This past Wednesday July 24th was International Self-Care Day. I guess we know a concept has infiltrated the mainstream when there is a day named after it.
Now, I’m NOT going to be one more person preaching at you to:
- Go for a walk in the forest
- Drink kale smoothies
- Meditate
- Have a bubble bath
- Do a downward dog
Okay – maybe I will preach at you to bring a consistent daily routine of EFT/tapping into your day …
Gees – if anyone doesn’t know these things by now, they must be very comfortable living under that rock!
The idea I’ve been playing with since hearing about ‘Self-Care Day’, is the relationship between self-care and stress management. The media certainly speaks about them as if they are the same. I’m not sure that this is helpful.
Self-Care is a much bigger concept than stress management.
Stress management is all about coping and managing ‘what is’ in the moment. It is about regenerating energy – so that we have greater capacity to deal with what is in front of us in this moment. It’s about stabilization. It’s preventative so that one can adapt better to one’s current life situation. It’s NOT about growth and transformation.
In NeftTI’s foundational DISCOVER the POWER of Conscious EFT program, we talk about the ‘hot air balloon’ of transformation. We live in the basket of the hot air balloon and sometimes the ride gets a tad turbulent. Stress management strategies help us to steady and soothe ourselves when the ride of life gets rocky. In terms of our nervous system, this means that we can reliably regulate our stress responses when we temporarily move into fight/flight/freeze.
However, the ability to do that is necessary but not sufficient for transformation. If we want to safely and sustainably transform our experience of life – from whatever form of ‘scarcity’ we are experiencing (love, pleasure, passion, peace, health, freedom, connection, joy) to one of abundance in that area – then we need to look at what is keeping our hot air balloon ‘tethered’ to the ground. What’s stopping it from expanding upward into the desired experience??
This is where self-care comes in.
Self-care is the decision to explore and release the chronic patterns of emotion, belief and behaviour that limit our potential to soar.
It is making the effort to looking at what is keeping our nervous system in CHRONIC patterns of dysregulation. What is it that is actually creating the stress that needs to be managed? What is the energetic root of the issue?
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
Albert Einstein
This doesn’t happen with the smoothies! Not to say that nutrition, exercise, spiritual practices aren’t important – they are. These kinds of stress management strategies can soothe the nervous system so that there is energy available for the finding and release of those tethers.
Although one caveat here…
Sometimes these stress management strategies can actually put increased tension on the hot air balloon’s tethers … increasing the rockiness of the basket with us inside it! Meditation, for example, can activate unconscious limiting beliefs around our worthiness and value, creating anxiety or other forms of dysregulation that defies logic.
This is one of the reasons that EFT is such a valuable modality. It spans the spectrum from stress management to self-care.
At its most basic, what we at NeftTI call bronze tapping, it is a fast acting, soothing, stress management strategy. However, with professional training, practitioners learn how to harness the power of EFT for self-care. How EFT deals so effectively to resolve current and past painful events and traumas and the resulting learnings we often take from them that are tethering our hot air balloon to the ground. And after the resolution, how EFT facilitates bringing new possibilities practically into our lives.
As a first step, I encourage you to attend one of the growing number of NeftTI approved ‘Introduction to EFT’ workshops being offered by many of our certified graduates. And then, after you’ve experienced the power of bronze tapping in your life, it’s time to DISCOVER the POWER of CONSCIOUS EFT – NeftTI’s foundational professional training.
Happy tapping for both your stress management AND your self- care!
Nancy