Welcome And The Core Question

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Welcome to Self-Care Saturday, Sweet Swatter. You can't pour from an empty cup. So today you're gonna refill with me. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot. It is Self-Care Saturday. We've been in a wonderful series. This series has been about the seven words that were gonna change our lives. Seven days, seven words. We've unpacked so many cool words this week, and today's no different. But before anything else, we want to ask a question that most people never stop long enough to answer. Who is the self in self-care? Now I'm not asking about what do we do for ourselves, not the what do we need or what we've earned after a hard week. Who actually is the self we're caring for when we say self-care Saturday? Because here's what we've discovered. Most people can describe their schedule, they can describe their goals, their relationships, their responsibilities, they can do it in detail. But ask them to describe themselves, and it kind of goes quiet. What do you mean, myself? Yes, sweet builder. It is self-care

Self-Care As Relationship Not Maintenance

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Saturday. Today is day six in our today's word series. And remember, we are discussing the self today, but remember we went through some other words this week. On Monday, we chose to move. On Tuesday, we chose action. On Wednesday, we redefined what it means to win. We rebuilt trust on Thursday. And on Friday, yesterday, we finished. We said we would we would finish what we started, right? So five days of forward motion, five days of doing. Yeah. Not because we're failing or we're we're not stopping because it's a problem. We're not stopping because we're weak or anything. We're stopping because the self, the word for this day, the self, did so much work this week, and I want to thank you for giving yourself a chance to get through Monday through Friday this week, and we spent that week together. Now, here's the revelation I want you to sip with today. Because the self did so much work, it deserves to be seen. The real self, the mind, body, spirit, soul self. Most of us treat self-care like it's maintenance, like an oil change on a car, you know, like an update for a computer or something we do uh so that we can keep on running. But what if I told you that self-care is not about maintenance? What if self-care is about relationship? And what if the reason most of us struggle with self-care is not that we don't have time, but that we've become strangers to ourselves? So let's start there, right at the beginning.

William James And The Three Selves

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Let's ask the question that philosophers, scientists, poets have wrestled with for centuries. What is the self? In 1890, William James, the father of American psychology, published what many consider the most important psychological text ever written: The Principles of Psychology. Now I read it so that you don't have to. And in this book, he said something that stopped the entire field in its tracks. He said that the self is not one thing. No, the self is actually three things woven together. There is a material self, a social self, and a spiritual self. And I'm gonna go over all three with you today. The material self. That's our body, our physical presence, our health, you know, our home, everything that we can point to that we can say, hey, that's mine. That's what the author called the material self. That makes sense. But then he added that there's a social self. Yeah, that's the part of us that's in relationship to other people. It's with the relationship we have we have with our parents, our kids, our colleagues, uh, our lover, our friends, the person in the community that knows us. The author said, We have as many social selves as there are people who carry an image of us in their minds. That there's so many versions of you and I that other people hold as an image, and that's part of who we are. So he talked about the material self, our body, our physical presence, then he talked about the social self, our relationships, and then he added the spiritual self, and I'm glad he did. Yeah, the spiritual self, what he called our innermost and most intimate self, our values, our conscience, your sense of meaning, the part of you that doesn't change, even though everything around you might change. Your spiritual self. Now, here's where this becomes personal.

Aligning Body Relationships And Values

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Most self-care, most of what the world sells us as self-care, only touches which self. Which self do you think the world is mostly going after? Absolutely, the material self. Remember, the material self is the body, the physical presence, the health, the things that we call mind. Yeah, that's what most self-care is focused on. That's what the spa is focused on. Sleep and workouts, the gym, the nutritious meal. It's all focused on the material self. And it's all good, it's necessary, it's all part of it. There's nothing wrong. I'm not mad at it at all. But there are other cells. There are these other two cells, the social and spiritual self. What about the social self? Are we tending? Are we paying attention to the relationships that feed us? Not that just drain us, but the ones that feed us? Are we showing up as the person we want to be? Not just as the person that everybody needs us to be, not the mask that we wear every day, but are we showing up as our true self in social situations? And what about the spiritual self? When did we last sit with our own values, the thing that that matters most to us, just you? When did you last ask, how do I live in a way that matches that thing that I believe? Does who I am becoming feel like who I truly am? I don't know about you, but I don't care. It's tough to sit with your spiritual self and find the time or to examine your social self. We spend a lot of time in the material self, but we have three selves. We have one life, but all three selves need care. So on self-care Saturday here at the sweet spot, we don't just care for the material self, we look at the social self and the spiritual self. Yeah, that's what self-care is about. And when you pay attention to all three, when you line them up, when you find some time to to meditate and pray and and and take some awareness and slow down a bit, you can contact a nerve in your body called the vagus nerve. It's a parasympathetic nerve in the body, it it helps you relax, it lets it helps you let go, and your inflammation drops, your heart rate settles, your brain shifts. When we do that deep breath in through your nose, and a long exhale, the brain shifts from survival mode into restoration mode. And that rest is not laziness, it's your biology doing its most important work. Absolutely, your body becomes aware

Ten-Minute Practice And Closing

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of itself, interceptive awareness, your brain's ability to sense and read your internal state actually activates, and your sense of self, the very experience of you being you, becomes apparent. Yes, the body is the self, but so are all your relationships, so are your values and your spiritual beliefs. Absolutely. So today, sweet spotter, today I want you to spend a moment reflecting on your three selves, your material self, that's you know, your body, but your social self, your relationships, and your spiritual self, your beliefs. That's how you care for you, all of you, because you're fearfully and wonderfully made, as the ancient wisdom always says. Yes, fearfully and wonderfully made, not adequately or functionally made, not productively made. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. Yeah, and the Hebrew word for fearful here is Yare, means awe with reference, a kind of sacred attention. You're a divine being having an ex an experience that is quite human. And self-care Saturday is the perfect time for you to align yourself, align your material self with your social self and your spiritual self. Take 10 minutes, no phone, no task, no agenda. Reach out to the person who fills you up the most, the person who loves you and who cares about you. And give your body something it's been asking for. Is it rest? Is it movement? Is it nourishment? Is it breath? What do you need today for your material self? What does your social self need and what does your spiritual self need? Just sit. Yeah, sit with the question: who am I becoming? And does that feel like me? Because, sweet spotters, this week we did a few things. We moved, we acted, we won, we trusted, and we finished. Each day, that's what we did. But none of that work lasts. None of it compounds or grows, none of it builds into anything sustainable unless the self, our word for today, is self, unless the self is cared for. We cannot pour from empty. We cannot give what we haven't received, and we cannot sustain a life built on a self we've never stopped to know. Today Saturday is not a pause in the journey, sweet spotter. It's the most important part of it. Today is word six of seven. One more day. The material you the social you, the spiritual you, all the versions of you for science, for soul, and for success. You're listening to the sweet spot. I care about you. I want you to care about you too. If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them. And please subscribe. I'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow's slow down Sunday. Oh, we're gonna finish up and we're gonna round out our last word. Take care.