Self-care often feels like a demand, a luxury, or something so utterly foreign to us that we aren’t even sure how to begin or it holds a taboo of females taking bubble baths.
We’re so programmed to believe that we are at our best when helping others, reaching for our goals, or doing anything but slowing down.
But what if self-care was looking at how you treat yourself as how you treat others? When you’re operating from a deficiency, you give your worst. But when you operate from an overflow, when you do give, it’s out of abundance.
Bedridden, my only job was to take care of myself, but somehow, at the time, nearly a decade ago now, it felt like a punishment.
Why couldn’t I go live my life like everyone else? Go rock climbing, dance, work as a wedding photographer, decorate my house, live my freaking life.
I didn’t know it then, but I know it now; being forced to slow down through my journey with autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses helped me remember the importance of self-care.
Hello darling, my name is Lumalia, and I’m the main voice and author here at Celebrate Again. My full story is more laid out in my book Blooming Upside Down, but my true heart is to create gardens for individuals to bloom.
I sometimes call myself a connection architect because I believe home is inside of you, and that begins with building connections of self-care back into harmony with your life.
So take it from me: don’t let the destruction of your health or life be the reason you have to learn self-care.
However, my true heart is to make self care feel more like play than eating your vegetables, so let’s begin.
Self Care Topics
What is self-care?
Self-care is the intention of recognizing your basic human needs, that you are more than a machine but a beautiful human being who needs an ecosystem to live. Let’s break down that ecosystem into physical self-care, mental and emotional self-care, and energetic and spiritual self-care while also holding the beautiful truth of all ecosystems: they are all intimately connected.
Physical Self Care
Self-care is part of physical care for your body. This isn’t just movement, exercise, or going to the gym; it is also the reality that your body stores information. Tension in your neck can often mean that you don’t feel like you can speak your truth or that your voice matters.
However, self-care is part of pure movement, too. Our beautiful bodies were built for play and lots of it.
When practiced from an early age (which, sadly, so few of us were exposed to a movement we loved), we build strong muscles, agility to move in multiple ways, and trust in our bodies to do great, beautiful things, like leap and just for a few seconds feel like what it’s like to fly and also deeply build a friendship with gravity, which may or may not have gone well for you in the past, but I hope it’s gone chiefly mainly since you’re still anchored to this planet. 😉
Want to dive into some free self-care practices now? Check out my free month of self-care guide.
Or try out my paid 30-day self-care challenge, which includes daily beginner-friendly yoga flows.
Mental Self Care
Self-care is also part of mental or emotional self-care. Often, this self-care gets addressed as mental health issues, like depression, anxiety, and stress, or when we experience less comfortable emotions like anger, fear, or sadness. However, mental and emotional self-care isn’t about playing wack-o-mole to the “issues” we have but building a relationship with our emotions, to the sensations in our bodies that often hold our feelings before they even reach our minds.
Mental self-care is about knowing that our emotions hold messages, stories, and beliefs for us to listen to and support. Many of us grew up without a community or caretakers who understood emotional well-being, let alone how to safely have an emotional experience without fully oppressing it or exploding our emotions all over everyone around us in a harmful way.
Emotional Self Care
Emotional self-care is about coming back into a healthy, holistic relationship with our emotional existence as humans. Learning that even though we fear emotions because they may not have been safe in the past, especially in our childhoods, we can create safe spaces for us as adults to have an emotional experience that supports us and does no harm to those around us, including ourselves.
Spiritual Self Care or Energetic Self Care
Spiritual, or what I like to call energetic self-care, has more to do with feeling states, sensations, and the power of our imagination. This science is still understudied in Western science but very old in Eastern practices of the chakra energetic body.
Zach Bush, M.D. recently said that the soul is “a description of the energy field that allows you to organize inside your mother’s womb. In the beginning, you are one cell that starts to divide like a tumor divides. And then suddenly, around replication 260, you start to differentiate, and suddenly, a cell becomes a kidney cell, a neurobiological cell; not only does it become a cell, but it knows where to migrate to in a three-dimensional map to become that organ system. And we cannot find that map inside the human cell, in biology. That map seems to be seems to be in the physics field which is to say the electromagnetic field, which is to say the space between everything. Your body, as solid as it appears to be right now, is 99.999% vacuum space filled with an electromagnetic field that is super dense and organizes the reality of the tissues around it. The vacuum space organizes the solid…that is the autonomy of the soul.”
