The concept of self-care

Self-care is what you do when you have self-love. It is when you give yourself a "mother" who supports you in all dimensions of existence.

Self-care has concepts that it needs to address in the framework of self-love.

1. Self-compassion. Self-compassion is when you are kind to yourself. Being kind to the self involves paying attention to what goes in and out of you - body and mind. Self-compassion therefore requires that you pay attention to your thoughts and emotions, so that you can prevent, manage and stop physiological self-harm.

When you are able to develop pyschological self-control, it becomes possible to monitor who you let it socially, and whether your spiritual practices benefit you.

Self-compassion is not only about keeping people out. It also involves "keeping out" dealing with damaging thoughts and ideas that can make you react.

When you are self-compassionate, you begin to ask yourself questions , instead of resorting to your go-to behaviours of avoidance of your emotions. Or avoidance of yourself.

Instead of emotional eating or emotional exercise, and venting you learn to sit with yourself and identify that you need to mother yourself. Feel your feelings, soothe and journal.

Self-compassion means, you understand that you need the kindness. Self-compassion helps you avoid self-betrayal as it makes you aware that any emotion you suppress is debt owed to the inner child. You hold space and reflect on how you feel rather than plunge into action.

There is no self-compassion without compassion for others. The very act and being of compassionate takes care of kindness for you and for others.

2. Self-respect When you respect yourself, you take steps to act with integrity. Any suffering you are going through is respectfully addressed with yourself so that it does not become everyone's business.

3. Boundaries Self-respect requires self-compassion and both are helpful for self-boundaries. Boundaries to prevent you from taking everything personally and lashing out. Boundaries prevent you from reacting and then claiming you were protecting yourself, when in fact you are self-harming. With self-respect and self-compassion, you employ tools to act in your best interest. To manage your triggers to avoid bleeding on others.

Self-care therefore means doing for yourself what a loving mother would do for you. With self-care you protect yourself from punishing yourself with negative thoughts and emotions. This prevents you from punishing others when you have not taken care of yourself.

Pyschological self-care helps you prevent or minimise or stop emotional dependences which are essentially a bypass strategy- emotional eating, emotional exercise, lack of social boundaries, spiritual bypassing, substance abuse, emotional spending and addictive behaviours.

The idea is to create a checklist to identify how you are addressing the four dimensions of existence.