TAKE CARE OF YOUR SELF

PAUSE A MOMENT

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF

Good morning. Welcome now to Pause a Moment – a time we take each week to reflect on ways to ease the ups and downs on your roller-coaster.

What do you really need if you want to lead a successful life? A soul-mate? An exciting career? A loving family? The comfort of a set of beliefs? It seems odd in hindsight, but for a very long time no one seriously asked “What is essential for a successful life?”.

[All I Need – Wendy Matthews]

For a long time life has been seen as divided into traditional compartments - work, family, and religion. That hadn't changed for centuries and, for many people, still hasn't. But early last century, a breakthrough on that perception began when the psychologist Abraham Maslow offered a new insight model where he noticed that people already have an identifiable hierarchy of needs – they naturally and automatically put basic needs first, and then work up a ladder of other needs in a fairly predictable order.

The most fundamental and basic four rungs of the ladder contain what Maslow called "deficiency needs" or "d-needs": Physical needs, Security, Friendship & Love, and Esteem. If our "deficiency needs" are not met we will feel anxious and tense, and our health suffers. Maslow's theory suggests that these most basic level of needs must be met before we will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs. Our motivation to go beyond the scope of the basic needs and strive for constant betterment is simply not there if we feel insecure, unhealthy, and/or cold, thirsty or hungry. Now that kinda makes sense, doesn't it? Jesus knew it – he fed the folks first before he tried laying his message on them.

[Who Cares? – Catherine Britt]

Physiological needs are the basic physical requirements for human survival. They include the metabolic requirements of air, water, food and warmth, along with clothing and shelter to provide necessary protection from the elements. While maintaining an adequate and healthy birth rate shapes the intensity of the human sexual instinct, sexual competition may also shape the sexual instinct. If these requirements are not met, the human body cannot function properly and will ultimately fail. Physiological needs are thought to be the most important; and you seriously should be meet them first.

Then comes the need to feel safe.....

[Blithe Bells – Aust. Chamber Orchestra]

With our physical needs relatively catered to, our safety needs rise to take precedence and dominate behavior. In the absence of physical safety – whether due to war, natural disaster, family violence, childhood abuse, – people may (re-)experience post-traumatic stress disorder or transgenerational trauma. In the absence of economic safety – due to economic crisis and lack of work opportunities – these safety needs manifest themselves in ways such as a preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, savings accounts, insurance policies, reasonable disability accommodations, etc. This level is more likely to be found in immature humans because they generally have a greater need to feel safe.

For us adults, our Safety and Security needs include:

• Feeling Personal security in body and mind.
• Feeling protected from threats to anything our ego considers important.
• Feeling able to take care of our financial affairs into the forseeable future.
• Feeling healthy and emotionally capable.
• Having a safety net against accidents/illness and their adverse impacts.

Love and belonging

After physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, the third level of human needs is interpersonal and involves Feeling like you Belong. This need is especially strong in childhood and can override the need for safety as witnessed in children who cling to abusive parents, and adults who cling to abusive partners. Deficiencies within this level of Maslow's hierarchy – due to hospitalism, neglect, shunning, ostracism – can impact the individual's ability to form and maintain emotionally significant relationships in general, such as:

• Friendship
• Intimacy
• Family

According to Maslow, humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance among their social groups, regardless if these groups are large or small. For example, some large social groups may include clubs, co-workers, religious groups, professional organisations, sports teams, and street gangs. Some examples of small social connections include family members, intimate partners, mentors, colleagues, and confidants. Humans need to love and be loved – both sexually and non-sexually – by others. Many people become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and clinical depression in the absence of this love or belonging element. This need for belonging may overcome the physiological and security needs, depending on the strength of the peer pressure.

[Respect – Max Merrett & the Meteors]

Esteem

All humans have a need to feel valued and respected; this includes the need to have self-esteem and self-respect. People often engage in a profession or hobby to gain position and recognition. These activities give some people a sense of contribution or value; others at the other end of the scale just want to be “famous”. Nobody with an ounce of ego wants to be a forgotten nonentity – me included. Low self-esteem or an inferiority complex may result from imbalances in this Esteem level of the hierarchy.

People with low self-esteem tend to rely on dodgy identifications (“That's me”) for internal support; they often need recognition and respect from others; they may feel the need to seek fame or glory. They fall disappointingly short because fame or glory will not help the person to build their self-esteem until they accept who they are internally; and once Who-You-Really-Are is recognised, fame and reassurance no longer matter . In fact, fame or recognition can have the reverse effect, and can prove fatal. Existing psychological imbalances, such as chronic depression, can and will hinder you from obtaining a higher, more stable level of self-esteem or self-respect. You'll settle for a soap-bubble of Self-Importance instead. POP – GONE!

