To look after yourself is to choose not to be harmed

Have you ever thought about what it really means to look after yourself? What it means to care for yourself compassionately, with intention and sincerity?

In recent months, I’ve learned that looking after yourself is not the same thing as protecting yourself. It’s not the same thing as comforting or soothing yourself.

To look after yourself is to unravel the thoughts and ideas, “good” and “bad”, that you are deeply attached to.

It’s the often-challenging, often-uncomfortable process of noticing.

Noticing the way your thoughts and emotions dance together within you. The stories you tell yourself and to others when you feel wounded. Your yearning for “good,” and your rumination about “bad”. Your attachments cementing over every opening, every crack of light, until they become part of you.

It’s the process of noticing these experiences from a distance as if they’re happening to someone else. Someone you love deeply.

From this process, you realize that you are a brilliant composer of thought, feeling and response. You assembled a symphony orchestra of complex ideas and profound beliefs. And you conduct it tirelessly, as if it is the most important job in the world.

And you realize that what you’re listening to is not “the truth”, if there even is such a thing. It’s a collection of things you made up and picked up from others. It’s the smoldering bits of memory that once burned hot in you. It’s the heavy stones that sank to the bottom because you couldn’t bring yourself to reach in and let them go.

To look after yourself is, ultimately, to allow yourself to re-create the composition. To give yourself space to drift from its sounds. Because you are not the sum of all that you have collected. Your collection can be dissolved, pulled apart, and built again.

Looking after yourself is an invitation to make more choices about what you allow inside. It does not have to be what it has always been.

To describe it in the words of Marcus Aurelius:

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.”