Conceptualizing self-care and self-love
I've been noticing more negative feelings in myself recently, like sadness, impatience, and irritation. Something that I've taken from one of Sharon Salzberg's guided metta meditations that I've been trying to incorporate into my life is the strategy of, when you notice that it's difficult for you to extend loving kindness to others, to first try to extend it to yourself. This is a big part of the reason why I've been revisiting the idea of self-love and self-care. Self-care is something that I'd never really tried to define for myself. In the past, I've associated it with things like doing sheet masks, drinking tea, and taking time off of school and work, without really thinking about what those things were trying to accomplish and whether they were even effective ways to care for myself. My friend Nicole introduced me to the Internal Family Systems model a couple weeks ago, which is a style of therapy that "combines systems thinking with the view