Why Self Care Feels Like a Luxury (Even When You Know Better) #235

Before you push through one more to-do list on an empty tank, let’s pause and talk about the belief that says you have to earn your rest. Because here’s the truth: rest isn’t something to chase when everything’s finally done—it’s something your spirit is already worthy of, right now.

In this episode, we explore WHY self-care can feel so out of reach for the ones who give the most. For the intuitive ones. The nurturers. The empaths.  The healers. The ones who feel responsible for holding it all together.

You’ll uncover where these invisible blocks come from—and why the very people who uplift others often struggle to honor their own needs. We’ll uncover the false beliefs you’ve carried: that care must be earned, that rest is indulgent, that your needs come last. And then? We’ll begin to release them.

Christina Wooten helps you access the wisdom and support of the Spirit World to elevate your life.
She is a Certified Psychic Medium and Reiki Master Teacher.  Christina is the owner of Sedona Medium and co-host of Modern Life and Spirit podcast.

She offers Psychic Medium Readings, Soul Readings, Past Life Regressions, and teaches how you can start communicating and receiving messages from your Spirit Guides - through her program.
Learn more about her offerings here

Currently registering for Fall Reiki in-person classes in Sedona - beginners welcome!  Contact www.SedonaMedium.com Today!

Enroll in Fall Reiki Classes Today! Space is limited.

Visit sedonamedium.com to learn more.

Transcript

Unknown: 1:38

Music. Welcome to the Modern Life and Spirit Podcast where we explore spiritual topics relevant to today's world. Your hosts, certified psychic medium Christina Wooten and Reiki master teacher Robert Wooten, break down how to work with spirit to create more positive growth in your life. Consider this podcast your go to spiritual resource for navigating the modern world.

