Self-Care as a Form of Self-Advocacy

Episode 111: 
Self-Care as a From of Self-Advocacy

In this episode I discuss the essential practice of self-care, emphasizing its role as a form of self-advocacy. I share my personal journey of integrating a daily self-care practice, advocating its importance for maintaining balance and well-being. I offer practical suggestions for incorporating simple self-care rituals into daily life and discuss how self-care can extend to advocating within relationships and the wider community. 

This episode encourages listeners to reimagine self-care not just as a personal practice, but as a foundational step towards fostering more intentional and conscious relationships.

00:00 The Importance of Self Care

00:17 Welcome to the Relationship Diversity Podcast

01:08 Redefining Self-Care

03:00 Self-Care as Self-Advocacy

03:24 A Busy Summer and the Need for Self-Care

04:20 Lessons from Brett Chamberlain

05:40 Practical Self-Care Tips

08:50 Advocating for Yourself in Relationships

11:13 Taking a Break for Self-Care

13:11 Closing Thoughts and Staying Connected

Episode 20: Self-Care is NOT a Luxury!

Episode 104: Advocacy and Support for Non-Monogamy with Brett Chamberlin

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Podcast Music by Zachariah Hickman

Chapters

• 0:00 Self-Care as Self-Advocacy
• 13:27 Exploring Relationship Diversity Through Podcast

Transcript

Carrie Jeroslow: 0:00

Self-care is essential. You can't care for others when you're empty, out of balance and disconnected. It always eventually ends up causing more harm than good. And when you model self-care as a form of self-advocacy for others, you give them permission to do the same thing. Welcome to the Relationship Diversity Podcast, where we celebrate, question and explore all aspects of relationship structure diversity, from soloramory to monogamy to polyamory and everything in between, because every relationship is as unique as you are. We'll bust through societal programming to break open and dissect everything we thought we knew about relationships, to ask the challenging but transformational questions who am I and what do I really want in my relationships? I'm your guide. Keri Jaroslow, bestselling author, speaker, intuitive and coach. Join me as we reimagine all that our most intimate relationships can become. Our most intimate relationships can become.

Carrie Jeroslow: 1:08

I've always been a huge advocate for self-care, and not self-care as in a massage, a nice meal or something that would seem extravagant, although I think those are all amazing ways to celebrate and nurture self. However, in my experience, once I added kids, businesses and relationships, I soon found that if I only defined self-care as something big, lengthy and special, I would never find the time or money to give it to myself. In 2017, when I was able to carve out a little more space in my schedule, I had an aha moment about how I could redefine self-care so that I could give myself a little of it every single day. Self-care became about connection to self, taking a few precious minutes every day to stop the internal and external noise, check in to see how I was really doing, nurture myself, breathe and gain clarity. My self-care became a minimum five-minute yoga flow, but I committed to doing it every single day. No excuses. I wasn't always present, I wasn't always quiet, I wasn't always able to connect to anything except how my body felt, but I kept giving myself five minutes every day, and after several months, my self-care practice became a saving grace, and now, in my eighth year of daily five to 10 minutes of yoga, I depend on those few sacred minutes to stop and check in with myself. I did an entire episode about how, with very little time and very little money, I developed this practical daily practice.

Carrie Jeroslow: 2:58

I'll link that in the show notes, and over the past few months, I came to a deeper understanding about the importance of self-care and how self-care can be a form of self-advocacy, and so this is what I'm going to talk about in today's short episode. This is a way that I'm advocating for myself and my well-being by doing a shorter episode, for myself and my well-being by doing a shorter episode. It's been a really busy summer, filled with beautiful adventures, moments of quiet, moments of chaos, illnesses, emotional challenges, big decisions, grieving, celebration and joy, and through all the ups and downs I've still managed to get an episode out every week, which at times has been very grounding for me. It's the thing I could depend on to come to every week. But as life through some bigger challenges, my way that I wasn't expecting getting an episode out every week has left me a little ungrounded and scattered and I don't want to bring that scattered energy to you because I care about you. So with that in mind, I'm going to make this episode pretty short as a way of advocating for myself and a lot of times when I'm learning something. I like to share with you some of the things that I learned.

Carrie Jeroslow: 4:20

In early July, I did an episode with Brett Chamberlain of Open. We talked about many things. If you haven't heard that episode another great one he shared so much with me that was really eye-opening and inspirational. So I'll link that episode in the show notes and we were mainly focusing on the week of visibility for non-monogamy. He gave a lot of ways that someone could do advocacy work, depending on their level of outness, meaning how out they were to the world, to their family, to their children or to no one. His ideas helped me tremendously.

Carrie Jeroslow: 5:06

When I got to that week and in unexpected ways, due to some things that were going on in my own life, I didn't feel like I could be really public in my support and experience with non-monogamy. However, I still really wanted to advocate for it and I was able to do just that by speaking openly and honestly with friends and family of my partner who were just getting to know me. It was empowering, yet private, and I never would have thought that advocacy work could be that without my conversation with Brett. So I wanted to do the same thing with this episode, centering on self-care and giving you some ideas about how self-care can show up as self-advocacy. Like Brett did, I'm going to start with the most private ways self-care can be self-advocacy and then extend it outward to bigger circles, with those closest to you maybe your friends, your partners, your children and then even outward into your community and the world at large. So, beginning with you and your inner world, which I believe is foundational for anything having to do with other people, here are some suggestions of ways you can advocate for yourself through self-care.

