balance your nervous system: practice self-care

Self-care gets a bad wrap these days. I think it is because it's become something we do when we’ve reached the end of the line. At that point, a bubble bath, a hike, or a pedicure seems like putting a bandaid on a gushing wound. Rather than wait until we are at our breaking point, what if we could think about self-care as a preventative practice? Why wait until we are reaching burnout to prioritize our health and wellness?

I want to reclaim self-care by thinking of wellness as a daily practice. When we can build an infrastructure for our lives, we will have support to sustain us and hold us up through difficult times. If we ignore our health and all of the warning signs of imbalance and wait until it is an emergency before we try to take care of ourselves, it won’t really work, which is why that massage we get once a year when we’ve hit our limit doesn’t magically make us feel any less burned out.

Here are a few things you can do everyday to practice self-care:

• Spritz rosewater on your face and in your eyes in the morning to refresh and clear the sleep from your eyes.

• Scrape your tongue with a metal tongue scraper and brush your teeth before you eat or drink anything in the morning.

• Clear your nasal passages with a neti pot and/or apply nasya oil to the inside of the nose.

• Massage your ears with oil. This is also a grounding practice and is helpful at night to promote sleep.

• Practice abhyanga (a full-body self-massage with oil).

• Develop a morning routine (e.g. meditate, exercise, journal, practice the sense care suggestions listed above).

• Develop a bedtime routine.

Follow along for the next few posts to learn more practical strategies you can use to balance your nervous system and heal from pain and click on the link in my bio and join the Path to Wellness.