Category: Self-care Strategies

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Addiction Treatment Self Care Self-care Strategies

Self-Care Isn’t Selfish: Essential Practices for Women in Recovery

best women rehab san diego ca

At Villa Kali Ma, it is our strong belief that women are precious. Every single one of us matters. This statement bears repeating, and often! Because for the many women we encounter in the course of our work healing addiction, mental illness, and trauma, the idea of being valuable just because we exist is often a foreign one. 

Most of the women we encounter suffer from extreme self-hatred, self-neglect, and self-misunderstanding. Rather than seeing that we are extraordinary and unrepeatable expressions of the one life force of which we all partake, most of us have the habit of seeing only flaws, failures, and deficits.

We here at Villa Kali Ma insist, though. Not only are women exceedingly precious, that preciousness needs care and boundaries to be preserved and nourished. While women are exceptionally resilient – able to endure a range of abuses and neglects ranging from the material to the spiritual – we are not unscathed by all the forms of mistreatment of women and girls that the world has heaped on us. Instead, we exist in a state of severe woundedness, carrying on not because of, but in spite of the ways that society has taught us to regard ourselves. 

In our daily work with women of all backgrounds here at Villa Kali Ma, we focus on the vital component of self-care for recovery, coaching skills of mental health maintenance and other forms of wellness practices that help women flourish and thrive. The vast majority of the women we get to know through this work need help learning to stop treating themselves the way they have been treated since birth – as something to be critiqued, told, rejected, abandoned, abused, ignored, or used. 

Women in recovery must learn self-care. Self-care isn’t selfish. It is an essential practice for all women, especially those of us learning to live in a new way after decades of struggling with substance addiction, mental health, and trauma. 

In this post, we’ll share thoughts about the most important aspects of self-care for women in recovery. 

Building a Self-Care Foundation That Supports Lasting Recovery

All self-care must begin with the understanding that there are serious consequences to self-neglect and self-mistreatment for any of us who are seeking to recover from addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma. If we treat ourselves the way we have always treated ourselves in the past, we will again experience the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that drove us to need professional help. To stay healthy, we must gradually learn to think very different thoughts, feel different feelings, and take different actions. Only then will we be able to experience and sustain those different life results we deeply deserve and desire.  

It is not a luxury to care for the self, but rather a necessity. Caring for the self includes meeting needs and honoring boundaries in many aspects of life. Not only must we learn to notice and care for the physical form we inhabit, by feeding ourselves healthy food, resting enough, exercising appropriately, and spending time outside in the great outdoors. We must also learn to notice and care for the emotional, mental, spiritual, relational, creative, and career (or purpose fulfillment) aspects of our lives. Because we are complex, multidimensional beings. Self-care is a living, breathing practice, a whole ecosystem of loving intentions. We learn to tune in, to get creative, to ask.   

Building a self-care foundation that supports lasting recovery begins with taking stock of the facts: where do our current self-care practices need work? Where do we try to go without our needs being met, where do we violate our own boundaries? In each of those areas, what would we rather have? 

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Self-Care Strategies

The body is the foundation of our entire experience in the world. It is the vessel inside of which we voyage on the seas of life, and the body must be strong, intact, and comfortable to inhabit. Therefore, by focusing on improving the physical body’s health, we accomplish a lot towards being able to care also for the other aspects of life, like emotions, thoughts, and love relationships. If the body isn’t well, then many other aspects of life suffer too, so it makes sense to always look to, and strengthen, the state of the body as a priority.

Here are the most important strategies for physical body self-care: 

Improve Your Diet 

Many women live with severe nutrient deficiencies, chemical imbalances, and toxic loads that have been delivered to the body from a variety of sources. Substance abuse leaves a chemical legacy in the body, but there are many other possible sources of toxins that interfere with nearly every aspect of the body’s ability to create states of health and happiness. 

Environmental toxicity, the many impacts of industrialization, manufacturing, & large scale agriculture, GMOs, preservatives, dyes, dental work, other medical procedures, beauty products, cleansing agents and pharmaceuticals can all contribute to the body being out of balance and ill. Hormones and neurotransmitters often need support to be replenished, as do important minerals and vitamins. 

