Self Care
A Fine line: Self Care, Reflection and Self Obsession.
In an industry built on 'wellness', can we have still have "self-love"? Without trying to buy it? Without mistaking it for a shallow form of self-centredness?
Self care is something I have been thinking of lately. Something I grapple with. Especially, when life circumstances push you onto the capitalism escalator and you feel like you accidentally joined the rat race where progress, success and busyness all seem to be wrapped into one idea of ‘achievement and purpose’. But is that really the most beneficial and meaningful way to contribute to society?
The act of going “no, I’m going to stop, I’m going to go at the pace that works for me”, is huge. Alternatively, perhaps it’s sometimes beneficial to ride with it for a while, to go with the ebbs and flows - And can that be done (‘riding with it’), while still keeping perspective? While still keeping your steady footing? Still questioning the end goal, the purpose and the motivation?
I think yoga helps us do this, for those times when you feel like you’re treading water and can’t get on top (stress). Yoga pulls you out. It makes you pause. You stop incoming information, you stop outgoing information and you have the space to breath for a moment - to regroup. It allows you to question how you are, and how you’re operating in this world, and how you would ideally like to be and relate.
And throughout this process can we have consistent, deep, real respect and care for ourselves? Especially in “in a world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.” Real, deep, consistent love”.
Poet and activist Audre Lourde writes that self care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
https://www.brainpickings.org/…/school-of-life-self-compas…/