When you think about self-care ideas for moms, you probably don’t think of a Buddhist monk. A monk’s life is probably the most different from the average mom’s life as you can get.
Monk’s life: quiet, contemplative, peaceful; full of prayer, deep thoughts and spiritual improvement
Average mom’s life: busy, loud, somewhat crazy, harried; full of caregiving, parenting angst, and laundry
Bear with me, you’ll see the connection in a moment.
You may have seen in the news recently that Buddhist monk and well known author Thich Nhat Hahn passed away recently at the age of 95. Now, I’m not Buddhist, and I actually don’t really even know that much about Buddhism. But when author after author and scholar after scholar that I read mentioned his work, I knew that I had to delve into it bit to try to understand his perspective. One of the first things I ran across of his writings was related to the four mantras.
What I found with these mantras was a collection of simple but profound wisdom. I believe the mantras were originally written as his way of helping people understand the path through which one can cope with suffering or struggles. But the four mantras also focus a lot on love. Now, me being a parenting writer, when I read excerpts of the mantras, I almost immediately put them in the frame of a parent-child relationship.
They could, however, be applied to a variety of different relationships. One of the lovely things about these mantras is how they represent the dynamic relationship of love between two people whether it be a parent and child or partners, spouses, friends, etc.
In the first mantra, he writes about is called “the mantra for offering your presence.” Hahn says simply, “dear one, I am here for you.” This really struck me because it made me think about how so often in parent-child relationships that’s really the starting point when our children are struggling, or upset, or emotionally distraught.
Instead of trying to fix them or distract them, what if we just offered this mantra: “dear one I am here for you.” What a lovely thought.
But in order to be here for someone, as Thich Nhat Hahn alludes to in some of his other writings, we have to be present to ourselves as well. This is where our understanding of self-care sometimes gets confused. In our modern world, oftentimes self-care ideas for moms are seen as a guilty pleasure or a way to escape our daily responsibilities. At best, it may be seen as a way to kind of recharge ourselves. I think if we look to someone like Thich Nhat Hahn’s writings, we understand the deeper meaning of self-care ideas for moms (or for anyone). Buried within that understanding is also the real reason why it’s so hard for many of us.
Thich Nhat Hahn describes self-love which is obviously part of self-care. This way of understanding self-love is about understanding and releasing your suffering. He writes this:
“If you have enough awareness, if you are curious enough, to look at your own suffering, you have already enough strength to love yourself. And to love yourself is to love the world. There is no difference.”
I think what he is saying is that self-love comes from the ability to recognize your own weakness, but also to treat yourself with compassion. If we see self-care in those terms, then we begin to understand why it’s so hard. In learning to care for ourselves we may come up against our own weaknesses or vulnerabilities.
So this might be why it’s so hard to meet our own self-care needs: because we don’t want to face those vulnerabilities. We want to appear invulnerable; appear indestructible in some ways. In recognizing our need for self-care, we come to terms with the fact that we all have abilities and we all have weak areas. That brings up a question: when do you feel like you need self-care the most?
I think for many of us, it’s when we’re stressed. When we have too many things on our plate when the responsibilities of parenthood and life and work feel like they’re crushing us. This is when we usually feel like we need self-care the most and oftentimes when we access it the least. What this is saying is that being able to recognize our need for self-care means we recognize our need and our vulnerability.
Related reading: How Reading Classic Books Can be a Powerful Form of Self-Care (for kids and adults)
What it also makes me realize is that the presence that Thich Nhat Hahn talks about in the first mantra can only come from a place of self-love. I know we hear this all the time. Every pop psychologist out there says that you can’t love anyone else until you love yourself. At a deep level, it’s true because you really don’t have anything to offer if you don’t face your own vulnerability and weakness and still show up for yourself. Then you have the ability to be present for someone else. Thich Nhat Hahn says it this way:
“Self-love is the foundation for your capacity to love the other person. If you don’t take good care of yourself, if you are not happy, if you’re not peaceful, you cannot make the other person happy. You cannot help the other person; you cannot love. Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself; for taking care of yourself.”
That really gets to the heart of it. If we want to love our children, we have to be able to care for ourselves. If we don’t; if we don’t recognize our vulnerabilities and our need for help, and our need to be kind to ourselves, we can’t show up in that presence (like he describes in the first mantra). When self-care takes on this kind of definition, then what do those kinds of self-care ideas for moms look like in the real world?
I think it’s easy to say that this goes beyond getting a pedicure or taking a hot bath. In this definition of self-care, I think it means that we come to recognize our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities and not hide them but rather seek out ways to care for them.
In real life, this understanding of self-care might look very different for each person based on their temperament and personality.
For example, if you’re an introvert like me, your care needs often revolve around
- a need for quiet,
- a need to recharge,
- a need for close personal relationships rather than big social events.
Recognizing these things about yourself helps you key into what your self-care needs are. So that your need for quiet or recharge time is no longer seen as a weakness, but just a need like anything else.
The same thing could go for someone who’s more extroverted. Your self-care needs might revolve around
- social interaction and
- conversation with people
- an energizing environment,
Recognizing that this is your self-care need can be empowering. It doesn’t make you a bad person to want to take some time away from your kids perhaps to hang out with friends. I think this helps us because it reframes those desires as real self-care needs and a real caring for your own personality and well-being. This could show up in many different ways depending on your personality. It’s empowering to think about these things in a new light and understand self-care as more than just an activity that you do to make yourself feel better but really, an act of self-love. This means that it is not selfish or indulgent in any way, but really, is at the service of loving the other people in your life, including your children. I think that’s key to helping us meet our own self-care needs is to understand it in this way.
I’ll leave you with one more quote from Thich Nhat Hahn:
“Your ability to love another person depends on your ability to love yourself.”
With this definition of self-care in mind, consider these questions:
- What activities fill you up?
- What boundaries will empower you to love yourself better?
- What would allow you to show up for yourself (and consequently your children) better?
These might be difficult to answer but consider them. In learning to care for yourself better, you might just find that you can also care for your children with more patience, attention and focus.
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