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Conditions.  We’ve all had that at some point.

I would be so much happier if I lost twenty pounds.

I could be happier if my house was completely organized and running like a well-oiled machine.

I can finally relax when my kids are married and having their own children and I don’t have to worry about them as much anymore.

Maybe we even still have them.  And while we think conditions themselves are helpful, that they will motivate us to do things differently, they actually are limiting, tend to make us small rather than expand.  Because when we talk to ourselves about our conditions, we talk to ourselves in a shaming, nagging, and/or belittling voice.  It is not that we shouldn’t try to improve our lives in some way; it is not that we just need to let our aspirations go; the question really is where is this aspiration coming from, what is the truth in it, and, given those things, what are we meant to do with them.

Tired of living in a world of shaming conditions?  Today we’re looking at how to shift that mindset.

Identify the voice.  Whose behind the voice you hear in your head telling you to be thinner, more organized, a better cook, make more money, and more?  Too often the conditions we place on ourselves are not even our conditions.  They are someone else’s, and we consciously or unconsciously have bought the message.  What are the conditions you live by and what are their origin stories?  Before you can get a handle on your conditional living, you really have to know where it came from.    

Get clear.  Now, that you know the origin story to your conditions (you feel like you need to earn more money because your sister does; you feel like you need to be a more creative mom always leading a family craft activity because your sister-in-law does, etc.), it is time to be really honest with yourself.  Does the thing itself matter to you (making more money, creating crafts with your child) or does other people’s perception or your perception of the thing matter?  Ask yourself for each condition what it is you really want.  Maybe you don’t want to lose time in the morning looking for your keys and that is why you feel like your entire house needs a dramatic organizational overhaul.  Maybe you want to be more patient with your child and doing a craft project daily symbolizes the ultimate in patience in you.  Maybe making more money makes you think that you will have less to worry about because all of your worries right now feel resolvable with some cash.  Get honest and really claim what it is you want.     

Identify what is controllable.  Now that you know what you really want, it is time to figure out what you want to do about it.   You really want to not feel frazzled in the morning and that is why you have been telling yourself for years that you would be so much happier if your entire house was very well organized.  But very well organized in your mind means no junk drawer, rainbow spectrum organized closets that hold only clothes that fit you right now and that have coordinating items already identified, a well stocked pantry that leaves you never lacking an ingredient, etc.  It would be easy for those standards to feel daunting from the start and so you never get your house into magazine feature shape.  Let go of those magazine standards and get specific.  What can you do to feel less frazzled in the morning?  Deep down inside you know the answer.  You just need to ask yourself the question and get quiet enough to hear the answer.  It could be as simple as “I want to not run around like a wild woman each morning gathering what I need for the day and manically searching for my keys.” Focus on solutions that will actually make that situation easier rather than the big blanket statement, “I need my whole house to be perfectly organized.”  Keys get dropped into the same beautiful bowl each night by the door you exit in the morning.  You pack your bag nightly for the next day’s meetings so that is one less thing we have to stress over in the morning.  You wake up 15 minutes earlier each day so you can linger over your morning beverage.  Often, much smaller solutions can satisfy us but we don’t implement those because they seem so petty compared to our big picture, epic and thus daunting solution.

Every time you find yourself with some epic, absolute thinking, walk yourself through these steps as a starter’s guide in moving yourself from limiting conditions to productive proactivity.  It’s not that we shouldn’t aspire to improve our lives, it is that when we believe sweeping generalizations based on messages we have been sold about perfection, we actually keep our lives smaller and less functional that we deserve to be living.                     

Your infant isn’t sleeping so you aren’t sleeping.

One of your parents has just suffered a significant health crisis.

Your relationship is on the rocks.

Your job situation is tough-and-go.

An unexpected emergency means the bills are getting increasingly hard to pay.

Sometimes, life just bites.  When that happens, we often switch into overdrive, doing as much as we can to try to keep everything from crashing down around us.   We give and give and give, perhaps until we are just on the cusp of giving out because we think all of the motions will make a difference, that they will keep the walls from crashing down.  If we stop our motion, there is a greater chance that the walls will come down, we think.  So we forego other things we would be doing to give these things the attention they need, and, not surprisingly, some of the things we come to forego are related to our self-care.  The things we do to keep ourselves running well feel expendable at urgent times.  But, then, days, weeks, or months later, we realize we never got back to our self-care and not only are we navigating a recovery from the situation itself, we don’t feel all that well—emotionally, physically, mentally, and/or spiritually—either and now have a recovery to navigate there, too.  The hurdle has become even bigger to surmount.  Rather than making room in life, the personal neglect has grown to compromise other things.  We simultaneously think, “I should have taken better care of myself” while wondering “how in the world could I have done that?“

Because one of the things I try to do when things hit the fan is not to throw every single self-care practice to the wind, too, I was inspired to share some thoughts on that process when recently asked to do a how to work self-care into life when it sucks post.  So, here we go…

Know what you need.  If we aren’t taking care of ourselves BEFORE crisis hits, it is going to be especially hard to take care of ourselves once a crisis hits.  So even if life is totally fine right now (or especially if it is fine right now), there is something you can be doing to prepare for self-care in crisis and that is knowing what you need.  Do you have a wellness prescription (a wellness prescription helps you identify what you need to run well in all capacities)?  If not, write one and begin putting it into place, knowing what you need will help you consider your own self-care so that you have the stamina to weather the crisis when life rains down on you.

