Why Self Care Is Essential To Your Success

In this episode, I break down self-care - why it's important to carve out time for yourself and the risks if you don't, how the self-help + self-care industries have been shifting, why this is increasingly becoming a problem, and what we can do to rectify it and how to connect with what you truly need and how to incorporate more self-care into your life. If you tend to put yourself last then this episode is for you. Grab your favorite drink and a pen and a notebook and settle in!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Wild Freewell podcast. I am coming at you from a very moody kind of weather situation and yeah it's kind of got me feeling some kind of feeling and I am here to talk to you today about what I think is a really kind of it can be at least a cozy topic and because of that I would really love to take a second and just create that kind of cozy chill feeling here. So I know that like a lot of people listen to podcasts while they're on the go, While they're in their cars driving around or while they are you know walking or running errands or maybe doing stuff around the house and what I would love to invite you to do and it might be a big ask and you may not be able to do it in the situation that you are in currently but I would love to ask you to take a second and take a couple of deep breaths and just really center in just putting yourself in a really receptive space because the topic that we're talking about is not unfamiliar, It's not new but it is so important and I really want you to be able to sink into that. So if you're driving please pull over before you do this or wait until later but if you're just like walking or if you're you know doing stuff around the house if you can just take a second and just take really three sorry three really deep breaths with me. So we're going to do them together so breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth and I'm going to get you to hold it at the top okay so just take a big deep breath in through the nose hold for a few seconds and exhale out the mouth another one in through the nose hold exhale through the mouth last one in through the nose hold and maybe exhale with a sigh and if you need to keep going with that pause this and please keep breathing if that felt really good if that felt really necessary please sink into that space be there honor what you need and when you're ready you can come back and I'm sure you can come back today today oh my oh my we are talking about self-care and what I had originally thought about this topic and like what I would name this episode is is why self-care is essential to your success and that is true but as I thought about self-care I just felt like maybe I wanted to take us on a different journey so I'm not sure that that's where this conversation is going but I think that there's some really important things to to understand about self-care and and one of those things is is the cliche so you know you can't pour from an empty cup and it's almost painful to say that because it is so cliche like it's just it's really terrible but it's cliche for a reason it really is because you just cannot give of yourself or from yourself when you are not giving to yourself it's just simply not possible and it's really I think difficult in this situation in the societal climate that we find ourselves in sometimes to prioritize that time for ourselves without feeling selfish I was talking to another friend of mine about this she recently gave up coaching which was really it was hard for me to hear that she had given up coaching honestly which sounds silly but we went through our training together and she's a you know a dear friend of mine and it was just interesting to hear one of the reasons why and one of the reasons that she kind of gave was that the the self-help industry and and I think that we're seeing this with self-care as well has been sort of monetized everything everything about the wellness industry has become monetized and that monetization and kind of turning the self-care self-help personal development industry into like a really kind of capitalistic industry has made us believe that in order to partake in self-care we need to be spending money or we need to be outsourcing our power and trusting in what someone else tells us is correct for us or is like you know the right form of self-care and I think it's really interesting not because the people who are offering these services aren't offering something valuable I don't there is no shade I think that it's great I offer a service that would fall under this category no of personal development and wellness and self-care so it would be awfully hypocritical of me to like judge somebody else who was doing the same thing so I don't mean that they're not offering value what I mean is that because of the monetization of this area it has made it so we are outsourcing our power completely and so we feel like we can't maybe take care of ourselves unless we are doing something that somebody else tells us is the right way to take care of ourselves and and I see this a lot even within like the the containers that I've been a part of the coaching programs or like anything else that I've ever been a part of I can see the ways in which I have done this myself and oh boy oh boy like I spent a good 10 years doing this if I'm really frank with you it is only the last year that I have really stepped into sovereignty in terms of personal development which is scary to say because I started my my personal development journey in 2008 roughly speaking so we are going on 15 years 15 years that is insane to say out loud sorry every time I talk about dates it seems to blow my mind and unfortunately you guys are the unwitting recipients of my my shock and awe but yeah it's um it's going on 15 years that I have been like involved in this industry and I've been working as a coach for five years now and um and it's just I've seen it where you are you are paying somebody hoping that that somebody has the answers for you and when this comes to self-care I think that we're seeing like a lot of people that are selling products or services to help with self-care and that's such a beautiful thing I think I think it's really beautiful that there is this kind of industry available to us like as much as I would like capitalism to shift I'd like it to be more conscious and I'd like us all to be more mindful of the way we're spending money what companies we're spending money with and making sure that we're not