SO MANY BOOKS about Health and Self-Care! How do I CHOOSE??! Well, these are MY PICKS 🙂
Not that any of them are good starting places, so don’t jump to buy any. Instead I share them here to present good principles of self-care that will be good places for you to start your practice. I will assume that you have come to this blog with an interest in your personal health and I wish to capture that curiosity with these carefully selected concepts and programs that I have experience with and can share with confidence.
To get started, i will set the stage with some basics of health. Understanding these basics will help all this make more sense —
1) In everyone there exists a NATURAL HEALING POWER, an innate ability to cure one-self, centered in our body’s normal physiology. This is nothing that you need to know, your body already knows, and it operates continuously, without interruption. Think of a small cut and the healing your body does to repair it.
2) The SOURCE OF ILLNESS is an unbalanced condition in one’s life, creating susceptibility to disease. This general statement may seem over-simplified, yet instead consider it useful motivation, as this balance facilitates our body’s natural healing processes.
3) LIFE is filled with UNCERTAINTY. Our response to this is key to our health: do we obtain a more balanced or unbalanced state? Uncertainty can be uncomfortable and or overwhelming, but it does not have to be disruptive. The regular practice of beneficial routines can build resiliency into the framework of our lives, which we can maintain simply by doing the best we can in any given moment.
4) Our physiology is made of individual cells, and each cell has a NATURAL AFFINITY FOR HEALTH, in every moment, sleep or awake. We may use our conscious mind to identify and navigate obstacles to this, mitigating their effects, and allowing our physiology to perform its natural function more effectively.
5) The more we RELAX, the more this goal is accomplished. Tension inhibits our body’s ability to attend to healing.
As simplified as all this may first appear, the strength here is that the practices can then also be simple. Simple to understand and easy to apply, and the cumulative power over the long term will be very significant, so much so that you will soon learn the value of holding this work at a high priority in your health care program.
Having some combination of these skills as a daily practice is what gives this its power. A one-time session is not sufficient.
Furthermore, a learning comes through regular practice. This learning is a mind-body connection that soon is easily seen to be the useful act of stewardship, with a mutually beneficial result. This will soon develop in to a call-response of listening to our internal needs and noticing the changes. This leads to the balanced condition mentioned above in #2 & #3. And it becomes self-fulfilling health as a result.
Our best chance at success comes from understanding that SELF-CARE is something we do with, and to, ourselves. Something we do on a regular basis, that we have a routine of, and best to have this routine be daily, and something we are always thinking about, in a good way! Also, a good program is one we enjoy doing, that we feel the benefits from, that we feel encouragement about, that brings a smile to ourselves as we look in the mirror.
Starting off easy, this first book presents an idea we all can likely relate to. It presents the value of exercise and is based on accepted medical practices here in the West —
OUTLIVE —Dr. Peter Attia (2023)
You can look back two years ago in my blogs and see a review I wrote of this book so I won’t repeat that here. In summary, he presents ways we can prepare for a healthy future by doing things now to present our most healthy self to our later years: The Long Term View of life, an act of forward-thinking, doing work now to create a better future. I consider this the foundation for an effective self-care program. — doing little things often to prevent big problems later.
I begin with this book as an example of what we ALL can do, at ANY age, to FEEL GOOD NOW. We can exercise. Again I refer to the prior blog for details of the benefits of exercise. Here is an encouraging quote from OUTLIVE:
“More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life.”
I’m often using my own body as my “test vehicle” and here I share my experiences for your knowledge base. I was never much into sports, I didn’t enjoy the competition or the work required, and I never felt very good at it. I often chose alternatives such as an art project when a choice was required. In college I discovered my huge draw toward big adventure and have since been rock climbing my entire life now. Through this I’ve always assumed I got enough exercise. Then I read Peter’s book and was taken in by his powerful arguments for exercise — the cardio part and the resistance training part — and now I am at the gym three times a week and loving it. My body feels stronger, I look muscular, and my sports interest has expanded. And according to what Dr. Attia writes, my later years will be much better, and indeed, this is my real draw to putting this work in now, and I wish to convince you of the same.
Exercise as a self-care practice is resistance training ( weights at the gym ), and cardio ( classes in spin/bicycling, dance, aerobics; and treadmill or rowing ), all around fitness classes, and seniors fitness classes. All that these classes require is your attendance. No trainers needed. Find a gym you like, and explore all the classes offered. There are classes of all levels. You can find the perfect “start place” available no matter where you are in your health. Ask them, tell them your experience level, it is their business to match you to a program. Trainers can be employed of course, yet don’t feel it necessary at the beginners’ level. I love having a class written on my calendar, because it GET’S ME THERE, otherwise I seem to find endless excuses if left to my own!
Now I wish to expand on self-care with several ideas and concepts that will make the work much more effective. Really, these are the gems of this blog.
