Prioritize Self-Care
By Deva Shantay
Have you ever noticed that when you’re busy, the first thing you put off is self-care? It could be because we feel that it’s a luxury we don’t have, a deadline needs to be met, or there’s a timeline that we have to abide to and we just don’t have time to take care of ourselves. Whatever the reason, can you shift your thinking and prioritize self-care?
What is self-care?
Did you learn about self-care in school or from your parents? I didn’t grow up in an environment that viewed self-care as a necessary thing. It was treated like a luxury and wasn’t respected because it wasn’t seen as productive. I was taught that working hard achieved good results and was the means to success. As an athlete, I pushed through pain and worked hard to achieve my goals. Rest wasn’t an option and not something prescribed when I was worn down, sick, or injured. Instead I was taught to push through the pain, work hard and mind-over-matter; that is how I would achieve my goals and be successful.
My introduction to the idea of rest took place during my very first yoga class. Savasana (corpse pose) was extremely difficult for me because it felt like a waste of time. I had things to do and places to be. I didn’t understand why grown adults would lay down in a room and appear to sleep together for 10 minutes at the end of our yoga asana practice. One day I decided to stay and experience it and found it very challenging but I did it again and again and I can tell you that now, savasana is one of the most blissful things that I’ll do in a day. It is a vital part of yoga that allows one to receive the benefits of the practice. Rest is self-care.
Now what else is self-care? Self-care is as simple as listening to your body’s urges—rest being one of the them. What other urges do we need to be looking out for? One urge that happens when first waking is the need to urinate. If you didn’t listen to your body, you would experience discomfort, possibly pain and might even feel flushed because you need to release your urine.
Another urge relates to your bowels. Releasing the bowels daily is vital to good health. When our waste sits in the intestines too long it leads to digestive issues like gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, weight gain, etc. Have you ever forgotten to take out the trash/or the compost? Notice how it smells when you open the lid. The food is rotting, smells horribly and is fermenting. This is similar to what happens in the bowels when we do not empty them.
The goal is release our waste every day—first thing in the morning. A healthy body will communicate to you when it needs to release, but there are many reasons why one might not listen to what the body is communicating. I hear over and over from my students that they can’t go to the bathroom in public, get busy and forget, or they wait until they get home at the end of the day because they are too embarrassed to go while at work. I can relate to this because I suffered from severe constipation until rather recently. It took discipline and perseverance to teach my body to release everyday at the same time each morning. It is possible and very important to let go of what no longer serves us. Honoring our body’s natural urges is self-care.
Developing a self-care practice begins with listening to the body, resting when needed, expelling the body’s waste and eating when hungry. Do you listen to your body‘s natural urges when you eat? Are you eating when your body is truly hungry—not craving, not desiring a snack, but true hunger? Our need to eat comes about 3-4 hours after the last meal. True hunger is when your digestive fire is revved up, ready to properly process the next intake of food. If we eat too soon after our last meal, we will disrupt our digestive system and create ama (toxins).
When you are truly hungry how do you eat? Do you just throw whatever you can find into your mouth, or are you properly planning out your meals, establishing a routine and eating at a regular time every day? Eating properly at regular times each day and allowing the process to be peaceful and calm, becomes a beautiful meditation all on its own. The way you eat is self-care.
The final urge with regards to prioritizing self-care is sleep. Many have disruptive sleep patterns. I hear from people all the time, “I didn’t get a good night of sleep last night”, or “I was woken up numerous times”, “I stayed up too late”, “I couldn’t sleep”, “I woke up feeling tired”, or “I wish I would’ve went to bed earlier”. Which category do you fall into? Do you stay up later than you’d like? Do you have trouble falling asleep? Do you have trouble staying asleep? Are you tired when you wake up? Do you have a hard time getting out of bed?
Our sleep cycles determine how well we are going to take care of ourselves the following day. If we sleep well and wake feeling rested, then we begin the next day already honoring ourselves and we’ve begun the necessary self-care for the day. Proper rest begins the process of self-care and also supports it. A good rule-of-thumb is to go to bed before 10pm and to wake before the sun—by 6am. This allows the deepest, most restful sleep and doesn’t disrupt sleep patterns by going to bed too late at night. The most healing takes place for the body and mind during these hours. Quality sleep is self-care.
I think we can all look at self-care in a new way. It doesn’t have to mean things that are luxurious and out of our reach. It can be simple (sleeping, eating, resting and elimination). If you honor these four bodily urges, I guarantee you will begin to feel better, more inspired and more motivated to live your life more fully. Sometimes we think good health is difficult to acquire but it can be simple. You know what you need to do, you just need permission to listen to it. Pee and poop when you need to, eat when you are hungry, rest when you are tired and sleep blissfully each night between 10 and 6.
I wish you a wonderful year full of self-care.
In gratitude,
Deva Shantay
Deva Shantay is a Co-Founder/Co-President of the True Nature Healing Arts Foundation, an Intuitive Guide, Professional Yoga Therapist and is currently enrolled at the California College of Ayurveda, becoming a certified Doctor of Ayurveda.