Different from self-care, my concept of Personal Care Blueprints addresses a place we’ve all been. We’re thinking, ‘yup, I should totally do that thing/s to take care of myself.’
Maybe you had someone suggest a new routine, or to take a supplement, or adjust something in your lifestyle, but you’re just not compelled to follow through. If so, this blog post is for you!
Personal Care Blueprints are a way to transform self-care that is random, with a hodgepodge of advice from various places into a framework that speaks to you and has a structure that makes it realistic to care for yourself regularly.
This is the first of a 3-post blog series. I’ll link to the second post at the end!
Being Without Personal Care Blueprints
is Like Trying to Fish Without a Hook and Bait…
…because you can’t secure what will sustain you without essential pieces in place!
Many years ago, I remember standing in my acupuncturist’s office as she began telling me about exercises I could do to help maintain some of what she had just alleviated in my back. What happened next will illustrate why many self-care practices either peter out or never take root.
Immediately, my attention became sparse. She was explaining in detail. But I wasn’t gonna do it. And not because I didn’t believe in its efficacy. Not because I didn’t trust her.
I just couldn’t fathom when I would do this.
I was tired. I felt the burdens of life that many of us endure.
The hustle of making ends meet, keeping up with the hardships of loved ones, my to-do list made the idea of other stuff feel weighty. I would eventually figure out how to carve out what I needed so my capacity wasn’t buckling as much. But to get there, I first had to address an under-conciousness about my Personal Care needs that rendered me ill-equipped to take on more self-care.
Under-Conciousness & Self-Care
Unless you grew up around lots of people who taught you to notice how you were doing on a moment-to-moment basis, learned about capitalism and power structures’ interference with our well-being as humans, and were inspired to examine negative, internalized messages, you’re likely on a journey in learning essential things that impact your wellness.
I like to use the term under-consciousness because people have varying levels of awareness about what impacts both their well-being and what influences their capacity to address their needs. And we all can keep garnering layers of awareness that help us.
These are three things I find people tend to discover when they decide to do a deep dive into their own needs.
- It often takes more time to care for our body-minds than we give ourselves.
- We have Parts of ourselves that unintentionally hinder self-care activities and we have a need to understand them compassionately.
- One size does not fit all, and your body-mind is not a problem for having unique needs.
Personal Care Blueprints Offer a Foundation
At my acupuncturist’s office, I hadn’t yet garnered an inner drive and structure that connected me to the why, when, and how of my self-care practices.
- Having self-care practices that answer the ‘why’–your why, not someone else’s– is self-feeding. This is because your body-mind will say things like, ‘Yum, this feels good!’ and ‘Wow, life is easier with these things in place!’
- Defining your ‘when’ gives you prompts. You can think about it like the sun rising and setting, and how activities may be coordinated around the time of day. Or eating when you feel hungry.
- Cultivating your ‘how’ answers two things: what is realistic for your life, and what intentions will make the feel of your self-care the right fit for you. This may be something like, “My care activities come into play each time I feel anxiety because this is when I most need it, and my intention is to ground myself”. Or “I do a lot of my care activities after I put the kids to bed because that’s when I’m focused on me, and I do them with a similar nurturing energy I give to my kids.
We can leverage an inner drive for self-care activities to make Personal Care more intrinsic in our lives. Care activities can create rhythms in our days and weeks where we start to crave the practices that feel good. It’s then easier to protect their existence.
Hindsight and my duty as an herbalist to make herbalism tools accessible and practical for people taught me that self-care is more easily prioritized when we:
- Work with what we’re already doing (like bedtime routines, brushing our teeth, or annual PCP visits) and attach small things to them,
- Create momentum with small steps and actions that build on each other, and
- Design care practices in ways that are feasible for our unique lives and incorporate joy.
The small actions can feel miniscule and minimally consequential, yet the whole picture of them working in cohesion together through time is profound. An example of this would be getting movement/exercise into the week that then helps sleep quality, which in turn improves anxiety and makes someone’s social, personal, and work life feel more manageable.
And how self-care actions and intentions can function together is like a blueprint of a house. It’s a foundation. A map and a way of knowing you have structural integrity to your Personal Care practices.
But what should be in a Personal Care Blueprint? Read my post, Fishing as an Analogy for Self-Care to learn more (and learn how I transformed my own self-care from where I was at in the acupuncture office)!