Redirect some of your attention to your own care.  A lot of times we think that self-care is a bonus if we have the time.  When we’re laid out or exhausted, we realize that’s not the case. Your time to care for yourself may be more limited when life is hard but you still really need to do it.  When you make that list of things to do each day during this time, make sure that you add two to three things to the list from that wellness prescription.  Even if you have to give yourself a little less self-care than you would normally like, less is better than nothing so follow through on your commitment to your own care and feeding by completing the couple things on your list.

Ask this critical questions: what do I need right now more than anything else?  This is one of my all time favorite self-care questions.  I ask it a lot of myself and of others.  It’s the kind of question that originally sounds very daunting but usually elicits an incredibly clear answer because we know ourselves well and we really do know what we need.  And what we need right now more than anything else just may not be on our wellness prescription.  So whatever answer comes to you when you ask this question, make a point to get it answered that day (even if the answer is massage and you have to make the appointment for two days out, going through the motions of meeting that need when the answer comes to you powerfully shows you that you can take care of you).  In fact, don’t just ask yourself this question once.  Ask yourself this question regularly—I actually love the idea of asking yourself this question everyday that you are in crisis mode.  It roots you back into yourself and gives your clarity and power.           

Think small.  There aren’t a lot of big windows of time in our days, and there are even less of them when life gets hard.  That said, there are some small windows that we probably don’t use in the best ways.  Try to dedicate some of those small windows of time for greater self-care.  One minute of a natural five minute break at work can be dedicated to stretching.  Ice or heat a tender spot on your body while watching television.  A few minutes of your commute can be used for meditation, prayer, or to call someone you have wanted to connect to on the phone.  How can you use small pockets of time to garner a greater sense of fulfillment?

Go small.  When life is tough, the last thing we need to be doing is running all over the place meeting all sorts of commitments that don’t really matter that much to us when this immediate urgent thing is in front of us. Go small with your commitments—even if you have to go back and decline an invitation- and give yourself some breathing room.

Call in reinforcements.  See your doctor, therapist, or somebody who is firmly rooted in your corner.  If you are struggling with the physical manifestations of stress or anxiety, a doctor or therapist can help.  A conversation with a friend might even help.  And so can things like meditation and yoga.   Don’t be afraid to put our your own SOS to help keep yourself running in the midst of what is going on.  You might find support groups, a friend willing to bring by a meal or take your child for a couple hours, or other unforeseen assistance.  Don’t be afraid to put it out there that you are struggling; that candor often yields more resources or suppor than you could ever imagine.

How do you work in self-care when life kinda sucks?      

♦

I have talked about tough patches before– one that might resonate is Roadmap to Resilience .

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.  I’d have to be a completely different size before I can take such a nice vacation,” a friend said when a girls’ Caribbean vacation was suggested.

“I am thirty-five years old, and I thought my life was going to have started by now,” lamented a colleague who meant “married and parenting” by her use of the word started.

And as they uttered these words, the people around them nodded, completely supporting these ideas that you have to be a certain size to go to the beach, that you have to marry young and be a parent for your life to have worth and meaning.

Seem familiar?  Probably so.

Too many of us do it.  Choose an arbitrary target like weight or graduation or marriage status as the crucible that will finally depict our arrival and right to happiness.

“If only, I could lose twenty pounds, then I would be happy and could…”

Fill in the blank here with all sorts of things including scuba dive, sing karaoke, take a cruise, ask him or her out on a date, wear shorts or a sleeveless shirt, move to Denver, go to my high school reunion, try out for a play, interview for that job, go to the doctor, or any of a number activities that so many of us readily avoid because we believe that our body has to be different in order to do them.

“If only, I were married, then…”

And, again, fill in the blank here with all sorts of things like I could buy a house or a car, plan for retirement, have nice jewelry, go to that gourmet restaurant, spend a night at the Ritz-Carlton, become a parent, go to Tuscany, buy a Dyson vacuum cleaner, get life insurance, or start a business.

On the surface, these might seem like completely reasonable conclusions.  In fact, it might even seem good to have these types of expectations for oneself.

Except that pinning so much of one’s worth on those expectations isn’t really motivating.  It creates outsized pressure, and pressure, ironically, isn’t inspiring.  Conditions shut us down.  They create walls that are insurmountable unless we brace ourselves on the only thing we have decided breaks them down.  We lose sight of the fact that we can break down walls with our very actions; we buy into rules that disallow us.

Linking our happiness and our ability to full experience life to whether we’ve reached benchmarks of our or society’s choosing means we both delay happiness and the thrill of experiencing life.

How are you avoiding life because you are waiting for some “goal” to be achieved?  What have you denied yourself on the grounds that you don’t deserve it until x or y or z happens?  Are you finally willing to step away from those rules and embrace life?

Because the truth is that magic doesn’t have to wait until we are married or weightless or degreed to happen. Magic happens when we let it, when we invite it to happen, when our heart is open to it, when we let the conditions go.  We are meant to enjoy the daily-ness of our existence, to root ourselves in this eternal truth.  It is not the accolades or ceremonies that define our life and give it all of its value.  The journey itself is the magic of our existence.  The journey is the goal.

 ♥

Have you been living with conditions?  Next Monday’s post will be all about examining our conditions and, more importantly, thinking through how to push past them.  Have you given yourself rules?  What are they?  Why do those rules/expectations seem important?  What questions do you have about moving past the conditions?  Let’s partner together in getting past our conditions!