Non-Negotiable Self Care

I've got a lot on my plate currently. Conference keynotes. Workshop intensives. Planning retreats for 2025. Curriculum planning for new class offerings in 2025. Classes this fall. Attending trainings for my own personal and professional development.

All things that I am totally passionate about.

And....I recently discovered two ginormous fibroids, so there is a hysterectomy planned for November. Two people close to me have gotten diagnosed in these last two weeks: “mild cancer” and “stage IIIA non-small cell lung cancer”.

And....a continuing genocide in Gaza, impending famine in the Congo impacting millions, ecosystems decline, climate catastrophe, the decline of democracy and civility…..

And....it's hunting season and garden harvest season which, although fun-sounding, can actually be quite a stressful time of the year up here in interior Alaska. The summers are just so short, and then we are scurrying to prepare for the long, cold, dark winters.

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About five years ago, back when I was teaching about compassion fatigue vs vicarious trauma vs worker burnout, I shared a concept: non-negotiable self-care.

Non-negotiable self-care is how I live and take care of myself, no matter what.

Non-negotiable self-care used to be transactional: Go to bed by a certain time with food prepped for the next day. Two meals – real food. Exercise. Fresh air. Hydration. Maybe some f-f-f-fun.

These days, non-negotiable self-care is relational.

When I notice a slippage in my relationship with myself and with my rightful (small and humble) place amongst things, then I start to notice my trauma survival traits emerge: hustling for my identity, self-esteem and self-worth through work and relationships; numbing out in order to avoid my feelings (current drug-of-choice is work); and denying the elephant in the room.

There's a reverse-narcissism in many of us who identify with codependent survival traits: the narcissistic belief that we think that we can save, rescue, fix everyone through our love and labor.

I know that I'm not *that* important, and I'm certainly not *that* powerful, yet these traits emerge if I’m not consciously aware.

Somewhere at the heart of this is a core wound around not mattering and feeling impotent, futile, powerless....around which I developed very necessary compensatory adaptations and behaviors. Once triggered, there's an internal scurrying, and then I'm off doing more, working more, scheduling in more.

Today, I can be with the losses and longings of my wounded inner child who couldn’t bend life to her will and who secretly yearned to do so. To surrender myself to my finiteness sets limits, and limits are good for we all need boundaries…and the space to grieve.

And yet, to surrender to grief absolutely requires an intimacy with powerlessness, for grief asks that we succumb to the throes of grief.

When powerlessness has become conflated or over-coupled with terror, then grief work will pop open the terror. Something deep inside me has always known this - hence why I've avoided grief work for most of my life.

Terror – like grief - needs containment, the container of community and of ritual. Regular communal grief ritual is foundational to my non-negotiable self-care. I'm not meant to hold this all alone. None of us are.

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Way back when I started doing shadow work and parts work, getting to know the aspects of me that were hidden from view and yet informing everything about how I was moving through this world, I eventually stumbled upon – and then befriended – my terrified inner child.

Fearfulness is my default response to everything in life, if I am honest.

Conversely, I used to over-compensate with false bravado, a façade of confidence. Ugggh…it is so draining and depleting to pretend away that terror.

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Grief ritual came into my life five years ago (that’s a story for another day).

On the other side of surrendering into a rapturous intimacy with grief that is intermingled with terror, there emerges: unbridled joy, profuse awe and wonder, an appreciation of beauty and bounty, an effervescent love of life in all its impermanence…all integral to my non-negotiable self-care these days.

The laughter of friends. The uncontainable enthusiasm of my dog around water. The majesty of the Alaskan mountains. Music that opens me up to places inside of myself that I didn't know exist. The return of the northern lights. The traditional foods of my people. Being outside. My garden.

Non-negotiable self-care is no longer transactional and bound to a philosophy of maintaining optimal productive output, for grief has transformed self-care to encompass a relationality with the world around me through a renewed relationship to the world within me.

And when my non-negotiable self-care no longer connects me to joy, awe, wonder, beauty and love, I turn towards the grief altar, so that I may participate more wholeheartedly in this ecstatic misery known as life.