Inner Medicine for Self Care

As a graduate student in Mental Health, my instructors are always asking the group "What are you doing for self-care?" Most would agree that a burnt out person has little to offer others. They might still be able to go through the motions of attending to responsibilities, but there is an imbalance that continues to build up in their system and that affects everything a person does. This is why the instructors try to instill self-care into our training. Everyone experiences the feeling of "being spent," from time to time, and some chronically live at a "breaking point." What is the internal medicine we can access to bring us back from the edges of health?

At these junctures of overwhelm, the idea of sitting still and breathing can seem impossible. We can be very critical of ourselves when what we know is so disconnected from what we do.

Maybe there's no time for you. But perhaps you do have time to slip into habitual distractions masquerading as self care like "shop therapy", numbing out to Netflix, or doom scrolling social media..fill in the blank..These only work for a short time and then we're back to where we started, probably even more off track. Is there something that comes in bottle or from a self help help guru that we've been missing all along? If only I could just...but ..it's not happening right now.

Again we visit the topic of disconnect and the need to reclaim our capacity to regulate.

As we develop a greater and greater capacity for self awareness through attention and great caretaking, the presence of the medicine of activated and fragmented moments can be recognized. In what way is the fragmentation showing up? Where does it want to connect back to? How can the system regulate itself back to running on clean energy? This longing to return to unity is one manifestation of the dance of Shiva and Shakti, the many fluctuations in the path to reunion of primordial duality.

When these patterns are activated, a person first finds a way to put the breaks on. Slowing down and becoming curious of the spaces within the fragmentation. This behavior is just the opposite of what the stressed part of us wants to do. If the racing thoughts could be coaxed into settling by being witnessed and responded to as needed moment to moment the spaces within the fragmentation can be known. A person might glimpse some insight into what has slipped through the spaces and call back the power required to acknowledge who we really want to be. It is all there at the deeper vital roots of our tendencies. If there's one important message we can apply through yogic traditions, it's the we already contain what we need to be whole because in our true essence we are connected to everything.

In the next phase, the seeker on the medicine path can appreciate and restore the jagged edges. We become motivated to further explore the inner landscape of consciousness, cultural constructs, ancestral influences, personal mythologies, and all of the other important things that are the deeper lying tenants of true self care: powerful inner medicine for integration of all of the parts. Making maps and building bridges back into the forest of the heart to come to the source of the deepest medicine we are.