Self-care: the passage way for living in connection with your body

When I first started writing this blog I titled it ‘self-care isn’t selfish’. But when I started writing about it, it was a bit of a duh, this is obvious moment. We’re now all the rave about self-care – which is by no means a bad thing. When people book in for a massage, bodywork or healing session with me at Burleigh Heads, they are, first and foremost, coming to support their self-care. Which is wonderful. It’s a foundation all of us need to have, to not be selfish - because when we are full and vital we naturally have lots of capacity to care for others.

But as I put my fingers on the keyboard to type out this blog, what came to me is how it’s still very much the common thing for us to not be in full connection with our body.

From my work in busy corporate life, this is so blatantly obvious. Under the pressures to get things done, we stiffen up, buckle down with our head down and bum up as they say, and by the end of the day we feel drained, achy and sore – and relentlessly we feel obliged to do the same thing the next day and the next day.  This is what I see in treatment, and it’s one of the most common reasons people seek relaxation massage – to relax and let go of the stiffness amassed from the pressures of life. 

When I’m in my corporate job I also have to watch I don’t get all hunched up when I’m buckling down churning out the work that needs to be done, often in compressed time. But the operative word there is that I watch when it happens. I’ve trained myself to observe my body tightening and in that moment of clocking it, more often than not, I tend to correct it.

I’m not perfect at it, but if I can do it I would venture to say, pretty much everyone else can! I say this because my nick-name at university was the girl that always had a paper due. I was Miss Stress-Head on legs, always wired and jumpy, totally disconnected from my body. I didn’t even know how tense I was because I was so disconnected.

It took a few things to happen in life for me personally, to realise that this way of running my body and myself was not at all supportive, and to cut a long story short – I worked on it.

I got the right support which included regular massage, healing and bodywork sessions, and it didn’t take too long before the reconnection with my body was front and centre. This changed how I was with work, how I was with pressure, how I was with everything. 

If you have a self-care regime in place, make sure that it’s supporting you to build that awareness muscle of staying connected with your body. It might seem a bit daunting at first, because when we do start to be more aware, we see more and we feel more – and it can be confronting. But this is a great and all-important step – because the moment we bring awareness to something it loosens its hold on us.

This is when self-care becomes a super powerful foundational tool.  Rather than it being a pampering go-to, it’s a self-healing go-to that becomes your barometer for how you move through life. And while it’s great and super important that we do seek out support such as massage, healing and bodywork treatments when we feel out of whack, it’s a whole other ball-game when we come to a treatment to consolidate our body awareness and go deeper with this.

Make self-care about caring for the whole of you and your body. It – our body – is our greatest, most loyal friend and companion, with us every nano-second of the night and day. It pays to pay attention to it, and it’s extraordinary what happens around us, in our lives, when we start to do so.

If you would like come and see us for a relaxation massage at Burleigh Heads, Gold Coast, to support you with your self-care and connection with your body, get in touch here.