This past month, I was involved in two conversations in my spiritual communities around our offerings of work and the practice of Self-care. In both conversations, in slightly different ways, I noticed an attitude of recognizing the value of our practices while simultaneously apologizing, slightly, for them.
By which I mean, adding caveats about Self-care not being a replacement for advocating for systemic change, or dismissing suggestions like “take a bath” as belittling of the struggles people experience in this world.
How I understand and experience this impulse is having been a therapist and spiritual practitioner for several years, having lived through the rise of Self-Care Discourse and the inevitable backlash to it.
What often irks me about backlashes is the tendency to overcorrect, to dismiss what was important and useful about the movement in the effort to address what is inadequate and harmful about it.
The backlash to Self-care originates, as is often the case, in its over-popularization and watering down. Important practices become touted as cure-alls, and any threat they posed to the political or economic order quickly becomes neutralized once absorbed into it.
So the transformative practices of simply sitting and doing nothing but breathing and observing one’s self, or of taking a break from hustling and consumption to relax in a warm bath, feed back into the atomizing culture of making each individual responsible for their own stress and the management of it.
I get it. I worked at a place that offered us complementary yoga sessions and back massages once a month or so, and that was absolutely lovely, but it was not enough to make up for the horribly run meetings, the unreasonable workload, and the the covert manipulations and politics. We would be pulled into meetings where we might be asked to provide recommendations of how to improve our work conditions, spend a great deal of time and care crafting those recommendations, and then sit through another meeting where our leader spent five minutes explaining why the majority of those recommendations would not be considered.
When Self-care is offered in these contexts, it comes across as both panacea and dismissal to problems that we aren’t causing and we can’t control. What I wanted was for my voice to be considered and to have control over my work conditions. No free ten-minute back massage can compensate exploitation.
In the backlash, I have seen calls for more collective, community care. Which is a beautiful vision, and one that I endorse. Knowing there are people out there who will have your back, who can be there for you and you for them, is deeply relieving of stress and buoying of the spirit.
Yet so many of us have no such community, have never experienced that kind of connection, or wouldn’t know where to begin to invest the effort and trust-building required. So many of our communities are ephemeral—they’re primarily remote, or they depend on shared employment, shared values and interests, or shared neighborhoods, all of which may change quickly and unexpectedly. When we invest in a community and find it dissolving or giving nothing back, that is deeply demoralizing.
Lonely people need something to hold onto while they’re doing the work of building community or advocating for change. Taking a bath, going to therapy, taking a walk, meditating or praying, spraying a bottle of charged aromatic water—none of these things are enough to transform oppressive and exploitative circumstances.
Yet those of us who know the importance of these practices need not apologize for that. These acts are not meant to transform the world. They are meant to create enough space and calm for our Selves to be seen and tended. They are meant to help us remember who we really are beyond this moment and this struggle, and to bring that essence into the work in front of us.
Our work is not to disconnect, but to connect with greater depth and presence over time. Self-care helps us to face the world with an inspired imagination; an open, courageous heart; and the power of our wills.