We hear a lot about self-care these days. Usually it comes with good advice: get enough sleep, eat well, exercise, meditate, set boundaries, take some time for yourself. All worthwhile, of course, but lately I’ve been wondering about self-care in a slightly different way.
What if caring for ourselves is also about how we keep ourselves company?
There’s something about that phrase that stays with me. After all, we spend our entire lives with ourselves. We wake up with ourselves in the morning and carry ourselves through ordinary days as well as difficult ones. We know the disappointments that no one else quite understands, the worries we don’t always talk about, and the small pleasures that may not mean much to anyone but us.
And yet I wonder how often we stop to consider the kind of company we are keeping with ourselves.
Do we listen to ourselves with some interest and curiosity? Do we notice when we’re tired or lonely or worried, or when something inside us is quietly saying, “This doesn’t feel right?” Can we offer ourselves encouragement when we’re discouraged, enjoy our own company when life is going well, and stay close to ourselves when it isn’t?
None of this means we should become self-sufficient. Quite the opposite. We humans need one another. We need people who know us, love us, make us laugh, listen to our stories and sometimes simply sit beside us when there isn’t much to say.
But there are also parts of our lives that no one else can completely enter. There are moments when another person can love us deeply and still not quite know what it feels like to be us.
And there we are, keeping ourselves company.
I’ve begun to wonder whether learning to stay connected to ourselves—with a little more acceptance, compassion and trust—might be one of the quieter forms of self-care.
Not as another self-improvement project or another thing we’re supposed to get right. I’m thinking about something much simpler: learning to notice ourselves, listen to ourselves, and perhaps become a little more interested in the person we’ve been traveling through life with all along.
What would it mean to become a good companion to ourselves?
That’s what I’d like to explore in our next Journaling Circle. Come spend a little time with yourself and join our September Journaling Circle right here on Breathing Spaces.
— Cindy Gum
