One indicator of emotional, mental, and spiritual health is the willingness and ability to “take care of ourselves”. The words sound simple. JUST love and affirm yourself, have relationships with people who do the same, and be attentive and responsive to your needs and wants – and you will be happy.
“Once upon a time….. Happily ever after.”
If it is so simple why do so few people actually accomplish it? And why do the majority of people experience a nagging shadow of a feeling-thought in the back of their minds that something is missing? What if this is as good as it gets?!
The truth that I have experienced in my life is that self-care is not hard – it is totally impossible. Rather radical for someone advocating hope, and daily inspiration, and a better life. And this radical awareness is a crucial beginning to taking care of ourselves through finding daily inspirations, journalling, developing a daily intimacy with a higher Presence, ourselves and other human beings.
Perhaps a starting point would be to realize and accept that we do not know what we want and need. In an inspirational talk that I have given, I give a situational question: Image that you have been given $500 million dollars, with one stipulation. A sensor will be placed on your wrist that monitors your happiness or unhappiness. And it will beep if you are unhappy. If it beeps, telling us you are unhappy, we will take away everything you have. HOW LONG COULD YOU KEEP THE $500 MILLION?
This question could be repeated with health, relationships, success, and fame – virtually anything that humans value and desire. The reality is that having the whole of the material world as we would want it could not keep us from “losing our own souls” – our soul being our sense of being unconditionally loved by, and connected to the presence of others, and unconditionally caring and loving of ourselves.
At first glance, it looks like we are “screwed” – hopelessly and helplessly condemned to fluctuating levels of pain, fear, loneliness, sadness, rage -- misery.
The most commonplace way that mankind has dealt with this reality is “denial” – "don’t even know I am lying”. In unconsciousness, the brain creates, to survive, an alternate universe of facts, thoughts, perceptions, and reactions. It is experienced as acceptable because it virtually eliminates the experience of pain and fear, except in exceptional moments and events.
Happiness in this universe is experienced as relief from flashes of pain, and as emotional numbness. I can remember thinking that I had a good day if I had experienced little or no conscious emotional energy.
So taking care of ourselves, in human terms, means becoming distracted by external circumstances and events, with a corresponding loss of self-awareness, and experiencing this blindness as hope and happiness.
For many in our time, this unconscious state is deteriorating. The truth is beginning to invade our alternative universes. And the initial gifts of conscious pain and discomfort are beginning to open wonderful fountains of living presence and change which can wash away the darknesses of the past and bring us into the Light of inspired living.
We will be continuing to find daily inspirations that can give us new light –Life.
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