Things That Fill Me: 12 Rituals That Keep Me Feeling Like Myself
There is a version of self-care that I don’t like: the kind that looks like a checklist, a prescription, a performance of wellness for someone else's benefit, or Instagram for that matter. What I want to share with you are the actual things, the specific, sometimes ordinary, occasionally ridiculous things, that make me feel like myself. Like I live in my body. Like the world is good and I am in it on purpose.
We are in summer energy right now, can you feel it?. Things are lighter. Brighter. There is more air in the days, more permission to slow down and actually enjoy being alive and on this earth. Summer has always felt to me like the season that gives us back to ourselves, and I think there is no better time to imagine and reprioritize the things that fill us up. Not the things we think we should do, but the things that actually work.
I am sharing mine because I think we underestimate the power of sharing what fills us, and because I am curious what yours are. Tell me. Leave a comment, reply to this email, send me a voice text (and yes, I will absolutely send you one back). This is not a list to aspire to. It is an invitation to make your own. What fills you? What makes you feel, even briefly, like everything is exactly right?
Here is what does it for me.
1. The annual closet and style session.
Once a year, I work with a stylist to go through everything already hanging in my closet. There is something so quietly radical about this: being honest with myself and filling a bag of clothes that can go to someone who actually needs them, and getting a full set of new outfits, photographed and organized, made from things I already love but didn't know what to do with. It is decadent and practical and liberating all at once. I end up feeling like I know who I am again, which is maybe the best way I can describe what good style actually does.
2. Farmer's markets.
One of my great and uncomplicated joys. Small businesses, real people making and growing things that bring them joy, the chance to sample something you've never tried and end up in a twenty-minute conversation with the person who made it. They just make me happy, and I have stopped needing a more sophisticated reason than that. I travel all over to explore the many markets around me.
3. Weekly love voice texts.
I am a voice texter, much to the dismay of my children. I leave love voice texts to friends and family for no reason other than to say: I love you, I miss you, I was just thinking about you. Of course all texts are fine, but being able to hear someone's voice, and having someone hear yours, is a completely different thing. It is connection that can be random, unexpected and delivered in the just the right moment.
4. Sarah Blondin.
She is the only person whose meditations I can listen to and feel held. In truth, the voices of most meditations annoy me (just sayin!). She is poetic in a way that sits in my soul, not just my mind. Her words often make me cry, which I have come to understand is not something to feel bad about, but instead, a gift: a way to let emotions move through me rather than stay stuck inside. I start my meditation practice with one of hers and then sit in silence for another ten or fifteen minutes after her voice ends. That silence is its own kind of nourishment and I am always reminded of how much I need this practice in my life.
5. Outdoor yoga.
I am not a yogi by any stretch of the imagination, but outdoor yoga is one of my great loves. Sunrise yoga on the beach. Yoga in the park, yoga at Red Rocks, yoga in the woods. Something about the body moving in open air, under sky, on actual ground, feels like being remembered by something larger than the day's agenda. I will find a patch of grass and a good instructor anywhere I possibly can.Thank you Pedro Luna for introducing me to this beautiful experience.
6. Walking with a friend.
This is one of the most underrated forms of intimacy we have, I think. It keeps me moving and gives me uninterrupted time with someone I love: old friends and new friends, the kind of new friend you're still figuring out. There is something about moving side by side, not face to face, that allows a different kind of honesty and connection. I take this wherever I can get it.
7. The semi-annual facial.
Twice a year, I get a facial. I am not a big spa person, but my skin is aging, the way skin does, and it deserves to be taken care of in ways that honor that rather than fight it. There is something grounding about it, the deliberate act of saying: I deserve to be taken care of. I mean that less as an affirmation and more as a fact I keep having to remind myself is true.
8. Scheduling all my medical appointments at once.
Every year, all of them: mammogram, gynecological visit, bloodwork, eye exam, dentist, skin checks. And I set the reminder for the following year before I close my calendar. This sounds mundane. It is not. It is one of the most empowering things I do. The deliberate act of staying in conversation with my own body, of asking my doctors what aging gracefully actually requires, of being someone who takes herself seriously enough to show up.
9. Solo dance parties.
I throw them in my kitchen, in my living room, wherever I am. Dancing moves something through me that nothing else quite does. It lets me be with my emotions and inside my body at the same time, and there is no version of a terrible day that a good song cannot at least partially solve.
10. The library.
My happy place. I know Kindles exist, I have one. Yet, I want to hold a book in my hands and flip through actual pages. I love the feel of a library, the smell of it, the specific kind of quiet it holds, the people who choose to spend their time there. There is something about being surrounded by that many stories, that many lives, that many worlds: it is immediately soothing. Finding a good novel that pulls me entirely out of my own reality and into someone else's is, without exaggeration, one of my favorite things on earth.
11. Playing with makeup and cosmetics.
I love this, and imagine that I was supposed to work in the industry in another life. Little shopping excursions to Ulta for a new body oil or lip gloss or eye cream, especially with a friend, make me so happy. There is something uncomplicated and playful about it that I do not feel the need to justify.
12. Sitting with the trees.
I am in love with trees. I think they are beautiful and wise and holding something ancient and mystical. To sit on the ground with my back against a tree, just to be there with her, is one of the most immediate ways I know to regulate my own nervous system. Something about their roots, their age, the quiet fact of them, brings me back to myself every single time. Mother earth at large does this, but the trees, specifically: there is no substitute.
These are the things. Some of them are small. Some of them are strange. All of them are mine, and all of them give me joy.
