The practice no one talks about…
For years, I picked my skin without realising I was doing it, sitting at my desk, watching TV, or driving. My hands would find a patch of skin and worry at it until it bled, and I’d come back to myself an hour later and wonder where I’d gone.
It has a name — dermatillomania. Excoriation disorder, if you want the clinical version. But I don’t think of it as a disorder anymore, I think of it as a wise female nervous system doing the only thing she knew how to do with everything she was holding. A way of discharging what had nowhere else to go. A way of being unkind to myself that was so quiet, so habitual, I didn’t even know it was happening.
What changed it wasn’t a technique or a fix. It was a sentence my coach said to me, again and again, until I lost count: “Are you treating yourself as a woman worthy of your own care and your own love?”
That question undid something in me, and it’s the same question I want to put to you today.
Take a breath before you answer.
Are you treating yourself as a woman worthy of your own care and your own love? In every corner of your life? Notice how you speak to yourself when no one’s listening. Pay attention to what you say yes to — and what you allow yourself to decline. Consider the way you nourish your body, honour your need for rest, welcome softness, and claim time alone.
When you notice yourself being unkind to yourself, and you will, because that voice is old and well-rehearsed, the practice is not to criticise yourself for the criticism. That’s just another layer of the same wound. The practice is to notice, pause, and to offer love to that part of yourself anyway. Especially then.
Try not to climb up into your head and intellectualise it. Don’t try to work out why she feels the way she feels, or whether her feelings are justified. Drop into your female animal body instead. Feel the sensation: the heat, the heaviness,or the hollow. Nothing is good or bad. Nothing is positive or negative. It simply is, and it is asking to be felt.
This is what I mean when I call myself a practitioner of the feminine arts. Not someone who has arrived, someone who practises, daily, and imperfectly for years.
It’s the same reason I started Selfie Saturday in my free community, so women could practise being seen and loved exactly as they are. Not the polished version. The real one.
She is worth this. You are worth this.
Have courage, dear heart
Charli ♥️🦁
If you love to explore the archetypes, here is a link to the beginning of the 13 archetypes: The Winter Witch