leaving this sort of like really negative imprint on the planet by supporting companies that don't give a shit about the well-being of us as people obviously the well-being of the people who make the clothes the well-being of the planet and the way that we're we're moving forward in that way so I wish that capitalism would shift but since we do live in this system and we can't ignore that I think it's really beautiful that we have these options of you know services and things that we can do in order to kind of dive into our self-care where I think this becomes problematic is when people are no longer able to understand what caring for themselves looks like because they are so busy investing in external courses programs teachings techniques or whatever in order to find that kind of sense of well-being because essentially the shift that we're seeing with the monetization of the self-help industry and the self-care industry is that we are just once again outsourcing all of our power and we're giving the control to the industry so now we have these industries and these again gurus lol that's what I always say because I hate it so much but it really we do kind of live in this environment where we look to these certain people to kind of lead us and to to tell us how to to be essentially and how to be better and how to feel better and no one is ever going to know that more than you it's just a fact and it sounds counterintuitive because and I've addressed this on other episodes too like well then what the hell is the point of working with you Alacia and it's not about me teaching you how to care for yourself so much as it is about and because sorry just going back to that for a second it's not about me teaching you how to care for yourself because I have no idea how to care for you because I am not you like I know how to care for people I know I know tools and techniques that can help you move forward and and care for yourself better but the techniques that I offer you may not be the best fit for you and that you may not like them as options for example so it's always going to be up to you to decide how to best take care of yourself and if we are talking like on a very simple like level okay like we're talking like superficial self-care so things like face masks and baths and and those kind of stereotypical self-care things I could make a suggestion to you of what I like and and you could hate it right only you know what makes you feel good in those situations so I think that we need to be really mindful of that and and I see this even in industries where some kind of like education or guidance is important so for example if we're talking about like EFT or tapping that's a technique or if we're talking about breath work or if we're talking about like astrology or human design or anything that people use to kind of like better themselves it's if we're constantly outsourcing our power to doing another course or doing another program or going to another class and we're never trusting that we've arrived at the point where we know what we really need just for us. Does that make sense? I feel like I need to give an example to kind of make concrete what I'm trying to say. So for years I did yoga in the morning and I still do but for years I followed a video and what I found in following the videos was that I was never getting exactly what my body needed. Now I am not a yoga teacher and so for years I really felt this kind of insecurity about going it on my own because I felt like well I really don't know what I'm doing because I don't have this piece of paper that certifies that I do and that is something else that I will one day cover the obsessive compulsive need for external validation of our internal skills and sometimes it's valuable and sometimes it's necessary but I think we become obsessed with it as well and I think there's dangers in that as well but that's a conversation for another time. So I would do these videos and the videos stopped making me happy and so the practice in the morning became like this slog and what ended up happening is I would search I would spend like 15 minutes looking for the right video to give me what I needed that morning because some of the yoga teachers that I like the most on YouTube they do a very sort of aggressive vinyasa or they do like a mix of like vinyasa and pilates which is a very kind of movement and heavy breath focused kind of yoga and first thing in the morning that is just simply not what my body needs that is not what it's craving for and so it took me a really long time to kind of build up the courage to be like fuck it I can't do this anymore I can't follow a teacher anymore who knows who knows yoga better than me but does not know me better than me and so I decided to start doing the poses that were necessary for me to feel good in the morning so what that looks like for me is just a ton of spine work I really need to lengthen and to move my spine because when I wake up in the morning I am very stiff and so all the swift vinyasa in the world is not going to really give me that deep connection that I need to feel in the morning to my spine and so I decided to like kind of take back control and take the power away from like these yoga teachers and they never asked for it this is not again not shade on on anyone offering these services thank goodness for the people that are doing that right thank goodness for the podcasts that have inspired me thank goodness I hope you feel for the podcasts I am offering to you people are offering such beautiful things and there's no judgment on that it's something that we all need to be endlessly grateful for that we have access to so many amazing services for free but when it comes to the point where you're valuing the other because the other is more educated or farther along or blah blah blah blah blah over your innate knowing that becomes a problem and I hate using the word problem but it really does it's this is what I would consider dangerous because doing it once with one teacher is one thing but when you build up a habit over time and it begins to seep into your relationships with your friends where you're deferring to what they want or what they think is best or to your partner and what he or she thinks is best it ends up becoming this kind of slippery slope of you just completely losing yourself to someone else to someone else's opinion okay and it is scary it really is scary when you look back and I have been in this position too where I have looked back and I've been like what the hell