Thursday, December 30, 2021
There are so many ways to be good to yourself. Attending to the needs of others could be distracting you from attending to your own needs. If your attention is on everything and everyone else, but never on being good to yourself, it can harm your sense of sustained wellness. You also can’t be good to everyone else, and be neglectful to yourself – expecting to be happy. It doesn’t work that way. If your emotional state is down, it could be a result of simply not being good to yourself.
The quality of your life increases by being good to yourself. But being good to yourself is not just having a good attitude about yourself, it’s actually doing something good for yourself. Make yourself sit still. Discipline yourself, lovingly with proper nutrition, going to bed at a decent hour, reading and listening to educational material, spending quiet time in prayer, and moving slowly, attentively, and calmly throughout your day. Being good to yourself is also listening – it’s listening to your body, listening to your soul and to what it needs, and it’s paying attention to what behaviors are not good for yourself. But ultimately it’s follow through, changing behaviors that are not good for you.
Being creative is also an important facet of being good to yourself. Be thoughtful about how you want to express yourself, too – that’s creativity but an important part of wellness. Give yourself a chance to get inspired – throw an elegant dinner party, write an old-fashioned letter, call a friend – but allow something good to emerge out of the space you give yourself, and allow yourself to create something good. Stop chasing happiness by rearranging all of your external affairs, and start creating more wellness from within, by being good to yourself. The quality of your life depends upon it.