Revolutionary, Authentic Self-Care Part 2

I once wrote an article for Our Sunday Visitor titled “Revolutionary, Authentic Self-Care” that talked about how real self-care focuses on turning to God in order to better prepare ourselves for the service of others. I’d like to expand on this further and talk more about what is wrong with society’s idea of self-care today. The problem is that the secular idea of self-care is really based on the idea of self-love and self-indulgence, which can often lead to the two capital sins of pride and gluttony. Secular self-care tells us that in order to really care for ourselves and others in the long run, we need to tune the needs of others out for a short time and focus exclusively on ourselves, indulging in things that we enjoy and ignoring the role of God and others in a truly healthy life and society.

As Christians, we know that we were created to know, love, and serve God, and one of the ways we do this is in loving and serving others for His sake. When everything is ordered toward Him, we begin to experience heaven on earth and we live the life that we were meant to live. Because of this, authentic self-care should focus outward on God and how we can better serve Him and others. When we begin to fall into the trap of turning it inward and focusing on ourselves, we become wrapped up in selfishness and pride. Once we make prayer and meditation central to our self-care activities, we will begin to see that we are truly taking care of ourselves in that we are preparing to live the life destined for us by God, marked by service to Him and others.

Taking our relationships with others to prayer and reflecting on what we may be doing right and what we could do better and letting God speak to us about the people in our lives is a great way to practice authentic self-care. Asking Him to help us see how we can better help our neighbor is what He wants us to do and is one of the ways we take care of our souls. Of course, everything relates back to our relationship with God, so examining our conscience in relation to Him is essential and the ultimate act of self-care is the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Having our sins forgiven and our souls wiped clean gives us the opportunity to start again and helps draw us closer to God by His grace and mercy.

I should say that doing things for pleasure is not always sinful and sometimes it can be beneficial to us. However, it is when we overindulge in pleasures to the point of thinking only of ourselves and neglecting the needs of others that we begin to sin. We should not look at pleasure as a means to fulfill self-love, but as a means to rejuvenate ourselves so that we can better serve God and others. For example, we can do certain fun activities that exercise our minds, like crossword puzzles, in order to keep our brains sharp so that we can think and reason more clearly when we are faced with situations involving our relationships with God and others. And if we are called to do a duty for others while we are engaging in these activities, we should not complain but instead go cheerfully and fulfill the obligation out of love for God and that person. When we begin to orient our self-care toward the better service of God and our neighbor, instead of toward the love of ourselves, we will start to lead a more fulfilling life, the life that God wants for us.