Xtreme Self Care
Last week I attended the Journeydance Teacher Training Module 2 at Kripalu. In this week full of extreme self-expression, dance, creativity, depth and play, I also ended up with a welcome lesson in extreme self-care. On my third day there, my left knee and ankle were hurting, and I had an enormous headache. Though I tried to fight it, plagued by my FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), I finally needed to admit, my body was telling me it needed to STOP!
It wasn’t even until later that evening that I allowed myself to feel the thing I was hoping to avoid, the sadness and disappointment of missing something. But in the next moment I was so grateful for the evening I spent lying in bed, playing scrabble on my iphone, watching Netflix, allowing my body to rest. And then the next day when I saw how restored and energized I felt, I got it. It’s not that the self-care I needed was really extreme. It only felt that way in comparison to my notions of how I hoped I would or thought I should be able to function.
So I decided to google “Extreme Sports”, as I kept calling what I was experiencing, “Extreme Self Care” (ESC) in my mind. Primary in the Wikipedia definition of an extreme sport is being counter-cultural. In a culture of over-doing, where we learn to avoid the full extent of our needs for self-care, by taking pills, drinking coffee, etc, actually honoring our bodies’ messages IS EXTREME!
Every one of us has needs for self-care; from our need to eat
clean food and drink water, to move daily, to rest, and sleep, to be alone, to be social and to tend our bodies when they call out for attention. Each of us and each of these to varying degrees. Yet in countless ways every day, when we push, when we grab a coffee instead of a nap, when we take a pain reliever instead of taking the night off, when we work late instead of meeting a friend for dinner, when we eat at the restaurant someone else picks instead of checking in to see what kind of food our body actually wants, when we eat foods that upset our system because other people can so we should be able to, we are essentially telling ourselves we shouldn’t have the needs we do; that our needs are too much or they don’t matter enough. Often we end up trying to steal it or sneak it later, with food or other indirect comforts.
On Friday night I had another opportunity to practice ESC when I got home from my week away. I went to an event in my community as I had planned, but found myself feeling tired and maxed out. Instead of pushing myself to stay I came home early, took a bath, wrote in my journal and went to bed early. It’s funny to feel as proud as I did for something as simple as how I spent that evening. But there was something triumphant in it. It was more than just being kind to my body. It was transcending the fear that if I stop I’ll never start again, that if I come down I’ll never come back up, that if I go in I’ll never come back out. It was going beyond the notion that missing out on something ‘out there’ would be more important than what’s going on ‘in here’. It was going ‘counter’ the ‘culture’ of my own mind that tells me I must always do more to prove something.
I tend to caution against extremes but in this case I think I could make an exception. I could use THIS kind of extreme in my life! You?
