Full of personal, strange illustrations, the deck is designed to add a bit of whimsy and joy for people of any age building out their wellness toolkit.
What is self-care?
To us, self-care is helping yourself navigate through a tough world with kindness, joy, and peace. When designing The Deck of Care, we thought about this journey in three broad skill sets - (1) mindfulness, (2) in-the-moment responsiveness, and (3) intentional life-design.
The foundation of effective self-care is awareness of your body, feelings, needs, and values so that you have enough information to be self-responsive and to create a life that will satisfy you. You’ll build out these skills with the Aces, Threes, Fours, and Fives. The Sixes and Jacks will also be helpful.
Built upon that awareness, self-care requires meeting yourself in the moment where you are with compassion. This in-the moment responsiveness will pull from skills in the Sixes, Sevens, Eights, Nines, Tens, Jacks, and Queens. The Threes, Fours, and Fives will also be helpful.
At a structural level in your life, self-care also includes changing your life circumstances to be more aligned with your values and gifts. This big-picture life building will take skills from the Twos and the Kings. In your planning work, you may also choose to create habits out of the skills from any of the cards.
This process looks different for everyone, and changes throughout one’s life. There is no Ted-Talk, one-size-fits-all solution to wellness. It takes a variety of skills, patience, and time. If you stay curious and playful, the process can be fun too.
How do I use the deck?
The deck is designed as a learning resource – something for you to read about and practice a variety of self-care skills. We recommend four ways to use The Deck of Care:
Play with them as a standard deck of cards. As you play any game, you can look through and read the cards, and get familiar with the practices offered.
Shuffle the deck and play one card at random. This is best if you’re just looking for one self-care activity to do and aren’t sure what you want to focus on.
Play through all four cards in a number (Ace through King). Working through all four cards in a number will give you an introduction to a research-backed self-care strategy, and help you learn a few different approaches to using that strategy.
Play through all 13 cards in a suit. Each suit in the deck covers a category of your life – and the self-care skill has been adapted to be relevant to that area of your life.
As you build out your toolkit, you’ll begin to realize that all the skills are interconnected, and you may need to apply more than one of the skills at a time. As you become more advanced, consider pulling multiple cards at the same time and thinking through how they intersect and can be used together.
How does this guide help?
Each card in The Deck of Care is written to break down a core self-care practice down to its essentials – giving you a brief introduction into the fundamentals of the skill. This guide is written to provide some additional guidance and information if you become curious and want to dive deeper.
A General Disclaimer
The deck will give you a lot of self-care tools - but it may not be enough for everyone. We encourage you to seek professional help if needed.