Hello you,
I have something different for you today! Early in January my friend Brigitte got in touch to see if I wanted to collaborate on a piece about building self-care rituals when your brain is kinda ADHD and I said yes with massive enthusiasm.
We got to have a brilliant conversation about our own self-care practices, falling off the wagon, shaping our self-care to support our neurodiverse brains, and what we’d recommend for anyone trying to get started with their own practice.
It’s been so much fun getting to co-create this with Brigitte, and it’s finally ready to share with you with eerily perfect timing. I swear we didn’t plan it this way but this conversation about rituals, supportive structure, and practice comes just as I’m opening the doors to Resourced.
Resourced is a 3-month one-to-one embodiment programme that helps you to create rituals that connect to a deep well of resilience and bring your life into full technicolor.
I’m giving you, lovely Substack friend, an exclusive early bird discount. Just use the code BODYMAGIC200 to get £200 off when you enrol before March 8th.
Click here for the full transcript
The quick(ish) and dirty recap –
Brigitte (she/her) is a systems and self care witch. She builds intentional systems for neurodivergent creatives who want to feel proud, successful, and get shit done.
She makes Notion templates that are a launch pad to help folks cross the finish line on their projects, as well as working one-on-one with neurodivergent creatives to custom build supportive systems.
You can find more of her work here:
What are your favourite self care practices?
Elle: Okay, disclaimer: self care is only half the story. Self care is deeply needed and we also need care that extends beyond the self. Community care and naming systems of oppression are so much a part of my own self care and what I do with clients.
With my own self care practices, the question that I come back to time and time again is: what do I need right now to be awake, resourced and connected to life? What needs to be in place for me to feel really fully alive in my life?
When I can answer that question I can be here for myself and take it out into the world around me. I can expand that care into my relationships, my community, and the way I move in the world.
The things that I personally practice are often also what I teach. So breathwork is really big, along with rest practices, which I resist so hard, and lots of wiggly somatic movement. I also have a lot of magical practices that count as self care too. Tarot, building little altars around my house, journaling, cycle tracking and being out in nature.
Those are all of the things I do to care for myself. And when I kind of list them out loud, I'm like, shit, that's a lot of stuff! But I’m not doing all that every day, right? It's a toolbox. I rummage around and find what I need at any given moment.
Brigitte: Number one for me is journaling. And that’s wild because my whole entire life I never thought that I could journal. I had a really strange relationship with it. And now that's my one thing daily non-negotiable. I need to get my mind out on the page!
My other one that I do every single day is I have a cycle syncing smoothie. I also pay attention to my menstrual cycle and I tailor the ingredients based on what phase of my cycle I'm in.
I also do magical practices throughout all of these things. So as I'm making my smoothie, I am infusing it with the, like the vibes or the intention, the affirmations that I chose to hold onto for that week. Like something that I'm like calling in or working on, I'm infusing that into my smoothie.
It's really simple things, but they're impactful.
My other ones are, I go for walks almost every day. Just like a little walk around the block. And then feeding and watching the birds in my backyard, because I’m a birder now and I'm obsessed with birds.
The last one is that I like to play tennis. It's amazing for energy. It's amazing for getting out emotions.
Any recommendations for how people (especially folks who are neurodivergent) can build a self care practice?
Brigitte: Be curious and experiment. If you have an open mind, I feel like it's going to be a lot easier to try things.
And consider that these self care practices might not look‘typical’. I would start there and allow yourself to try things, see what happens, and keep iterating.
A good way that I have figured out how to do that is by making a list. Start an inventory of some things that you already enjoy, that you could count as self care. Then you have something to look at when you're like, ‘oh, I need something.’ It's not like you're trying to pull something out of the air.
It can feel impossible to pull self care tools from nothing, especially if you're feeling dysregulated when it's going to be harder to recall those things. Having your little toolkit gives you options and then you can pick and choose in the moment and see what works.
Elle: It's almost like making yourself a little menu to choose from. Like, you showed up at this restaurant needing something and you can ask: What's here today? What do I feel like? It's a sweet, simple way of caring for yourself.
That’s my really practical recommendation too - write it down, give yourself a system. Get it out of your head so you don't have to carry it in your brain all the time. It gives you some containment, which is so helpful. We can be really resistant to constraints, but for us neurodivergent folks it can give you a boundary that you can then be playful within.
And then beyond the practical, I’d recommend coming to your self-care with the intention of meeting yourself where you're at. What if there is nothing to fix about you?