Christina Wooten: 2:06

Hey there, kindred spirits. Welcome to Modern Life and Spirit podcast. It's me. Christina Wooten, certified psychic medium at Sedona medium.com Welcome to Our Podcast, sacred space. I'm glad that our hearts can share some time together and connect a little bit today, if you've been following our podcast, you know that we recently finished up a five part series about the love languages and how that influences our spiritual and sometimes our intuitive lives. And as I was reflecting on what's what's next for us? What do we really need? I was talking to my guides about it. The thing that kept coming up over and over again was about self care. Why is it that self care is so hard for the same people who extol its virtues to other people, so the same people who know better. I'm talking about the healers, the light workers, the artists, the intuitives. Why is it so hard? I see this over and over again, where the most incredible lights, the most incredible healers, are also deep into some toxic default patterns when it comes to self love and it comes to self care. So over the next few weeks, I want us to work on shifting that energy to illuminate self care blocks, to be open completely to a new way of being, to a new consciousness to guide us into the fullness of love, which really includes ourselves. So as we dive into this topic, I just want to start by asking you, why does self care feel like something you have to earn, like you have to have some permission to rest? Why is that even healers, intuitives and spiritually minded souls can fall into this trap of thinking that self care is indulgent, and at the same time they're encouraging other people to take better care of themselves, and seeing firsthand the disarray and the disease within the body that a lack of self care can cause. It's one of the greatest paradoxes of the healing path. You know the truth about self care. You believe in it 100% for others, you advocate for it. But when it comes to you, there's this voice that says, Not yet, not until I've done more, not until I've taken care of everything else. Oh, let me just start by saying this won't be everyone's life experience, but from a lot of healers and empaths, what I'm going to share today is very real. And if something in your heart feels a quiet yes as I speak, then I am definitely talking to you today. There are a lot of blockages in our mindset when it comes to self care, and most of them didn't start with you. Now more than ever, there is so much energetically being asked of us. We're living our lives. We're taking care of other people, we're serving our clients. We're staying connected to our sense of purpose, while at the same time, navigating a nervous system onslaught every single day. It's a lot. And if you're an empath, I know you're feeling just how intense it is. We cannot pretend that we're not in a different time. Right now, something different is being asked of us also, and many intuitive people you've known this. Maybe you've had health challenges that forced you to reevaluate how you show up for yourself. Maybe spirit has been whispering to you that it's time to change. Or maybe you just feel this inner knowing that the old ways of pushing through and keeping going aren't working anymore. We don't have the time anymore to talk about self care without really living it, because when we don't, we're headed straight into burnout, and beyond that, into something that disconnects us from our core, that leads us into the dark night of the soul when it goes on too long. There's a theme that I've been noticing around all of the cultural upheaval and division that seems to be marking this era right now, and that theme is integrity. We are being asked to live in full and. Integrity to hold the vibration of real love, and that starts by living what we say we believe. If you believe in love, compassion and care, then that vibration has to flow both ways, outward and inward. Self care is not just this luxury, it's how we practice integrity with ourselves. It's how we live that true fullness of vibration. And if you know self care matters, if you know in your heart that it's not selfish, why does it still feel so out of reach? So let's take a deeper look at where that resistance originates from many healers and empaths. Grew up absorbing subtle and sometimes not so subtle, messages that caring for others comes first, that your needs come second, or that sometimes, in some cases, in some family dynamics, they don't matter at all. In fact, most healers became who they are because they were trying to heal a dysfunctional family system. They were compensating. So some of us developed our empathic abilities early on, not as a gift at first, but as a means of survival, learning how to read the room to sense when someone in your life was safe or when they were in an unstable or unsafe place. Maybe they were angry, maybe they were drunk, maybe they were aggressive, but being able to sense when they were destabilized. Many healers started healing early in their family of origin. And that's not because that's something that they chose, but it's because they had to. So at a time when you really should have been learning how to regulate yourself, how to explore your interest, how to build your sense of self, you were focused entirely on someone else, or on several people depending on the family dynamic, you learned perhaps that your safety depended on someone else's mood, and so your attention begins to focus outward, always scanning, always adjusting, always trying to make things better so that you could feel safe, and that scanning outward, that sensitivity to the emotional state of others, that becomes very hyper aware and hyper vigilant, is what makes a super strong empath. So at that time of life, self care wasn't about you. It was about taking care of others, because if they were okay, then you you could breathe. You didn't learn how to ask, What do I need right now? You learned how to ignore your needs, how to bury your feelings and do what it took to keep the peace, whatever that happened to be, and that's where self abandonment begins, and that's what we have to gently unlearn. When you grow up in survival mode, anything about you can feel indulgent, so rest, nope, not when there's more to do, joy, not when others are struggling. Play only if it doesn't inconvenience anyone else. You may have even taught yourself not to even hope for those things. So even happy moments like birthdays or holidays might have also felt unsafe because attention on you may have triggered chaos around you, depending on your family system. So when you think about caring for yourself now, something inside still kind of whispers, nope, I don't need that headache today. No, thank you. Just take a moment let that sink