Crowdsourcing My Self-Care

[lunabee34]

I need some calm and peace and comfort and strength and love and light in my life.

To that end, I would appreciate it if you would tell me about your religious, spiritual, mystical, and/or secular practices, rituals, or behaviors that give you the aforementioned.

Note: I would be delighted with lateral discussion; as a teacher, it is always my goal LOL. However, I will not tolerate any negative comments about peoples' beliefs and practices in this post (which I know is an unnecessary disclaimer as you all are the loveliest people who would never dream of being that kind of jackass).

Comments

[sholio]

During one particularly stressful time in my life, I started developing what I call The Little Zen Garden of Chill, which was (in my case) a page of a sketchbook on which I was developing a very detailed, completely unplanned scene filled with things that were fun and unstressful to draw. Instead of getting mad, I'd go draw another little part of the Zen Garden for a while, because I know the state of drawing things relaxes me. I don't know what would work for you like that, if it might be doing a little bit of a papercraft or having a window rock garden or similar project (dollhouse, terrarium, fishbowl) in which you rearrange things and add things. Or a jigsaw puzzle where you go and add some pieces. Or whatever. But basically a pleasant, fairly mindless displacement activity that you know relaxes and de-stresses you, which you can do for calming and emotional regulation when you've had to deal with a situation or memory that you need to calm down from.

(I actually only did this for a year or two, so it's not necessarily a permanent lifetime coping strategy - but if you like it, it could be.)

I also got a lot of catharsis during a different period in my life out of coming up with detailed running-away plans like lyr was saying. Am I going to do it - obviously not. But it was remarkably cathartic to look up property in places I might want to live or make incredibly detailed plans for buying a travel trailer on Craigslist and taking off for a 2-year journey around the country.

All of that aside, one of my biggest ongoing things that I do is to treat each week and each month as the start of a new small episode of my life, in which the slate is wiped clean from the past week/month and I'm starting fresh on diet, word counts, exercise, and other measures of health or success. There's a thing I've done for several years now in lieu of New Year's resolutions where I start a new "thing" every month, and I obviously don't always do that (in fact there was a lot of the pandemic where I didn't do it at all) but I'm trying to get it started back up again. It could be literally anything along the useful to fun spectrum. It could be intended to test out a new habit to see if it'll stick (taking a 10-minute walk when I get up in the morning, say) or get some short-term goal accomplished that's not meant to last beyond the month (like decluttering one small section of a room every day until done, or losing a specified amount of weight) or something fun or self-improving (like doing a little painting or a sketch every day, or going to bed early to read). Some months I've decided the Thing is posting on Dreamwidth every day, or working through my comment backlog. One of the rules is that if it's not working out and I don't like it, I can just drop it and start something new next month.

But I do like the blank-slate nature of starting each week or month fresh, and in particular I like to spend the first couple of days of each month (to the extent the rest of my life lets me, anyway) in a kind of meditative, quiet state, doing all my end-of-month business paperwork and thinking ahead to plans for the month and just kind of taking it slow and easy.

I hope your life will be easier and kinder to you soon. <3

[lunabee34]

Thank you so much for these detailed and thoughtful suggestions; they're really helpful.

I remember you posting before in your journal about adopting new habits/practices for a short period of time and then moving on if it's not working.

The idea of treating each week or month as completely new and a time to start over really resonates with me. I've always been big on New Year's Resolutions and the beginning of each semester as times to make changes, but I love, love the idea of scaling that way down.