Fortunately, all of these concerns can be assessed and addressed through the professional attention of a nutritionist or doctor of functional medicine. We here at Villa Kali Ma strongly believe in the power of healing the body with food and other lifestyle changes, and we help all the women we meet to consider this angle of their recovery.  

Exercise

Some form of daily exercise is necessary. There are many different kinds of exercise, ranging from very high impact to low. Depending on your unique body, you may benefit from changing the amount or kind of physical activity you get every day. If at all possible, it is favorable to combine exercise with increasing the amount of outdoors time you are able to get each week. Gardening, walking in the park, and even a walk around the neighborhood can greatly improve the physical health of the body. 

Sleep 

Sleep is nature’s cure for many conditions. The body restores itself through sleep, but many of us struggle to get the right amount and quality of sleep that we actually need. To prioritize sleep, we may need to develop habits of reducing screen time, going to bed earlier, cutting out caffeine entirely, or make other such changes to encourage the body to rest. Sleep is a complex topic; note that sleep is also greatly improved by dietary changes and exercise. 

Second to physical self-care, we at Villa Kali Ma prioritize emotional self-care. Emotional self-care means attending to how we feel, and what we may be thinking about ourselves throughout the day. Here are our top recommendations for emotional self-care. 

Reflection

It’s important to have time and space to reflect on what we feel. Villa Kali Ma recommends that each woman cultivate the habit of taking time every day for checking in with herself. 

A practice that many women find relatively easy to install is journaling. Set a timer for 15 minutes and free-write all of your thoughts and feelings first thing in the morning or right before bed, and you will gradually build a relationship with yourself in which you are able to vent your emotions to yourself. Recording gratitudes and setting intentions may optionally be part of your reflection time, but it’s important to make room for negative feelings too. By writing negative feelings down, we often don’t have to speak them out loud to people or let them turn into negative actions. 

Support Network

It’s a vital aspect of self-care to make sure that we have enough safe people in our lives, with whom we can be our authentic selves to a reasonable degree. Some of us are fortunate enough to have a pre-existing network of friends and family who help us face our burdens with less loneliness, but most of us experience isolation and chronic disconnection emotionally. If you’re in the latter situation, don’t worry, that is enormously common, and there are solutions. 

The easiest fix for isolation is to join a supportive community, adding in extra meetings and activities on the daily. AA, NA, and other types of self-help community are ideal for adding a support network in quickly and effectively. Alternatively, we can receive support through a therapy group, or through an activities group that meets regularly. Joining a yoga community, spiritual group, or other kind of welcoming community can also help.   

Individual Therapy

It is strongly recommended to be in individual therapy of some kind. There are many different kinds of therapy, ranging from body based, to creative, to relationship-oriented, to cognitive behavioral. It is important to have a dedicated, regular space with a professional for slowly working through the many healing pieces that arise for women who have addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma. 

Finally, we recommend that each woman develop a strategy for spiritual self care. We do not endorse religion at Villa Kali Ma. We mean rather that it’s very helpful for a woman to develop her spiritual nature as a resource for recovery. Activating one’s spiritual capacity helps with a variety of daily challenges, providing guidance, solace, comfort, and inspiration. Every person alive has spirituality of their own, and no one can tell you what that should be like. At Villa Kali Ma, we suggest only that you do work with your spirituality, and use it to your advantage. Here are our tips for developing your spiritual powers further.

Prayer

Broadly speaking, prayer just means talking to spirit, putting your needs, thoughts, intentions, or worries into words. Speaking to a spiritual someone or something, even if it’s your own higher self, has enormous benefits. Most people find that over time, if they continue to “talk to God” or “talk to the universe”, a very practical helpline can be established. Eventually, a trusting relationship is built, in which we learn that if we ask, we do tend to receive.

Mindfulness

Meditation can come in the form of a sit down practice, but since many women with trauma find it hard to “just be still”, it’s important to note that mindfulness comes in many forms, including walking, art and movement. Even if we must start with short sessions of just five minutes, gradually developing our capacity for mindful awareness, whether sitting or doing a physical activity, brings spaciousness, peace, calm, and the capacity to tolerate our suffering with more loving detachment. We encourage every woman to develop her latent potential for peace and equanimity through finding a mindfulness practice that she enjoys enough to pursue.