Most people have a need for stable self-respect. Maslow noted two versions: a "lower" version and a "higher" version. The "lower" version of esteem is the need for respect from others. This may involve a grab for status, recognition, fame, prestige, notoriety or attention. The "higher" version manifests itself as the need for self-respect. For example, the person may have a need for strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence, and freedom. This "higher" version takes precedence over the "lower" version because it relies on an inner competence established through experience. Whenever I suffer from an inferiority complex, or feelings of vulnerability or helplessness, deprivation of Esteem is high on my list of the usual suspects.

Esteem and the higher levels of wellbeing are not strictly separated; instead, the level of Esteem is closely intertwined with a need for Self-actualisation.

[Be What You Be – Angus Stone – 4:52]

Self-actualisation/Altruism

There's a Ruthless Rule of Happiness that goes "What a man can be, he must be.” And there's another one that says something like this – “Happiness is no kin to Complacency. You'll never find out what's possible until you explore the impossible.” If we don't keep stretching our potential, we steer ourselves into a doldrum of disillusionment and dissatisfaction, and then we blame that on others [he/she let me down].

I seem to spend a lot of my life these days challenging reluctant players to do better than they are. Where they experience disappointment, I often see blatantly unrealised potential. This dis-ease arises from an unfulfilled need for self-actualization. This level of need refers to what a person's full potential is and how completely that potential is lived out. Maslow describes self-actualisation as the inherent, (usually unconscious) human desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be. 80% of humans don't even get that they're short-selling themselves and will even get quite uppity at the mere suggestion they're giving up instead of living up. Maybe that's why I have few close friends; I require those who profess they want to play with me to do better than they think they can. It's a bugger being able to see wasted potential go down the gurgler in gushes of self-righteousness or oozing leaks of smug complacency.

Those I am closest to perceive or focus on Self-Actualisation very specifically in some area of their life. For example, one person has the strong desire to become an ideal parent. In another I can think of, the desire is expressed athletically. For others, it may be expressed in painting, performing, organising events, inventing, or producing and presenting radio programmes. Maslow believed that to understand this level of need, you must not only achieve the previous needs for health, security, safety, love & belonging, and esteem, but you have to also master them. If you haven't; go no further. Go back to basics. It's nigh impossible to contemplate the meaning of existence // when your kids are cold, wet and crying from malnutrition. You cannot be an effective, empowering broadcaster when you're main concern is how many phone strokes you get to your ego (I got ten calls today!)

By exposing this "hierarchy of needs”, Maslow has had a huge impact, and his way of seeing it suits common sense. A successful life requires firstly a secure foundation. My Dad, a child of the Great Depression, did his hamfisted best to drum Security into me every day of my life. Secure job; rock-solid faith. Wham bam, thankyou Sam! Yet it didn't seem to make him happy, and life as it presented itself to me in my late teens and early 20s was just not that simple. To this curious mind there were too many unanswered questions. In my experience, life keeps changing, and I think there is now one need that supersedes all others. Without it, money and family won't make up for it. A prominent career and professional status will be undermined. Without this, the very possibility of leading a happy life is jeopardised.

[Take Care of Yourself – Charlie Byrd]

This one need is the need for Self-Care.

Self care? Yes. If self-care was treated in our culture with more awareness and due respect, services like Lifeline and Beyond Blue would go begging for business. Multinational pill pushers would go broke tomorrow if people became aware of how easily they've sold out their self reliance and esteem // in favour of promised cure-alls and an easy ride to La-la-land.

The accumulated knowledge of medicine, psychology, and longevity studies agree about Self-care. Each of us has the potential to avoid disease, retard aging, and achieve a higher state of well-being // if we pay attention to looking after what we've created. A new horizon has opened that millions of people are not fully aware of. They continue to hold on to old worn-out notions that deprive them of power over their present and their futures.

[Old Fashioned Morphine – The Hillbilly Goats]

These outdated notions include the following:

1. It's your GP's job to keep you well.

2. Old age is a state of decline.

3. Money solves most problems, and the more money you have, the better.

4. Everyone has inner demons and they are to be feared. It's better to keep quiet about them.

5. What you don't know won't hurt you.

6. Life is unfair and bad things happen randomly.

7. There must be something wrong with people to whom bad things happen.

8. Chronic disease is all genetic, and there's nothing you can do about your genes.

Every one of these notions is contradicted by Self-Care. Looking after yourself, as I mean it, involves engaging the following possibilities –

1. Wellness of body, mind and spirit becomes your individual responsibility.

2. How old age shows up for you reflects your beliefs about it. Vital beliefs lead to a vital old age. Beliefs in decline and decrepitude lead to ….. you got it!