Carrie Jeroslow: 6:27

The first suggestion is committing to self-awareness. This could be as easy as setting an intention to be self-aware. This could be closing your eyes and taking a breath for three minutes every night and ask yourself how do I feel right now? What does my body feel like? What worked today? What didn't work? What felt good, what didn't feel good? This isn't a one and done task. We're continually evolving and growing. I'm in a place where I'm doing this for the umpteenth time. I've lost count and although it still feels unknown because I don't know where it's going to lead me in this chapter of my life, because I've done it so many times before I know I'll emerge. I don't know how or when, but I've found that the less I resist and the more I allow, the more it flows and moves. And if this is the first time you'll be starting this kind of process, finding a trusted friend or therapist, coach or counselor can help you so much to move through all of the emotions.

Carrie Jeroslow: 7:35

Self-awareness involves knowing where your boundaries are knowing your triggers, knowing and having self-soothing and self-regulating activities, the awareness of when you're out of balance and needing to center and ground, and then having the courage to make yourself stop, to make space to recenter. I talk about this connection, time to self through some kind of daily ritual, some kind of daily experience, like I had my five to 10 minute yoga, something like that, whether it is two minutes of breathing, one minute of feeling your body, feeling your feet on the ground, something that is a daily practice so you can connect with yourself, celebrating the sweet, joyful moments and breathing through the tough, challenging times. In these ways, self-care is self-advocacy, advocating for yourself and your needs by creating space to learn what those are, learning what triggers you, learning the feelings when you get triggered, learning what soothes and calms you, and then following through and doing them when you find yourself in that place or as soon as possible afterwards. After some time of getting clear with yourself about your needs, desires, triggers and things that you want to implement with your private self-care practice, you can move outward a little bit to advocating with your partners or close friends. Now self-care in this respect can look like honoring your feelings, expressing yourself from those feelings, knowing when you need a timeout, speaking from I instead of you, for example, I feel this when you do that instead of you. Make me feel this when you do that. Or a way of advocating for yourself through self-care is removing yourself from a situation when you're too triggered.

Carrie Jeroslow: 9:33

And then self-care as a form of self-advocacy with family, bigger circles, communities, in person and online, could look like this Choosing the level of sharing and communicating Remember you don't have to share everything with everybody. This can be self-care by advocating for your mental, emotional and physical well-being and by keeping you in safe environments. Choosing to distance yourself from groups that don't resonate or finding ones that do. Choosing to take a break from social media or the divisive side, the unhealthy side and it's going to get even more that way in the coming months. I can feel it going to get even more that way in the coming months. I can feel it Using the energy that you would put into that divisive aspect of social media to instead find groups that are healthy, supportive, accepting and inclusive, communicating clear boundaries when needed, removing yourself from a conversation or experience when you don't feel safe.

Carrie Jeroslow: 10:36

So do these kinds of things help you to reframe self-care? Self-care is essential. You can't care for others when you're empty, out of balance and disconnected. It always eventually ends up causing more harm than good. And when you model self-care as a form of self-advocacy for others, you give them permission to do the same thing. You begin to model the idea of taking responsibility for the way that you show up in the world, for your emotions, feelings and actions. And that doesn't mean we put up with situations that are unhealthy quite the opposite, which leads me to a big decision I've made regarding this podcast.

Carrie Jeroslow: 11:20

In a form of self-care and advocating for my well-being and the well-being of my family, I've decided to take a small break. I don't expect to be away for more than a few weeks or month at the most. I plan to return in the fall with more incredible conversations that I already have lined up with wise change makers in the relationship diversity field. But for now, after much contemplation, much self-care, many weeks of my five-minute yoga practices, many moments of asking myself hard questions, after all the feelings that came with the idea of pausing and there were a lot of them and the courage to admit that I needed to stop temporarily, catch my breath and gain fresh perspectives, it became clear that, instead of pushing through, which is how I usually do it, I needed to instead advocate for myself by slowing down. Part of that was to take a rest from this podcast for a few weeks. When I made that decision, I felt my whole body release, let go and breathe. This needed space allowed an opening to go within even more regroup reset with the intention of re-emerging more centered, grounded and able to re-engage with more intentionality.

Carrie Jeroslow: 12:42

Things feel very chaotic in the world. Most of us are sensitive creatures who, even when we aren't conscious, pick energy up and these can affect our relationships with our communities, strangers, our partners, our children, our pets and, most importantly, ourselves. I believe that with a more loving, stronger, grounded, conscious, accepting self, we can create a stronger, conscious, loving, accepting world. So here's to you and your wellness. And with so much love in my heart, I'll close with stay curious. Thanks so much for listening to the Relationship Diversity Podcast.

Carrie Jeroslow: 13:27

Want to learn more about relationship diversity? I've got a free guide I'd love to send you. Go to wwwrelationshipdiversitypodcastcom to get yours sent right to you. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast. You being here and participating in the conversation about relationship diversity is what helps us create a space of inclusivity and acceptance together. The more comfortable and normal it is to acknowledge the vast and varied relating we all do, the faster we'll shift to a paradigm of conscious, intentional and diverse relationships, to a paradigm of conscious, intentional and diverse relationships. New episodes are released every Thursday. Stay connected with me through my website, kerryjerislowcom, instagram or TikTok. Stay curious. Every relationship is as unique as you are.