Self-Love vs Self-Care
We hear the words self-love and self-care thrown around a lot in the wellness community.
But what do they mean?
For us, when we talk about self-love, we’re encouraging you to take time for deep listening to your inner voice. We’ve found that our inner voice is frequently communicated through our bodies, so we start the self-love process with listening and coming back into our bodies. As we become aware of our body, we’re able to move our awareness into our heart, mind, and spirit to fully acknowledge what our inner self is saying.
We’re moving towards acceptance of all aspects of what our inner self is sharing—however uncomfortable it may be.
Self-love constantly evolves as we deepen our listening skills. We develop, slowly and with practice, a deep trust in the knowledge that each of us has the wisdom and ability to know what we need in every moment. That wisdom is the hardest thing to share with other people. Ultimately it’s called self-love because we need to find and discover it ourselves. No amount of books, podcasts, or blog posts can do the work for us.
So if that’s self-love, what is self-care? This beautiful poem, by Holly Holden, is a great illustration on the distinction between self-love and self-care:
Holly highlights the distinction between self-love and self-care. Self-care, as we define it, is all about action taken from our listening practice mentioned above. Do you need yoga, better food, movement, connection, or sleep? The answers to those questions, and the actions inspired from those answers, is self-care.
Self-love is the acceptance of ourselves exactly as we are. Can you love your full self, right now, no matter where you are, how your body looks, what your mind is thinking, and how your spirit feels?
Sometimes self-care is action and other times self-care asks us to pause. In this case, the action is inaction. It’s the acknowledgement that there is a need for rest. That's not easy. It's taken years of practice for us to be present in rest and inaction as much as when we’re checking off our to-do list.
So many of us are “fixers.” Have you ever said to yourself, when you’re stressed or overwhelmed, “Just give me a list of what to do to solve this! I will go to therapy, I will do support groups, I will take my supplements.” We just want to do that those actions to fix ourselves.
And those actions are absolutely OK, that's your internal system to take action to take care of yourself. But when you take it one step further to pause and ask, "Are supplements what I need right now? Is therapy the answer?" The answer you arrive at after a deep listening to yourself is self-love.
Self-love is that deep, deep listening, and creating a beautiful home within ourselves to come to understand the next right action.