Dear Diary,
Lately I have been thinking more about self-care.
As I go deeper within my own journey, I continue to remove more and more of the external anchors of safety and stability in my life. Not in a reckless way, but deliberately. The more I do this, the more I continue to learn how to rely on myself as a radical experiment. And as that happens, something else deepens alongside it: my relationship to my own ability to care for myself.
Self-care has been central to my reflections on healing and well-being for a long time. Quite early on I came to see that self-care is one of the most direct paths toward self-love. Not the kind of self-love that appears overnight like a revelation, but the kind that slowly reshapes the inner environment we live in.
Self-love is what prevents us from abandoning ourselves, blaming ourselves, or creating a harsh and hostile atmosphere inside our own minds.
And yet for many of us, self-love is incredibly difficult.
Most of us were not raised in a world where self-love was the priority. We were raised in a world where belonging came first. As children we needed to comply with our families so that our adults would continue caring for us. Later we needed to belong in the social ecosystems of school, friendships, and community. Thriving depended on fitting in, adapting, and learning how to respond to what others expected of us.
If our caregivers themselves never developed a deep sense of self-allegiance, they could not pass that capacity on to us. Not because they wished for us to abandon ourselves, but because they were simply transmitting the strategies that had helped them survive.
In this way, many of us were lovingly taught not to love ourselves.
Because of this, self-love rarely appears as a sudden transformation. It tends to grow slowly through many layers: moving from self-blame to self-acceptance, from self-rejection to self-trust, from criticism to gentleness.
And this is where self-care becomes such an important practice. Self-care is not a bubble bath or a lifestyle aesthetic. It is the ongoing act of responding to what we genuinely need. And often, change begins in action long before it settles into how we feel. So small acts of care can begin to reshape the inner landscape.
What I have been noticing recently is how fluid self-care actually is: it is not a fixed list of good habits, and it is not the same thing every day. It changes depending on the moment, the context, or the state we are in.
Sometimes caring for myself means pushing forward. Sometimes it means allowing myself to stop. Sometimes it means discipline. Sometimes it means softness.
For example, self-care might be:
- forcing myself to go for a walk because my body needs movement and fresh air
- allowing myself to stay in bed all morning because rest is what I truly need
- sitting down at my computer and doing the work even when motivation is low
- giving myself permission not to work because my emotions need space
- reaching out to a friend because connection would nourish me
- cancelling a social plan because I know it would drain me
The deeper I go into this practice, the more I notice that what really matters is responsiveness. Listening carefully enough to recognize what the moment is asking for, and then allowing myself to meet that need without immediately layering guilt or judgment on top of it. And the more I do this, the more the atmosphere inside changes. Care replaces criticism, curiosity replaces control, and a quiet sense of being supported from within begins to emerge.
This is also where self-care begins to connect very naturally with coherence, because it is not about following a rigid set of rules about how we should behave, but about remaining aligned with what is actually happening inside us and around us in each moment.
Seen this way, self-care becomes one of the most practical expressions of coherence. It asks us to listen, to sense, to adjust, and to respond to reality as it unfolds, rather than forcing ourselves into predetermined formulas.
It asks a simple question:
What do I genuinely need right now?
And then it asks something even more difficult.
Am I willing to give that to myself?
And lately I have been wondering whether this reflection is asking for something more concrete. In the past I have offered group challenges around self-care to help people experiment with new ways of caring for themselves, and I am beginning to feel curious again about what that might look like now, after everything my understanding of coherence has added to the picture.
Maybe it is time to explore that again. Perhaps as a new challenge, or perhaps as a small course dedicated entirely to deepening our relationship with self-care. I do not yet know exactly what form it might take. But the question has been sitting with me lately, and I am listening.
If you are reading this and something in it resonates with you, I would genuinely love to hear from you. You can send me a note and let me know what this reflection stirred in you.