in. And if this is your pattern, you probably still feel the most comfortable looking outward, which again, makes you an amazing Empath, asking questions like, well, who needs me now? Who can I help? Who or what needs my worry energy? There will always be someone who's happy to receive your light, but when you are giving from an empty place, it costs you. The people around you might see you as the strong one, the one who can handle it all, even things they can't seem to handle themselves. So they don't always hold space for you. They don't check in on you. They assume that you're okay, and your feeling of neglect and loneliness gets wider. And here's the thing, it's this is not about them. This is about you. And this pattern that has been learned, you've learned to regulate yourself through others. You've learned to put yourself. Last, but here's your opportunity right now to know yourself, because to care for yourself, to love yourself, you have to know what it is that you need. And that takes time. It takes gentleness. It takes pausing long enough to really shift where you're listening inward, really listening to that small voice that maybe hasn't had space to speak before, or speak as loudly as it's really needed to before. So let's just kind of pause for a moment and process, because this is big and you don't have to fix it all at once. It's a strong dynamic that's at play, but we can start to take some new steps, create some new energy, like crack open the door and begin to address the root cause, and that can look like just taking one little step. So what's one loving thing that you can offer yourself today just because you are worthy of love, not because you've earned it, not because you've done enough, not because you got all the right check marks on your to do list today, but just because you matter, and your happiness matters, your body matters, your spirit matters. And as we talk about this, I want to just express that this is about awareness. It's not about blaming others or diving back into the past and living in the past. It's about understanding where these patterns came from, so that you can just lovingly bring them into the light and begin to shift them. You are not here to live in survival mode anymore, and you're not here to abandon yourself or to put yourself on the back burner for this mystical time which seems to never come of when you get to be first. So we talked earlier about integrity. Integrity means that your actions reflect your deepest values. And if you value love, if you value healing and care, it's time to let that love flow inward. So let it start small. You can pause whenever you feel the urge to fix that's a big one. Take a breath when you feel the urge to push beyond your limit or give just a little bit more, when you're already running on fumes, and start to ask yourself this really important question, what do I need right now? And then just listen, because you are worth listening to, and if you're a healer, if you're intuitive, if you're a sensitive person, your insights are powerful. You've seen it in how you've shown up for other people. Having that same powerful insight for yourself, just being able to listen to that wisdom that's already speaking to you can really open your whole world up. Now, what I want you to remember about this, though, is that if this has been a pattern for you in your life, it won't feel natural to put yourself first. Self care will feel stressful. It will feel uncomfortable in the beginning. That is, and that's probably part of the reason right now that you avoid it as well, because it feels so uncomfortable. But as you begin to expand your consciousness to include a more balanced way of living, you're going to begin to normalize it. It will feel easier, and as it begins to feel easier, you'll have so many more rewards to appreciate that, just reinforce it for you, your body will be able to speak to you more clearly, to give you more insights into your own healing journey. You'll become even more intuitive, because you'll be listening to all that information that's available to you, the inward information and the outward vibes. You'll be stronger and more resilient, much more solid and grounded, because you're begin to fully occupy your root chakra. I mean, just the acknowledgement of the body is the temple, is our root chakra. The list of benefits just goes on and on and on. It's a beautiful thing when a healer turns their own light and abilities to their life. That's the kind of energy that you really feel when someone walks into a room and their aura is just full of light and full of energy, that it just impacts the space that they're even in. That's what we're talking about. So today we're going to challenge that old story, the old energy blockage that's been sitting in the back of your mind and how you relate to yourself and others, that self care is indulgent because it isn't indulgent. You know, this self care is essential, and this blockage is 100% ready to shift, or else you wouldn't. And be listening to this today. This message wouldn't have found you if it wasn't meant for you. So as you start to shift this energy, and as you take those first steps to pause yourself when you're feeling the fixer inside, wanting to fix things, I want you to also reflect a little bit today about what early messages about rest and about self care is still guiding your actions. What is your default way of approaching self care? How is it modeled for you in your life? What messages were you taught about your role in other people's self care and in their regulation and in their management? Because this can all begin to illuminate some really important places that are ready to level up for you, that are ready to take the next step in your living life to the fullest, and your next level of embodiment in consciousness. So I invite you to dig deeper into that, to not let that kind of fall on deaf ears, so you can see where some of these personal blockages in your self care habits might have originated from, so that, that way you can start to shift and heal it head on. I'm excited about us going deeper into self care blockages. I think this is significant. It's important. It's not enough to just say, take better care of yourself. We have to address the root blockages to that beautiful flow of energy within so that we have a highway of love flowing within and outside of us. I'm excited to see where this takes us in our journey together. Thank you for joining us. I would love it if you would take a moment to rate and review a podcast, wherever it is that you are listening, to make sure that you are following us, so that you get all the updates on new episodes. All right, everyone, many blessings. The

Robert Wooten: 18:34

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