Listen to the companion podcast episode HERE.
We all begin our self-care journey somewhere. It’s like a lot of things in life: you might not recognize where you began – what paradigm shift or pivotal moment brought you to the starting line. But years down the road you’ll look back and go “ahhhh, that was it. The beginning.”
That was certainly true for me. I didn’t even know I was on a self-care journey until I was five years in. Looking back I can clearly see each paradigm shift.
I’d love to take you along on my journey. I want to start by defining self-care. I’m passionate about making the term self-care accessible and applicable for every mama, everywhere. For the purposes of Soul Mind Body Selfcare, here’s our working definition:
Let’s start at the beginning…
Paradigm Shift #1: The Beginning
I didn’t know anything about self-care until after I had my first son in 2013. I had come off several stressful years in my late teens and early twenties, earning my bachelors, working two jobs, putting myself through an intense master program, getting married and having a baby in quick succession. It was a lot of stress (even though a lot of it was obviously good!) and not a lot of recovery time. I remember feeling like I was getting sick one fall while I was deep in the trenches of earning my masters. I told myself I didn’t have time and I just kept pushing forward. That’s just one example of many.
Add to that: I didn’t know how to care for myself even if I’d wanted to. Period. I didn’t know what that looked like. I treated my soul, mind and body like a machine: they did what I told it to and that meant I never really stopped.
Even after my son was born, I didn’t stop. I was up and around just a couple days after a very long, intense and traumatic birth. The midwife was horrified. I remember going to Target, my newborn in a moby wrap, way too soon because I just thought that’s what I was supposed to do. Get back to life, get back to normal.
Oh, man. I could write a book, just on that. How as a society we have lost the beautiful, vulnerable, necessary healing time that is postpartum. I had no clue. No clue what a healing postpartum season looked like. No clue that there was no getting back to my old “normal.” No clue that I had nothing to prove, no one to impress, by pushing myself too hard, too fast.
In fact, it wasn’t until I was around 15 months postpartum that everything began to catch up with me. I was still breastfeeding, had suffered an early miscarriage and my husband was away for six months going through training for a new job that would move us to the other side of the country.
It slowly starting dawning on me that: caring for my baby was only part of the motherhood equation; the other part was learning how to care for myself as well.
This was my first big, paradigm shift. The beginning of my self-care journey. I wasn’t well physically, emotionally or mentally. Our of sheer necessity, I found myself at a naturopath, trying to figure out why I felt like I was falling apart. During the two hour intake session, I ended up sharing things I’d never shared with anyone. I realized then I probably should have been in therapy long before. It was the beginning for me.
Paradigm Shift #2: A Slow Awakening
After seeing that first naturopath, I took baby steps towards addressing some physical issues I was experiencing. Skin issues, hair loss, inability to concentrate, wired but tired, prone to depression…so many things pointed to the fact my adrenals were shot. What I couldn’t know at the time was that this was only the tip of the iceberg.
I did start to feel some micro improvements, but I still didn’t have any clue what self-care was or the depth to which I needed it. I did what I could with the knowledge I had at the time. Which is all anyone can do, which is why this is called a journey.
Fast forward to six months postpartum with my daughter at the beginning of 2016. I had been through a super stressful year prior. We had moved across country for my husband’s new job, away from family. We had been through house hunting, found a place and had been working non-stop to fix it up. All while my husband worked 12 hour days and I managed the renovations. Add to that: pregnancy, wrangling a toddler, an emotionally intense delivery, extended family issues…
That time still blurs together. I was overwhelmed, stressed, not sleeping, and I still hadn’t learned what I needed to thrive, how to meet my own needs or how to ask for help. Before I had become pregnant with my daughter, I had been writing my heart out, building a blog, and an email list and I literally hit “delete” on all of it. Just like I had hit delete on all the parts of life that made me…well, me.
I hit rock bottom. I found myself at my parents for a few weeks and, for the first time, I was able to rest, to sit back while my children were cared for by others and actually see them, see myself, have space to think. That’s when I realized again that I needed help.
I found a naturopath in our new area and dove deeper into functional medicine. I still went into my first appointment with a shotgun approach, not really knowing what to ask for or what was priority. Once again I took baby steps towards caring for my physical body. I was diagnosed with candida and got on a regime to treat that. I did a Whole 30 and learned so much about eating whole foods, reading labels and how to cook a lot more things from scratch. Through that whole process I discovered my body [and my skin! It completely cleared up] did so much better without conventional dairy.
Addressing the physical was good. It brought me to a place where I could actually start thinking about what I required to thrive. How I should care for myself. What I needed most. It helped clear some of the brain fog and the nagging physical symptoms that distracted me from working on deeper issues.
The clearer mind brought me to counseling and starting to do the hard work of setting healthy boundaries. I am not by nature a strong willed person, but I became strong willed when it came to my own self-care. I learned the importance of saying no, of prioritizing myself and my family over what others thought or wanted. I realized I had to stop playing the martyr. No one could read my mind. I had to get to know myself better, understand what made me thrive, and learn to meet those needs and how to communicate them. I had to take responsibility for caring for myself.
I began practicing yoga and I fell in love with how it married movement and breath and brought restoration to not just my physical health, but my my mental health as well. I’ve been practicing yoga for almost five years now and nothing helps me feel more at home in my body or my mind faster.
