You’ll notice that for the past few years, I haven’t been blogging as much. I got wrapped up in creating my Repattern Migraine Masterclass (basically, a decade worth of research in one course – my master’s thesis). I also launched my Migraine Alchemy podcast. And I was, of course, busy with the usual challenges of being a Mother. Keeping my business afloat year after year during summer vacation has been no easy feat.
But the biggest reason why I haven’t written as much is because for the past few years, my marriage was in the process of dissolving, and is now in its final phase of death as my husband and I seek to accomplish our divorce.
I’ve never experienced anything like this. My parents just celebrated 50 years together – way to go Mom and Dad! I can’t help but share a picture of their cuteness. What a privilege and blessing to have parents who are still together and adore each other. I love you both. THANK YOU.
Lessons From Journeys Through the Dark Night of the Soul
While I have no frame of reference for divorce, I DO have a frame of reference for something just as painful and gut-wrenching: the years I spent navigating chronic migraine. And I do thank that dark night of the soul of confronting migraine head-on, and coming out the other side, for much of the resiliency that I’ve had in this divorce process.
The fortitude, strength, and inner resources needed to overcome a chronic pain condition that most doctors don’t have a clue how to solve, is enormous. Likewise, in divorce we are called on to either crawl up in a dark corner and become a victim, or open our arms to the experience of a family being torn apart while we watch everything unravel. If we surrender to this process, we get to see what is at the foundation underneath all the dysfunction (spoiler alert: it’s Love), reach down to a more core essential part of ourselves, and from that place, start to weave a more coherent life from the wreckage.
What a journey.
What a mixture of pain and pleasure – pain at seeing my children’s hearts break, my dreams of lifetime partnership die – and pleasure at the newfound time and space to find myself again, to care for myself.
What a blessing.
What a cornucopia of lessons.
While these lessons are painful, they are necessary, and because learning is one of my top values, they are utterly welcome. I can only bring this attitude to divorce thanks to the realization I had that going through chronic migraine was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Maybe divorce is one of the best things to ever happen to me too, in its own twisted way – not because of any inherent quality contained in the process, but because of how I choose to approach it.
One of the most painful lessons I have learned through this divorce is how much I had abandoned myself and because I had done so, I most certainly couldn’t practice self-care, because I didn’t have much of a self from which to practice it. I had so little space in my life to have a self that I couldn’t bring my self to my roles. Instead, I had become my roles. I had become an automated version of myself, an impersonated robot of “Marya”.
Self-abandonment is a Common and Problematic Affliction (Especially Among Mothers)
How can you care for a self if you’ve abandoned yourself? You can’t.
You cannot have self care without healthy boundaries. But you cannot have healthy boundaries without self-esteem. And you cannot have self-esteem without being anchored in your sense of Self.
My hero, Terrence Real (of Relational Life Therapy) says, “Maturity, or if you prefer, good mental health, simply means that you treat yourself well. Many of us don’t.”
Terrence defines a boundary as “that which allows us to remain protected and connected at the same time.” In other words, having healthy boundaries is essential to having functional relationships. But again, if we don’t have the self-esteem to have healthy boundaries, we can’t have healthy relationships. Ergo (and this is obvious), if we don’t respect ourselves, don’t value ourselves, our lives are dysfunctional.
Migraine is one of the downstream effects of the stress that arises from our self-abandonment (I do cover this in the Repattern Migraine Masterclass, btw).
So, self-care is the antidote to self-abandonment. I am sharing here what I have learned about having impeccable self-care because I believe it may be relevant to anyone in any situation wanting to reclaim their sense of themselves, and be kinder to themselves on a more consistent basis.
I realize, unfortunately, that much of my ability to implement this level of self-care comes from the luxury of now having five days off from all family commitments, which is an enormous boon. No longer shouldering the constant cooking and cleaning for others has been a huge weight and burden lifted from my life.
I don’t mean to gloat or rub it in to any of you still in committed partnerships, but I will say that I am committed to these practices even on days with my kids, and I’m determined to attract a new partner who also has a high level of self-care, so that my own don’t die away once I get into partnership again. There’s gotta be a way to have the space for oneself within partnership. My guess is that it requires an egalitarian relationship, which of course is something we can only manifest once we truly have respect for ourselves.
What Actually is Self Care?
Up until now, self-care seemed like a catch-phrase for something no-one around me really seemed to know how to do – another thing on the to-do list of the impossible pile of “shoulds” that most of us live buried beneath as we wade our way through our lives. Self-care, as most in our culture practice it, amounts to some form of respite or copacetic for the dysfunction of our lives. For most of us, especially during the stressful times of our life when self-care is most needed, self-care is little more than a token gesture that we enact haphazardly, a frantic step in the direction of trying to convince ourselves we possess some measure of self-respect that we actually don’t have.
