Self-Care is Not Enough: Learning to Build Communities of Care

I cut my nonprofit teeth working at a rape crisis center. Crisis support for survivors of sexual violence was a constant part of the job, even though it was never my main gig. With statistics like 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men being sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime, nearly every conversation I had at work included some variation of "this happened to me/my sister/my mom/my college roommate/my son/my neighbor/my whole community when they sent us to boarding schools."Near constant immersion in trauma takes its toll. Whether it's called secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, or vicarious trauma, everyone who works in the anti-violence field feels it as some point - a combination of overwhelm, hopelessness, anger, and total dread at the idea of showing up to work the next day."You need to take better care of yourself," was the constant mantra, shifting blame for the problem to the worker instead of the work. Self-care was considered a "requirement" to do the job well, yet was never paid work. I felt most nourished in my work when it was part of building a larger community of brilliant, funny, and fierce survivors and allies who were serious about ending sexual violence by whatever means necessary. Yet this work was unfunded, and thus hard to prioritize in an already 12-hour long day.I loved my job, but I quit when I hit a point of burnout I wasn't sure I could return from. It was at this point that I started meditating in earnest, which led me on a path to end up here at Buddhist Peace Fellowship. I know I'm not the only person whose meditation practice was born out of a desire to end the suffering of burnout.How do we find new ways of talking about self-care that help us care for ourselves and each other as part of a larger community of care? Who can we look to who already have some good ideas about how to do this? There's a flurry of conversation happening today about these questions (including several spiritual activist and political Buddhist-leaning friends).I'm very curious what folks here at Turning Wheel Media are thinking about self-care! I'd love to hear your stories, experiences, or responses to the larger conversation in the comments.~dawn---In one of my favorite articles last year, Yashna Maya Padamsee opened up self-care and asked us to move the conversation to communities of care.

 If we let ourselves be caught up in the discussion of self-care we are missing the whole point of Healing Justice (HJ) work. Talking only about self-care when talking about HJ is like only talking about recycling and composting when speaking on Environmental Justice. It is a necessary and important individual daily practice- but to truly seek justice for the Environment, or to truly seek Healing for our communities, we need to interrupt and transform systems on a broader level. - Yashna Maya Padamsee

Yes! Even in healing work, we can't just work on the level of the individual. We've got to talk about transforming systems. (Can't wait to see how we will include transforming healing at a systemic level in next year's project, The System Stinks).B Loewe picked up this thread again yesterday, asking "Can we put a nail in self-care’s coffin and instead birth a newer discussion of community care?"

As I most often hear it, self-care stands as an importation of middle-class values of leisure that’s blind to the dynamics of working class (or even family) life, inherently rejects collective responsibility for each other’s well-being, misses power dynamics in our lives, and attempts to serve as a replacement for a politics and practice of desire that could actually ignite our hearts with a fuel to work endlessly.- B Loewe

It's generating a flurry of responses:About self-care - or self-determined care - as a radical act, particularly for people who have been told their lives don't matter because they are black or brown, poor, trans, queer, female, not from the US:

i love the idea of community care…but what is that, if not community supporting each other in our self-determined efforts to care for ourselves and our families?there’s that relationship wisdom, “you can’t change someone else.” i feel that – i know it’s true for me, when people try to change me i root my feet down into the soil of what is.grace boggs speaks it into movement, echoing gandhi, “we must transform ourselves to transform the world.”for me this includes self-care. or perhaps more precisely, self-determined care. because the messages we receive are that our lives don’t matter, that we don’t deserve love, or even to exist. to choose instead to value ourselves, our health, and the health of our communities – all as one, not at odds with each other, is radical, it’s self-determination. - Adrienne Marie Brown

And disappointed responses that we *do* have emerging models of community-based sustainable self-care coming out of disability justice circles, if we actually listen to broke disabled folks:

Yes, self care- like non biomedical models of healing- have been coopted by people who want to make money off of it. And typical burn out movement organizations trying not to burn out run their workers into the ground til they get sick, then take them a way for a special four day yoga retreat. That's not actually using a model of sustainabiltiy that comes from disability justice! It's doing the same kind of organizing non profit industrial complex movements have insisted on for years- which pushes out parents, broke folks, and disabled folks, to name just a few- but tacking on a little self care on the side. Getting rid of doing yoga is not the solution. Listening to brokeass, disabled and femme communities about how we actually create ways of organizing where we're not just grinding ourselves into the dust AND we're not going on some $4000 spa vacation once a year is the solution. - leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha

-----------------------If we're going to take a systemic look at healing and sustainable self-care as Buddhists, how do we do this in a way that recognizes the very different experiences people have with self-care based on whether they are sick/disabled, poor/working class, black/brown, trans/queer? And how do we, as leah lakshmi points out, lift up the voices of poor folks, disabled folks, parents, and other people pushed out of movements not because it's "nice" or "politically correct" to lift up these voices, but because these are folks who have real, concrete strategies for sustainable self-care and healing?