Upstream Self-Care

Much of our self-care is just symptom management. 

Managing symptoms is really important! It calms the nervous system, and our nervous system is often over-worked.

However, our nervous system is NOT overworked by “life.” Our nervous system is overworked by our own unhealthy inner relationships with our mind, heart, and bodies. 

This is a really simple concept to understand, yet it can be extraordinarily challenging to experience and know: our problems aren’t “out there,” they’re in here. The outside world - how it occurs to us - is a reflection of our inner world.

Take beauty, for instance. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The way I experience it, actually, is that beauty is in the mind of the beholder - much of what the eye sees is what the mind has told it to look for.

One of my daily self-creation declarations is my access to a greater range of beauty than my default seeing provides:

"I am that this moment is perfect - I see beauty in everything, and I create incredible value from all life's experiences."

A client was recently struggling with his over-analyzing mind. The way he saw it, if he could only feel less fear and anxiety, then his mind would calm down. 

That’s what I call “downstream self-care,” or simply dealing with symptoms. He could calm his fear and that would likely calm his mind for the time-being, but it wouldn’t address the source of the inner pain of his thinking. 

Self-care for symptoms is like getting a really good water filter to clean the pollutants out of the water before we drink it. It works, but it doesn’t deal with the pollution at its source.

Instead of even talking about his fear and anxiety as an access to quelling the symptom of an over-analyzing mind, I instead inquired into the nature of his mind itself - in his experience.

Inherent in his wanting to quiet his over-analyzing mind was judgment - he does not like that over-analyzing mind! So we navigated that experience and he uncovered what I wish for all of us to uncover: ALL parts of us are for us, and seeing that creates space for a whole new and empowered experience of each of our parts.

As he healed his relationship with his mind, he actually healed much of the pain of his fear and anxiety too.

There are a few key techniques I use to explore the terrain upstream. I’ve written about them before, and I could write about them again, but it would only be a map.

We can take courses and read books (and blogs!), but a culture focused on self-care for symptoms will only ever see "problems" that need fixing and solving.

True healing and integration doesn’t come from reading a map, it comes from walking the landscape itself.

Walking upstream is an inner process. What I do as a life- and soul-coach is create space for people to navigate that inner landscape safely and with a compass: 

The upstream-pointing compass is pointing to the same place for all of us: innate peace, beauty, wholeness, and holiness. That’s the true Source of our existence, and somewhere between that source and our current experience of life, the waters get a little murky.

So while self-care for symptoms is helpful, care for the True Self is our spiritual curriculum and an entirely different experience.

Much Love. ❤️