happened to me like I was so powerful and I was so sovereign and I was doing things on my own because I felt like that was a way to do them and then I got all tripped up for me the number one area about this is business man oh man that one just really threw me for a loop I was so busy chasing after a paradigm and a way to do things that someone else who was you know quote unquote better than me farther along than me smarter than me whatever more successful than me more successful than me that they had followed or that they had created and seemed quote unquote right and there's nothing wrong with those paradigms but they weren't necessarily right for me and as I move it back into those programs because I still have them I have lifetime access to them and sometimes I go back to them as I come at those programs from a place of sovereignty like I said in the last year I have really stepped up and been like no this is enough is enough like I'm going to listen to me first and I'm going to filter every single thing that I read that I hear that I see that someone says through my own system and I'm going to ask is that true for me do I want that to be true for me I'm going to ask myself these questions these big questions because it's life you know your whole life I'm going to ask myself these questions and then I will decide if that is valuable or not so as I come back to those programs they are endlessly valuable but at the time they were poisonous for me they were toxic because I was in a space where I was weak and it's it's not good or bad it is a statement of fact I was weak I was not connected to myself I was not in a in a state of power in a position of power and I was just willing to listen and follow blindly to what someone else told me was right without listening to what is right for me and then there's so many examples that I could give of this as well like in the past when I had tried different breathing techniques and those breathing techniques were really triggering and and I felt like I wanted to keep trying because you know somebody told me that they were really beneficial and they may have been and they are actually they are beneficial but if some tool comes to you at the wrong stage of your life it really makes not one iota of a difference how powerful this tool is it's not the right tool for you at this moment in time I've spoken about the kundalini course that I'm doing recently and and I I've done kundalini yoga before like probably I think I don't want to say 10 years ago but probably close to that I mean it's been a while it's been a while and when I did it it was endlessly triggering it just I was not in a space to receive it it was giving me asthma attacks it was making me feel sick like it was just a really negative experience and so for a long time I couldn't go back to to kundalini yoga because I had this negative experience I had this sort of like I don't want to say pattern but I definitely had like a sort of like um maybe even like a little bit of a block around it honestly I don't really love the word block but I think it's appropriate in this case and so when I came back to it which was in late late September of last year 2022 I came back to it very slowly very gently and with so many modifications and so much patience and when I when I started to embrace it in a slow way and allowed it to unfold the way it was meant to and I wasn't forcing myself to do it quote unquote perfectly or exactly how the teacher was doing it or exactly how quote unquote it's supposed to be done it was able I was able to like really sink deeper into it and now over time I have built up my practice and I am able to come at it at a completely different way I am able to do it more the way it was intended to be done the way it was quote unquote supposed to be done okay because I gave myself that space to kind of come at it slowly but even within this just as a side note within the program that I'm in there is a video that the teacher made that I am you know meant to follow the idea is that I follow this video and I followed it for the first couple days and it was the video was fucking annoying it was really irritating there was too much talking I can only listen to people repeat the same things over and over for so long so like on day four or five when I've now memorized every single thing that the teacher was saying at every point of the video that was enough for me so I had to find a way to make it my own so what I did was I took the video and I translated what she was doing into time so she was doing three breathing exercises for four minutes each with a little bit of extra breathing in between so what I did was I went to insight timer and I created a timer that followed the pattern that she was doing in the program and I began doing the exercises on my own and this would be I think highly discouraged it would be highly discouraged because you've joined a program the program has a teacher the teacher creates a video you know and she teaches you how to do something and she did teach me how to do something there is no again no shade like endlessly grateful for this program because I really believe it's changing my life but I listened to the videos long enough to learn what I needed to do and then I needed to make that process my own that is life that alchemy of taking in information and being taught how to do something and then taking that process and putting your own sauce on it putting your own spin on it that is that is life that is creation and that's exactly what I want you to do with everything that you hear me say anything that I'm talking about and if you've ever had the opportunity to work with me or if you want to work with me in the future you will also do the same thing you will take everything that I ask you everything that we learn together and you will filter it through your own system and you will take the bits that feel good and you will add your own spin and you will drop what doesn't work and that's the that's the way it is I got the sense when I told the teacher that I wasn't doing the videos that she wasn't necessarily super impressed with me because that's not her intention and I'm sorry that that's not her intention but I decided to do what was best for me I'm still doing the practice exactly the way she set it up I'm just doing it on my own time I listen to different kinds of music depending on what I need some days I listen to binaural beats some days I listen to something really uh floaty and kind of ethereal sometimes I listen to like really badass affirmations