Journey To Self Love- Self Care

Module II

Key Ingredient #2:  Self-Care

Self-Care is the most important thing that I do in my life. It is what allows me to be there for other people.  When I take care of me in all ways, physically, emotionally and spiritually then I have the vitality, strength, stamina and life force to be there for all the people in my life. – my family, my friends, my clients and me.

I think of Self Care and being in Perfect health is broken down into 5 important components:

1)The Self-Care of my Body and my physical well being.

2) The Self-Care of my Emotional Body and its well being.

2) The Self-Care of my Mind or Mental Body and my state of mind.

2) The Self-Care of my Spirit or Spiritual Body and its well being.

3) The Self-Care of my Soul and my alignment to its perfection.
When you think of you as ALL of you and how you care for you it is taking responsibility for your life and your care. It is showing up for you without excuses and moving from a place of fear to that of change. It is moving into the uncomfortable. It is shifting out of a victim mentality that life is out of your hands and you have no control over your circumstances to taking back the reins and saying YES to life. Yes to your life. You are the creator of your life, and so I’m asking you to ask yourself how do you want to live it?  I had to choose. I chose vitality and found that place deep inside that allowed me to say “YES!” to be the best Carolyn that I can be.  To use my fear as a driving force for change because I want nothing less from now on but to claim my abundant life in complete integrity and alignment with my Soul, present in my body, with a calm mind.

So let’s get the meat of this, when I start speak about Self-Care with someone, I immediately hear all the excuses…for example I hear from many women and men, I’m too tired to make dinner for myself, or plan and buy my food plan for the week, I don’t have time to work out or worry about what I’m putting in or on my body, my house is not clean and don’t have time to clean it or I don’t want to have someone in every other week to clean it because I don’t want a stranger in my house, or I’m not willing to let go of this or that behavior or thing, or give up dairy even if they are sensitive to it, or whatever it is.  I hear a lot, I want to lose weight but I am not willing to say give up alcohol, wine, dairy or bread for example.  Or I’m too tired to exercise or I don’t have the time.  I don’t want to spend the money on my health, or whatever the ego has designed to keep you small and in less than optimal health.

However, all of these excuses are a choice to chose the gremlin inside that wants to keep us stuck and small, because as the old saying goes if there is a will there is a way.  By choosing to thank that lovely Gremlin for its thought and then doing the opposite, and then by choosing to go all in for health and self care, you choose to say Yes to life and vitality and no to the things that take that very vitality away. By taking care of yourself first, you then have the energy and stamina to be there for others.  If you have children, it is good to incorporate them into your self care. Exercise with them. Cook with them. There are options. When you neglect yourself, you gain weight, you don’t sleep enough, you get stressed, anxious, and sluggish. You feel depressed and lethargic.  This is not Thriving this is surviving.

When was younger, I had many many years where I was a priority. I took care of my health, my body and even through college made my own healthy food instead of gaining the college 20lbs I actually came out of college looking good and thin!  It wasn’t until my late twenties early thirties when I started to put on weight. It was when I shifted from making sure I took care of myself with sleep, good food, exercise, reading, friends, fun and weekend spiritual workshops, to taking care of my sick Mother who was dying of breast cancer.  It was her third round of fighting the disease, which had been going on for over 10 years, and this time it wasn’t going away.   My mother passed away just shy of her 53rd year Birthday and she almost took me out with her.

At this time, by taking care of my terminally ill Mother is when I started to lose myself as the priority, and it is when the weight started to come on in a big way and the pounds started to pile on.  The more I took care of her; I had less time to take care of me. I started eating take out all the time, I had less sleep, I was under tremendous stress being a primary caregiver and working full time.  My sister and I spent many a late night running to hospitals at all hours of the night, stress and drama became our mainstay.   After her death, I was about a size 12 from a size 8, then it stabilized for awhile until I gained even more weight and I became very very heavy in my late 30s after another series of personal events started to take its toll on me…the stress of 9/11 and being a New Yorker living in Manhattan which created environment of fear that I lived and slept in.  Then a few years later, my youngest nephew had been born with a terminal condition that affected his ability to produce energy. My nephew Spencer died at 11 months.  This sadness took a hold on me and I got heavier.  Then again, when I broke up with a man who had been the only one I had ever truly wanted to marry but broke up instead, I put on more weight.  I got up to 220lbs at one point and pushing a size 16 but lucky to still fit into a size 14.  At this point, I was depressed, and felt very hopeless. I have to say I was not feeling any real sense that life would be ok.  I did however realize that I was the only one who could change my life and make the shift.  So I did.  I took my life in my own hands and started looking to make a move to live away from my family and friends and leave New York.