No matter what you believe, part of our responsibility to our self-care journey is to also look at our energy. It’s one of my greatest joys to neutralize this subject, remove religion from it, and tap into what I like to call the wisdom of the body. To come at it in a none judgemental approach because it is still, in part, a mystery to our modern minds that want to understand everything to feel safe and open up to explore, knowing in exploring the most magnificent things always get discovered and what a beautiful life to live if you get to discover that in yourself.
So, what is self-care?
Self-care looks at the full spectrum of your body’s emotional, physical, and energetic systems, which at first can sound absolutely daunting when you grow up thinking, “To know everything is to be well.” Knowledge is extremely powerful, but what is more powerful is having a relationship with all these areas of yourself.
This is why I built my self-care membership with a roadmap to guide you into experiences and inspirational talks to help you begin your journey. Start yours today with my Self-Awareness Quiz.
Self-Care Tips and Ideas
Where do we begin with self-care? How do we succeed at it? While that topic is too broad to cover in one blog post, I’d love to share my favorite self-care tips and ideas to get you started.
Self-Care Tip #1: Find your why
Why do you want to take care of yourself? And if the answer is “because I don’t want to ___,” I want to challenge you to go deeper. Go beyond the fear of something going wrong and ask what do I really desire. Flip the conversation from being preventive to fulfilling a desire of yours.
Let’s try this. Let’s say you desire to have better self-care because you don’t want to be really sick as you get older and dependent on strangers or the government to take care of you.
Let’s change that to I desire to live a healthy, active, fully present life for as long as I can.
Do you see the difference?
One is focused on what could go wrong and trying to prevent it, and one is focused on following what your heart really wants: to be well and to live a full, beautiful life.
Here’s another self care why example:
You want to have better self-care so that you aren’t constantly burnt out and exhausted. Let’s look into that.
Why are you burnt out and exhausted?
- Is it because you are overgiving and doing it, because you have to, or do you feel like you need to?
- What is your genuine desire here?
- You desire to do self-care because you want to feel your own self-love poured back into you.
- You give so much and want to feel held, seen, appreciated, and supported.
So what if you’re going to have better self-care to cherish yourself deeply? How does that feel? Good right? That has absolutely been it for me, too, darling. And it’s ridiculous, marvelous, I promise.
You’re doing fantastic.
Self-Care Tip #2: Make a habit of it!
Find ways in your current life to incorporate self-care plans.
Need an inspiration boost? Check out my 30-day self-care challenge.
Self Care Tip #3: Practice self care in community.
Find ways to take care of yourself with other people. Accountability goes a long way. We are very social creatures, and we need each other to encourage us when we feel like giving up, when we get stuck, and when we hit the “end of our rope.”
Self Care Routines
Everyone loves the self-care morning routine, which I’m also a huge fan of, but I also want to love on my night owls here. Or people who’ve become night owls because it’s the only time they actually get to shut everyone and everything off and be with themselves…I see you, babe.💋
This is why I also encourage you to have maybe a self-care routine in the evening, too!
Hell, you can even have a self-care lunch routine or a self-care nap routine.
It’s your beautiful life, darling. You can make whatever routine you want.
The best part about self-care routines is that you rarely meet someone who gives you a hard time for “needing your self-care time.”
OK, so please don’t use it to scroll on social media, binge-watch TV, or eat junk food.
Those have beautiful roles in our world but are not the healthiest forms of self-care.
Self-care is time to go, not time to be entertained or stimulated.
However, for some of us who lived through a lot of traumatic experiences in our childhood (known or oppressed, meaning we don’t have memories of them), giving ourselves time to unplug and be entertained is a form of self-care because to be “off the clock” not doing historically wasn’t safe in our bodies so giving permission to do that is also beautiful.
