New for 2022! Self-Care as a Way of Life Workshop

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions. Like a lot of people, I spend the last few days of December and first few days of January reflecting about what has happened in the past year and what I want to happen in the upcoming year. I review the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the academic year, and make adjustments. But I don’t really do resolutions in the traditional sense. In 2020, I did a vision board for the first time. You know how that turned out. Thanks, COVID-19.

This year I’m eschewing both resolutions and vision boards. Instead, I’ll stick to the same commitment that I’ve made to myself for the past five years: strengthening my commitment to my self-care rule of life.

Since 2015, I’ve been using a rule of life as the structure for my self-care disciplines. I’ve been teaching students in my spiritual formation classes to do the same. In 2022, I’m inviting my readers, friends, and colleagues to join me. On Saturday, January 15, I’ll be hosting a 2.5 hour virtual workshop, Self-Care as a Way of Life. In it, I’ll teach participants what self-care is about (hint: it’s not spa days) and how we can use it to enhance our health and well-being. Then I’ll walk you through the steps to develop your own self-care rule of life.

So if you’re ready to level up your self-care for 2022, come join me. The cost is $35. Space is limited, so reserve your spot now. And be sure to share with friends who might be interested.

Register

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I can’t believe it’s the end! Thank you to everyone who’s followed (and continuing to visit) this series. Be sure to sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay updated. I plan to offer a Rule of Life workshop soon.

Practicing good, consistent self-care requires knowing your needs and developing a plan to which you can hold yourself accountable. For me, that has come in the form of a rule of life – “a pattern of spiritual disciplines that provides structure and direction for growth in holiness” (Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast). Developed by monastic communities as a way of shaping communal life, many people use a personal rule of life to nurture their spiritual development.

But we are not just souls. We are body-mind-spirits-in-relationship. Thus, a rule of life is not just about growing in holiness. It is about growing in wholeness.

A personal rule of life should include practices to promote wholeness and vitality in our spiritual, physical, emotional, and relational well-being (mine also includes intellectual and missional). Wellness, of course, is relative. Your idea of wellness needs to be tailored to your unique needs, capabilities, and health concerns.

Spend some time this weekend drafting your own rule of life. Consider the disciplines and practices that you need to engage in to be well. Some practices are daily; others might be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Start small. Mine started out with just a few practices but has grown over the years as I’ve learned more about my needs. A rule of life should be aspirational; make it challenging but realistic.

If you want to take it a step further, create a poster of your rule of life and put it someplace that will serve as a reminder to you. I keep mine in my planner as well as on my office and bedroom wall. I revisit it regularly to see how I’m doing, including where I’m doing well and what I need to improve.

A rule of life is a personal pattern of practices and disciplines that nurture wholeness and well-being.

Resurrecting Self-Care Day 38

Mindfulness is not just about the mind; it also promotes body awareness. If you have problems with self-care, then you likely have difficulty with body awareness. We arrive at a state of self-care neglect because we have been socialized away from our bodies.

We may live in our heads, focused on the world of thoughts, logic, and performance. This is often the plight of people who are high achievers. We can become masters at ignoring our physiological needs in order to get the work done. Sometimes we even pride ourselves on our ability to go without sleep, food, rest, movement, touch, and sex. We call it discipline, drive, and motivation.

Sometimes we’ve been taught to focus on the needs of other bodies – other people and institutions. We pride ourselves on caring and doing more for others than for ourselves. We call it responsibility, love, even discipleship.

After two breast cancer diagnoses, I am finally learning to pay attention to my body, including its sensations and needs. I am getting better at noticing pain and discomfort when it arises, and then responding to it with care. Body scan practices have helped me develop that skill.

A body scan is a guided mindfulness practice where we systematically pay attention to how each part of our body feels. Usually done lying on a yoga mat (or seated in a comfortable chair), they take 30 to 45 minutes. For years I avoided it because of the time involved. But after a year of practicing it once or twice weekly, I feel its benefit. I am diligent about self-care precisely because I know how much my body needs it.

I invite you to try the practice today, perhaps a traditional MBSR approach with Jon Kabat-Zinn or Elisha Goldstein, Kristin Neff’s compassion body scan, or a trauma-sensitive approach.

Body scan meditations help us to correct self-care neglect by teaching us to pay attention to our bodies.

