“I’m going to take better care of myself this year!” 

This sentiment, or something very much like it, has probably shown up in your Instagram feed approximately 7,000 times over the past few days. I’m seeing it myself, and hearing it from clients and loved ones, and believe me, I get the impulse.

But whenever I hear someone say something like that, it makes me wonder: what does “better” mean? Or I’ll ask it another way: do you know what enough is?

Because here’s the thing: in making that statement – ”I’m going to take better care of myself this year!” – you’ve already decided a few things. You’ve decided that what you’re doing now isn’t enough. You’ve decided that you need to do something different than what you’re already doing. And you’ve decided you need to do something more. 

But to what end?

When it comes down to it, do you  know what it feels like to be well taken care of? How will you know when you’ve “taken better care of yourself” enough? 

Do you know what enoughness feels like in your body?

Many of us don’t, or don’t consciously think about it. We’re primed to look for more, for bigger, for the next big thing. The 90 day plan, the lifestyle change! But if you’re already overstretched, more is not the answer. You can’t exhaust yourself into renewal, it just doesn’t work that way.

So here’s my invitation to you this month: take a little time to settle into yourself. And think about a time that you can remember when you were well cared for. Not some peak moment, all is right in my world, I’ve just been on a 7 day retreat feeling. But a simple moment, when someone around you took good care of you.

That moment when your neighbor gave you a rose out of his garden. Or that massage therapist who seemed to know what you needed before you could even articulate it yourself. 

Or, if you don’t have an active memory of something like that – and you may not, that’s fine too – imagine what feeling enoughness might feel like. Where do you feel it in your body? What does it feel like? 

And, what tiny, tiny, tiny action might you take to support that feeling? Again, let me emphasize: tiny. 

Take the smallest action you can think of, and then half that. I really can’t tell you enough how revolutionary it can be to do less, you have to feel it for yourself. But once you do, everything changes.

A final note here: you might not know what satisfaction actually feels like, because being satisfiable is something we often need to re-learn, re-member. Or for some of us it may be we’re learning it for the first time, if we’ve never really experienced it. . If nothing is ever satisfying, and you can’t imagine what that feels like, it could be that you were left without your core needs attended to when you were tiny, and that feeling of enoughness never made it into your body. That’s OK too, we can work on that. 

f you do suspect that might be the case, then here’s my invitation to you: how’s your big toe? Or the roof of your mouth? How about your eyebrows or the pads of your fingers? Right now, how do any of these  feel? OK? Or at least OK enough, comparatively?  If you can find a touchstone in yourself that feels OK enough, it’s one place you can always return to.That might be a door into feeling what enoughness, satisfaction, feels like in the rest of you.

As always, I’m here for you! If you want this to be the “year you take better care of yourself,” I’d love to be part of that care plan. We can to figure out what that actually means, and looks like, for you. Find out how we can work together here.