Category: Self Care

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Self Care

Summer Self-Care Routine for Mind and Body

When we women at last realize that we are deserving of our love, cherishing, protection, and support, we become unstoppable. A woman who knows her real value is a benevolent, harmonizing, shaping force in the environment, a powerful creator and protector.

One way that we women can help ourselves and each other thrive is to deeply embrace the concept and practice of self-care.

Self-care is a principle that strengthens us, leads us to our personal destiny, and out of the many traps laid for us by elements of our world that don’t have women’s best interests at heart.

When we deeply embrace self-care, giving ourselves permission to treat ourselves as we have always longed for someone to treat us – as unconditionally lovable, forgivable, deserving wonders of creation, full of mystery, magic, and nature’s ineffable perfection – we can get a lot of creative satisfaction and joy out of the practice itself.

This summer, we invite you to join us in celebrating the season in a spirit of creatively rethinking your self-care!

What are some summer self-care ideas to feel your best?

Self-care can be more than a habit, more than hygiene and maintenance. It can be a way of speaking to your deepest self and listening to what she has to say, in return. Self-care is a dialogue, a way of giving love to yourself and seeing how that love changes you. An ever-evolving adjustment and dance, a movement forward.

The way to do this is to lean into your creative, poetic, magical side. Understand that self-care is connected to the sun, the stars, and the universe itself. It is connected to photosynthesis, koalas, and giant amethyst caves.

In other words, to care for the self is to care for the beauty and uniqueness that we see all over our world – when we care for our own beauty and uniqueness with an artist’s touch, we can blossom under the loving attention we give ourselves.

Here are some ways to lean into the poetics of summertime as you give love and care to the irreplaceable creature you are.

Soak up the Sunshine

Sunshine supercharges us, energizing and cleansing our electromagnetic fields, filling us with warmth and power. Can we imagine the big sun in the sky connecting to the smaller energetic sun we hold in our cores? Can we let the sunshine relax us, sing us its starry music, and raise our frequency? Summer is the time to honor and soak in the sun (safely), and to let each cell in our body be uplifted and reminded of what we’re really made of.


Get in the Water

The water element is the perfect counterbalance to soaking in the sun. This summer, let yourself relax into the healing properties of water to dissolve and wash away every burden that’s hanging heavy on our bodies, darkening our souls, or polluting our minds.

Rivers, lakes, waterfalls, and of course, the ocean, are nature’s free healers. Everyone knows we are 75% water – there’s a reason that we like to be immersed, at home in our element, literally.


Self Care is a Performance Booster

Top athletes, performing artists, and extraordinary achievers everywhere are very disciplined, primarily about making sure they get the requisite self care that is necessary to be in optimal condition. We can learn from them the simple truth that the better we treat ourselves, the better we are able to perform at our best.


Touch base with the Earth

Summer is the season that belongs to bare feet. Whether in the garden or at the beach, let yourself feel the support that this earth has for you, skin to skin. Take the earth’s grounding, containing, neutralizing energies in through your feet, and let your personal body field become balanced.

If you like, you can imagine an anchor dropping from your heart and sinking down deep into the earth, until it reaches the very center of the planet. Feeling it there, allows heaviness to be a pleasure. Feel how the earth holds onto you, keeps you.

Replenish

Due to the heat and all the fun in the sun, self-care this summer should involve conscious replenishment. After releasing what no longer serves us into dissolving waters, after allowing the fiery purifying heat of the sun to repair us deep into our cells, after letting the earth ground us, we can let our bodies find replenishment in the form of nourishing juices, electrolytes, and moisture. We can drink pure water and feed our skin with healing oils.

How can you make the most of this season?

If we let nature rule us instead of fighting it, we can receive its gifts more easily. What if we let summer be what it is, surrendering to its wisdom and preparing realistically for its effects on us?

What is summer to you? A time of warmth, increased light infusion, and long and lazy days, and nights that encourage us to linger outside and see if we can recognize any constellations. Or is it maybe a time of painful memories, stimulation of our dreams, and longings that are almost hard to bear?

Whatever summer is to you personally, consider that that is meaningful, not a coincidence, but a perfection of some kind.

To reflect, you may want to explore the following sentence start:

To me, personally, summer means…

In movies, books, art, and songs, summer means…

To nature, animals, and plants, summer means…

Summer is the best time of year for…

Summer is the worst time of year for…

The best thing about summer is…

The hardest thing about summer is…

How can I help myself through the hard parts?

How can I deepen my experiences of the best aspects of summer?

Overall, how can I make the most of this summer season?

How movement can help with mental health and self-care during the summertime?

Movement is nature’s most potent medicine, as it has a way of working troubles out of the body. In the summer, movement and exercise come more naturally to us, as we tend to have more energy, time, and inspiration to get outside.

