Self-Care for Liberation

Reclaiming Self-Care from Tyranny and the Industrial Wellness Complex

Self-Care as a tool of liberation, not an avenue to complacency and compromise.

I have noticed, mostly within the agitated ranks of my leftist comrades, a frantic urgency, not only as a symptom of distress but as a display of engagement. An informed “awareness” that feels more akin to the trauma response of hyperarousal than to mindful action. And rightfully so, you may say, as ICE agents hunt down our neighbors, and Trump brags about kidnapping foreign leaders, and brazenly ignites a fascist imperialism that would swallow sovereign nations against the will of the people.

But I feel amongst my peers an anxiety stimulated by not only a condemnation of far-right fascism and complicit neoliberalism, but also a fear of alignment with anything deemed to be corrupted by postcolonial capitalism. There seems to be no end to where we can go wrong. What institutions and practices have not been co-opted in the service of capitalistic exploitation?

I think specifically of the Wellness Industrial complex that could have me, in the rear view, cringe or repent of my earnest yoga videos from mid-pandemic, and my self-published book Yoga for the Anxious Entrepreneur, in which I use the language of self-care and productivity as a Trojan horse to entice people who have bought into the entrepreneurial grift. I wrote it as an invitation to embodiment, a chance to breathe and reevaluate one’s values, a place to slow down.

I do not repent of it. But I do understand the critique of self-care that accompanies a spiritual bypassing that looks to quell revolution and rebellion. We can easily see how the language of self-care is used in capitalism to sell skin care routines, wine, or anything deemed luxurious; it's self-care, we shrug. Purple devil emoji. But in this essay, I reclaim “self-care” from its role as a double agent of tyranny. The language of personal responsibility is used too often by our oppressors as a way to sidestep accountability for systemic exploitation. Through fitness and self-help books and programs, we see some individuals “succeed,” but at the expense of turning a blind eye to the needs of others and building resilience and adaptability to the status quo.

For example, unbeknownst to me, as I was posting yoga videos to help my community during lockdown and the George Floyd protests, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also using yoga to further his own ends. In the 2020 article Spectacles of Compassion: Modi and the Weaponization of Yoga, the author and sociologist Sheena Sood writes that the Prime Minister was using yoga to place the onus on individuals to care for themselves, rather than look to their government for protection and social services. He called on the tenets of peace to silence dissent. All this, while he has fueled a Hindu Nationalism that has endangered and killed countless Muslims and those of other faiths, as well as perpetuated caste systems that exploit fellow nationals.

I am not an expert on yoga, India, or South Asian history, but in my due diligence as a teacher, I have wanted to better understand the practice that has helped me so much and how to share it respectfully with others. I have come to understand that the practice in its country of origin has roots in classicism, and that the language Sanskrit, which we seek as “woke” Westerners not to appropriate, served a purpose similar to Latin in iterations of the Christian church, further alienating the common person from spirituality. Putting god and enlightenment behind a paywall or class access, and that is some bullshit.

I believe that the reason certain practices are commandeered by tyrants and despots is not for any inherent “evil” the practice possesses, but rather for their empirical effectiveness.

Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the people,” not “the placebo”. (Allow me, for the sake of the point, to not get into the importance and effectiveness of placebos in a certain time and place.) Let us understand spiritual and physical self-care not as a sugar pill to soothe us into submission, but as a way to better understand ourselves as we engage in true radical movements that ask us to put our comfort at risk in pursuit of justice and equity.

To see how well we can care for ourselves amidst so much neglect and abuse, to know we need not follow the lead of our abusers and continue to punish ourselves, and keep our wounds open as proof of injury.

I know my injuries, and spent years showcasing them, asking anyone who would listen to validate their existence, or I shoved them away and called them forgiven, like a poorly cleaned cavity decays beneath a cap.

In my ongoing healing, I have had to pull teeth and rebreak bones. And my wounds, I accept them, how they have changed the trajectory of my life, and I allow them to heal in the ways they can, despite the continuing persistence of the forces that caused them. This has been through my self-care practices.

I am a “pray without ceasing” member of my moving, breathing community. I do my best to tend to the limbs entrusted to my care, my arms and legs, my lungs and brain, my heart. My heart. My heart.

And it is not simply for my betterment that I pursue strength, but to be the body that comes up underneath the ones whose legs are incapacitated. I remember what it was like to be told I was too much, too heavy, my need too great, but a blessed few did come alongside me and help me on my way. They did not carry me forever but gave me a chance to stand again, to build back strength, so that I could lend it out in return when others grew in their need.

May we understand the cycles of being caregivers and receivers. And how tending to our personal needs as we continue to seek to be of service is not a continuation of an individualistic “bootstraps” mentality, but a living by example model that says what I am strong enough to do for me, I’ll do, and let the excess be given to those with less.

And so I volunteer my service as a yoga teacher, to teach others how to tend to an activated nervous system that many have relied upon for years, as the adrenaline that accompanies action. But it should be recognized that the same activation that may move some to fight leads others to flee or freeze. In the polyvagal theory of trauma response, while the sympathetic nervous system does offer some a power boost for retaliation, it seeks only to survive the moment regardless of the long-term effects. It is a system that works on an abbreviated form of automatic processing because it perceives the threat as so imminent that other systems are foregone.

I invite those who are able, in a world where so many are not, to slow down, bring our bodies into the parasympathetic nervous system, which gives us access to rest and digest, and become an embodied and nourished part of our community. Let it give us clarity in action. When we do not have wealth in our pockets or the privilege of status, let us make use of the resources we do have. We must cultivate the wealth of our mind, body, and spirit to do our best for the long work ahead. Because it is, in fact, a very long road.