6 Ideas for Self-Kindness & Living Each Day As If You’re Already Healed

I know, I know. It’s a tall order for sure. And should you not require healing at the moment, it is possible you may still score an idea or two. Ideas for Self-Kindness & Living Each Day As If You’re Already Healed explores mind, body, spirit connections and heartful territory. It may overlap a bit with self-care, but have you noticed how “self-care” is now annoyingly just another oversaturated marketing ploy? I am minimizing its use here as I can. Directing kindness to yourself in fresh, brave ways matters. It matters to health, relationships, and community.

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Ideas for Self-Kindness & Living As If You’re Already Healed

There are seasons on my journey with chronic illness I am compelled to shift into radical self-kindness mode. (Flares of Crohn’s disease, pancreatitis, Raynaud’s phenomenon, and BRCA2+ genetic mutation issues.) I guess that’s why these posts surface.

Life Lately Behind the Blog

I loved the slowness of today. Somehow I slept a full 8 hours and then didn’t have anywhere to be as my husband golfed. I decided to collect wildflowers along the creek behind our house and then pressed them. They will become artwork since I have always wanted to create my own botanical art.

As I walked the path winding around meadows and the babbling creek, my thoughts turned to Marian, my mom’s best friend who we lost in July. She was here walking on a day like today, less than one year ago expressing how this place reminded her of her mother. Something about the season, the scents, and the swaying trees in our backyard enlivened memories of her childhood.

Maybe it wasn’t memories as much as foreshadowing heaven. Who knows? Toward the end of her Alzheimer’s journey, it was a privilege to spend time with her and family at hospice. For more than a week, that liminal space transformed me, and isn’t it true that clarity comes as the unimportant recedes and Love moves forward? Suddenly this precious friend who embodied love and service could begin to rest in a place in between heaven and earth…and we could bear witness to a life in full bloom.

Why I Need These Ideas

With chronic illness flares, there are bad days when I struggle to articulate where my pain originates and which symptoms are most problematic. With ocular migraine, my tongue is often tied. Partial blindness, dizziness, and brain fog are familiar friends too. Frequently, I just don’t feel like myself. Irritability is also tricky to navigate. Whether my thoughts are fuzzy or not, on a a bad day, anxiety can surface.

Do I draw strength from Divine Mystery? Yes. Ask for help from family? Sometimes (I’m fiercely independent so I’m a work in progress). TLC for myself involves becoming a witness to my needs and turning a loving gaze of a devoted parent toward her weary child.

These ideas for living as if you’re already healed spring from a gaze of grace from which to draw strength and calm.

I’m not suggesting we get delusional and pretend we’re okay when we’re not. What I want to explore is how we might expand notions of what WHOLEHEARTED LIVING looks like…what HEALING FEELS LIKE. When we let go of how we think they look and feel in order to make room for A NEW SPACIOUS AND KIND WORLD OF THE REAL AND WHOLE, we’re getting there!

1. Slower Meaningful Mornings

Since I work from home, I count it a supreme blessing to be able to structure my day according to my needs.

I wonder what calm awaits if you were to awaken 20 minutes earlier to journal, sketch, meditate, stretch, or walk in nature? What new world might be awakened?

Contemplative prayer is my thing, but your thing may be yoga, listening to music, or relaxing with a book.

For me, morning rituals and a slower pace set me up to recover and reflect, no matter what symptoms lie ahead. A fresh start where I align with God and open my heart is a chance for centering and where a capacity to see blessings expands.

2. Make Sure You Are Breathing

In my 40s, more often than not, I held my breath. Challenged by raising teens, work demands, and illness, I deprived myself of slower living. Unfortunately, things had to fall apart before I could begin to breathe again.

We can tackle problems, face difficulty, and interact while also breathing deep. We can also choose to suffer less in our unhealed state. For me, living in the absence of cure means not becoming overly attached to ideas of perfect health or long remission. I’m worthy and full of dignity right where I am.

You, your immune system, and the cells in your body will welcome with love the calmness and blessing of oxygen as it enters you, as your nervous system regulates.

3. Should We Always Trust the Body?

This is a tricky one. I used to think I should always trust it. No more. It’s not trustworthy when autoimmunity is involved! I have fought through so many flares this year and worked so hard on diet and de-stressing, yet still they come. Autoimmune problems are wack, and my system attacks itself. I can’t trust the systems to be calm. So at this juncture, my answer is “it depends.”

Your body wants to heal, but trust may not be the right language in the conversation with it when pathology and mutated genes are involved. With certain mental health disorders, you can’t trust the flurry of thoughts, impulses, and disordered thinking. My own disregulated system may in one day decide oatmeal for breakfast is the devil and punish me for days.

So while I can listen to my body, my treatment typically involves tricking it, quieting it, and correcting its confusion. No wonder physical illness creates so much stress and stress impacts illness.

4. Opening Heart Space

This mind can become a flurry of lists, insecurities, confusion, and worry. Some of us seem intent on appeasing the worry gods with our worry.

For me, letting go of thoughts and opening my heart is a daily practice. This heart simply closes every time I become annoyed, feel resentful, judge, get triggered or am wounded.

Daily spiritual practice helps since it doesn’t matter how much of a mess I am when I offer myself to it. Emptying helps. Calm comes when I don’t have to perform. When the challenge is simply to allow each fleeting thought to drift away. If a thousand worries drift into my consciousness, a thousand opportunities emerge to free them, to return to God or Love or Mystery a thousand times.

Daily contemplative practice is more of an entrance than escape. As my heart is surrendered, spaciousness grows, and over time my seeing is refined for how all is sacred.

Relax & Doodle

I sit at the piano to play, sing, and write every single day. Maybe it’s watercolor painting for you. Journaling is another way to let go of what needs to go and bring expression to what needs expressing.

5. Boundaries & Unapologetic “No”

Learn this phrase “hmmmm, that doesn’t work for me at this time.” Have trouble saying no because of FOMO or people-pleasing or reasons mysterious even to you?

Since you cannot possibly do ALL the things, saying no is inevitable. If you are not disappointing other people now and then because of your healthy boundaries, are you maybe overextending?

Setting boundaries and saying no are not selfish. I heard Joanna Blakely say she cares for herself “for the good of the realm.” Yes! It’s true!

Loving yourself well is a gorgeous gift to the realm!

6. Slower Pace

We already know this. Body, mind, and spirit are depending on us to slow down. Messages are everywhere to do the opposite, but we aren’t machines.

Think about how much attention spans, impatience, and tolerance have shrunk in the last decade. Why have we become so eerily afraid of slow responding, pauses, slow driving, slow cooking, and stillness? It is as if capitalism has conditioned stillness right out of us!

I suppose chronic illness could cause one to strive to be extra productive on good days. But I tend to live slower on good days now. Slowing the pace is a way to return to ourselves, to RE-member.

Let’s be so well-practiced in slowness to anger that people wonder if we’ve been bodysnatched. 🙂

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No more!

I hope you found something helpful in these reflections.

Tour a Uniquely Serene Peaceful Home

I wish you great wellth and increased compassion for yourself because it will impact all of those in your realm moving toward greater self-kindness and wellth.

Peace to you right where you are.

-michele

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