Creating a Personalized Self-Care Plan
Creating a personalized self-care plan is a great way to start something new. This is why I have my 30-day self-care challenge. (Try out my free month of self care guide pdf here!)
However, if you want to create something more personalized, taking stock of your self-care ecosystem is good.
Physical self-care Plan:
- How is my physical self-care going?
- Do I feel good about my physical health?
- How do I want to feel better about it?
- What resources/experiences in the past have felt good about addressing this area of self-care?
Mental/Emotional Self-Care Plan:
- How has my mental health been throughout the past year?
- Are there seasons of the year or patterns around my cycle that you need more support than others?
- Often, in winter or at different times in our cycle as women/femmes, we may experience different emotional self-care needs.
- What experiences/resources have I given myself in the past that support me in these areas?
Spiritual/Energic Self-Care Plan:
- Are there patterns of beliefs I get stuck in, such as not feeling enough, giving too much, people-pleasing, coping with things in unhealthy, toxic ways, getting in fights, or having a lot of drama in my life?
- What resources or experiences in the past that have been healthy have helped me through these seasons?
- Or what experiences or resources are available to help support me in these areas?
These can be complex questions, so if you have the support of a community, a friend, a therapist, or a coach, these are great questions to bring external support.
Also, be mindful that while we may create a plan, the role of self-care is to build a friendship with yourself.
Sometimes, that is a daily exploration of discovering what you need and how to support yourself in the moment versus feeling like you’re following a rule book.
However, guidelines and structures do help us when we are really busy to have intentional time carved out that doesn’t get disrupted by other areas of our lives.
Free Month of Self Care Guide
If you’re ready to explore self-care, I invite you to try my FREE month of self-care guide. You can download a free PDF with daily challenges that are sometimes essential, sometimes silly, sometimes random, and at all times, I hope, absolutely beautiful.
Cheers to a beautiful self-care journey!
Self-Care for Women
As mentioned above, self-care for women can look very different than self-care for men.
Women’s bodies biologically operate differently. We not only have a 24-hour cycle in our body, but we also have a roughly 21-35-day cycle where our hormones experience all four seasons.
If we are caretakers or in other roles as mothers, self-care may look radically different. Even as caretakers as men, self-care may look radically different, too.
While I could spend a lifetime talking about self-care for women, I want to acknowledge that it is so needed and important, which is why soon I’ll have another article on this whole subject.
In the mean time check out my free month of self care guide pdf.
Self-Care Products and Tools
Honestly, I’d say you don’t need any products to perform self-care.
Instead, you need an awareness and knowledge of what is happening inside of you and, more importantly, practices in place that help you focus on caring for yourself in a way that feels good to you.
For every human, this may look very different, and it may look different in different seasons or even on a day-to-day basis.
So, while I won’t list any self-care products here, I’ll share some of the tools that I’ve found to be supportive in my life and for many of my meditation students.
Self Care Tools
Self-Care Tool: Mindfulness practice
This could be meditation, journaling your thoughts and feelings in a nonjudgemental stream-of-consciousness practice, or practicing simple daily check-ins with how you’re feeling and doing.
Self-Care Tool: Physical movement practice
While going to the gym or even a daily walk can be a good habit to begin, I love to encourage people to let themselves fall in love with some form of movement, whether it’s dancing, swimming, running, yoga, bike riding, rock climbing, whatever movement that feels good in your body do that. There is absolutely no reason to feel like you “have to” go do something in your life and force yourself to do it.
Yes, there are days when showing up on your yoga mat can be hard, getting yourself to the activity you know you love, but it’s a lot easier to keep doing the things you love than the things you feel like you have to do.
Get access to 30 days of yoga/movement in my 30 day self care challenge
30 days full of self care tools, email delivered to you each day.
- Daily challenges
- Movement practices
- Journal Prompts
Join the heaps of humans who have said that this challenge “helped them build more confidence!”
Self-Care Tool: Connecting with Nature
Connecting with nature is a very important tool we have as humans. This can be as simple as walking outside every single day. To sit beneath a tree and watch the branches and leaves move.
Connecting with nature used to be a way of life, and we’re discovering how disconnected we are as we become more disconnected from nature.