Nature and Music

Nature and music, especially the great works of classical music or jazz, are two other categories that can be resources for developing spirituality. Both nature and music tend to stimulate spiritual feelings and teach us about what our own spiritual nature is like. Increasing the amount of time listening to music and observing the natural world are both valid ways to develop spiritual self-care.

Overcoming Guilt and Prioritizing Your Wellbeing

Many women need help working through the guilt they feel when they begin to put their own needs and boundaries first. It has been deeply ingrained in us to believe that if we do not attend to other people first, we are bad people, or there will be relational consequences for us. People will be angry or think ill of us.  

It is possible that some people in our lives will in fact need some time adjusting to our new focus on caring for ourselves. However, anyone worth keeping close to us will like it that we are caring for ourselves more, for the simple reason that when we are happier, they are happier. We will have more energy, compassion, and love for them, if we are allowed to make sure we are ok first.

Although we have all been trained to believe that other people’s happiness requires that we put them first, this is a misunderstanding. Provided we are talking about two adults, we must care for ourselves first, and then if and only if we have a surplus, we may give away what we choose to share with others. The giving is always optional, and we can only be generous when what we give away isn’t something that we ourselves need. To give what we have away, in exchange for someone giving us what we need in return, is the core misunderstanding of codependency. 

In the short term, some people probably will feel let down or angry when we take care of ourselves before we take care of them. In the longer term, they will be inspired to realize that they are also allowed to care for themselves, and that we want them to do that too. 

If necessary, remind yourself of the consequences of you not putting yourself first. Our loved ones may wish, in their wounded child parts, that we would care for them before taking care of ourselves. They might rightfully have never gotten what they needed, and they had come to rely on us to be kind or to help them. Even so, they do not really want the consequences of us not caring for ourselves first. No one is benefited by us losing our sobriety, mental health, or shutting down or spiraling out in a trauma episode.

Learn Sustainable Self-Care at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of trauma treatment, as well as mental health and addiction recovery services for women. Located in northern San Diego County, we are blessed to be able to offer a standalone trauma healing center, The Retreat. In all of our serene, comfortable locations, we help women learn the necessary art and practice of self-care. 

Our all-female team of licensed clinicians and certified holistic practitioners provides quality trauma-informed treatment, giving a chance to discover deep bodily and spiritual recovery. Our comprehensive menu of complementary holistic sessions includes massage, Ayurveda, yoga, acupuncture, sound healing, Reiki, breath work, and more. 

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Internal family systems model of healing Self-care Strategies Therapy

Humility and Healing in the Addictions Profession

Any honest psychotherapist will tell you that when genuine healing arrives, it wells up out of a hidden source, dispensed by something (or someone, depending how you look at it) that surpasses our understanding.

What exactly that hidden source is, we can truthfully only speculate. People in the psychology field can (and frequently do!) draw up diagrams and theories of the healing force, but the jury is still out.

The theorizing, of course, has been going on for millennia, since long before modern psychology was a twinkle in Freud’s bespectacled, Austrian eye. Model after model has attempted to explain not only what’s going on when soul illness takes hold, but also what is happening when we heal.

No model, in the end, resolves the mystery to anyone’s permanent satisfaction. And as this blog post will explore, we at Villa Kali Ma are inclined to call that a good thing.

Internal Family Systems Therapy and the Self

Some contemporary psychotherapy models, like Internal Family Systems, have postulated that healing wells up from a kind of independently operating energetic field that is very personable and relatable. Something that’s not the human mind nor the ego personality per se, but nevertheless feels like it’s us.

IFS calls this inner healer Self, in honor of the language that came most naturally to IFS founder Richard Schwartz’s clients as they were articulating its presence in sessions. Because rather than being a theory dreamed up outside of a clinical context, Schwartz says that he first uncovered and then verified Self’s presence and properties through decades of clinical work, helping the most “hopeless cases” recover.