3. Money provides for basic needs. After that, there's no correlation between money and happiness.

4. Facing your personal issues now has a huge impact on how healthy you will be in the future.

5. What you don't know gets either ignored or repressed and creates emotional and physical difficulties. Your cells metabolise everything that happens to you, whether you're aware of it or not. This is why I keep banging on about “Be Aware”, as distinct from “Beware”

6 & 7. Life matches your conception of it. Whatever your opinions you get to be right. And you think being right is all that matters. How wrong can you be? Your mind shapes how events turn out in your experience, not vice versa.

8. Genes change. Your genetic makeup is fluid and dynamic, responding at every moment to your world and your response to it. And your genes can't differentiate between your inner and outer world; they react equally to both real and imagined stimuli.

The bottom line of this list is that you have the power to create your personal reality. Life doesn't care whether you believe that or not, which is what self-care is ultimately about. Whatever personal reality you create will affect how you function, and the whole lot will be passed on to your children, one way or another. We are badly in need of a new model for well-being. Decades of public information about prevention has made headway, but the whole subject feels less than urgent to most people, especially when they're still young enough to make changes that make a difference. Most people still segment their lives into work, leisure, and family. Little time is left for self-care. Yet caring for yourself today is exactly what determines your life for decades to come, and those of your offspring.

OK. Verbs in sentences: Consider including the following suggestions in a new regime for looking after yourself:

- Make Happiness a high priority. Try sticking this on your fridge door – “Happiness First, Then Take Out the Garbage, Then Save the World..... in that order.”

- Make sure your life has purpose and meaning. If it doesn't, make something up, just for today. Then tomorrow, make something up again. Make your day ABOUT something, bigger than yourself. Be a participant of it, and include others in changes for the better.

- Live according to a higher vision. The best form of self-care is to merge yourself into some wider, higher possibility.

- Expand your awareness in every decade of your life.

- Devote time and attention to personal growth.

- Pay attention to the fate of the world around you, and your role in that. Are you a player, or a spectator?

- Follow at least a minimal regimen of good diet and physical activity. But don't go overboard about it. Remember Oscar Wilde's dictum “Everything in moderation – including moderation.”

- Allow your brain to reset by introducing downtime several times a day.

- Get to know your inner world through awareness, meditation, contemplation, and self-reflection. Remember Socrates? – A life unexamined is no life at all. As I write this I'm looking at a neighbour who's come outside her unit to smoke a cigarette. She puts a white cotton glove on her hand before she lights up, and sucks the acrid smoke into her lungs. She won't coat her home or her fingers with whatever shit comes out of those things, but she's happy to let her lungs cop it. And she doesn't see the absurdity of that? Who knows? Maybe she does. It's none of my business. I'm grateful for her reflection of my own stupidity.

- Practice gratitude and appreciation. Find something to be happy about in the moment. Spread it around.

- Learn how to love and be loved. This is a lifetime challenge. I'm still learning how to be a father to my darling daughter. Thank God it's not too late.

As you can see, self-care goes far beyond eating our vegetables and signing up for the gym. It has nothing at all to do with “Every man for himself”. It amounts to a new model for success and happiness, a model that abundant evidence supports. Right now, most of the existing models feel very dead-end-ish. Consumerism is a ticking time bomb; "work hard and play hard" leads to exhaustion and eventual physical, emotional and mental debility. Postponing happiness until you retire wastes decades of life and risks terminal disappointment. "Looking out for number one" deadens the soul.

 

Higher-Self Merge Meditation:

[Bon Voyage – Vangelis – 2:33]

Close your eyes

Imagine your favourite peaceful place.

Go there. Look around you; take it all in, and feel at home.....

Imagine a figure walking toward you. It is yourself – your self at its fullest potential. Your self -- calm, content, assured and quietly powerful in your being. Let this being walk towards you, until it stops just in front of you. Look at you. Feel the welcome warmth of your truest and fullest self....

Now step forward and merge into your self. Turn and sense the world with all of your senses through your new and perfect self.

Be this.....

Self-care as the one need you can't afford to ignore; include it into your balancing act. This one simple idea can change how you live today, tomorrow and every day after that.

[Bring Yourself Home to Me – Jimmy Little (A) – 3:44]