Wednesday, 10 January 2018

Self care is not selfish

Self care is not being selfish.  What is self care? It is treating ourselves like we are valuable. We often look after our cars and devices better than we look after ourselves.  But if you want to be in it for the long haul you have to take care of yourself.  Another name for this is self-love.  People talk a lot about loving yourself. But what does this really mean? The core of what it means is that you value yourself. This shows in how you look after yourself.

The spiritual law says we are spirit (or in terms of contemporary physics:  energy).  We live in a body (which our physics tells us is also really vibrating" packets" of energy or atoms with large spaces in between).  This body is our "earth suit"  We humans cannot live in this material  realm without it.  We also have a soul or individual personality.  This is expressed in terms of intellect, emotions and will.  We are each a completely unique expression of the entire space-time continuum.  Or as people term it somewhat vaguely and being politically correct expressions of :  "The Universe".  People are wary of the term God because He/She and the original Transgendered Being has got a bad rap.  A very bad rap since denominational religion has used the concept of God to terrify people; to justify the middle man (priests, pastors, ministers almost exclusively male) and to have someone to blame besides each other for the horrible condition of much of the world and the people in it.  The real issue which people skirt around is whether or not "the Universe" is conscious and whether or not"the Universe" manifests as a Person a Being, the Creator in whose image we are created and with whom we can commune.  This is to be continued in a different blog. 

If we are a spirit with a soul in a body we need to take care of each of these aspects of ourselves.  Let us start with the body.  Our bodies are living organisms.  Much like dogs they are unconditionally loving and will allow us to punish them until they drop. Preventative medicine is almost a contradiction in terms.  Medicine is concerned with treating symptoms and conditions with drugs and invasive physical procedures.  Heart lung surgery is amazing.  Where it comes to physical trauma like injury and accidents modern medicine has no parallel.  There is an interesting documentary called Heal on itunes which makes this point.  However apart from that we need to be able to prevent illness.  People generally know about good diet.  However diet and weight have become the focus of health and a giant industry.   Apart from good diet (which means a little bit of all the food groups, as fresh as possible, not genetically modified and as free of chemicals as possible in smallish appropriate quantities ), the main requirement for our body is exercise.  This is sadly lacking for most people.  We are sedentary culture:  cars TVs computers devices keep us sitting not moving. Our health:  mental and physical depends on a body that moves regularly.  I will blog about exercise and its importance another time. 

Just as the body need good food and exercise so does the soul:  we need to have good mental and emotional "food" not "junk food" consisting of "reality" TV, the violence and horror and fear- mongering of "news"  (as pointed out by Skyhooks long ago) and cruelty disguised as comedy.  We need good mental  and emotional food:  music and the poetry of songs (including rap) inspiring stories about what people achieve in sport and elsewhere, movies that encourage and uplift.  Fun is great too: dancing joy laughter outdoors being with people who are kindred spirits.  What about spiritual food? We need that too.  What is spiritual food?  Food that links us to our deepest self and the bigger picture.  It is meditation it is studying the spiritual law and putting it into practice:  things like what goes around comes around, be kind to others. be kind to the planet. be kind to yourself. Above all it means seeking to find out who or what our consciousnesss comes from.

Here is the kicker:  since our spirit is the predominant energetic force spiritual food is the most important of all.  We can have the healthiest fittest body in the cosmos and have mind and emotions tuned and focused and managed but if our spirit is inactive we are empty sad and lost. 

So self care starts from the inside out:  the spirit is the real self.  We live in a culture that has confused spirituality with religion and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Spiritual laws like physical laws are true whether we believe them or not.  Whether or not you believe in gravity if you jump off the garage roof you will probably hurt yourself.  But knowing about gravity and thrust and having the technology means you can fly. 

Spiritual laws are the higher order laws our science hasn't caught up with yet but it will.  Knowing these laws means you can learn to fly - without a plane.   Now there's a thought........