Self-care is tricky business, because the ego can co-opt anything, including self-care practices. If you’re being hard on yourself for not doing self-care enough, or you’re being hard on yourself in how you do self-care, it isn’t self-care. Self-care also isn’t being so entitled to your space that you throw the rest of your life off balance by not having ecological thinking. As Terrence Real points out, we are only individuals within relationship, within a larger ecosystem of needs. Balancing the needs of the individual and the family is no easy feat, but certainly self care is not reaching the conclusion that you have to decide between one or the other.
In this article, I want to speak about real, authentic self-care – one anchored deeply in a level of devotion to my wellbeing, one coming from a part of myself that refuses to listen to any programming that lies to me about my true value, or distorts my innate instincts about what I know I need to flourish, whether others in my life can relate to it or not, or whether others in my life judge it or not. True self care is anchored in a deeper place than all that.
Self-care as a practice is a set of tools that are repeated over and over until the changes in quality of life are so remarkable and obvious that we immediately notice the difference once we stop doing them. And not only do we notice the differences – we are in fact baffled that we previously settled for such a low quality of life, that our standards were that low, that our quality of life was that poor.
Real self-care is not a set of habits that admirable, ambitious, and therefore “good” upstanding people “have” because they’re so driven that they can accomplish doing what the rest of us exhausted and less motivated folks can’t.
Instead, self-care is the quality of our consciousness in how we treat ourselves moment to moment, in whatever we are doing, whether it’s a “self-care” activity or not. Self care is the level of tenderness that we bring to those self-care activities, how valid we feel in doing them, how much compassion we have for any shitty programming that tries to get in the way, how firm we are in sticking to them, and how gentle we are with ourselves if we get off track.
In short, self-care is best characterized by the the feeling of warmth that we bring to those activities and to our self.
I love what Terrence Real says about self-esteem: “it’s not something you have, it’s something you do”. You’re either doing it, or you’re not. In his definition, self-esteem is “holding oneself in warm regard in the midst of your imperfections.”
Self-care requires self-esteem. Not caring for ourselves reveals that we don’t value ourselves, don’t hold ourselves in warm regard. Therefore, when I speak of impeccable self-care, I am referring not to our unflailing consistency in self-care practices, but rather being totally committed to bringing that level of warmth to the activity, which includes being compassionate with any parts of ourselves that are judgemental of how consistent or not we are doing self care. The warm, loving, and compassionate part of ourselves, if we let it lead our lives, doesn’t indulge that part, but instead simply and kindly steers us back to where we want to be without all the layers of drama.
This past year I’ve employed a wide array of self-care practices with a conviction and consistency surprising even to me, except for the obvious reason that they served as a life-raft in the most harrowing year of my life.
Below are my key daily self-care activities. The ones you use for yourself may be quite different. Remember, the key is the consciousness you bring to the activities, not so much the activities themselves.
1) Get Plenty of Nutrient “S” – Sunlight
This is a gift that I give myself every day – Sunlight. As I’ve been studying Quantum Biology through the work of Dr. Jack Kruse, I’ve come to understand that we are primarily bio-electrical beings, not biochemical (not that the two are entirely separate). Sunlight is not only a signal that our biology needs to function (without which, no amount of supplements will really work) – sunlight is the source of all life on the planet. Orienting to the sun every morning (and getting outside momentarily through the day to also get rays, and ideally watch the sunset if that’s possible too), means that I am constantly looking towards the source of my life, giving thanks, relishing this sunlight, and receiving its healing into my body.
I seek to expose as much skin as possible to the sun, doing nude sunbathing on some days, or just taking my shirt off. While the light signals on the retina are key for triggering serotonin synthesis (which later affects melatonin levels at night), every cell on our skin is also a solar panel.
Vitamin Sunlight is so valuable for people with migraine because migraine is problem caused in part by low serotonin levels. Not only does your mood get boosted by sunlight, but your incidence of migraine will go down, and your insomnia may very well be solved by this deeply nourishing practice.
Key tip: instead of “getting sunlight” like it’s just something to do on the to do list, shift from your masculine “doing mode” into your feminine “being mode” and make a point to RECEIVE the sunlight. Relish in and delight in these divine rays of warm goodness. Shoot, why not have a spiritual insight, epipheny, or experience while you’re at it! Or take the time to read a spiritual or inspirational text while getting your morning Sun.
