Real Self-care

Don’t heal the world
Heal yourself, and then you heal the world.

I woke up thinking those words. I pushed back at them as I made French toast for my son and walked my whiskery dog. They’re dorky words, the kind you embroider into a pillow or carve onto a piece of wood to sell at a spiritual-center fundraiser.

But the words kept coming back to me.

Tap tap.

Don’t heal the world. Heal yourself, and then you heal the world.

Sigh.

Fine. I know what those words mean. I’ve been bucking it—there’s freedom and focus in anger, it makes everything out there rather than under our skin—but not all of world’s problems originated with someone else. I carry some of them inside me. The work I need to do starts with me.

There’s a book that I need to write. An uncomfortable one, one that shocks all my tender places. I need to dig into that rather than choose the easy road and write another mystery. Also, I have a tendency toward the judgmental. I must stop that, even though I have to remind myself a thousand times a day. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be 999 times. Wait, there’s more. Sometimes, I repeat political or social or newsy things without either having heard them firsthand or verifying via at least two objective sources that they are true. No more.

I sometimes get paralyzed by the thought that I can’t do everything and so shouldn’t do anything, or even worse (to my mind), that I am not allowed to enjoy the good when there is so much bad. So and finally, I’m giving myself permission to play, laugh, and make mistakes, which is the guiding tenet of our creative writing retreat in France this June.

Heal yourself, and you heal the world.

Please, if you’re comfortable, share below what you’re doing to heal. Let’s bring the light.