Inspiring self in care with creative embodiment
Possibilities are endless when we feel creative.
When our sense of vitality is weighed down by challenges, transitions, and obstacles, adding this colour throughout everyday life gets tricky.
Self-Care
Activities of daily living are the self-care tasks we do each day. These actions are considered to be instrumental in understanding our health status, so they are commonly used to measure our level of functioning and independence. This explains our capacity to care for ourselves to professionals. When our body’s abilities change and we seek support, we come into contact with specific labels of the things we do every day. We start to look at our experience in life from the physical point of view, within our whole body inside and out. This is embodiment, how we experience our everyday lives through our physical selves.
Our bodies are made up of systems that work together to create our whole. When a part is not working with the rest, or not as we’ve come to expect, our experience through our body is not enough. The trouble is, when we don’t have enough to sustain our view of well-being, it’s not looked at as an experience through our bodies. It’s something to fix; a yes or no checkbox, from an outsider, with our identities still attached.
What happens next is that something already made will be offered to us, in addition to our identities, bodies, and point of view. It overpowers our sense of time and space. It leaves the impression we are not enough and will stay that way without more. Having to choose from pre-existing options depersonalizes embodiment. Say our activities of daily living, being self-care tasks, are supported. Without our including our personal experiences through our bodies, how could we really be supported in our practice of self-care?
Self-Neglect
When we practice daily self-care, we are preventing self-neglect. Going about our day to day lives without living challenges, transitions, and obstacles, brings us such a natural sense of embodiment we may not realize it. When our abilities change, and our physical selves are not enough to keep up with the everyday care we usually give ourselves, we notice how we experience our life through our physical self. It changes the way we have gone about doing something. We’re used to providing it for ourselves. We we’re once able.
This change in self-concept manifests a natural inferiority to our prior self. It changes how we are, and want to, experience everyday activities. It affects our esteem, our personal identity. Without additional care, self-care will turn into self-neglect and we know it. If we don’t make a choice outside what’s given, it’s as though we are neglecting ourselves. Disdain is a strong word, but so is the stigma of ‘choosing’ self-neglect. It’s the personal possibilities that are lacking for personal care choices and this; is a challenge, is a transition, and is an obstacle. We’re seeking efficiency, while living this existence, through our perception of embodiment.
When systemic pressure is added to our personal system, we’re at risk of disrespecting ourselves because inspiring the possibilities that will personally take us up, over, and beyond our present realities isn’t what’s being offered. Support is added on top of, it replaces, and it rejects our ways of being. The separation between what we expect and what we experience through our physical selves grows wider. It preoccupies our minds, spirits and souls. It lowers our sense of vitality. It limits our possibilities ahead.
Time-Space-Body Connections
Our sense of time is closely related to our physical experiences. Our personal styles for self-care are experienced through our physical self. Our body’s shape how we move through life, the pace and rhythm our momentum can work with and thrive on. It depends on who we are and what we need to get done, so we can feel at ease with what we have. It’s about re-discovering personal momentum. We’re growing.
As a sense of time can feel influenced, so can our sense of space. Adding more to our everyday lives adds more sensations to our experiences. When changes to our bodies are under review, and our self-care practices are assessed, our body parts appear separate from our identities. Each aspect of our daily life, including our bodies both inside and out, is examined as though we’re outside of it too. We’re not though.
Our experiences through our bodies matters. Our time-space perceptions shape our physical possibilities for self-care. Feeling closed-in or wide open, over or under whelmed, with our supported self-care practices, brings us to internalize the experience of self-neglect. Without our personal view, this body-time-space interaction is experienced in a way that disrespects our very reason for care to be added in the first place.
Creative Embodiment
We’re not resisting self-care practices in favour of self-neglect: It’s difficult to creatively think and act from lived experience while living a challenge, transition, or obstacle, and our available options do not meet our expectations. Authentically supporting self-care within all lives is a practice of creative embodiment. It’s a journey of exploration to discover the new possibilities we can merge within our everyday lives, to thrive.
It’s not about adding more but adding within our physical experiences to sustain our self-care practices. Whether mind, body, or soul, adding our perspective of care is how we care about ourselves. It provides our understanding of how we complete self-care tasks to professionals. By inspiring, versus predicting, the possibilities that will create the embodiment we’re seeking, we practice self-care for genuine well-being.
Considering our present time-space-body experiences, our lived experience, and our future aspirations, creative embodiment practices self-care in any condition by bringing the self back into care. Those of us who have or are living conflicting life experiences have the strongest abilities for imagination, innovation, and creativity. It’s about feeling lifted out of the impossible box and into the colourful world of possibility.
“Being creative is expressing yourself creatively through any form of art and even other ways is being more optimistic in trying new methods until you succeed with the right results you were looking for.” – Laura Annabelle, living well with mental illness
‘Activities of Daily Laughter’ inspires a flow of exploratory experiences using creative embodiment, uplifting our sense of vitality to enhance our natural, creative ability to think and act from lived experience. This releases our self-awareness, projecting our influence into new possibilities and pathways for self-care practices that connect our experiences and expectations within our everyday lives.
Click here for activity inspiration to bring creative embodiment into activities of daily living.
