I am thinking a lot about B. Loewe’s article “An End to Self- Care” right now. I'm trying to figure out if he's saying what I think he's saying, what I hope he's trying to say, or what I'm afraid he's saying. No matter what it is, I am having some feelings and reactions, like many others. I, too, am
yearning for more community healing and transforming our relationship to
healing, specifically the way capitalism has taken healing out of our hands and
made it expensive and something we see as a “luxury” and something kind of
precious, but without muscle. Sometimes the prescription of self- care can be
problematic: the inherent classism in some of the ethics of self-care, the
illusion that our struggles and our healing are individual and separate from
each other, the shitty cycle we can get into judging each other and ourselves
for not meditating or eating well or resting. But these kind of declarations to
end self - care and that there is no time for self -care hurts all of us,
especially disabled people and chronically ill folks.
I’m a community- based healer who sees people individually
for healing work, as well as teaching and offering healing in community
contexts. My work is rooted in collective liberation and self-determinism. It’s
nothing new to invite people into your home, give them some tea, listen to
their grief, hold space for their pain, lay them down on cushions on the floor
and pray with them or touch them or move energy, and offer them remedies made
from plants and stones. This is ancient. This is deep healing. And this is
radical. Our healing traditions are so massively co-opted, then mangled in the
maw of capitalism, we think we’re being radical by eschewing taking care of
ourselves? People need self- determined, bone-deep, individual care and support
in a community healing framework because we are still healing from isolation
from each other, we are still healing from racism and poverty and oppression
and trauma and we need healers who get that to offer us their time and skills
to help us heal on an individual and
collective level.
One of my teachers, Karyn Sanders, an herbalist and healer
of Choctaw descent, was trained by a traditional curandera in L.A. This woman
would just take on whoever came to her door and doctor them and Karyn does the
same. She doesn’t have office hours, she doesn’t have “rates”; she does the
work that needs to be done and the people make an offering. I have a feeling
that if you asked most older traditional healers, they would certainly see
their work with individuals as tending to the whole, because we are taught that
people’s individual pain, as well as our well-being, are also part of the
whole. I would say that most of the people I see for things like depression,
addiction, chronic pain, chemical sensitivities, digestive complaints,
heartache, fatigue, grief, anxiety (just to name a few) are connected because
most of their suffering is rooted in generational and collective trauma and
oppression. Their pain is not going to be relieved by committing more to the
struggle. Usually their healing is a long and non-linear path, supported by
some awesome healing practitioners, leaning into their connections to their
communities, creating rituals and new habits around food, movement, and rest,
and having their pain acknowledged and held with compassion and tenderness. And
when we heal, we have to remember we are not just healing for us, we are
healing through time, healing patterns woven through us, healing our ancestors
and our lineage. (*see interview with me in No More Potlucks for more on this idea.)
What we need to end- and by end, I mean transform- is the
privatization of healing, the illusion that our struggles are also private and
separate, the marginalization of disabled and chronically ill people and people
who struggle with mental illness, disassociation from our bodies, and the
pervasive disconnection from all of our
indigenous healing traditions and ancestral wisdom (and we all come from people who have healing traditions). Also,
I might add, we also need to transform the way we talk about self- care as
another obligation, something on our infinite and overwhelming to do lists as
organizers and activists, another thing we can feel guilty for not doing enough
of. I agree with B. Loewe that we need to transform the way we see our work
too; our activism is healing
work, and vice versa, and it is vitally important that we source it from
somewhere deep- our spiritual practices, our connections with each other, our
heart’s desires for justice and liberation for all beings, and the visions our
ancestors have rolled out before us. YES. When we are connected to our purpose,
we have something deep to draw upon and we won’t burn out, rather than trying
to manufacture empty energy from our very depleted kidneys, or caffeine, or
other stimulants. And YES to the end of guilt and shame about not taking care
of ourselves or doing it right all of the time. Most of us have grown up inside the medical industrial
complex in which we are taught to be disassociated from our bodies, to
pathologize and diagnose, and to suppress our symptoms. Creating more shoulds
and judging folks for not seeking help, or for not taking care of their chronic
cold, chronic fatigue, or chronic pain in the ways we think they should is not
the path of healing, and throwing out a call to end self-care doesn’t seem like
a wise remedy either.
If we’re wanting to encourage more collective care, we also
need to help support people in taking care of themselves; if we judge and
minimize the importance of self- care (bodywork, resting, and yes, even
knitting), how are people going to feel safe asking for help? Collective care
looks like a lot of things: healers having sliding scales or seeing people for
free sometimes, creating a meal plan for a friend dealing with chronic illness,
babysitting kids while their parents nap, so they can be well rested for their
work in the world, and their work raising kids… but collective care doesn’t
have to be instead of self-care.
There are so many people I work with who are just beginning
to integrate self-care practices, practices that nourish them individually, and
connect them to the whole. People who are reclaiming rituals and practices lost
in the last generation or two, for whom self- care is radical and essential:
young queer activists of color remembering their grandma’s recipes and cooking
them up for friends, laying altars for our beloved dead, laying our bodies on the
earth, taking a break from sugar (self-care and disinvestment from a fucked up industry), going to the community
acupuncture clinic once a week, finding a special stone to hold in a pocket for
grounding, putting ourselves to bed a little earlier. I would hate to see us
abandon these beautiful practices. I’m reminded of something my friend Dean
Spade said, “We need to be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as
we fight oppression.”
In my dream, our bodies are part of our collective body and
our collective body is not just us, but our whole planet, our earth body. My
body is made of stars and dirt and the blood of my ancestors and the breaths of
all the people who have been here before me and the green exhale of the trees.
How can I possibly think my pain and my joy is mine alone? So I imagine, I
envision, and I invoke that we need more care, more of the time and that self-
care is just one part of our collective movement towards healing. We can gently and fiercely take care of
the little baby bodies, the disabled bodies, the aging and dying bodies, the
green bodies, the blue bodies of water, the four legged bodies, each other’s
bodies and the one body you were born into, this time around.
Many thanks to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha for her
response to B. Loewe’s article and for her fierceness and gentleness.