while I'm doing it and I'm sure that all of this in the Kundalini tradition would probably be extremely discouraged and I still don't care because I need to be taking care of me I need to be doing what is best for me and so do you in every situation all of the time now let's talk about the biggest kind of I guess cockblocker to getting to actually doing self-care and this is also inherently attached I think to the capitalization and the monetization of of self-care but we simply refuse to put ourselves in a position where we come first we have been taught that if we put ourselves first that is selfish and that because we're not taking care of other people or we're putting time aside for ourselves when there's a million things each day to get done that that's not okay and I find that extremely interesting because I think that that attitude really serves the capitalistic agenda which is that you produce and your production is the really the only thing about you that's valuable so if we look at the shape of our society the way things work I want you to think about how much time you spend sleeping and how much time you spend working just like analyze that for a second please I really want you to sit and ask yourself how many hours per week do I spend working how many hours per week do I spend sleeping which one wins I want you to take a second too if you're a parent I want you to take a second too if you're a parent and I want you to tell me how many hours a day do you spend taking care of your family so that could be cooking cleaning taking care of your kids driving them here and there making their lunches whatever it is okay spending time with them obviously there is no there's nothing wrong with any of this necessarily it's all just about putting it into perspective okay okay and I want you to think about how much time you spend taking care of everybody else family children partners okay friends whatever and I want you to compare that again to how many hours you're sleeping and right now we're only talking about sleep and we're not really talking about self-care are we we're talking just about sleep I mean you literally need sleep to survive okay so just be very honest with yourself about the ratio of how much time you spend working how much time you spend taking care of other people and how much time you spend sleeping I don't even want to get into asking you how much time you spend taking care of yourself because I would imagine that the the answer is almost non-existent because when you factor in the fact that a lot of people working in a traditional position work about 40 hours per week if you're living in North America I would wager a guess that you're working way more than that way more than 40 hours a week and if you factor in the fact that you are a family like you have a family you have children you have a partner and all of those things the likelihood that you are sleeping the correct amount of hours per night is almost impossible I mean statistically speaking I mean even mathematically speaking there's 24 hours in a day right we are supposed to be spending roughly seven to nine hours per day sleeping and I would be willing to bet that most of the people that are listening to this right now are not doing that because it feels probably I would also assume like you can't do that because of the way that life is is structured and this is why I say that it's really important that we look at it from a capitalistic perspective because if we don't have this kind of idea of like a 40-hour work week okay and production production production produce produce produce if we don't have that then all of a sudden sleeping becomes a lot easier because you have more time and space for it even if you were working a reduced work week if you were working part-time if you were working like different hours it would also be easier and we didn't talk about any of the things that are necessary just for your basic well-being we did not talk about how many hours per week you spend exercising or how many hours per week you spend moving your body if exercising is not something that feels good or feels aligned for you we didn't even talk about that because what is the likelihood that you have the opportunity to do that when you're working 40 hours a week and you have like other people that need to be taken care of I can understand why we think it's necessary that everything else comes before us because we live in a society that values that trait that kind of quote-unquote selflessness yikes and that is how it's portrayed like you are selfless you are a martyr you are godlike when you sacrifice yourself for other people okay we we value that it is it is viewed as like a beautiful trait to have when you sacrifice your own well-being for the well-being of others which I think is absolutely psychotic I really do it is psychotic it is literally putting the mask on everyone around you while you die on the plane that's how that story goes and that's really harsh like the way I just said that but I think it's so important because we need to hear somebody saying things that shock us out of this bullshit frankly out of this bullshit so I understand why it's necessary I understand why there are that the structures of our society kind of push us in that direction what I don't understand is why any of us thinks that any of this is possible okay why it's how how it could possibly be possible to care for other people while constantly ignoring ourselves now you can ride that train for a little while and you are riding it full speed ahead 200 kilometers per hour straight into a wall called burnout I've I've I've walked this path I've ridden this train I know how that story ends when we are trying to endlessly produce and we are pouring from ourselves and not pouring into ourselves there is only one way that the story ends okay and it can be really hard to realize and to understand that it is necessary for you to take care of yourself especially when you are living in the paradigm that I described before when you are working the traditional nine to five when you have a family and you have all of these responsibilities and you can be sitting there staring at me and I want to I really do I want to recognize my privilege because I realize that what I am asking of you is asking you to take more time and pour it into yourself which may feel very much like an impossible task and it is quote-unquote easy for me to say because I do not work a traditional nine to five and just that fact alone that I do not work a traditional