When we exercise we not only release pent-up energy that would otherwise be spent running the mental hamster wheel, we actually have the chance to process. During movement we complete and sort the events that trouble us, passing them more quickly into memory. We store our experiences away in the archival part of the mind, where we keep events that don’t need any more thinking about.

No matter what challenges are asking for our attention this summer, movement is a way to encounter them that is well supported by nature and the body. Movement is nature’s way of processing our experiences.

Be kind to yourself and choose a movement that the body likes. It’s common and normal to feel resistance to shifting gears or exercising, and we can help ourselves with that by choosing activities, places, and people that the body feels a big Yes to. Whether we want to belly dance, kite surf, or yin yoga this summer, movement can be a companion for the season.

How can summer interfere with mental health?

It’s not at all uncommon to have many triggers associated with summertime. If this is you, you aren’t alone. Many of us have this experience, too. Holidays, barbecues, family, vacations, and even just free time or longer days can bring troubles and pain to the surface for some of us.

While it’s no fun to have to process the next layer of our wounds and false beliefs yet again, it’s also an opportunity. If and when summer interferes with our mental health, the answer is to find a way to lovingly engage with ourselves, to look towards rather than away from what is surfacing for our healing awareness.

With all healing, there is a gift once we get to the end of healing and processing a particular piece. There is always a reclamation and celebration at the end, as we embrace a long split-off part of ourselves back into our loving arms. What started out as an annoyance, even something pushing us into dread or fear, turns into a present, a part of us that we really do need, coming back home. So hang in there through the wound-healing and self-reclamation process, it’s worth it!

Villa Kali Ma supports self-care for women

At Villa Kali Ma, we celebrate self-care for women, acknowledging it as a powerful cure for what ails us and every other woman we know. Wherever there is pain, the answer is always self-love. Self-care is our self-love in action.

Categories
Self Care

International Self Care Day

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we recognize that self care is a practice, something to get up and do every morning of every day. It is part of being in a human body to also care for the body we are. Our souls and spirits need daily care too.

Self care is a practice in two senses. It’s a practice in the sense of being an ongoing, daily ritual, like meditation or exercise. It’s also a practice in the sense that most of us are still learning how to do it. We need to practice self care regularly until it becomes second nature to us to do so.

Why is it so hard for women to care for themselves? There are a lot of answers to that question, but one reason lies deep in our lack of love for ourselves.

Self care reflects basic self love and a sense of deserving. That deserving must be unconditional – whether we have been good girls that day or not, whether or not we’ve perfectly met everyone’s expectations of us.

What is International Self Care Day?

International Self Care Day is celebrated every July, as a way to promote awareness of the many benefits of self care.

Since the 1950s, lack of self care in the populace has been noticed as a negative factor in health outcomes. Many simple actions would help people be healthier, but a willingness to care for the self is still rare.

International Self Care Day helps change perceptions about self care, to help people understand not only that they are allowed to care for themselves lovingly, but also that it’s a necessity.

What is the history of International Self Care Day?

In 2011, the International Self Care Foundation established a day to celebrate Self Care officially. The day is used to promote awareness of self care and change public perception.

What is the timeline of International Self Care Day?

As early as the 1950s, Western medicine began addressing the topic of self care, in recognition of it being a missing ingredient.

Even into the 1960s, self care was still a novel concept, generally considered unnecessary or indulgent. Due to many cultural transformations in the 1960s, the 1970s saw the notion of self care take root in the populace, in part through the rise of humanism in the field of psychology.

In the decades since the 1970s, the belief that self care is important has grown. Since the founding of International Self Care Day in 2011, the concept has continued to gain in prevalence.

What are FAQ’s of International Self Care Day?

Here are some questions that women with addiction, trauma, and mental health struggles often have about self care.

Isn’t self care just being selfish and self indulgent?

Self care isn’t the same thing as selfishness or self indulgence. In fact, self care makes us less selfish.

Selfishness arises when we don’t care for ourselves, so our needs come out sideways and we take energy from others in a draining way.

Self care is about giving to the self, generating positive vibes and goodness in our own personal sphere. The more we care for ourselves, the more we have to share when we choose. If we have a horror of being selfish, as many of us do, then we must understand that we have to take extra good care of ourselves.

What’s the connection between self care and addiction?

Almost always, addiction takes root in an environment of self-neglect, if not self-hatred. Addiction cannot abide in the heart, mind, or body of a woman who loves herself and knows that she is worthy of boundaries, kindness, and self care.

Those of us in recovery have to do more work than others to make sure we practice self care heroically, to counteract our pre-existing conditions of rock bottom self esteem.