Around the same time I started yoga, I embarked on a mission to not just organize our home, but completely declutter it. Get rid of everything that we didn’t love or use. Of course, my mission wasn’t quite that clear at first. I just knew that too much stuff overwhelmed me and I was tired of trying to organize it only to turn around and find it a jumbled mess two minutes later. So I started decluttering, space by space. Month by month. It’s been a journey in and of it’s self. A long learning process. Like peeling away the layers of an onion. But, truly, decluttering our home, our schedule, my expectations, my brain, everything has been a huge game changer in my self-care journey.
Paradigm Shift #3: Starting to Share My Journey
The spring my third baby was born was one of the most beautiful seasons of our life for so many reasons. We had just finished a long, arduous process of selling our house, moving to a new town, living in a rental paying double payments, battling lots of sickness (I was sick for two solid weeks before my son was born, coughing until my ribs ached, sleeping sitting straight up in bed at 9 months pregnant, ha).
My son was born, my first successful home waterbirth. It was quick and intense and beautiful. He was perfect and so was our postpartum experience thanks to all the many lessons I had learned and my mom and my husband caring for me, the kids and the house so seamlessly. I spent the first two weeks in bed with my baby and gave myself a full 12 weeks before I started any exercise beyond walking. I let my body heal and didn’t try to rush. It felt so freeing. We finally sold our house and found a new house. The cherry on top was that the baby was our best sleeper yet. It all felt like such a gift.
When my third was about nine months old, I started intentionally sharing my self-care journey on Instagram. The more I shared, the more I heard from other mamas how desperately they craved self-care but didn’t know what it looked like or how to implement it. So, I kept sharing everything I had learned and was learning and one day Soul Mind Body Selfcare was born. A few months later I started this blog so I could have a place to write that gave me more space than an Instagram caption. I’ve slowly, steadily grown my mama tribe and hope to continue growing.
Paradigm Shift #4: Self-Care Isn’t Just the Feel Good Stuff
When my third baby was about a year old, I found a local functional medicine doctor to get a proactive, head start on caring for myself postpartum. This time when I went in for my first appointment, I didn’t shotgun; I knew the questions I wanted to ask, the tests I wanted done, and where exactly I wanted to prioritize.
A series of comprehensive tests revealed/confirmed I had borderline Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, multiple food sensitivities, leaky gut and two different gut infections. I went on a strict elimination diet for two months, cutting out several reactive foods including coffee, alcohol, eggs, yeast and gluten. I followed several different protocols to heal my leaky gut, detox my liver, support my adrenals and get rid of my gut infections. In order to do the protocols for the gut infections, I needed to wean my third baby at 16 months. Which isn’t early by any means, but he could have kept going and it made me sad not to be able to nurse him for as long as he wanted.
But sometimes self-care looks like sacrifice. During the fall and winter of 2019 I really ramped up my self-care on all the levels. I started meditating, dry brushing, visiting the sauna, using a castor oil pack, utilizing adaptogens, practicing moon cycling, getting massage, taking regular detox baths. You name it, I was doing it. We started trying for another baby and I wanted to be as healthy and strong as possible.
Of course, in January I (along with all the family) got the horrible flu that was going around. It set me way back. I didn’t feel like myself for weeks and was still dealing with lung congestion, low energy and relapses a month later. A month after that I experienced hair loss due to the stress of the sickness. Which is just amazing…I don’t even want to know what it would have done to my body if I hadn’t already been so focused on my health and self-care on every level.
A few weeks after that, in mid-March of 2020, we found out I was expecting. Not exactly how I’d hoped to step into a new pregnancy. And it so happened to be the same week of the full moon, day light savings and when all of the Covid-19 stuff hit the fan. It was an intense time on a spiritual, emotional and mental level…let alone on the physical level.
All the lessons I had learned over the previous 8 years came full circle. It felt a little like ground zero once again. Where the rubber meets the road. Almost like a new beginning of some sort. I’m still navigating it. Because this is a journey. There’s no finish line in this life and that’s okay. The beauty and growth and transformation is in the process.
Don’t forget that, mama.
Listen to the companion podcast episode HERE.
To recap, here are four big lessons I’ve learned so far on my self-care journey:
Big Lesson #1:
Addressing the physical is so necessary and might need to happen first before you can think about anything else. Healing physically will bring you to a place where you can actually start thinking about healing emotionally and mentally and deciding exactly what you require to thrive.
Big Lesson #2:
Setting boundaries is key. You have to learn to say no. You have to learn to make yourself and your immediate family priority over anything and everyone else.
Big Lesson #3:
On that note: stop playing the martyr. No one can read your mind. No one is going to magically meet your needs without you asking. Ultimately you have to take responsibility for caring for yourself. Determine what you need to thrive and then meet your needs or communicate them clearly to those who can.
Big Lesson #4:
One step at a time. One day at a time. Nothing worthwhile happens over night. It’s called a journey for a reason. There’s no medal for the first person across the finish line because there is no finish line. At least not in this world. What matters is that you are learning and growing and moving forward one step at a time.
Listen to the companion podcast episode HERE.
Have any questions for me? Leave them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer! You’ve got this, mama. Never fear! One breath, one step, one day at a time.
For more self-care goodness, come join me on Instagram. And if you haven’t joined my email list yet, that’s a great place to find more of the same. Check out the side bar (or scroll all the way down if you’re on mobile) to view all the freebies I’ve created just with you in mind. I hope you find something helpful.
Let’s care for ourselves,
Hannah