nine to five makes it much easier for me to focus on self-care because I work my own hours and I can make my own schedule and I can decide if I need to take time off if I'm not feeling well I'm responsible for how I deal with that my clients know that they're dealing with me one-on-one do you know what I mean if I needed to move a session I could do that if I really had to I rarely ever do but if I had to I would so and I and I could which is another thing how many of us how many of you on the call and I know that I was part of this because I used to work in a traditional system but how many of us feel guilty when we phone in sick I mean we are actually ill we are actually sick and we feel guilty phoning in because it puts our colleagues and the company at a sort of disadvantage and it creates a certain amount of disease or unease sorry unease within the company within the situation for that day and so we don't so we go to work and we push ourselves even farther past the limit how many of you have been in that position I know I certainly have I know how I used to shake I used to literally tremble when I had to phone in sick because I felt so so so ashamed because I knew that I was putting people that I cared about my team at in a really uncomfortable position essentially and so that story alone shows you how we are taught to value the other above ourselves and what I what I'm saying is not to move towards an individualistic kind of perception of the world because I understand that that too is a problem like we see that in if we look at an east versus west dynamic we see that the east is much more collectivist collectivistic collectivist okay we sort of understand what I'm saying even if I'm saying it wrong and that the west is much more individualistic and individualism long term becomes very dangerous when we have absolutely no regard for the other and that is not what I am talking about here what I am talking about here is being able to care about the other because your cup is so fucking full that you can give from the overflow instead of constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel there is a massive difference here between those two things and I think it's really really important that we clarify that because this feeds this discussion that I'm having with you right now feeds into this idea that self-care is selfish self-care is fucking necessary we need to reframe it we absolutely need to reframe it and self-care does not look like spending a shit ton of money or even a shit ton of time on anything self-care in its most essential form is really just you doing something that feels really fucking good and you doing it just for you okay this is why I think that self-care and bubble baths somehow become have become like inextricably connected I hate bubble baths which is what I what I always refer to when like people are like well you know give me some examples of self-care well I know a lot of people love bubble baths but like that's my own personal hell like the idea of sitting in water filled with my own filth like to me that's not a vibe I'd much rather have a shower um but like obviously that's bad for the environment as well and there's like a lot of other things that we can unpack there but whatever but the point is is that I think that that's why these things have kind of become entwined because how much does it cost you time-wise or money-wise to have a bath I mean even if you are having the most bougie bath ever meaning you got really expensive bubble baths and you have like a really nice robe and you have really nice candles and all of these things first off the candle you wouldn't use one time the bathrobe you have forever so maybe your initial investment altogether like if we're shooting really really high would be like a hundred dollars okay to get the bathrobe to get the candle to buy the bath salts or bath whatever gel I don't what is it even called um anyways if we were talking about that like a hundred dollars and and that would like the bathrobe will last you forever the candle will last you probably for a couple of months and same with the bath salt soap whatever okay so it's not necessarily about the time or the money and I think that that's one of the ways in which we are getting tripped up it is literally just about doing things that make you feel good and make you feel like you are seeing yourself like you are caring for yourself like you are witnessing and honoring and showing up for yourself and like you are really valuable that's it like the self-care for me and I've said this a million times on the podcast like even the janky episodes from before like when I first started I've always talked about this self-care for me looks like having a hot hot hot scalding shower that is self-care if I've had a stressful day there is nothing that is going to ground me more than that and aside from my water bill and the obviously like impact that that has long term on the on the environment which is not something to like joke about but it's yeah it's there um aside from those things like a bath or a shower does not cost me anything it just costs me time and how long can I really stay in the shower for or the bath like 10 minutes 20 minutes an hour how long can you really be doing that activity before you need to get out I mean literally even just because you become waterlogged like you can't be there for very long self-care for me looks like going for a run self-care looks like going to a bar with a friend and having coffee how long is that half an hour an hour couple hours at most so it's not about the money or the time self-care for me also looks like doing like kundalini yoga doing yoga doing breath work you don't need to necessarily invest in these things unless you want to you can find fairly reputable people you need to be careful obviously when you're like going into the interwebs and so on and so forth but you can find people online that will teach you these things for free and I'm not talking about never investing in people that you believe in or never expanding your knowledge and going really deep with a teacher I could have looked up kundalini yoga online but I had no fucking clue what I was doing and I had a really negative experience with it the first time I did it it was necessary for me to make the investment in this program it was necessary for me to move forward on my path with this now I have learned something that I will carry with me beyond this program and that is amazing and it has opened the door for me to potentially