My Self-work Routine

I started intentionally working on myself a year ago today, writing my first journal entry. Since then, I’ve iterated  to the point where I am settling down into a bit of a routine.

When I began,  I made the commitment to invest at least 30 minutes on self-work every day. The way it looks today is a nightly four-part exercise, taking about that much time. In addition to this practice, I read and talk to wise people. I’ve learned that many, many people have traveled along this path. I use their insights as path markers, holding them lightly. It was their path. I have my own to find.

I usually begin with journaling what I am currently feeling, listening to my body, looking for signs of somatic responses to stress. At first, this was a dubious activity (“uhm… feeling… fine?”), but I soon recognized that I have a few consistent somatic patterns, whether it’s a tension in shoulders or a knot in my stomach. I then trace these back to the emotions that caused them.

This leads to the second part, the archaeology of self. Here, I focus on understanding why I am experiencing these emotions. My goal is to surface the underlying wrinkle, the “thing that creates the suffering”. I’d found that looking for cognitive distortion patterns helps me as a good first pass. Sometimes it takes a few days (or weeks), but I usually arrive at some key assumption that was hiding in plain sight. I’ve grown to rely on David Burns’ vertical development and on Kegan/Lahey’s immunity to change techniques. This is also where I document what I learned in my experiments and design new safe-to-fail experiments to try.

Next, I move to the third part, letting my Purpose find me. I shift my focus from where I’ve been to where I am going. In the beginning, I struggled quite a bit with even discerning the pull of the Purpose. I was really trapped in “duty”, “supposed to”, and “have to”. Seeking clarity, I ask myself what I actually want out of life and whether my actions lead to that. I study how I instinctively frame my actions and whether the framing or the actions themselves need to change. Through this process, I keep sketching and refining the bigger resonant whole, the thing that moves my spirit, the larger Purpose.

I conclude my day with the riverbank. Early this year, I was introduced to meditation and it has been a gift. Thank you, Search Inside Yourself and folks who taught it as a class. Meditation serves as my closure for the day, putting back all the pieces that I may have dislodged, making me whole. It’s a blissful touch of serenity, a glimpse of what’s possible, however brief.

I am not sharing my routine because I believe that you should follow it or that it is somehow a solution that works for everyone. I can’t even guarantee that it works for me. YMMV.

I am sharing it here because if you feel overwhelmed, lonely, and lost, I hope to spur your curiosity to give intentional self-work at try and maybe come up with the routine of your own. I am but a data point, a tiny bit of evidence of making tiny steps toward inner peace and seeing my own Self more fully and embracing its beauty.