Emotional Self-Care
An important aspect of self-love is what I call “emotional self-care”: managing your emotional life in ways that are healthy for you. Unpacking that, we get a lot of things. For me, what comes out is self-compassion, self-expression, self-encouragement, drawing boundaries, and standing up for yourself.
Self-compassion. You know how it feels to have compassion for a child or pet that you love? When they are in pain or difficulty, you feel for them, appreciate them, believe in them, root for them and want things to go better for them real soon. You are on their side. How about being on your own side? Feeling those ways about yourself is self-compassion - an important part of emotional self-care.
Self-expression. Everyone has feelings, and feelings in general want to be expressed. True, some people are naturally more expressive than others, and self-expression can sometimes harm others. But feelings nonetheless need to be felt and expressed in some way or else they become stuck in your body. Finding safe, healthy ways to express your emotions is part of emotional self-care.
Self-encouragement. There are always plenty of reasons to feel discouraged, especially when things are really hard. But if all you ever felt was discouragement, that in itself would impede your progress toward better days. Providing yourself with regular injections of hope, joy and other uplifting emotions on a regular basis is part of emotional self-care.
Drawing boundaries. When your experience has shown that a certain person, behavior or situation inevitably makes you feel worse about yourself, your life, or the world, limiting that factor in your life is a positive, healthy thing to do. That requires drawing boundaries. Healthy, self-loving adults draw boundaries when needed. Drawing boundaries is part of emotional self-care.
Standing up for yourself. Humility and modesty are nice qualities, and nobody likes a braggart. But there's something else inbetween. How do you represent yourself, to yourself and others? What image of yourself do you convey? Do you only speak of your flaws and failures? Are you excessively self-critical inside? Speaking positively about yourself, standing tall in your values, and recognizing your successes even within your failures are examples of standing up for yourself - an important part of emotional self-care.
Only you can do these best practices for yourself. Others can help by providing emotional support, but you have to receive that support, don't you? Isn’t it possible for love and support to be coming at a person in waves, but the person can't take it in? How many times have you seen that? Yup. Emotional self-care is an inside job.
These themes will all be addressed my online NIA Dance for Mental Health classes for the next few weeks, as part of the Self-Love quarter. Every class will give you a great low-impact whole-body workout, while helping you get better at emotional self-care.
You can start anytime. Every class has value, and there are no pre-requisites.