practice kundalini yoga on my own but the value of this group was something different like the value of this group wasn't even necessarily in the kundalini yoga so much as it was in the connections that I made with other people and the things that I learned and the way that the way that it was all presented to me and the way that I was taught to embrace the journey and allow it to unfold there was so much value in it that it goes beyond just the practice itself so this is not a call to to be cheap or to never invest in people or never find ways to support yourself beyond but what I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be a barrier money does not have to be a barrier time does not have to be a barrier but it is likely the number one reason why you are not taking care of yourself okay and and that can be that can be very difficult to navigate but it really is about budgeting and realizing that there are ways to collapse time and what I mean by that is there are ways to make it seem like you have more time and taking care of yourself is actually one of them so there's a really famous like quote by Deepak Chopra that if you don't have time to meditate for 20 minutes and you need to do it twice and the reason why he says that is because meditating creates time it creates space not the first time you do it not the second or the third or the fifth but the 10th and then you know the 30th and when you get to the 100th it makes a huge huge difference because it regulates your nervous system in a way that allows you to come at life from a totally different energy so if you are feeling like you don't have time to do something for yourself you are absolutely in need of doing something for yourself if you feel like you don't have time to take care of yourself if you don't have a few minutes to invest in your well-being I encourage you to stop whatever it is that you are doing right now and go do something to take care of yourself before it's too late and what I mean by too late I mean before you reach the point where you are breaking down and breaking down looks different for everyone breaking down for me means entering into a space of almost complete and total uselessness like I end up burning out I burn out very quickly first off I wish I didn't I wish that wasn't true but my experience so far has been that because my nervous system has not been regulated enough to manage day-to-day stress and so I'm doing things now to really mitigate that because I don't want to be in that space again I really don't want to be there but when I get to that space it looks like not being able to do anything I basically shut down completely and I end up spending most of my days crying crying because I want to do something and I want to move forward because the capitalistic tendencies they get to us all so like even though I'm talking to you about how you are more valuable than what you produce that feeling of value because of your production doesn't just disappear it takes time to unwire the the cultural paradigms the societal paradigms that we live in and to kind of look at them objectively and realize that they don't belong to us so even though I realize these things I know them I'm talking to you about them now I am teaching about them with clients and so on and so forth even though I know these things it doesn't mean that I don't fall victim to them sometimes so when I am in this state I am particularly sensitive to the fact that I am simply not producing at all and if I'm not producing that means I'm not very valuable to anybody am I and so I end up completely shutting down so that's what I mean by before it's too late I mean do something before you get to whatever your personal limit is and you will know you will know that you're close you will feel it it will feel maybe like a buzzing in your body that you just can't control or rampant thoughts that are are just taking over your life they're waking you up in the middle of the night you're not able to sleep you're sleeping poorly all of these things are so fucking important to pay attention to I am begging you I am begging you because I care about you because I want you to be well because I want you to be healthy because I want you to take care of yourself okay and so recognize your own signs and do something to mitigate them now you'll notice like I've said earlier that I'm not giving you examples of how to take care of yourself I'm talking to you about why it's important that you do because I don't know how you take care of yourself so one of the things that I would encourage you to do is to take out your phone and open your notes app and literally create a list of things that make you feel good okay and you can break them down into things that are free going for a walk for example would be free being in nature in any way shape or form that is good for everybody whether you like it or not I understand that that might not be your bag but it is endlessly endlessly beneficial because it literally we are living beings the nature is living and we exchange energy with nature and it really helps calm our nervous system loving a pet is another excellent way to like kind of move through the same kind of energy exchange they really help us regulate because watching them and witnessing the way that they move through the world is really inspiring and it's really beneficial for us so that's those are three things alone that are free that you don't need to do anything maybe you have to pay for gas to get to wherever it is that you're going but that's about it so that's something that I think is just important to create a list of all the things that you can do to take care of yourself bubble baths runs exercise movement breath work reading a book watching a tv show being mindful not to binge being mindful not to like necessarily escape into the television that's an issue in and of itself which we will cover I'm sure another time on the on the podcast as it's something that I suffer from a lot more than I would like to admit but yeah like so being mindful that you're not and even if you're using your phone with all of these activities also being mindful of that because technology in this case is not necessarily your friend so I would encourage you to do something for self-care that is actually tech-free that would be like the epitome that would be like the you know the apex of self-care but you do you right always you got to do what you think is best there's one last aspect of self-care that I want to touch on that I think is really important because when