In the final analysis, Schwartz (a self-proclaimed rational pragmatist by training and inclination) proposes that Self is an indwelling, benevolent healing energy found within everyone. Self is available to help with the healing process. Schwartz maintains, in fact, that Self is the probably the best, most reliable guide for healing that we have.

The benefits of working with the model of Self 

Self cannot be dirtied, damaged, or destroyed, Schwartz insists, no matter how much else goes wrong in our lives. Like the sun, Self shines on, untarnished, behind our trauma, addictions, and mental illness. Once we clear the clouds, the Self is revealed, shining gloriously as ever. And Self can be called upon – in fact it is the best source to call upon – for help removing all that blocks Self’s light from reaching us and healing us with its life-giving radiance and warmth.

Far from resolving the mystery that surrounds psychological recovery, however, IFS’s concept of Self raises almost as many questions as it attempts to answer. For some skeptics, the concept of Self sounds like another version of the storied holy grail. A fountain of healing, perhaps, but nothing we can lay our hands on in any satisfying way.

For the pragmatic among us, though, it’s important to acknowledge that embracing this core tenet of the IFS model produces specific results that have eluded other models. IFS is counted as an evidence-based practice which is particularly helpful with some of the toughest areas of the mental health field, including extreme trauma, addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, bipolar disorder, and dissociative identity disorder.

The success of the model is owed, in large part, to IFS’s gift for creating true alignment within, bringing peace to a fractious inner system under the benevolent leadership of the Self. So whether or not we find the IFS picture of a benevolent healing Self latent in all people to be plausible, the results speak for themselves. Navigating the healing journey by consulting a compass magnetized to the concept of Self (or something similar) is undeniably useful in many psychotherapeutic contexts.

Most importantly, IFS has brought hope and healing to desperate cases that have languished or been abandoned altogether elsewhere in the behavioral health field, including the fields of trauma and addiction recovery.

Self-Healing as An Emergent Property of Nature

Setting aside IFS and the notion of Self, some folks may intuitively and rationally relate more to the idea that an indwelling, self-correcting and emergent healing force is available to all of us, simply because we are part of nature.

We are mammals after all, born from nature’s creative genius, the same as the rest of life. Therefore, the reliable property that can be counted upon to cleanse, heal, replenish and restore communities of animals, plants, materials – even whole ecosystems – can be prevailed upon to heal us too.

Nature shows a remarkable ability to bounce back from the extreme burdens placed upon her, as the returning forests of Chernobyl testify. Similarly, nature finds ways to heal the body and spirit, from even from the deadliest of toxic loads.

Healing by A Power Greater Than Ourselves

Many psychotherapists and others drawn to the healing professions are actually privately inclined to relate to the healing force as what AA calls “a power greater than ourselves”. For such professionals, the healing force is to be approached with humility, reverence, gratitude, and profound respect. Though to use spiritual language is generally frowned upon in the behavioral health profession (perhaps with good reason), there are many healers who, in the privacy of their own heartspaces, do unwaveringly believe that it is God, Spirit, buddha nature, christ consciousness or something along those lines, that is dispensing the healing, and not the healer themselves (at best an instrument of God’s healing).

If we are willing to believe what gifted healers, including groundbreaking psychotherapy visionaries like C.G. Jung have said about their own experiences with inspiration and discovery, we will find this to be a common theme: healers serve as medium, channeling healing from higher realms, much more like a priest or shaman, than a doctor or machinist repairing a broken mechanism.

Healing as a Property of Physics

Still, some therapists and healers are drawn to more materialistic, rationalist explanations of the healing force. They might be more prone to view healing as the effect of ultimately predictable operations of physics, large or small scale; healing is mysterious only because we don’t yet understand these operations.

For such healers, there is a kind of faith that we may eventually, through scientific experimentation and discovery, crack this mystery once and for all. Then we may at last be able to harness and control the properties of nature’s healing powers, to be at our command. In such a view, it is our ability to finally see into the heart of the mystery which may liberate us.