I saved my life by moving to Chicago.  Making this move to a new city created the space I needed away from everything I ever knew to start fresh and reinvent myself.   It started me on the path to really figure out how to use my gifts to help others and find the right person who could help me get my life on track to being a healer, a teacher and a Soul Therapist. However, the truth is that it wasn’t until my run in with Breast Cancer that I decided enough is enough and the buck stops here! This is when I went on my own Journey to find Self-Love and it began again from the beginning with Self-Care.

How do you even start to make the shift from self-neglect to self-care? You break it down into the 5 Bodies that make up who you are: physical, emotional, mental spiritual and soul.

You start with your body: start with the physical. I started with my body. I began to embrace and love the body I was in and thank it for surviving to this point in my life and I vowed to start taking better care of it.

I learned to eat good food, without preservatives, as much as I could control that was organic, low in sugar, no chemicals. If I buy meat its grass fed, I do the best I can to plan my meals and I eat a lot of the same things most days. Simple makes it easier for me but if you are a person who enjoys preparing delicious food there are a lot of healthy options out there.  I do not drink much alcohol at all if any more because I found it lowers my vibration, gives me a slight headache and well, just puts on weight with all that added sugar.  Also, the truth is, that when I drink too much the next day I am not as vibrant, I’m sluggish and a bit sad.  Who wants that? I lost 60lbs and was able to maintain most of it and now am a size 6 in most pants a  8/10 on top.

The next thing I looked at was my makeup and all the products I use every day to maintain myself and what I consider being feminine.  However, no one ever told me that make up is loaded with toxic chemicals! That there is a chemical in cover-up that makes me have an allergic reaction and this is hyper allergenic stuff I’m speaking about.  When I was in Mexico at the Soul Therapy School Summit in February 2013, my Spirit Guides told me that I must get off all chemicals. I was like huh? Is that possible? I was told to all start embracing my feminine side, which I had pushed aside after so much hardship to and power through life. I must embrace receiving again.   This all made me start really thinking about what I was putting on my skin, in my mouth and how did my environment look and feel.  I was told that my mascara and hair color was creating little pellets around my hair follicles and in my eyelashes and was blocking my clairvoyance and was the cause of my headaches.

What a task that was! I had so many creams and lotions and potions and so much makeup!!  I loved my hair colorist and I had was so afraid of so much change at once but I had asked to be healed and to be all I can be and this was the next step so I jumped again!  So on my last day in Cancun, I was introduced to a new all natural mineral based make up line and was taught how to use it.

I came back and returned all my unopened make up to the department store and a couple high end unopened creams I just purchased. I put bags together to give to the Salvation Army of cream, antiperspirant, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, body lotion, everything I could think of.  I spent hours in Whole Foods finding new makeup, new self care products, and then the detox started. I actually had a headache and detox symptoms from coming off the chemicals.   I found an all-natural hair colorist and my hair has never looked so amazing without that brassy tone that happens with bleach.

After adjusting to this huge change, I was then told to look at the medicine I was taking. I was told that my symptoms are not real symptoms but are side effects from the medications I was on. The burning in my stomach was not IBS but was from my stomach being so sensitive to the Zyrtec I was taking.  I was sooo scared to get off my allergy medicine and get rashes and be uncomfortable because with each new symptom the doctor would give my new medicine. I was on 4 allergy medicines, a IBS medicine as needed and a Thyroid medicine that was not working very well.  I decided to take maters in my own hands and asked my Doctor to switch me to Armur, which is a Pigs hormone for the Thyroid and is not synthetic, I took myself off of all Ibuprofen and now I can go out in the sun without sunglasses because a side effect of Ibuprofen is Sun Sensitivity and stomach pain. I took Advil almost everyday without even thinking about it for Restless leg and I found a homeopathic version that works better than Ibuprofen.    I have been detoxing from all this medicine with some itching and rashes but they are now subsiding and I feel 100% better. I am feeling like all my systems are working in harmony and I have lost my irritability and edginess. I am able to wake up in the morning feeling energized and one amazing thing I noticed is now I am remembering my dreams without the haze of medicine.  I am also breathing so much better and don’t feel the shortness of breath I was having. I believed that my allergies were causing these symptoms but it was the very medication that was causing it. I gave my power to the men and women in the white coats.  I took what they told me too without reading the side effects and the labels. I was brought up with the idea if there was a pill you should take it. Why suffer? Now, I think twice about it and will question any medication they want to ever give me. I actually have decided that my body has a higher intelligence and all I have to do is go inside and ask it what it needs.

