Self-Care is Not a Dirty Word

It really isn’t! If we truly tended to ourselves, we would tend to everyone and everything around us infinitely more effectively!

We humans aren’t very good at taking care of ourselves. Not really. Not in the ways that serve our deepest well-being. We don’t really know what that means. We’ve collectively internalized the pattern of disregarding, dismissing, silencing, even shaming, our truest needs and callings. It’s a pattern passed down over generations and deeply reinforced all around us. It’s a pattern we’ve so thoroughly internalized that we don’t even notice how much it is at play.

I invite you to take this seriously. It’s essential for the change we so need and desire in the world that we learn how to take care of ourselves. Beyond the surface. In the places we don’t think are possible - that we don’t even notice are there.

The belief underlying this pattern is that we are separate, exempt, not part of the world we are working so hard to transform. We believe that taking care of ourselves interferes with the good of the whole. It’s understandable we have this belief. But it is wrong. How can we create better conditions for the world if we exclude ourselves? We can’t.

I know this pattern well. It lives in and confuses me too. I’ve heard the message I’m trying to convey to you countless times, in countless ways, from countless people. People who I love and respect. I believe my friends, colleagues and teachers when they say that taking care of myself is good and worthy and right. But I struggle to heed their words. And I see them struggling to as well.

This gets to change! It gets to change for you. We get to undo this disconnect of ourselves from the whole that’s part of the disconnection at the root of all that we are working to transform. We can’t leave ourselves out. We don’t have to! You don’t have to.