Focus on Soul-Care Over Self-Care

Me, during one of my soul-care nature walks.

Almost everyone I’m talking to these days seems to be overwhelmed by the business of the holiday season.

Living into Advent? What Advent?! I’m just trying to make it to Christmas!

And the common advice for many of us will usually take the form of: “Take care of yourself! Engage in good self-care practices like a massage, or a manicure, or a lovely brunch with your girlfriends!”

This is not bad advice and I love doing all of those. 

But I want to say something else. 

Always focus on your soul-care over your self-care. 

A massage feels good for an hour but soul-care practices fill you up with joy, peace, and love for much longer than that. 

So what are soul-care practices? They’re practices that help you connect with the infinite well of wisdom, joy, peace, and love that both transcends you and lives within you. 

There are three fundamental soul-care practices that you can see below:

Soul-care practices are simple and never need to be expensive or extravagant. In fact, most of them are free.

And all of them are easy, even if they look intimidating at first. 

Just pick one off to start and start small. Don’t judge yourself if you feel like you didn’t do it well enough. No matter what, if you are trying, rest assured that you are doing it well enough. Soul-care is a long process and you begin by taking one small step. Then, another small step. So on and so forth.

The other thing about soul-care practices versus self-care practices is this: Sometimes, self-care practices can make us feel even worse when we return to our normal routine. The kids may seem more chaotic than usual, the clutter in the kitchen can feel unbearable. 

Here’s why: The purpose of self-care practices is to help us escape our normal routine. Typical self-care practices soothe our nervous system. But upon returning to our normal routine, the heightened sensory surroundings like the messy kitchen or loud children or stressful work environment will be a shock to our nervous system, making us want to escape yet again. 

Again, this doesn’t mean I don’t recommend classic self-care practices, I myself have a massage scheduled for tomorrow! Sometimes, escapes are exactly what we want!

Soul-care practices, on the other hand, affect our nervous system and our soul, which is the part of ourselves that isn’t affected by circumstances. it’s unconditional and infinite peace, joy, and love. 

So, when we return to our normal routine, we’re not shocked. We’re more patient and loving, and brimming with gratitude for this life we’ve been gifted with. 

Now, as a Christmas gift to all of you, I want to offer you a soul-care session that we can do live, together! And it’s free!

One of my favorite spiritual practices is a version of St. Ignatius’ Daily Examen, where we notice the movement of the spirit in our lives. I love doing this practice every evening but I especially love doing it at the end of each year to reflect upon God’s movement in my life throughout the past year. It also creates a spirit of awe and wonder for the new year.

All of you are welcome. You don’t need to arrive prepared or be a “certain kind of spiritual person” or have “a certain amount of spiritual knowledge” to be a part of this gathering.

I’ll lead the session on Friday, December 30th at 4 p.m. E.T. on zoom. It’ll be about an hour long. I would LOVE to see all of you again as I’ve met many of you through my online classes or one-on-one sessions. If you’re interested in joining, set aside that date/time on your calendar and a zoom link will be emailed out on December 28th to all my blog subscribers.