It’s Time To Practice Exquisite Self-Care…

“This book is rooted in the conviction that our bodies offer us the deepest wisdom — wisdom that can guide us through the river of life. The more we deepen into the body’s wisdom, the more we will find greater freedom, joy, nourishment, rest, and empowerment for exquisite self-care. This is the contemplative practice. This is the journey into the “last unexplored wisdom.”
~*~ Christine Valters Paintner ~*~
The Wisdom Of The Body: A Contemplative Journey
To Wholeness For Women

My journey with my body has never been an easy one. A childhood of long-term sexual abuse from 4-18 so fractured my relationship with my body which, as children do, I “left” in order to survive, the abuse caused a disconnect between body and mind, spirit and body. I have long told therapists that the best way I can describe my relationship with my body is that I feel as though my spirit is soaring ahead with my body bumping and banging on the ground behind me. We are not one. We are separate entities connected by a slim thread and my body has never felt like home to me. I struggled with weight from grade-school on, and after having my 3 children I kept gaining weight until I became obese. Food was my only comfort, the way I numbed out. The only times I ever felt really connected to my body was when I was pregnant with each of my children. I ate a perfect diet, I cared for my physical body because it was housing my precious babies, and even giving birth, labor pains and all, and the time afterward nursing my children, was a sacred time, the first time I really felt love and connection with my body. But the years go along, the children grow and go, my marriage ended, and I was alone. What does one do with a body then?

The abuse also left me with a basketful of mental health issues which I would deal with for a lifetime — Bipolar Disorder, serious depression, an acute anxiety disorder, and PTSD. If my relationship with my body was already fractured, my mind was fractured too, leaving me with few tools to piece myself back together. I started therapy at 18 and today, at 67, have been in therapy for nearly 50 years, in and out, but more in than out. I have been hospitalized for nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, lived with suicidal ideation for a long time, and, well, to say that I had no clue what “self-care” meant is an understatement.

After the terrible grief and sense of loss when my house burned down in 2014, and lostness in general, I ate my way up to 400 pounds. My will to live was pretty much non-existent. Eventually I began to do one diet after another as so many do and got down to a little over 300 pounds but could get no lower. And then, in 2017, a miracle occurred. I had become pre-diabetic, the neuropathy in my feet got so bad — and I already had badly compromised feet from multiple breaks and a couple of surgeries, my foot doctor told me on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the worst, I was about an 8, I had “At Risk Feet,” I could barely feel them, and by then my feet were so badly compromised I was at risk of falling and did a number of times — I knew I had to do something. I wish I could recall, or recreate, the magic that led me to making the change but in October 2017 I went on the Ketogenic Diet. Over 18 months I lost 75 pounds, came out of the pre-diabetic range, blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol and all the rest were in the normal range, and I looked and felt better than I had in my whole adult life. I felt so proud, and, well (I’m blushing) I actually felt pretty. And for nearly a year the diet so changed my body I was able to go off of all of my psych meds. It was a miracle. Eventually I did go back on the meds but I was vigilant about the diet and my health remained good. Only in retrospect has the P.A. who manages my meds said, in a meeting where I pointed all of this out — the fact that I had lost almost all the weight I lost when off meds — that yes, while the medication might not make me gain weight — it can — it can slow down your metabolism so that losing weight could be very difficult, but I needed the meds and I was maintaining my weight loss. And then came Covid.

Everyone has had a very hard time with Covid in one way or another. For me what happened is that even though, being agoraphobic, I had rarely left the house before Covid, suddenly I couldn’t leave at all. I learned then that there is a big difference between not leaving the house often because that’s what I needed to do, home being my comfort zone, and not being able to leave the house because of the pandemic. I became increasingly anxious, my mental health issues were all over the place, my meds were raised, changed, raised again and again and again, and while I was still basically on the ketogenic diet where I hadn’t “cheated” in over 2 years I started cheating more and more often. I had not ordered food from out like pizza and Chinese food for the whole time I was doing perfect keto but suddenly you couldn’t get out to get food as you once did. My son-in-law or daughter got groceries for me from a basic list of staples I needed, but there was no dashing out to grab a few things at the store to make a special keto meal when I felt like I needed something special. I started ordering a pizza or Chinese food on occasion, and then “on occasion” became routinely, then weekly, and sometimes more often. I gained weight, and I gained, and gained, and gained until I had gained all the weight I lost back. The change in diet for the worse made health issues creep up again and my mental health was all over the place. Inotherwords, I was a mess. Self-care? What’s that? And then the day came when I went a few pounds over what had been my highest weight when I went on Keto, and that’s when everything came to a halt. I was afraid. Really afraid.

Now I am back on Keto full tilt, I have an appointment next month for a complete physical, something I haven’t had for a year and a half because of Covid, I am ready to regain my physical health, and lose the weight I gained but there is something more, something harder, something I’m not sure how to do and have never, in 5 decades of therapy, been able to accomplish. I am ready to re-enter my body, to love my body, and to realize that it is not just a vehicle to get around in, it is sacred, it is holy. It is perhaps the deepest thing that I have ever done because it’s not about the diet or any of the rest, it is learning to love and care for my body as a spiritual practice. And I have begun. Baby steps for sure, but I have begun. This, to me, is the beginning of exquisite self-care, treating our bodies as the holy vessels that they are, doing everything we can to make them healthy and strong, not so we look like super models, or measure up to whatever society’s current trend is in “the perfect body.” It is loving our bodies, and tenderly caring for them as we would somebody that we love, and if we don’t love ourselves, we really can’t deeply love another. Love comes from strength. Self-care is a tool for gaining strength in body, mind, and spirit. That is my goal and my aim.

Also, I will be spending a lot of time in the garden. Fresh air, sunshine, moving more, tending living things, glorying in all the flowers, the bees and butterflies and dragonflies, the birds and the wildlings in my woods all around, and most importantly letting Mother Earth heal me as she will. And then there are the physical things, and there are so many things we can do of course but because my feet are seriously compromised I must take tender care of them. Later today I am going to do a foot bath with essential oils and epsom salts, a really long soak, cut my toenails, massage my feet with coconut oil laced with lavender, and then put on soft cotton socks to protect my feet as the oil soaks in. Tend the body, tend the soul.

How do you practice self-care dear one? It’s so important. Would you join me in this journey? We’ve all been through so much for over a year with the pandemic in addition to, well, life! Isn’t it time?

If not, why not? If not now, when? I recently had to ask myself these questions, and I realized that there was no time like the present. And so I have begun.