A Mystery at the Heart of the Profession

We at Villa Kali Ma find something compelling in each of these models. What we like about IFS’s notion of Self is that it feels personal and relatable. What we like about a nature-based understanding of healing is that it feels beautiful and abundant, like nature itself. Many of us feel wonderful acknowledging that healing comes from a power which will always be far greater than ourselves. And what we like about the scientific approach is the encouragement to experiment, and make sure we always favor the facts over our biases.

None of these approaches, to our view, erases the mystery. And that’s ok. That’s good. Because while the mind is an articulate tool for conceptualizing and interpreting data we may gather about the ultimate source of healing, and the heart is good at finding healing waters by feel, there nevertheless remains a mystery at the heart of the art and science of recovery.

This mystery encompasses why exactly it is that some of us who undergo terrible trauma do not end up turning to addiction (or other extreme behaviors) to cope, while others of us do. Or why some of us who fall into domain of addiction or mental illness have it in us to find our way back to the land of the living again, while others of us don’t even start that journey. Why, furthermore, do children growing up in the same family, with similar genes and identical childhood conditions, come up with such different solutions to the same problems? If abuse begets abuse, why don’t all children of abusers become abusers? Pull on this thread, and you may unravel a tapestry shot through with patterns which are far larger than we are prepared to glimpse.

Indigenous and Contemporary Practices for Healing

At Villa Kali Ma, we offer a spectrum of modalities, representing the full scale of what we have found to be practically helpful for helping women recover from trauma, addiction, and mental illness. Sometimes, our holistic approach means integrating indigenous, alternative, Eastern, or just non-mainstream healing systems into the work, and sometimes it means we rely mainly on broadly accepted clinical models. We’re open to all healing systems that bring benefit – we’re interested in what works in the real world. Most often, we combine approaches, because each woman is different and not everything works for everyone.

Answers to the mysteries briefly touched on in this blog post have been offered by indigenous cultures and ancient systems of knowledge for thousands of years. Respectfully, we often lean on these traditions, taking many tools and ideas from these treasure troves.

For example, we rely on the healing powers of posture and breath discovered by yoga to help women regulate their bodies and create peace, safety, strength, and calm. We use the power of imagination to encounter symbolic personal representations of illness and find their energetic medicine – a healing approach akin to what is found in most shamanic cultures (though also used in art therapy, hypnotherapy, and Jung’s active imagination, to name a few Western healing systems that rely on healing imagery too). Throughout our many mindfulness-based approaches to therapy, furthermore, we use insights taken from the science of meditation, originally gifted to the West by way of Eastern cultures.

We run a fully licensed facility and our board-licensed and certified therapists are anchored in the Western model. But we don’t mind acknowledging where the Western scientific model has fallen short. If the mental health crisis facing America is any indicator, the West has, in spite of its resources and special kind of brilliance, not yet solved the problem of how to heal human misery.

Humility in the Healing Profession

Whether you believe that the contemporary Western models of illness provide a better model, or you’re more inclined to acknowledge the wisdom of older indigenous models as potentially superior, is not that important at the end of the day. Either way, whatever model, we here at Villa Kali Ma we believe in the power of humility. No matter which tool we take in hand, a spirit of humility needs to guide that hand.

We know we may very well lose our footing if we reach too far into speculation about the what and the why, and most especially if we ever think that we have settled an issue once and for all. Those of us who work in the field of trauma, mental illness, and addiction recovery cannot afford to be settled.

Instead, we must learn a different art than certainty, dominance, mastery, and generalization. These are dangerous practices for us and our clients. Rather, we learn, with humility, to do all we can to dowse for the waters of a healing spirit inside a client’s system. We do what we can to invite, encourage, and honor that spirit, so that it might feel welcome in the psychotherapy room with us.

When we see the healing force’s promising seed sprouting within ourselves or another, we do what we can to nurture it, careful not to crush it or harvest it too soon. We remember not to assume we know what it is. A lot of the time, doing what we can to nurture it means getting out of the way, trusting the inborn wisdom of that force, to know better than our well-meaning, sometimes-anxious healer personas.

If you find yourself resonating, dear reader, with our conviction that humility as healers protects, you might be interested to peruse our many offerings available for healing women’s suffering. Whatever your situation, we send our heartfelt blessings over to you today, that it may fill you with all that you need to thrive and shine, filled to the brim with health as you define it!

