Self-Care Is Ultimately About Loving Yourself
Self-care is ultimately about loving yourself. It’s thinking enough of your own body – your being – to be attentive to ways that you can nurture and healthily soothe yourself.
Our culture gives us very mixed messages about our lovability. Much of marketing is designed to convince us that we’ll only be lovable – only be enough – to the degree that we consume the things that advertisers want us to consume. We’re graded and judged and categorized almost constantly.
Without the self-care of actively loving ourselves, sometimes it’s been easy for us to forget to do things that are good for us and that we enjoy.
Play, for example, is a profound form of self-love. How playful are you? How able are you to be relaxed and fun with friends, family, colleagues? What are the primary influences on your attitudes toward play? Can you see how being playful is loving yourself by setting down your burdens while you’re playing?
How can you actively cultivate the habit of loving yourself? Who can support you in this self-care? Are you willing to experiment and see what kind of positive difference loving yourself as a form of self-care can make?