Spiritual Self Care

"Many men go fishing their entire lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after"

-Henry David Thoreau

Those of you who are familiar with me and my coaching style,  know that one of the things I talk about the most is that your happiness and well-being is innate and not dependent on your circumstances.  In other words, you don't need to change, be, do, or have anything in order to be content and well within yourself. It might then surprise you to discover that I am a big fan of cultivating that well-being through doing stuff.

I originally got this idea from one of my mentors, SuperCoach Michael Neill, in his first book You Can Have What You Want: Proven Strategies for Inner and Outer Success.  He talks about creating a spiritual self-care routine that cultivates and feeds that inner well-being.  The idea is that when you take really wonderful care of yourself, and spend time hanging out in your own joy, you are going to have a much more beautiful experience of life.  As I talked about in my last article, when you make the starting line your own happiness, you get to have an amazing journey, and you are much more likely to create outer success with ease.  So, by creating a strong foundation of well-being in your life, you are setting yourself up for inner and outer success.

Let's clear up the whole notion that taking really wonderful care of yourself is a bad thing.  First off, who are the people you love being with the most?  Are they the ones where their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being is in shambles?  The ones who are miserable and needy?  Or, do you enjoy hanging out with people who are really happy within themselves?  I'm going to suggest the latter will get the majority vote.  You show people the greatest respect and love when you love yourself really well.  You have so much more to give when you start with you.  How can you love someone well, when you don't love yourself; and I'm not talking about the creepy co-dependent, needy, feeling that many people mistake for love.  If you have joy in your heart, you model that for others, and share it.

There's a reason why when you are on an airplane they tell you to put your oxygen mask on before even your children, because if you die, you're no good to anybody.  It's the same with your well-being, if you are dying inside, no matter what you do, you're energy will not serve anybody.  There's no energy quite as icky as a really clingy, needy human being. (I am not at all saying that having needs and getting them met is bad or wrong, that's a different conversation).

Okay, now that we got that cleared up, what's the spiritual piece about?  When I first read that it was SPIRITUAL self-care, I though 'hey I meditate sometimes, and read spiritual books' so I must already do spiritual self-care right?  Well, it turns out there's another way to see it that I found incredibly useful.

This is how Michael Neill talks about in his book:

 "Spiritual self-care is no more or less than the care and feeding of your spirit.  We all have the experience of being in 'high spirits'; in the arts, a 'spirited' performance is one filled with life.  In fact, the word 'spirit' comes from the Latin word for breath, so your spirit is quite literally your life force --- that part of you that makes you feel alive.  Spiritual self-care then is the deliberate in-spiring of ourselves --- the daily focus on what it is that makes us come alive."

So in other words it doesn't have to become a discussion about God or Mysticism.  It is as simple as asking yourself, 'what do you know you do or could do that makes you feel alive or spirited?' and then go do that.

Now let me address the seeming conflict between doing and being that I brought up in the very beginning.   It has been my experience that we can't really separate out our physicality from our spiritual nature.  We can't just be, and we can't just do.  They are intrinsically linked, and even if there isn't a direct causal link, there do seem to be things that we can DO, to tap into our innate well-BEING, that we are all born with.  Even though you can still experience tremendous peace and well-being in the midst of seemingly outer chaos.

Weekly Coaching Tip:  This Just Works!

Here is a simply structure you can use to track and increase your daily spiritual self-care

1. Get out a clean sheet of paper, or open a new word document
2. Make a list of at least 10 things that you know make you come alive or inspire you.  Ask yourself, What do I know to do that feeds my spirit?  What do I know to do to take really good care of myself? Be careful to not let this become another to-do list.
3. Form your list into a check-list where you've got a box for each day of the week for each self-care item.  You can now check off whether you did that item for the day or not.
4. Challenge yourself to get as many as you can every day for the next week, and track your progress.
5. Just for fun, see if you can find a link between the number of check-marks and how well your day went.

I'll share with you a couple of the items on my list so you can have an idea of the kinds of things you might find on your list.  I've got dancing to music, journaling, playing tennis, reading ACIM, and snuggling with my cat.  These are just a few to get you started.

Have fun exploring, and watch your life transform as you take really great care of yourself.

Love and Light,

Coach Ty