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The best practice that I have found for getting comfortable with silence and cultivating self-awareness is meditation. I began meditating nearly 20 years ago when I first embarked upon my self-care journey and I honestly don’t know where I would be without the practice.

There are many forms of meditation, but when I speak of it and its benefits, I am specifically referring to mindfulness-oriented practices, which help us to become grounded in and aware of the present moment. There is a large body of research demonstrating its health benefits.

As someone who stays in my head a lot, it is very easy for me to ignore my bodily experiences, including my feelings, sensations, and needs. And as a StrongBlackWoman in recovery, my modus operandi is centering the needs other people and suppressing my own. In fact, one of the biggest challenges in my self-care journey was that I couldn’t name my own needs.

Mindfulness meditation helps me to be grounded in the here-and-now, to notice what I am experiencing both internally and externally, and to do so without judgment. As my practice grows deeper, so does my self-care and my ability for compassionate connection. I began with a daily practice of 5 minutes of breath awareness meditation. My current practice includes 20-60 minutes daily of mindfulness practices, including sitting meditation, body scans, yoga nidra, qi gong, or yin yoga.

Make a commitment to practice at least 5 minutes of meditation today. Good starting points are Tara Brach’s “Brief Meditation: Arriving in Mindful Presence” and Rhonda Magee’s “Short Awareness of Breath Meditation.”

Mindfulness grounds us in the here and now and helps us to name our self-care needs.

Resurrecting Self-Care Day 27

Today I am grieving. Hard. I am grieving the murders of eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at massage parlors in and around Atlanta, which is where I live. I have spent most of the morning on social media, grieving in community. Later today, I have a series of meetings and presentations to attend. It is hard to even fathom doing so in the midst of this grief.

I am honoring my anger and my grief by allowing it to be. But I want to honor something else too – my commitment to live joyfully. I want to seek joy not because I’m running from the pain, but because joy reminds me that life is – and I am – more than pain. Because I don’t want pain – especially pain caused by White supremacy – to win.

As a person whose body is marked by intergenerational cultural trauma, seeking joy is a strategy of resistance. It erects a force field around my limbic system and says to racism, “Not today, Satan! You don’t get to inscribe more of your injury upon me today.”

So I will grieve, maybe for days. But as Alice Walker said, “Hard times require furious dancing.” So today I will also be sure to carve out moments to dance and laugh and play. I will seek joy. How do you seek joy in the midst of pain, anger, and despair? How might you practice joy as a resistance strategy?

Practice joyful resistance.

today’s practice

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It might seem weird to include anger in a weeklong focus on joy. Many of us think of anger as the enemy of joy, as the absence of happiness, optimism, and hope. We think that finding our joy means suppressing our anger. That is not true.

Anger is a normal and natural emotional reaction to a perceived threat or hurt. It is the “fight” part of our fight-flight-freeze response. Far from being sinful or inherently bad, anger signals that something is wrong and that we need to tend to it. We may need to alleviate, remove ourselves from, or change our appraisal of the threat. We may need to engage in self-care to tend to the hurt or injury. We may need to “tend and befriend” others to find support.

We honor our anger by becoming aware of it and allowing it to exist. We approach it gently, noticing what triggered it and how it impacts our bodies and behavior. We try to understand what work our anger needs to do, what lesson it is telling us about ourselves or the situation, and what it needs to heal in that moment. We honor it by not repressing it, but also by not making it bigger than it is.

Joy can be a powerful companion to anger. It can set boundaries around anger and direct it to an appropriate target or outlet. It can also diffuse anger. Intentionally seeking joy in the aftermath of anger can be a way of telling ourselves, “Thanks for signaling that something was wrong and that I needed protection. Now that I am safe, I am going to soothe the leftover pain by seeking out joy.” How might you honor and care for your anger?

Joy can be a powerful companion to anger. But first we must honor our anger.

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UPDATE: When I designed and scheduled this post over the weekend, I couldn’t have predicted it would fall on today, as we grieve an anti-Asian killing spree, one which happened not far from my home. I was so happy to find the series of photos of an Asian man in full joy because it’s an image we rarely see in US popular culture. I don’t know how to feel about this being the image and the message for today when we are hurting. But I’m holding it as a wish for my Asian American friends to know joy and hope in the midst of despair. It’s my wish for myself today too.

