How Can You Remove the Blocks to Healthy Self Care ?

Healthy self care, or lack thereof,  is influenced by our past. Powerful messages in our unconscious drive many of our behaviors including how we care for ourselves.

We all know that our memories and unconscious beliefs travel with us through life. Some memories may be forgotten, others may haunt us. At times they may come crashing into our awareness like an uninvited guest! Or they can come drifting softly in to remind us of times spent in peace, beauty, joy and love.  And certain ones can emerge from the depths of our minds to instruct and inform us of unfinished business or teach us a valuable truth.

Our memories and unconscious beliefs affect how we care for ourselves so a bit of discovery is healthy and useful!

Questions to get a sense of how beliefs about healthy self care were formed.

How was I cared for as a young child?

How were my needs treated?

Was I invalidated, told (overtly or covertly) that my needs were unimportant?

Am I selfish to care for me?

Is it alright to receive—care, attention, support, nurture?

Healthy self care, beliefs and emotion

Emotional intelligence is a major factor in our health.

We all hold an emotional tone (some refer to this as a personal vibe) that is a product of our past experience and beliefs. This  emotional tone may not be in conscious awareness but it does affect every aspect of our lives including how much we are able to embrace healthy self-care.

We can learn how to shift this emotional tone through learning how to let all emotions move fluidly and easily through our system. Repression of emotions results in endless emotional loops that drive behavior from areas outside of our awareness.

Healthy self care: and Foundations of Emotional Intelligence
Working with the qualities of surrender and acceptance and learning to release regrets and judgments are some of the qualities/capabilities of emotional intelligence. Embodying those capacities helps to develop and maintain strong energy that promotes good health on all levels.

Embodying a feeling of surrender helps to free up deep feelings of struggle and conflict. It also helps to bring your heart into coherence through the generation of inner peace. We have spoken about coherence and its relationship to good mental, emotional and spiritual health in other blog posts.

Cultivating feelings of acceptance of the way things ARE, even as you hold the awareness that you wish for change, enables you to move beyond patterns of resistance and brings more peace to your heart.
We may not often think about emotional intelligence and its relationship to healthy  self care but it is a way to not only free ourselves from the past but also a means to create grater happiness, health and serenity.