Self-Care Promise

“I have come to believe that caring of myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.” – Audre Lorde

“Make a promise to yourself to make her own well-being sacred.” – Unknown

As life gets busier and busier, I find myself neglecting to do certain things because I feel like I don’t have the time. There are only so many hours in the day, right? Getting up early to practice yoga or meditate most days seems impossible. Eating out or eating a frozen meal seems easier faster than cooking healthy meals. Clean my apartment? Yeah, I’ll do that later. Getting eight hours of sleep a night?  Um, yeah right. I find myself putting too many things on my plate; saying yes to things I don’t really have time for. I’m sure I’m not the only one who lets this happen. Especially when life gets busy, it’s easy to put ourselves last.

Last week, as I was feeling completely exhausted and worn out, it hit me. I need to slow down. Take time for me. Get back into the practice of actually taking care of myself.

Self-care is THE most important thing we can do for ourselves. When we take care of ourselves, we give ourselves the opportunity to be our best selves. There really is no other way. If we neglect to meet our needs, fill ourselves up first, and nourish ourselves from the inside out – we aren’t doing ourselves, or anyone in our lives, any favors.

I like to use the analogy of one of those pyramids made of drinking glasses. One of them on top, with different layers of other glasses below. Pretend you are the empty glass on top. Now imagine you have a pitcher of water. The water represents love, joy, rest, health, time, compassion, and so forth. Instead of trying to evenly fill all the glasses at once, fill your glass first. Fill it up ALL the way until it overflows. When you do that, the overflow from your glass will effortlessly trickle down into the other glasses.

When we fill ourselves first, we have more love, compassion, and joy to spread to others. We are also happier, healthier, and  have more energy and patience. In turn, the time we once thought we didn’t have enough of becomes abundant, and we are able to do everything we need or want to do. Taking care of ourselves enables us to be our best for those people in our lives we love and care about the most.

I am making a promise to myself, right now, before all of you – to start taking better care of myself. I am going to start implementing a morning practice again. Yoga, meditation, journaling. I am also going to start going to bed by 10pm during the week. I am going to get back into cooking healthy meals. No more eating out or frozen meals. I am going to take more baths and find other ways to relax besides mindlessly watching TV. Give myself permission to say no and/or do what I need to do for me.

I know I feel better when I do all these things, so instead of feeling bad about not doing them, I am just going to start doing them again. I want to feel good, have more energy, lose weight, and be my best self. It’s totally up to me to make these things happen. No one has been stopping me, except me.

I deserve to be happy, healthy, full-filled, taken care of and so do you.

I invite you to join me in making a self-care promise to yourself. A promise to start doing what you need to do for you. Put yourself first. Make better choices. Take care of YOU! Incase you didn’t realize – YOU are the most important person in your life.  

What are you going to do to start taking care of you? What are some of your self-care practices? I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to share in the comment section below.