we talk about self-care we do tend to talk about like the fluffier side of self-care which means doing things that like make us feel good and like doing things that we really love and that kind of like bring us up and like raise our energy and so on and so forth and that's what we've been talking about up until now and those things are super important and you need to find and I mean that like yeah you need you must it's it's not an order necessarily but it kind of is at the same time like you really really need to find a way to incorporate those things into your life because they are essential to your well-being and and therefore obviously going back to what I had said the topic was was essential to your to your success but um one of the things that I think is not necessarily talked about as much in terms of self-care but is equally important is the fact that sometimes sometimes but not always sometimes self-care looks like doing the hard thing oh I said it I said it um yeah so sometimes self-care looks like doing the shit that you really don't want to do but you know you gotta do you know you gotta do it so um personal story I've been struggling with my morning practice lately I've just been kind of feeling off my game um for various reasons which I am aware of but I'm not necessarily doing something about because you know you sometimes you you fall off your you fall off the wagon you fall off your practice you fall off like your path for a second and then I know that I will course correct um when the time is right and I am being very mindful of what's going on I am being very aware and I am realizing that I am making a choice I'm actually going to do an entire podcast episode on this exact topic but so keep an eye out for that but um sometimes self-care looks like doing the thing that we really don't want to do so I fall I've fallen off my practice I've been doing my morning practice kind of like so so um and I'm never rigid so it's not about doing the same things at the same time in the same way every morning I don't believe in that at all I don't believe in consistency for the sake of consistency I think that if you walk that path and you are not somebody who is naturally consistent or not somebody who is naturally jazzed about doing the same thing every day I think you are walking a path to failure and I think it is a waste of time then I think that doing anything for the sake of doing it is stupid um and you will hear me I've said it a million times I do not approach my practice that way I do not approach my life that way that is just not my vibe at all however there are times where self-care looks like doing the thing that you don't want to do this morning I did my full practice and I did not want to I really did not want to but we are going on a couple of days of kind of like yeah like I've done it but I haven't really done it full out and I haven't really been showing up for myself and it was necessary that I get like my shit together and really show up fully for myself and I did and I felt amazing when I did it and therein is the value of sometimes doing things sometimes self-care looks like that it looks like doing the thing you really don't want to do because you know it's going to make you feel better in the end sometimes self-care is going for a run even if you're not feeling super jazzed about it at the beginning because often the hardest part is putting on your shoes and walking out the door or going to the gym because half the time the hardest part is not actually being at the gym but getting into the car and driving to the gym right so and I'm not saying that we ignore our bodies ever ever you need to honor where you're at there are days where you know that going to the gym is going to be more counterproductive to your well-being because you are pushing yourself beyond where you are capable of going you will know and if you don't yet begin to build up that relationship with yourself begin to really listen to yourself and start watching out for these cues okay about when and how you are getting tripped up or you are getting like kind of stuck in the consistency and you're not really listening to yourself you need to listen to yourself first and foremost okay so we're never talking about pushing beyond where you know you can go but you will know you will know the days where you're being lazy versus when you really can't or when you're making up some bs excuse about why you can't do the thing you will know I promise you I promise you you will know the difference I trust you that much and I want you to trust yourself that much you will know the difference so when I did my practice this morning I literally did halfway and then I was like okay I'm just gonna you know try this second part and whatever happens happens and then I tried the second part of my practice which is like an 11 minute mantra that I have to like sit there and like swing my arms around like I honestly wish you guys could see me it's a little bit embarrassing but like it makes me feel so good like it's mind-blowing I wouldn't have ever guessed that it would have this kind of positive effect on me but it makes me feel amazing and like I started doing it and I'm like yes yes I was so vibing on what I was doing that like I 11 minutes passed and it was like oh my god I can't believe I'm done like and I felt so much better afterwards and it's also part of probably why I'm sitting here having this like really long conversation with you today because I I have the energy because I have the mental space to show up and have this conversation which is amazing it is amazing and that is partly because I showed up for myself first this morning and so I would encourage you to do the same to show up for yourself first first thing in the morning even if you're not a morning person and maybe especially if you're not a morning person like you need to honor yourself always but I would encourage you to find some kind of activity that you really vibe with and that really works for you first thing in the morning to try and like really connect in and maybe that looks like journaling while having a coffee and all of these by the way I would like to like state I guess but also like really highlight the fact that I may give suggestions that seem on the more feminine side and I would just like really encourage you if you are like if you consider yourself aligned with masculine energy to give these things a try because I have a lot of like male identifying clients who have started journaling and have told me that like at