Last month we looked at the physical and emotional aspects of self care. This month, let’s look at other self care considerations. Not only are your physical and emotional pieces important to you, but the mental and spiritual components of being human are equally significant.
Mental
Another self care consideration deals with your mental state. Setting goals, positive thoughts and clear thinking are important in order to achieve a higher state of being. These states include satisfaction, contentment, hopefulness, optimism, positive beliefs, enthusiasm, happiness, passion, joy, appreciation and love.
Setting Goals
Setting goals gives purpose. It’s a way to help you map your life and give direction. A good way to proceed is to set a goal with a specific intention and examine the outcome. The goal may be exactly what you want and need, it may be beyond your ability to fulfill, or it may be too simple and may not be truly helpful.
Realistically, when your thought process is transparent, the best results occur. That means each step of the way is clear, understood and doable. If that is not true, it’s best to rethink how you will proceed and revise the plan. Or you may realize upon looking at the revisions that they’re not falling into place the way you thought they would. You may even have to revise and map out your goal many times. At some point, you will have a definite plan that gives structure to your life,
Setting a goal and achieving it definitely takes clear thinking. In addition, setting a goal and understanding it is not within your reach is also clear thinking. It’s not important to always achieve your goal. But it is important to determine what opportunities and lessons come out of setting and attempting to implement the goal. How does this process positively contribute to your life?
Clear Thinking
Another self care consideration has to do with clear thinking. Setting goals for yourself contributes to clear thinking and vice versa. If you have specific goals in mind, your thought processes revolve around it. Your input is to gather all the information you need to reach your goal as best you can. This may involve research online, reading, speaking to knowledgeable people, and sometimes thinking out of the box. Your output is to see all the possibilities of how that which you’ve gathered can be put together to reach your goal.
Clear thinking is also about keeping an open mind. It’s about being methodical. Sifting and sorting through a lot of information can be overwhelming, so having a plan to reach your goal gives you the structure upon which you can build. For example, enumerating the steps you will take helps you understand how you will proceed. Then you hopefully will see more clearly what you need, as well as what information is superfluous.
All goals are not complicated, but regardless of the complexity of your goal, it matters how you think about it. When your thinking is clear, it helps you make good decisions. Good decisions contribute to feelings of confidence and satisfaction, which then encourage you to continue making other clear, good decisions.
Positive Thoughts
It isn’t possible to have positive thoughts one hundred percent of the time. There are times and situations which produce unhappy, angry, mean, discouraged, disgruntled, or jealous thoughts. However, positive thoughts help you live a more satisfying life. When you look at any situation to find the good in it, you grow. You are learning how to live life more fully. Perhaps you may be learning tolerance, or patience. It’s possible over time, you may also be learning to look at other perspectives beside your own.
The more insight you acquire, the more positive you can be because you realize everyone is doing the best they can, including you. Every person is growing at their own rate during their life. That pace may be faster or slower than yours, but when you accept it for what it is, you find your thought processes become more tolerant and positive. You have a choice, so do you choose to be happy or unhappy?
Spiritual
Another self care consideration is your spirituality, or lack of it. Spirituality means different things to different people. Some people are religious, belonging to a specific practice. Others find their spirituality in nature, or in how they relate to the world outside of them. Regardless, spirituality is a positive influence. It is a belief in something benevolent that is of a higher consciousness than anything you are aware of. Being consciously spiritual helps you live your life more thoughtfully, positively, and sometimes profoundly. It helps you grow as a human being.
However you practice spirituality, it is one more means of taking care of yourself. You might find different ways of expressing your spirituality throughout your life. Whatever the path or paths you follow, you grow more over time. This is what life is about.
Conclusion
In this blog, I have offered some self care considerations. As we grow as humans, it is important to take care of ourselves in many ways. We are complex and live on different levels of existence. Our physical health is important, as is our emotional health. These aspects were discussed in a previous essay. Taking care of ourselves mentally and spiritually is also important. The physical is concrete. The others are etheric. Emotions, thoughts, and spirituality can be expressed physically in some way, but there is a higher component to them. That is what makes humans, human. Be aware of all the parts of you. Take time to be in the moment, to respond, rather than react, to accept, rather than judge. Help yourself to grow and be happy. Adonai.