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Self-care Strategies

Strategies to Promote Self-Care

Care and Feeding of the Human Being

When you go to the humane society to adopt a pet, you understand you will need to care for that animal.

Not only do you understand that you will need to feed it, clean up after it, and take it to the vet, but you understand also that this animal is going to need your love. Your attention. Your patience, sometimes. Your affection, certainly. This animal’s life will be in your hands.

And how do you as the pet-owner-to-be feel about all of this? Excited. Here for it. On board. You can’t wait to take this cute little being under the sheltering wings of your care.

What motivates you as a pet owner to take on the needs of another? Nothing more than the instinct to love and care for life. Do you know that kind of excitement about the journey, privilege, and challenge of caring for life?

Well, guess what? You, whoever you are, already have one animal who needs care, attention, affection, and love: You.

Self Care: A Requirement of Human Life

Though many of us learn it rather late in life, loving care of the human being we are is necessary to have the full bloom of the flower we are here to be.

Since human beings are multidimensional, complex life forms, that care needs to address several layers and levels of our experience. The physical body needs a lot, sure. And so does the emotional body, the mental body, and the spiritual body.

But we don’t get a pre-printed guide to self-care. We have to learn what we can from our parents and teachers, from friends and people around us, and make up the rest as we go along. We are all writing our manual, filling it with our own experiences of what works and what doesn’t.

What would you put in your self-care manual in each section: body, mind, emotions, and creative spirit?

What Is Self-Care?

Self-care refers to all the practices that are generally recommended and required to make sure that the human being you are is living a full-flowered life in all dimensions of your being.

There are orders of priority: the survival of the physical body is number one. The body is the basic vessel in which we sail on the seas of life, so we have to take care of it first.

Enough of the right kind of healthy food for our bodies, abundant water, plenty of exercise, quiet time, sleep, affectionate touch, undirected play time, time in nature – all of these things are good self-care practices for the body.

The body is remarkable and can get by with less. But it does better with more – to keep the flame of health bright and strong inside of the body, all of these practices are beneficial.

The emotional body, a delightful and very tender child inside of us, needs a lot as well. How indeed can we secure all the love, connection, warmth, contact, and companionship we crave? All that it takes for the emotional body to feel safe and secure, happy and attached to life?

And then there’s the mind – our hunger to learn, to make meaning, to interpret our world and act upon it. And our needs for spiritual dimensions, creative expression…the list goes on.

Human beings might be infinite in dimension, and at each layer of us, we can pose the question: how do we nourish and give love to this layer of our existence?

The good news is, that self-care has been practiced since the arrival of earth’s first human beings. Because even though there are a lot of different kinds of human needs, and there are many different ways to meet those needs, all humans have the same needs.

The needs that make self-care necessary are built into the species of the human being. So we can learn a lot from others around us, and how they are answering the same question we are: how to have the best life in this human form?

What Are Some Examples of Self Care?

Here is a list of universal human needs put together by the Center for Non-Violent Communication:

CONNECTION

acceptance

affection

appreciation

belonging

cooperation

communication

closeness

community

companionship

compassion

consideration

consistency

empathy

inclusion

intimacy

love

mutuality

nurturing

respect/self-respect

safety

security

stability

support

to know and be known

to see and be seen

to understand and

be understood

trust

warmth

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING
air
food
movement/exercise
rest/sleep
sexual expression
safety
shelter
touch
water

HONESTY
authenticity
integrity
presence

PLAY
joy
humor

PEACE
beauty
communion
ease
equality
harmony
inspiration
order

AUTONOMY
choice
freedom
independence
space
spontaneity

MEANING
awareness
celebration of life
challenge
clarity
competence
consciousness
contribution
creativity
discovery
efficacy
effectiveness
growth
hope
learning
mourning
participation
purpose
self-expression
stimulation
to matter
understanding

Looking over the list, we can ask ourselves, what self-care practices would help us get these needs met?