2) Surround Yourself with Kindred Folk
We are social animals, and being among likeminded folks is a form of nutrition. This is not just an idea, but is something clearly spelled out in Polyvagal Theory: the very functioning of our major organs in our body, and the level of inflammation in our body, is regulated by our vagus nerve. The third branch of evolution of this nerve, the “Mammalian” branch, gets safety through a shared sense of care from others. We sense safety and care when we surround ourselves with people who have a kind tone of voice, make eye contact, and who touch and comfort us. This is what we need as mammals to thrive not just emotionally, but biologically as well.
For me, the kindred folk I chose to surround myself with during the divorce were mostly my close women friends in my women’s group. They served as my main support, and also a great source of fun and playfulness. Again, this is a form of nutrition we can’t afford to deprive ourselves of if we really want to practice self-care.
As Lewis Mehl-Madrona said, “Beyond any technique, relationships are what heal.”
3) Move and Strengthen Your Body, and Relish What Gives You Pleasure
It has been proven that people who exercise have better self-esteem. And in my view, you don’t need much to feel better in body and mind. I live in a place with a lot of adrenaline-seeking, extreme sports enthusiasts. Many of these people are hugely fixated on expensive gear and big muscles – sports as a form of prowess and showing off. That’s not what I’m talking about here.
My daily practices of movement are varied, but I am sure to do at least one or two of these forms of embodiment daily. I like to run up and down the hill behind my house a few times a day. I also do push-ups and squats in my kitchen between work tasks. I love Qi-Gong for loosening my connective tissue.
And I also practice pelvic floor exercises. These exercises are not only great for sexual function, but they also help to strengthen my back. (Did you know that the health of our womb, which is enhanced by increased blood flow from pelvic floor exercises, determines how well our brain ages as women? Yes, it’s very valuable to do pelvic floor strengthening exercises, and I go over this briefly in the Repattern Migraine Masterclass).
I also drink from the REMPlenish straw to strengthen my tongue muscle. This is an easy exercise because it is done simply whenever you hydrate. By strengthening my tongue muscle, I breathe more through my nose, which has an incredible amount of health benefits (see the book Breath by James Nestor for more info). Those who are already in the Repattern Migraine Masterclass know that getting plenty of oxygen is key to preventing migraine, since migraine arises in an environment of low tissue oxygen (aka, hypoxia).
Of course, anything that gives us physical pleasure is a form of self-care. Whether that is dance, or sexual pleasure, we need to access our full range of energy, expression and ecstasy as human beings in order to thrive.
4) Integrate Your Emotions by Reparenting Yourself
I can say with absolute certainty that emotional intergration, especially as taught through The Presence Process, is far and away the most important skill in self-care. The Presence Process is a twice-daily, ten week meditation process focused on emotional integration.
I’ve gone through three rounds of this process developed by Michael Brown. It is hands-down the best thing I’ve ever done for myself, especially if I am using the definition of self-care as being the quality of our consciousness in how we treat ourselves moment to moment. This practice has been so insightful and life-changing that I recommend it in the Repattern Migraine Masterclass. I’ve had many participants in the Repattern Migraine Healing Circle mention how helpful this practice has been for them.
How exactly do you bring warm lovingkindness to yourself in every moment? This practice will teach you how. Unconditional kindness requires full presence of uncomfortable emotions, which we normally resist. If you’d like to listen to me discuss my experience with this method on Instagram, you can see my post here.
There are of course many spiritual practices available to us, and everyone resonates with different ones, but this one is unique in that it helps us to move out of concepts and into the resonant felt-sense of our emotions, which means working at the point of cause, rather than simply meddling with effects.
According to this framework, problems in our life are reflections of un-integrated emotions, and are in fact perfectly designed to trigger these emotions, so that we can integrate them. Essentially, when we get upset, we have been “set-up” by life to be presented with an opportunity to show up for ourselves in the discomfort of our emotions and practice self-compassion, rather than creating more mental stories about how the problem is “out there”, or trying to manipulate outside circumstances in order to feel ok. When we emotionally integrate and respond rather than react, we make change at the causal level rather than trying to solve a problem by working at the level of the effects of that problem (which is our avoidance of uncomfortable feelings). As Michael Brown points out, you can’t solve problems by working at the level of their effects, which is what most of us do, and why our problems and emotional congestion persist.
5) Honour Your Cosmic Intelligence, Intuition, and Exquisite Sensitivity
I’ve long stated that in order to heal a chronic condition, you have to use all of your forms of intelligence – that means not just analysis, but also your common sense, intuition, and instinct. Those latter three forms of intelligence all involve the ability to honour your exquisite sensitivity. Self-love is also a form of intelligence.