We have to remind ourselves that if we don’t love ourselves proactively, we will end up hurting everyone around us again.

What happens when you don’t practice self care?

There are many problems that arise when we don’t care for ourselves, ranging from physical disease to self destructive behavior. When we don’t practice self care, we end up suffering and causing others around us to suffer along with us.

When we don’t practice self care, we create unnecessary problems for ourselves and others. This can be as subtle as unconsciously teaching self-hatred and self-sacrifice to our daughters, or as dramatic as fully relapsing in our disease and kicking off the whole addiction cycle again.

What does self care even mean?

Self care means that you actively, regularly, repeatedly, and forever take care of the life form that you are, in every way that is required for this being to be happy and healthy, cared for, loved, encouraged, etc.

This means physical care, like hygiene, sleep, healthy food, protecting yourself from chemical exposures, etc, and also active care of your emotional, mental, and soul life.

What are International Self Care Day activities?

International Self Care Day can be a yearly reason to revisit your self care, and dedicate some special activities to celebrate yourself and what you need.

Spoil Yourself - in a Healthy Way

Every woman I know could confess to a secret longing for something that actually isn’t so hard to arrange. Flowers are a good way to self-spoil without a lot of cost. For example, you could make a force-bloom narcissus for your window.

Since we’re going into summer, you could also make sachets from garden herbs or dried flowers.

Is there something that would be relatively easy and affordable to do, a low hanging fruit, an activity, or symbolic gesture which would mean a lot to you?


Do Something for Your Inner Child

Self Care Day could be dedicated to your inner child. Is there something playful, silly, or whimsical you could do this year, to give a special gift to your inner child?

This VKM therapist once went to the San Diego Zoo, all by myself, because I wanted to see the newborn baby hippo. That worked, and counts as self care!


Love Lists

A very easy exercise that can help with self care is to write a long list (fill a whole page), of sentences that start with “I love…”. Think of small, concrete things, as much as you can.

I love having bare feet in the garden. I love the smell of geraniums. I love the little yellow green finches that come around this time of year.

Once you have filled up the page with small things you love, see if there is anything on there that you could allow yourself to experience, right away.

What are 5 interesting facts about self care?

Here are some aspects of self care which might surprise you.

Self Care makes us more able to give to other people

It’s true. When we practice self care we end up feeling so much better that we naturally give more love, kindness, energy, and attention to others. Self care creates energy in our personal sphere, rather than taking it away.


Self Care takes very little time

Many self care practices can be done super quickly. For example, you can set a timer for 1 minute and gently stroke and massage your own face, head, and body, and long before the timer is up you will feel an increase in self-love as your body responds to the care you are choosing to give yourself.

Expanding the timer to 5 minutes and you already have even more options. 5 minutes of stretching. You can dance to a pop song in less than 5 minutes.

With 15 minutes a day, you can have quite a robust self care practice going, and with an hour a day, you’ll transform your life.


Self Care is a Performance Booster

Top athletes, performing artists, and extraordinary achievers everywhere are very disciplined, primarily about making sure they get the requisite self care that is necessary to be in optimal condition. We can learn from them the simple truth that the better we treat ourselves, the better we are able to perform at our best.


Self Care Improves Self Worth

When we treat ourselves every day like we are worth taking care of, sooner or later we start to feel that we are worth that. Especially when we say out loud to others something that reflects the truth that we are taking care of ourselves, it has a way of building confidence, self respect, and self esteem. A statement as simple as “I’m going to stay home tonight because I want to give myself a chance to catch up on some rest after this week of working hard” can build the internal reality of being worth caring for and treating as precious.

Self Care Makes Us Resilient

The more we care for ourselves, the more relaxed and capable we are in the face of uncertainty and change. We are able to tolerate ambiguity better, and we are less stressed. That means we have more access to our native human intelligence and can radiate vibes into the environment that make everyone else feel better too.

Why do we love International Self Care Day?

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we love International Self Care Day because we know almost all women still need to be told many more times that it’s ok to care for ourselves.

We need to be reassured, reminded and encouraged to realize that we are precious and that we deserve to be treated as such. Human beings need a lot to thrive – and that’s ok. Not only is it ok to put ourselves first, but it’s something to celebrate every time we manage to do that.

Villa Kali Ma can assist women with self care

Self care is at the heart of all we teach women who come through our doors. To recover from addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma, we must embrace the principle of self care.

We may need to change our mindsets, and practice practice practice the simple art of loving ourselves as we have always longed to be loved by someone – unconditionally, abundantly, and for all time.

If you’re facing addiction, trauma, or mental illness, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to be. You can come get better with others (like us here at VKM!) who know exactly what that’s like, as well as how we women can find our way out again.

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