first they hated it and they felt so much resistance to it and that now it is literally changing their lives so don't write something off because it seems like it's on the more feminine side that maybe that maybe that's the same thing for a bath if you're like a man right like baths are not my thing because they're not my thing but it's not because like they're girly or whatever and there's not like oh like a task that like oh it's masculine and so I'm not going to do it like you have to be willing to explore yourself and to really let yourself see what feels good for you no matter of what like stigma might be attached to it right just do you just do what you want to do and try everything try absolutely everything so if you're sorry going back to the original point though which is that if you're not a morning person trying to do something really simple in the morning meditating is always a big one if you have not gotten on the meditation train especially if you're listening to this on insight timer what you doing insight timer has so many free meditations it is like literally one of the best apps I think on in existence right now in our world in 2023 insight timer hands down for me is the best app for meditation there is so much value there there are such amazing teachers on there including yours truly wink wink um but there are so many amazing teachers on there offering so much value and just yeah like you have these unlimited resources please give meditation a try I genuinely believe that meditation will be the thing that changes society one of them at least for sure if everybody was in therapy or in coaching and meditating I feel like the world would be a much better place because we'd be dealing with our shit internally and on our own through meditation and then we'd be dealing with our shit internally and externally with a coach or a therapist so like that would be that would be a game changer in my opinion but anyways but yeah like give meditation a try it just creates so much space and the more frenetic and frantic and panicked and stressed and overwhelmed that you feel the more you need to meditate and it is gonna suck I will not sugarcoat it I'm not gonna lie to you it is going to feel like absolute garbage at the beginning it's going to be very difficult you're going to be like why am I sitting here like this is such a waste of time you will spend five minutes literally bad mouthing meditation the first time you sit down to do it and I still think you should do it and I think that you should do it more than once and I think that you should keep going until it starts to feel good because it really does it always starts to feel good I would be willing to bet money that for every single person if they found the right way to meditate for them which is not the same for everybody so if you found the right way to meditate I would be willing to bet that meditation would be beneficial for every single person on the planet and it is a great way to collapse time and to really create space for yourself so that's my number one suggestion for for self-care but you know take it or leave it guys take it or leave it because you are sovereign beings and you are just listening to this girl who is sitting in her little house in Italy talking to you but like who am I? I am not more important than you I'm not more intelligent than you I am not more anything than you right you are a sovereign being you are in charge of what you do but you got to take care of yourself I really don't care I really don't care what's going on in your life I really don't care like how hard it is or how busy you are or whatever you have got to carve out pockets of time to take care of yourself and like I know that people hate it when people say this and like I am not a 4am person I'm not part of the 4am club or the 5am club and I will never be that's not my vibe I'm not going to do something because like somebody says it but if you need to get up 15 minutes early earlier to meditate then I really think that that's something that you should give a go I really do I would highly highly highly encourage and recommend that so just to wrap things up today self-care is I guess essential to your success is it not? Absolutely it is why not self-care is essential to everything people self-care is essential to living well self-care is essential to being a human and not like chewing people out while you're on your daily commute or when your boss pisses you off or whatever like self-care is like that gap that makes it so you can like see something shitty happening and be like hmm isn't that interesting and not have like a massive reaction to it self-care is the foundation of life and showing up for yourself first is not selfish it is necessary and that is like the one of the I think maybe that's part of my mission is actually to turn that around that you need to take care of yourself first because if you don't you cannot take care of anybody else oxygen mask baby that's the whole thing so yeah I hope that you found this like excessively long episode helpful I say excessively long because I like to keep them much shorter than this but this conversation was way too important and I don't feel guilty about the time I feel like this was 55 minutes of like jam-packed goodness so I hope that you feel the same way I hope that you learn something I hope that you found value in this I hope that you filter every single word of everything that I said through your system and yeah if you love this it would mean the world to me if you would rate if you would rate this episode and subscribe of course if that's something that you're into I would love to connect with you more so yeah if you'd like to you can find me online on Instagram at Candice Alacia or on my website at www. Candicealacia. Com and I look forward to catching you on the next episode have the most beautiful weekend ever and yeah take care of you bye!

Reviews

Amazing Alessia! Always love your potent real-life treatments! Self-care for me is the water I have to navigate when I can’t even see the land where self-love lives. The best rationalization I know for self-care is: no one else can or will do this for you. We each have the responsibility in life to discover what we need and take action. If we neglect self-care I find we will surround ourselves with people in the habit of taking whatever we offer up. And then we travel all the stops on the burnout highway. If you care for yourself first, people around you can be free to give. And we can thrive. You nailed it. Exhale. 🤍🤍🤍🙏