The more we can get back to growing our foods, touching the earth with our bodies, and doing grounding activities like putting our feet on the grass or sand is very powerful.
My personal favorite is to lay completely down because I love my whole body to feel anchored into the earth.
Self Care Tool: Connecting with Others
Connecting tools, and having spaces or practices where you are in the community is so essential as humans. This can be having a best friend you can call regularly, a group of people you meet up with online or in person, volunteering in your local area, serving on a neighborhood association, or anything that feels good to you.
Go do that.
Don’t join the PTA because you need community.
Join the PTA because you’re really excited to be there.
My personal favorite tool is Kindred. It is a somatic, intuitive movement meditation practice that combines the principles of meditation, community, and movement into one experience that is really fun and easy to do by yourself or in a class setting.
It helps you access different feeling states at will, move energy in the body, tap into deeper brain waves that help you rewrite and reprogram beliefs or stories you’re stuck in, and tap into deep flow states. Try a pay-what-you-can Intro to Kindred class here.
Overcoming Self-Care Challenges and Barriers to Self-Care
Often, we think of self-care as a chore, a thing we must do, like brushing our teeth. And while, yes, we need to do those things. You’ll find having a good self-care practice more accessible if it’s coming from a positive state to have motivation, as we’ve discussed throughout this article.
If we are moving to self care from a place of guilt or shame or should’s, the self care may actually be less productive than doing absolutely anything else. However, that isn’t to say that sometimes we need to give ourselves a little pep talk to go do good things for ourselves when we’ve become so addicted to quickly satisfying things like eating high-sugar, salty, or fatty foods or scrolling endlessly on social media. These things are biologically created to keep us addicted, and it is literally the company’s role to keep you eating those foods endlessly or on those apps endlessly to keep you consuming. So, we must stay aware of these things to take care of ourselves instead of becoming dependent and, in many ways, enslaved to systems that do not have our best interests at heart. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but it’s an actual reality; we don’t need to obsess over it, but we should be aware of it to choose differently. Because when we lose awareness, we lose our ability to choose.
Get some support with my free month of self care ideas.
Free Month of Self Care Guide
If you’re ready to explore self-care, I invite you to try my FREE month of self-care guide. You can download a free PDF with daily challenges that are sometimes essential, sometimes silly, sometimes random, and at all times, I hope, absolutely beautiful.
Self-Care in Relationships
Self-care is vital for the health of all of our relationships because how we treat ourselves is how we treat others. We must be able to receive what we are giving ourselves, or we will quickly find ourselves sick, depleted, and burnt out. Sometimes, it might take you a day; for some people, it might take decades, but we are not machines. We can only expect to keep giving and receiving support ourselves. Machines don’t either; they constantly receive energy to flow, so why wouldn’t you give yourself the same?
Let’s take it a bit deeper. Relationships require that we have a healthy relationship with ourselves and love ourselves. We value ourselves because if we cannot, we will forever look for it in someone else, and that story has been told to be tragic too many times for humanity to keep repeating it. This blog post dives more into the topic of self-love in relationships.
Daily Self-Care Practices
I won’t bore you with the basics, like getting enough sleep, eating more fruits and veggies than processed foods, consuming media more than you create, or dwelling with nature or others. But here are some of my favorite self-care daily practices.
Self Care Practices: Sun exposure
I live in the PNW, which means we get sun for 3-5 months out of the year. So every morning that the sun is out, I sit outside in the sun and journal and meditate, and, in the summer months, I work from the patio as long as I can before my laptop screams in heat load. Please be mindful of your own tolerance for sun exposure and sensitivity. Most people can enjoy sun exposure before the peak hours of the day, before 9 or 10 am, depending on where you are in the world. Even being in the shade but exposed to natural light is better than waking up to the light of a screen. After years of using my phone as an alarm clock and sound machine, I finally spent the money on an alarm clock/sound machine, and it’s been a game changer not to wake up to the temptation to be on my phone.