My kid is a middle schooler now, which means our home has very few toys. Early adolescence is when people get all serious. We stop playing anything except video games, sports, and musical instruments. We become self-conscious about looking silly, childish, or uncool. Some of us worry about that less as we mature, but we forget to return to play.

It seems that all mammals play. Only humans think we grow out of it. But play, like laughter and pleasure, is a vital part of our lives. It is an important antidote to the impact of stress. Animal research indicates that play even improves our social relationships and our executive function, including our decision-making and emotional regulation skills.

I realized the importance of play firsthand on a stressful day. Unable to concentrate or do anything productive with all my anxious energy, I impulsively grabbed some of my kiddo’s finger-paint. I had spent years watching him paint (and before that, my child clients in play therapy), but it was the first time I did it for myself. It transformed my mood within minutes.

Even when we recognize the value of play, we tend to restrict it to weekends, holidays, and vacations. And the more stressed we are, the less we play. What might it look like to integrate play into a regular workday?

Spend at least five minutes engaged in play today. Get on the floor with your kid or a pet, grab some Play-Doh or fingerpaint, play frisbee or throw horseshoes, stand in a mirror and make silly faces, or dance the zaniest you can. Just play.

Spend at least five minutes engaged in play today.

today’s practice

Resurrecting Self-Care Day 24

I’m a big list person. Part of it is a memory issue. If I don’t write things down, I’m likely to forget them. But I’m also highly achievement-oriented, so I get a perverse feeling of satisfaction when I check things off on my to-do lists. I admit it, I have written things on my to-do list that were already completed just to experience the thrill of checking it off. Yeah, I have issues.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, though, that I realized that my task list did not reflect my self-care priorities. My weekly to-do list is filled with work, parenting, and household obligations. Rarely did it have anything on it that was connected to my commitment to my own health and well-being. And when it did, it would usually be something “meditate” or “exercise.” Those are important, as we’ve already discussed. But what about my emotional health?

Emotional health is about knowing our limits, setting boundaries, managing our stress, and forming good relationships, to be sure. And it is also about experiencing pleasure and joy. As adults, unfortunately, we often get disconnected from joy.

What might it look like to intentionally include pleasure and joy in your day? It can be something big (like getting a pedicure) but also something small like doing a puzzle (not a mindless video game), finger painting, hula-hooping, or even taking some time to sit outside in the sun. Whatever you choose, prioritize it today. Give something else up if you have to in order to enjoy even five minutes of pleasure.

What might it look like to intentionally include pleasure and joy in your day?

today’s practice

Resurrecting Self-Care Day 23

When I was going through breast cancer treatment, I laughed a lot. I considered it an informal part of my treatment plan. There is some evidence – albeit inconclusive ­– that laughter may improve emotional and physical health. It’s been studied all over the world as an intervention for mental health issues (e.g., depression, anxiety, quality of life, self-efficacy) and physical health problems (blood pressure, weight, fatigue, sleep quality, immune function, etc.). There’s even a such thing as laughter yoga.

Laughter is not a curative. It is not going to cure your depression or anxiety or hypertension. But it can help by reducing the level of stress hormones circulating in our bodies, which are themselves associated with various illnesses and poor health conditions. Interestingly, simulated laughter – which is self-induced without any particular stimulus – may have better effects than spontaneous or natural laughter.

When I find myself getting too serious (as can often be the case when you’re a Black woman coping with chronic pain and illness in the middle of a pandemic and a resurgence of White nationalism), I seek out sources of laughter. I watch funny videos (babies and pets are my faves). I act silly with my family. And occasionally, I just make myself laugh for the sheer joy of it.

I laugh at everything I can. I laugh in meetings when no one else does. And you’ll always know when I find something really funny, because I will throw my head back or lean to the side and crack up.

How often do you laugh? When was the last time? Aim to get some laughter in your life today.

Laugh fully and loudly.

today’s practice

Resurrecting Self-Care Day 10

Our focus this first full week of Lent has been revisiting the basics of self-care. Some of these practices may be well-established habits for you. But if you’re like me, at least one of these areas is a point of struggle for you.

At its core, self-care is about knowing ourselves enough to know what we need. Even if you aren’t consistent with it, do you at least know what you need? From there, you can begin setting goals in terms of frequency and length. But start with identifying what you need.

Next week’s focus will be on self-compassion.