Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host. And today we will be talking about the secret of self care. Sure you've heard the word self care a lot, self love, self care. Hopefully we'll be able to give a little bit of new information, but before we get started, be sure to Please consider like sharing and subscribing. As you know, this helps YouTube to get our content out to more and more people. And please consider sharing with your friends and family so they can benefit as well. Thank you for that. So the secret of self care, I wish I could have a class, an interactive class and see what you think is the secret to self care. I know we talk all about care of the physical body and we're going to go through different aspects right now. There's two. Secrets that I'm going to share today and, but first we're going to talk about the different aspects of self care. First of all, we have to look at when we say self, what do I mean by self? So self, I'm a human being. Okay. I could, if I say myself, I could say my name. I could say my. My job I could say my role in life. Maybe I'm a mom. I'm a daughter. I'm a friend I'm a this and that could be myself, but that's kind of my role, right? Who am I who is the self? So I'm gonna say I'm a human being let's go from there. The human being is a soul and a body So I I'm a soul I'm a living consciousness that's right now using this body to express myself. And I'm using language that I learned and I'm using hand expressions and so forth, whatever is culturally appropriate and so forth. So I'm a soul and a body. I'm a human being. So I need to take care of. The body first of all. So we'll talk about the physical part. So physical self care, obviously the body needs to be fed, the body needs rest, the body needs exercise, the body needs, to be cleaned and taken care of and so forth. There's billions and billions of dollar business on healthcare. of the body, right? Healthcare and also fitness and everything else. And then there's, nutrition and it's billions of dollars of business trying to tell us the information that we need to take care of our bodies. So that's one aspect and I'm not going to talk about what is the best way to take care of your body I personally I feel that each of us has our own journey with our own body and we need to Take a lot of these things into consideration There was an episode not too long ago on health and fitness You may want to take a look at that episode also and so That's the physical part, emotional, emotional self care. So the emotional side is the feelings that we're having we've had many, many episodes on the laws of karma and also this theme of, I need to take care of my own feelings. A lot of times we are blaming the circumstances, blaming the situation, or we find ourselves in repetitive emotional states. Now, as I'm saying that, I want to give everyone a second to think for a minute what I mean by that. What does it mean that I find myself in repetitive emotional states? They're not always positive, right? For me, I can say that one of the most common repetitive emotional states that I have found myself in is excitement, excitement. I'm overexcited. overstimulated. Something like that. For someone else, it might be an emotional state, might be sadness or anger or, something like that. Whatever the repetitive emotional state is or fear, the anxiety, things like that. Emotional self care means that I am giving that part of my experience, that emotional part, my attention. And then I'm trying to work out what's going on with myself emotionally. Medicine and psychology has tried to help us with this and to some degree, it works. I'm going to have spiritual input in a moment. The next level is psychological. And I'm going to say in the psychological realm that I'm talking about self respect. That I feel worthy and I feel good about myself and I have self esteem and I feel maybe proud of my life and I feel satisfied and things like that. If I don't feel that, then I need to take care of my psychological wellbeing. And again, we have psychology and we have all kinds of things out there to follow, which is fine and has a place. And now I'm going to talk about the spiritual side. Before we get to the spiritual part, there's also what we call, what I'm going to call the heart and mind. We say what I really feel in my heart. So this is where we're getting into, into the spiritual realm now, actually, because When I start talking about my mind and I start talking about my heart, I'm trying to talk about how I really feel like the closest that I can be to being authentic about what I really feel. Why am I bringing this up with self care? I feel, and then I'm going to tell a secret in a minute, but I really feel that we've given our power away a lot. What I mean is we have been focusing on external circumstances, blaming situations, maybe not thinking of things in a, in a positive way or in a way that benefits me, I've been, been self defeating and self critical and things like that because I've been following some ideas from the past, but I'm not really taking care of my own body, emotions. Psychology, my own self esteem and my own heart and mind. I'm not being responsible because I'm focused on what's going on outside. I say it, but it's so pervasive that we're not even aware that it's going on. This is why meditation is so essential and so important in terms of. Taking care of my heart and mind. What meditation does is it begins to awaken the spiritual side of my existence. I'm going to say it again. Meditation begins to awaken the spiritual aspect of my existence as a human being, a soul and a body. The soul, you could say has the heart and mind is in the soul or closer to the soul. So when I start focusing on my heart and mind, I want to get more authentically myself. Think about your own life for a moment. Have you ever met anybody? That seems to be very confident that no matter what's going on, they're kind of able to stand their ground. And I'll give an example. This may not be relatable to everyone, but I'll give an example. If you watch the old Western movies, now I had never watched Westerns my whole life until the last few years. I never was interested in them. They didn't make any sense to me. It just seemed like there was a bunch of men standing there and they were doing close ups on their eyes and who's going to move first. And everybody's just looking this eye, that eye. And I used to kind of make fun of them in a way because I was like, nothing's happening. They're just standing there looking at each other. But after a while in the last few years, I realized that Westerns for me anyway are about self respect. They're about who has the most self respect, who can be the most uninfluenced and the most self confident. of that group of people. Now, usually there's some kind of injustice that gets taken care of or something, but the, the interactions of the people is about self respect. So if we take it, we're not living in the West, the old West right now, but if you take it into your own life, do you feel confident in different situations in your life. Do I find myself reacting? Do I find myself powerless? Do I find myself upset, emotionally upset? Am I taking care of my body properly? How do I feel about that relationship with me and my body? Now, as I'm saying this, try not to feel overwhelmed because what my experience is that meditation naturally helps us to address all of these aspects. So now I'm going to get to the two Two secrets, two secrets of self care. One secret is attitude. What