Self Care Practices: Meditation
Meditation: I get it; it doesn’t sound super sexy to do. I honestly resisted meditation for five years of everyone and their brother telling me I needed to practice meditation more. But I know now it was because I hadn’t found a practice of meditation that felt good to me. I love movement, and when I found Kindred, I immediately fell in love with meditation. It’s a movement meditation that helps you tap into feeling states and work through different visualizations (try my Pay What You Can Intro to Kindred class here). Also, Yoga Nidra is a powerful meditation practice I learned after my yoga teacher training. Yes, I became a yoga teacher and hated meditation. It’s a story, but I fell in love with Yoga Nidra because it was sleeping and meditation and met me when I was pretty sick and a busy mama. Sign up to try a Yoga Nidra here.
Self-Care Practices: Nutrition
Nutrition: I’m a lemon water first thing in the morning girlie and celery juicer. It’s a whole story about how I ended up juicing celery on an empty tummy every morning, but I found it through Medical Medium, and it’s been a very powerful way to begin my morning. I also enjoy smoothies every morning because it’s a quick way to get a lot of fruit in my body when I have my family to help take care of and off to school. Letting go of eating a lot of fruit has been a game-changer in my craving for sweets. I found that my body typically needs a lot of fruit and sugar throughout the day. I’m talking four bananas, 4 cups of frozen berries, and four oranges a day kind of girl. I used to need sweets after every meal, but I found that my body craved fruit sugar that is more bio-available than canned sugar and doesn’t cause crashes. Many of us rely on caffeine or fancy coffee drinks, sodas, or tea that have just as much, if not more, sugar in them than the amount of fruit you could eat. Replacing all that with fruit gives me much more energy throughout the day than any other food. However, that is my personal experience; I’m not your nutritionist.
Self-Care Practices: Writing or Journaling
Journaling/Writing: Morning pages are helpful to me, and sometimes evening pages. I sit down with my journal or computer with a notes tab on and music, letting whatever wants to come out flow out. This was how I wrote my first book, filtering through the stories I wanted to be told. Still, it’s also a great way to see what’s going on inside of you or discover some beautiful wisdom you’re holding on to when you sit down to spill out whatever is there. You can burn it after. You can keep and publish it, lol; it’s your process.
Self-Care Practices: Movement
Sometimes, I dance with no intention. I turn on Billie Eilish or whoever is on my favorite queue list and let flow whatever is in my body. Sometimes, I’ll reach a meditative state and have visuals come through to work with, and sometimes, I’m just deeply letting all the feels of my body come out.
Whatever daily practices you try, I hope you do them because they are fun and exciting for you. Who knows, daily painting or drawing may be on your list! Play around, look at what you did for fun as a kid, start there, and see what comes up.
Wanna try some yoga classes with me? Check out the yoga flows inside my 30 Day Self Care Challenge, $35 for daily movement classes, self care challenges, and journal prompts.
Free Month of Self Care Guide
If you’re ready to explore self-care, I invite you to try my FREE month of self-care guide. You can download a free PDF with daily challenges that are sometimes essential, sometimes silly, sometimes random, and at all times, I hope, absolutely beautiful.
Cheers to a beautiful self-care journey!
Find more self-discovery topics here:
- Lumalia’s memoir Blooming Upside Down: A Memoir of Healing from the Incurable
- Self Care
- Siren Archetype
- Back Home in my Body Workshop
- 30 Day Self-Care Challenge
- Self Awareness Quiz
- Feeling Lost in Life
- Women’s Retreat Oregon and Wellness Experiences in Portland, Oregon
- Self Love Retreat with Flower Therapy and Rose Baths
- Self-Love in Relationships & Why It’s Important
- Living Life To the Fullest
- How I Cured My Autoimmune Disease and Learned to Cope with Chronic Illness
- 200+ Self Love Quotes
- The Journey In
- Is it a Sin to Explore Your Body? Empowering Female Sexuality
- Best Self Improvement Books
- Your Body As Poetry
- Goodbye Good Girl: Healing your inner child
- How to Stop Your Inner Critic
- Tree of Life Mythology and Mind Body Connection
- Eye Candy of the Northern Lights in Oregon
- Wellness Retreats in Oregon 2024
- Healing Trip: Self Discovery Retreat