Let’s begin with some mind concepts and images. Some perhaps new and different paradigms may be before you now, so open the mind to absorb and consider, understanding that the result promises to be very rewarding while the effort required is very small. Often I have resistance to new practices, needing time to adjust my thinking, and this may be true for many of you as well. I ask that you embrace the REGULAR PRACTICE of this with the satisfaction that so little is required and so much will be gained with regular practice (something as close to a daily practice as you can adjust to).
MERIDIAN EXERCISES — Shizuto Masunaga (1997)
Using this favorite book of mine as example, we can play with his concept of knowing our medicine, knowing our physiology, knowing our bodies well enough in an experiential way, that we develop a give-n-take that becomes our mutual guide to good health, and makes sustaining such good health really possible, . Early in this book, he presents the idea of the medicine master:
IO-KAI
‘Io’, The MASTER OF MEDICINE and ‘Kai’, practicing skill
“The MASTER OF MEDICINE knows the true nature of diseases. He knows how diseases come to be and he knows how to prevent them. He knows how to deal with illness and he is able to keep people from becoming ill. Thereby having both a Cure and a way to PREVENT” — from Meridian Exercises by Shisuto Masunaga (1997)
Can WE be such a “Master” ourselves? Where can we get such knowledge? We can, and we can get it from experience. Life is experience in itself. Let’s take it in. Learn from it. Use it to our benefit.
Of priority in the act of Self-Care is working with the body’s natural health function, making its work easier, by removing parts of life that are distractions or obstacles from this norm. Here are a couple key points:
HOW TO RELAX — An important obstacle to the body’s healing work is tension in our bodies, so it’s clear that knowing how to relax is key. A very interesting thing about relaxation is that once we are “there”, really there, completely relaxed, we know deep inside that we can always go more. So saying we are relaxed is sort of a joke. And seeking to relax can also be at times surprisingly elusive or simply something we have forgotten how to do. So the act of relaxing is sort of a practice and sort of an art.
OUR REACTIVE WORLD — We can manage our selves through knowing ourselves. Understanding hormone excretion in our bodies, and their connection to our thoughts and our breath, is useful since we can create mental images and also actively control this physiology to facilitate relaxation. Our environmental setting has an obvious effect on this work since we feel certain ways in certain environments. We get to the real power of all this when we can adjust our hormone response withOUT having to change our environment. Down-regulating is a term for this practiced intentional hormone control. We get triggered to anger and then we breath it back down, or sometimes a cold shower is more like it!
DAILY PREPARATORY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES TO READY THE BODY FOR HEALTHY EXERCISES —Imagery can hugely augment our body’s natural physiology. Masunaga’s book presents exercise stretches that work along “tension lines” and with the pictorial images in this book we can use our mind to feel release along these lines. Our imagining of the tension line, and feeling the release along this line, facilitate and expand the release further. Reaching for a feeling of more release is like putting happy faces on all our cells :).
SELF-CARE EXERCISE IDEAS — So many options here! Consider any and all of these that feel right to you, and if unfamiliar then give new things a go, always listening to what feels right to you. Be mindful of how you feel with new experiences and go slow at the beginning to avoid any discomforts. A fun story is my recent foray in to PILATES! I always thought I was doing balanced muscle tone work until just a few months ago when I gave pilates a try. In it I found a whole new way to work my body and I am finding it fabulous! Simply a story of how having an open mind, at whatever age, for new ideas is helpful.
SELF-CARE TECHNIQUES FOR ILLNESSES WE GET/HAVE — Times will come when we do have some illness, a common cold, an injury, either minor or major. Things happen. A benefit of being an experienced Self-Care artist, is the development of a feeling base from which you will understand the language of, and can intelligently work with, the minor illnesses that can come our way. Yet I also ask you to notice that one can develop the understanding and the appreciation that a healthy body has a well prepared immune system and therefore illnesses are fewer and less severe.
EARLY DISCOVERY of any imbalance or illness in the body makes for smaller needed degrees of repair. What we can personally do to care for this illness may seem small, yet small changes can work big results when begun early.
DAILY MORNING STRETCH is one the most valuable self-care actions available to us. Why I leave this to the end, I don’t know. I will write my next blog all about the power of stretch. I enjoy my morning stretch more than anything else here. All is done with an eye toward my future and I receive the benefits of FEELING MORE FIT every day. My back is not stiff. My legs feel strong. My feet are free of pain. I sleep well.
In this blog, I have presented many things in a less-than detailed way for the interests of this being an easy read for you. And you may have questions or you may wish more details or wish to explore further with curiosity any of these ideas and practices. So, I ask that you please reach out anytime about anything, and I will be happy to entertain any of them, or direct you to places of help. Specifically, I can give practices tailored to your place in a self-care program, for both advanced or just beginning, and can give comments to any practices you have that you wish to enhance or refine. This work is my business for the past thirty years and I have become very good at doing this. These are the things I am very experienced at. Cheers and Happy Self-Care!
BE SAFE OUT THERE. BE GOOD. DO WELL. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF FIRST. AND BLESS YOU ALL!