In my own journey with self-care, meditation (such as the Presence Process mentioned above) has been one of the best ways to clear my mental and emotional slate so that other forms of intelligence can come through. Paying attention to my dreams at night, and journalling about my dreams, has been another way to tap in to the cosmic intelligence available to me if I care to notice it.
I’ve found that I can hear my intuition in an auditory way. It speaks in my right ear, sometimes in just simple yes/no terms, and I can distinguish it from other thought because it has a distinctly kind, unassuming, clear, and unpretentious quality to it. We could call our intuition our Higher Self or Inner Knowing. I believe that rather than coming from survival-based ego parts, this intuitive self is part of our core essence.
The more intuitive I become, the more my life is in flow and in alignment with who I really am, the more synchronicities occur, and the more aligned I am in myself: my emotions, thoughts, and actions all line up in a congruent rather than fragmented way.
6) Talk to Yourself, and Touch Yourself, in a Kind Way
One great way to practice self-care at night (or really, any time during the day), is to put your hands on your body and send love to your body. I especially like doing this right before bed, and I’ve noticed that my dreams are always much more positive when I spend 5-10 minutes doing this.
It is good to combine this touch with positive self talk. Positive self-talk is especially valuable whenever you are feeling anxiety or negativity. Rather than trying to stop the negativity, replace it with positivity. Speak to yourself as the most loving parent would – encourage yourself, acknowledge and recognize yourself, and tell yourself how great you are. Tell yourself that you love yourself. Look in the mirror and tell yourself you love yourself, every single day.
You can also use positive self-talk through tapping (aka, Emotional Freedom Technique). This technique can be utilized right before or after meditation, or at any point in the day when you feel overwhelmed. The combination of positive self-talk while touching your body is a powerful way to reprogram messages of low self-worth.
7) Surround Yourself with Beauty, Including the Beauty of Yourself
Whether it’s taking more time to be in nature, or simply beautifying your house, or grooming yourself withe more care – most of us feel better when we are surrounded by beauty, and investing in this beauty is a form of self-care.
For me, one priority during the divorce became that of having a beautiful bed. When my husband and I broke up, I bought a new four poster bed and draped it with silk saris. I imagined this was the cocoon from which I would eventually hatch and blossom into my new life. It was a way of creating a tranquil environment that would signal to me the importance of resting and luxuriating in horizontal repose.
I also noticed that with the breakup, I had a sudden urge to purge my closet of all of my old clothes. I also felt a call to wear different styles, colors, and textures than I had before. I now take the time to groom myself, play dress-up, and delight in feeling gorgeous.
Guess what: just as you now have permission to like yourself, it’s also ok to think you’re a catch! It’s ok to feel great about how you look.
You are stunning, especially when you know it.
8) Eat Well, and Mineralize!
It goes without saying that eating well and mineralizing are important parts of self-care, but I won’t go over that in detail here, as this article is already too long. The main point of this article is that when we care about ourselves from a deeper place, the actual self-care “tasks” like eating well are much easier to pull off, because they are coming from a place of actual self-love rather than obligation.
But “That’s an Insane Amount of Self-care”, You May Say!
It’s only insane coming from the standpoint that self-care is a chore, and taking time to oneself is indulgent (pssst – that’s the old paradigm.) Self-care on this level is a way of life, not a privilege.
The most valuable currency in our lives is time, not money. Having freedom means having, or making time, for what is important. If you don’t have the time for self-care, you don’t have the freedom to remind yourself how much you adore yourself. You’re too busy to allow your tender intimate relationship with yourself to flourish.
Since the health of our outer relationships are a reflection of our inner relationship with ourselves, this time commitment is well worth it. Here, in our time with ourselves and our self-care practices, we lay and water and nourish the seeds of our blossoming, and from this foundation, our whole life flourishes. We show up for ourselves in the way we were always secretly hoping others would, and because we provide for our own needs, we attract partners (or qualities in the partners we already have) who have a similar value for us that we hold for ourselves. We discover that life is a mirror of our inner state.
But it gets even better: through self-care, we also model impeccable self-love to our children. We break the chains of ancestral trauma – all the imprints and coping mechanisms and drama that arose from the core lie that told us we weren’t enough.
May this lie wither in the light of your own self-love. May your life blossom into ecstasy and joy, your birthright! All the self-care work I have done over the past year has left me overjoyed about the divorce, something I could have never imagined a year ago.