is attitude? Attitude is the tone of energy or the overriding idea that I have going into any situation. So I can have an attitude of cooperation or an attitude of. irritation. I can have an attitude of, suspicion. So what happens is the attitude is like a background energy behind the person. So In the consciousness of the person. There's a background energy. Everybody can read your attitude just like I can read everybody else's attitude. The thing is that we're not usually responsible for the attitude, but the attitude is communicating much deeper and much more clear than anything we're saying and doing. For instance, let's say I say to myself, I want to take care of my body and I want to be healthy, but my attitude is that I just want to Escape from my worldly pain and I'm going to eat to make myself feel better. And then I'm going to, deal with it later. Maybe I have an attitude of procrastination or an attitude of carelessness or something like that. So the care doesn't end up happening. So one secret I can say is in terms of self care is to start looking at your life with an attitude of self care. Like if I'm going to eat. Let me have an attitude of self care when I eat. If I'm going to take care of my body, let me have an attitude of self care and self love while I'm taking care of my body. How many times do we take shower or do whatever we're doing for ourself, uh, in terms of self care, but the mind is going somewhere else, or maybe I'm annoyed with my body or annoyed with the situation. How do I feel about my own emotions? Do I get annoyed with myself? What's my attitude towards myself emotionally? What's my attitude towards myself? Psychologically, do I get impatient with myself? Do I have expectations of myself that that are realistic or unrealistic and I'm reacting to myself all the time? What attitude do I have towards myself? So I feel that we can transform our attitude into one of self care, little by little, even for one, even for one day, sometimes it's one day at a time, right? That maybe I'll be able to feel better about the different actions that I'm doing to help myself. Sometimes I can be doing the right thing, but my attitude is not positive. I might be already self defeated. Like I don't believe in it, but I'm doing it. I don't really believe in it, but I'm doing it. We see this all the time. Like our actions are not matching. The attitude. So the first secret is attitude. The second secret, and maybe I might have to do a whole episode on this, but I'm just going to say it. You can't resolve a feeling with a thought. You have to resolve a feeling with a feeling. So here's an example of that. If you feel upset and somebody says to you, well, you just got what you deserved, Is that going to help you feel better? Well, obviously it's not going to help you feel better, right? If I feel upset, maybe what I want is to somebody is for somebody to care, somebody to show, compassion or empathy, right? So that's like a feeling. So I'm having a feeling and the feeling comes to meet the feeling and that affects the feeling. So the other secret of self care is that wherever I am on the self care, give the right thing if you want to say medicine, give the right response to the right thing. So if I'm having a, if I'm having an action problem, I have to change the action. This is a good point because a lot of times people will say, Oh yeah, I'll do it. You know, I'll, I'll see you there or I'll do it and then they don't do it. Did you ever do that? Did we ever do that? I've done it in the past. I haven't done it in a long time, but this idea of you just say Oh, I'll do it. Or yeah, I'll change that or I'll do it. And then you have no intention of doing it. The way to change that is to actually do it. So action helps action, right? Feelings help feelings. Thoughts help thoughts. But the thing with thoughts is we have to get to know what we're thinking. And this is where meditation comes in because again, this idea of the beginning of observing our mind, observing our thoughts, observing what's going on. Then I start to be able to see, wow, I am thinking this. When you sit down for meditation. And your mind is going crazy, like I like to say, or you say, okay, I'm going to sit and think I'm a point of light, I'm a soul, my nature is peace. And then all of a sudden the mind goes off on, the laundry that has to be done or the errands that have to be done or so forth. Why are the thoughts going? I mean, we know that the thoughts are going. So I have to say, I should make another thought, thought over there, come back here, right? Me getting angry that the thought went away, isn't going to change the thought. So the feeling is not going to change the thought. So anyway, that's the second secret. A thought helps a thought, a feeling helps a feeling, and an action helps an action. This is important because to get better fully as a human being, we have thoughts, feelings, and actions. We, and words too. Words are part of the action. But all of those things that we do have a potential to be transformed. If I can have an attitude of self care and I start watching my thinking and I start being responsible for my attitude. Then I can literally change all of those levels. And ultimately that is what spiritual practice is all about. So self care, the secret of self care is that first of all, we have a lot of levels of care where we're complex beings in a sense. We have a lot to be responsible for, but I'm here to say that if we start being responsible for all of that and start to make changes, my self respect begins to rise. I start to feel better. That is real self care. And I'm able to make decisions and changes and so forth. That doesn't happen overnight. The old attitudes and the old habits that we have have momentum and have power, but with regular practice, little by little. It begins to shift. And which way does it shift? It shifts in the direction of spirituality. I am a soul. My nature is peace. My nature is loving and benevolent and pure and wise. And I care about everyone. I care about the world. That's the kind of attitude I want to share. That's the kind of attitude I want to be reflected in my thoughts, my emotions, my words, my actions. So, little by little, one drop at a time, I'm moving in that direction. So self care from a spiritual standpoint means that you transform everything, but you become you. You transform by taking responsibility for everything that's going on. Little by little, I become aware of it. I start to shift it. And then eventually I start radiating this spiritual vibration or the spiritual attitude. And I'm going to say that is self care. And that's the result of self care is that your authentic real self begins to shine through. So I'll leave it there. I hope that gave a few more things for you to think about. I do recommend that this is good. It's a 15, 20 minute talk and it's good to watch one, but I would suggest watch. A lot of episodes like don't just watch one. I made them short so you can watch a lot If you watch a lot of them, you'll start to realize i'm starting to think a little differently I'm starting to think in terms of self care. I'm starting to think in terms of the laws of karma I'm starting to be a little bit more responsible for myself and it'll happen naturally. It won't be like It's not hard, but I think we need to be exposed to different ways of thinking where maybe we can be empowered. So I'm going to leave it there. Remember our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And until next time, take care. You
