to see it as a candle lit in a vast darkness. I realized that I am entrusted with tending to this flame while it lives in my body. And that Self-care is about learning what makes my flame brighter and what makes it flicker. To keep my flame alive in childhood, I had to develop fierce protectors who locked this flame under layers of my body in the form of tense muscle and viscera. As the years—and life stresses—piled on, these protectors did the thing they knew how to do best: they tightened, making an already tense body even more constricted until the whole of my being was organized around these dense, tense places. This is trauma, and it caused enormous pain, both physical and emotional. Today, I realized that until relatively recently, these fierce protectors had closed in around the flame of my Self so valiantly that it nearly went out – all that was left were smoldering embers of a once vibrant and bright flame. My protectors had come close to doing what they had fought against others doing for so long – they had nearly extinguished the flame. When they realized this, they felt grief and spontaneously began to unfurl. They shifted into a ring of interconnected warriors, at once very young and very ancient, standing guard around a stone circle in the ground. In the stone ring was a fire. They are still very much needed, but they are also allowing a bit more space for more life to be breathed into this fire.

IFS has been one of my primary Self-care tools that has helped me ease some of my body’s pain. For me, it took a solid year or more of mostly focusing on the dense, locked places in my body, especially in my chest and shoulders, around my heart, and in my lower belly. Focusing a gentle, loving attention on constricted places is a practice I still do in meditation, in yoga, in dance, when I wake up in the middle of the night, and when I feel pain. What I realize now is that for me, this is true Self-care. These practices are done not to make me a kinder, stronger, or more easygoing human (though they might do that), but rather to honor that flame. What about you? What supports you in fanning the flame of your Self energy?