So you can show up exactly as you are. Messy brained, big feelings, scattered, exhausted, whatever it is. And your practice has space to hold you in that. Your practice gets to be shaped for you and your needs rather than needing to look like some measurable external metric of what a successful self care practice looks like.
What do you do when you fall off the wagon?
Elle: I have fallen off the wagon or been distant from my practice so many times. So many times! And the thing that really helps me is almost taking an animist approach to practice.
Your practice is something that you're in a relationship with. You can move closer or more distant. But if I don't speak to my best friend for two weeks, or if I don't call my mom for a month, that relationship isn't gone. I'm not starting from scratch. For whatever reason, it got a little distant but I want to get back to it so I can just come back.
Or maybe the distance is because the relationship needs to change in some way. I think it's so funny the way we get taught rigidity. As if you're meant to be the same all the time. You're meant to choose a thing and then just be the same. But generally as humans, we're not that. We are inherently prone to change.
So if you suddenly find your self–care doesn't feel magical or alive or connective, then, yeah, then you get to change. And that's because you're human. That's cool.
Brigitte: That's exactly that's exactly what I was going to bring up. I get curious about why my practice fell off or what was going on in my life. Assessing and then reassessing the situation. Letting things shift. Seasonal shifts are a big one for me. As seasons shift, my practices shift.
I’d also say to give yourself grace and compassion when you fall off the wagon. That allowance to be curious and experiment with your self care practice. Find out how you might want to change it, or try something new, or try to do it in a different way, or let it fall off entirely.
It can feel hard to let things go. But sometimes it's just time to go to your list and pick out something new to help you care for yourself.
How do you make space for neurodivergence in your practices?
Brigitte: Allowing myself to experiment and find out what works for me. And then writing it down and being diligent with the follow through.
If I know that a self care practice is something that I'm craving, I know that when I practice this I feel fulfilled, I get the benefits from it, it makes my world a better place, it helps me to show up better, but I'm like having hella resistance to it for whatever reason?
Then I have to also figure out what’s going to be the best way for me to do that practice.
My biggest example is that I have a hard time doing a yoga practice at home. Sometimes it feels absolutely impossible to get on the mat. So I got curious about my yoga practice over the years and I looked at when I was doing yoga almost every single day and I asked - what are the conditions that helped make that possible?
A regular schedule, accountability, a teacher to guide me, a financial commitment - I found out what I needed to have in place in order to make this happen, and found ways to give myself that in my life now. It's okay that I need these things. It’s also part of the practice.
Elle: I really love to build containers that let me shape my practice to exactly what I need that day. Setting timers, creating playlists for specific practices, writing a set amount in my journal, following rituals; giving myself parameters to work within is a big part of supporting my neurodivergent brain in my practice. These little containers that hold me and my practice.
And in terms of really meeting myself where I'm at, I give myself so much space to be authentic in my practice. After years of feeling like there was a way to be ‘doing it right’, I don't put that expectation on myself. I let myself make noise, move when I need to, be still when I need to, go slower, go faster, shout, cry, be stiff, injured, messy. I’m an imperfect human and so I try to let my practices meet me in that.
What is the most surprising thing you've learned from or discovered about your self care practices?
Brigitte: I’ve realized that my ADHD symptoms are more manageable when I'm taking better care of myself or devoting enough self care to myself.
And I didn't realize this until I started sliding off. Then I started noticing my symptoms getting way more challenging. I was starting to have a way harder of a time. And I was like ‘What the fuck's going on?’ It was a great benchmark to look at all the stuff that I’m doing to care for myself and see that it's like really having a big impact.
Elle: I think it's so funny because the whole point of a self care practice or a regular practice is that it becomes regular. And so you don't necessarily see an immediate change. It's a slow drip and then it's only when it's taken away that you become aware that it was doing something.
That slow build was one of the things that came to me as the most surprising result of my practice. Twenty-something me who first started these practices of self care had what they would give her. I’m so much more present in my life. I have greater agency. I’m more powerful, more grounded, and I have capacity to be with life in way more depth.
The other thing that really surprised me about my self care practices was how much they have radicalized me.
How much doing these things that bring me in touch with my needs and my desires also brings me into connection with the world. Reminds me that I’m not separate. Self care becomes something that I do to have the capacity to show up. To fight what needs fighting. To build what needs building. And unlearn what needs unlearning.
Brigitte: That's exactly how I look at my practices. Like my journaling every morning, I know that by taking that time to dump everything out of my head, I'm then able to show up in such a different way throughout my day, like for myself and for everybody else.
And without that care for myself I wouldn't be able to really tap into those parts of myself and the connection with everybody else.