By Menksah Hezahadjed
Self-care has become a popular talking point on social media and in health care these days. However, I don’t think most institutions recognize all aspects of the self, in particular, the energetic and the spiritual aspects.
There was a time in my life when I realized the importance of taking care of myself. I thought it was a simple thing. However, I did not realize that there are layers to taking care of oneself. Like most of us, I was going about my usual life: I had a job, started a family connected with my children, extended family, and friends, and just tried to keep up with the typical demands of modern life — political issues, religion, and education. I tried to eat clean and reduce my consumption of red meat, exercise, and manage my stress levels. I would read a book once in a while. I thought I had it figured out.
Then, one day out of the blue, I got sick; I was forced to start paying closer attention to myself. But the “self” was an aspect that I didn’t even consider. I can see now that there was a sequence of events playing out that I was not aware of in terms of health and the lifestyle I was living. When I started to recover from my illness, one of the first things that I noticed was that I didn’t know much about myself or my family history. I knew a little about my father and his father, and mother. I knew even less about my mother and her mother, and father. I have asked questions before but got few answers and was often told to stay out of the past. I accepted this as the normal way we go about things in this society. It is interesting that I was looking for answers everywhere when it was so close, it was inside of me — it’s undeniably what I am and what I am made of. This modern society has done a great job of masking itself as having the answers, but now I see this is just a marketplace. Marketplace in the sense of a place where everything is bought and sold at a price, basically for the consumer, the cost becomes losing the values essential for survival.
See, what I didn’t recognize is that there is a big spiritual aspect that I just didn’t think about. My thinking was that religion was a way to understand the spiritual. I just thought that spirituality is for other people and not for me. As I am coming to understand, the spiritual aspect is one of the biggest factors that determine how well I take care of myself and my health in general. Everything has its roots in the immaterial, and oftentimes, health issues are no different.
Like the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are coming from, then you don’t know where you are going”. This holds true for the fact that all of the things that make me who I am, the aspects that I can see, and the aspects that I cannot see, as well. This fact that I come from a mother and a father, and they came from mothers and fathers, cannot be denied or underestimated.
My realization is that self-care has more to do with knowing where and who I come from and honoring those aspects of myself than I initially understood. My life started to reshape itself for the better as soon as I started to acknowledge, validate, and care for the unseen self.