The need for physical well-being can be supported with practices that promote physical health:

Exercise – walks, hikes, workouts, yoga, dancing, sports, outdoor activities, etc.

Hygiene – showering, washing your face and hair, brushing your teeth, etc.

Sleep – limiting screen time, reducing caffeine and sugar, going to bed earlier, following circadian rhythms when we can, etc.

Nutrition – the right amount of foods that nourish us, heal us, resonate with us

Our many social connection-based needs can be met by self-care practices as well. Support groups, teams, classes, and hobbies, accepting invitations to try new things.

For each kind of need, there are best practices that address them. For our need to play, we can do improv or play board games. For the need for beauty, we can listen to classical music, look at paintings, and spend time in nature.

Journal on Your Self-Care Needs

Looking over the list of universal human needs, which of your many human needs feel met already? How are you meeting those needs? What self-care are you already doing that helps you get those needs met? Appreciate yourself for your positive ability to meet these needs.

Take note also of those needs that are currently unmet. Is there a self-care practice you could design for yourself, which would help you get that need met? If you have no path of self-expression at the moment, could you pick up a creative hobby, learn to paint, or sing? If your need for learning is unmet, could you take a course?

Strategies to Promote Self-Care

Here are some ideas on how you can bring more self-care into your life.

1. Write a Permission Slip

A lot of us struggle to feel that it’s ok to care for ourselves as fully as we need. It sounds indulgent, or that we must be exceptionally needy if we want all that. But remember, although we can get by with less, we thrive with more, at least when it comes to self-care.

Write yourself a permission slip in which you give yourself full, unfettered permission to care for yourself as much and as well as you can, and put it up somewhere you can see it. It might be as simple as writing, “I am allowed to care for myself as best I possibly can”.


2. Make a Commitment

Commit to self-care. You can write out a strong why-based statement of commitment:

I, [Your Name], hereby commit to excellent self-care, every day of my life. I commit to care for myself at all levels of my being, to the best of my ability.

I am doing this because I know self-care is …[your reasons for deciding to care for yourself more fully from now on].

Revisit your statement of commitment and the specific reasons you’re choosing to prioritize self-care frequently.


3. Put Self-Care on the Schedule

Draw up a weekly schedule of self-care practices, and put it on your calendar. If you have a paper calendar, that can help with making it visual, easier to see gaps, and places where a self-care activity could be snuck into a busy day. But any calendar will do.

You might want to make a time-based commitment to a specific self-care plan and agree beforehand to stick with it no matter what distractions, thoughts, or feelings come up.

To meet my need for peace, I will eat my lunch outside in the garden every day for the next two weeks, with no phone.


4. Resolve Your Ambivalence About Self-Care

Many women feel conflicted about self-care and the self-love it represents. Becoming conscious of what you fear will happen if you care for yourself is a tool we may need to use again and again.

Here are some common associations that people have with self-care:

Other people will think I’m lazy, uppity, or spoiled – who do I think I am that I deserve to be treated so well?

People will think I’m selfish or feel I’m not there for them enough

If I care for myself, I’ll start to feel better and get my hopes up about life, and then it will just hurt even more the next time I’m disappointed.

Write out your negative associations or lingering doubts about whether it’s safe and allowed for you to thrive and be happy.

If these kinds of self-care-sabotaging thoughts feel familiar, a possible cure is to journal on the following:

Are these fears or negative expectations 100% likely to be true?
What evidence is there that these beliefs are not completely true, or not true in every single case?
Where do these beliefs not apply? Look for exceptions.

Trace the fear-based beliefs and values back to their origin. Where did I get these ideas? Who taught them to me? Do I want to be like that person, live as they live?

Villa Kali Ma Can Teach You Self-Care Strategies

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we’re all about self-care. We believe each woman’s life is precious, and the world needs all of us women to heal up and make some changes for the good.

We know that when we care for ourselves, we are doing something good for all of life. Self-care strengthens the love in the world. It fortifies those who need strength and amplifies those whose voices should be heard. Adding more love to the world is never wrong.

If you need help learning to care for yourself even more, to love yourself more wholeheartedly in all the dimensions of your unique being, we’re here with lots of good ideas for how you can do that.

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