Maybe my body needs to move, or stretch. Maybe it needs to tone to clear out blocked energy, maybe I need to mediate or take a nap.  My body is an amazing vehicle. I ask it what it wants and I am not going to vainly allow anyone to take control of it again.

Lastly regarding your physical well being, it is important to maintain a healthy body by the following suggestions:

  1. Move your body.  Exercise both cardio and weight-baring exercise is extremely helpful in maintaining not only a health body but also a clear mind. It gets rid of excess emotional stress, and energy and mental noise.  It keeps your bones and muscles strong so you can function in your world, and take care of yourself.
  1. Schedule your sleep, take a nap even for 10 minutes its very refreshing, mediate, and wake every morning with a self-massage to wake the body.  It brings you back into it after a long night and communicates your love for it and yourself. It takes 5 minutes and it is worth it. Then after my self-massage, I pound my chest in the center by my heart 17 times to waken the Thymus gland. This keeps you young and vital.
  1. Go for bodywork. If you have pain seek out the healers such as Acupuncture, massage, energy healing etc.
  1. Make sure you are going to the bathroom. If you are stopped up, toxins can build in the body and cause disease. Get colonics if you need to. But get it out and make sure you are going every single day.

Your home is so important in relation to self-care.  I make sure my apartment is a sanctuary from the world. That is it is comfortable, feminine, soft and warm.  I keep it clean and neat, and since I hate to clean, I have someone come in every other week to do the heavy cleaning.  I like this because I am paying it forward by giving someone a job and I believe my home is worth the money, and it is not how I want to invest my time. I would rather be creating, working or playing!

#2 & 3 of Self-Care = your Mental and Emotional bodies: How are you managing your thoughts and your emotions? How are you speaking to yourself? I covered this in Self-Talk.  This is a full topic in itself.  Things to consider, if you have old stuck emotions they will be there until you release them. Old hurts, pains and feeling that you are holding onto create energetic blocks in the emotional and mental fields that hold you back and keep you stuck in the past which makes it that much more challenging to live in the Now, fully embodied in the present moment.  These feelings become trigger points that cause you to react to new situations in old ways. These old emotions can cause disease in the body if left to their own devices.  They potentially can stop you from the intimacy we all so crave and/or connection with other people.  They can keep you from feeling connected and that you belong.  They can make you quick tempered and hard to be around or irritable.  By seeking out assistance to unblock you and help move this energy through you can live a fully embodied life, vibrant and alive.   This can be done with mediation, Soul Therapy sessions, healings and Past Life Regressions, talk therapy etc.

#4 Spiritual Body: make time for your spirit.  Be out in nature, take walks, thank the Sun, the Moon, the water you drink, and the air you breath and Mother Earth every day. Go to bed every night and write 3 or more things you are grateful for every single day.  I do this every night and this way no mater how challenging the day, I go to bed reminded of the things that made me happy and grateful that day and I go to bed with a smile.  Say good morning to the Sun, tell Mother Earth you are happy for another day on her planet, thank your guides for their presence and guidance in your life.

I also suggest, sending out as much love to the world as possible.  Smile at people, say good morning and good night, ask them how they are, send love out through your heart and eyes. Create an energy field of love around you. When you do this it creates a magnetic energy field around you that pulls in and attracts more goodness, love and abundance toward you. What you intend and send out comes back to you 10 fold. So love others, and your planet, and then love yourself.  Find time for quiet, to light a candle and read a book or your favorite magazine.  Listen to music. Just sit and be.  Being is under rated in our world today and just your state of being is enough.  When you create this positive energy field around you of love and compassion you attract those very things to you!

5) Your Soul.  Respect your Soul as a powerful creator.  It knows what is best for you and your life.  The goal is to be fully present in your body to align with your Soul and its purpose so you may live in your purpose. This will allow you to feel so empowered. It is the dream you have of being complete and all that you can be. It is being self-actualized.   I am on the path to being in aligned with my soul and am striving daily to live out its purpose to be of service.  It is not about me, it is about the world and human kind. However, it starts with me, loving me. It is about my journey back to myself and Self-Love. It is where you must start.  Start on the journey back to Self-Love through Self-Care.

Blessings,

Carolyn

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