I was once interviewed by a lovely lady I had the honor to meet through Medium. One of her thoughtful questions was 5. "Do you pour love into self from time to time?"
Well, I think my very favorite way to implicitly show love to myself is taking care of my overall health involving my four basic needs — Intellectual (to learn), Emotional (to love), Physical (to live), and Spiritual (to leave a principled legacy), and continue doing my best to maintain the balance between all my dimensions.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake. It is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. ~ Brianna Wiest
Open your heart. Take the whole-person approach — body, mind, heart and spirit — and see what a powerful expression “open your heart” is. Physically, keep your arteries clean through proper diet and exercise so that your heart is strong and healthy. Open your heart emotionally so that you are willing to involve people in the problem and work out solutions together, and listen deeply for understanding. Open your heart mentally so that you are constantly learning, see people as whole people, and free yourself of “quick-fix” thinking, so that leadership indeed becomes your choice. Open your heart spiritually so that your life is driven by a higher wisdom, by a divine conscience whose ethic in finding yourself through losing yourself in the service of others — doing well by doing good. ~ Stephen Covey
More to the point, I love myself through taking care of my balance; which automatically results in my happiness/fulfilment: the product of having reconnected with the servant leader in us and of being on a noble mission that goes beyond ourselves instead of chasing a self-serving goal and “success”.
The mission does not have to be as big as saving the world from a pandemic. As introduced above, it only needs to be principled and is the manifestation of our “Spiritual Intelligence”. Inspiring a person or making their day through a simple free act of kindness does the trick!
Interestingly, it explains why I don’t really “need” the “quick-fix” hormones anymore, while I used to survive on them. I was getting depressed whenever I was compelled to stop exercising (no Endorphins anymore), or that I was going through a relationship breakup (no more Dopamine).
