There has been a collision of forces in my life recently pointing me toward writing about community and care.  An article called “The End of Self Care” by B. Loewe provided the final spark, the thing I couldn’t leave alone without fashioning my gut response into words, into paragraphs, into the outlines of dreams.

B. wrote that we – as radicals, organizers, activists, and maybe as a society more broadly – should put and “end to self care” and replace it with community care.  I read the article and the ensuing conversation voraciously because I dream of living within this community of people who care for each other.  And I dream of that community existing for many friends and family, scattered across this massive country, who are also facing mental and spiritual crises.

When I look around right now, I see our culture and society defined by dispersion, over-work, hyper-individuality and the resultant isolation.  Which is to say, we are living through a period in which most of us are lacking community.  And by “community,” I mean networks larger than biological families that care about each other and share resources – everything from food to tools to childcare to music and art.  And if we are lacking community for basic skills and tools sharing, then we are definitely lacking community support for healing.  And there are so many of us that need care.  So I’m worried about a proposal to “put the last nail in the coffin” of something that has been nurturing, if not perfect, for so many people.

I am a mother, an organizer, and sometimes a poet.  I am a yoga student and teacher, and I am a friend, sister, daughter, partner.  I am mother to a three year old with disabilities.  And by extension, I am a caregiver and a care receiver.  My privilege and culture allowed me to grow up believing in the importance of my independence – control over my body and my life.  My son’s disability has forced me to depend on others, and disability has made me come to respect the work of caring in a profound way.

But before disability, I made my living as an activist and organizer.  When I first got into social justice work, I was thrilled to have seasoned organizers put words to the disenchantment I’d seen and felt growing up.  Alienation.  Inequality.  Oppression.  Imperialism.  Racism.  Homophobia.  Although I was on the privileged side of many balances of power, I still felt deeply uncomfortable with inequality and xenophobia – even without the words to describe them – and I loved the idea that I could do something to effect change.  Some of the first activists I looked up to fed the idea that the more I worked toward social justice, the better I’d feel.  Or more dangerously, the more I worked for social justice, the more penance I’d pay for my sin of being born white, with class privilege, with citizenship.  So I worked hard.  And like many activists, organizers, and artists, there have been times when I’ve felt the profound, nourishing joy of doing work that aligns with my values – my revolutionary vision for another kind of world where we’ve ended oppression, racism, planetary destruction, and instead live in a world of democratic, life-affirming communities that honor the gifts of each and every person.

But what those leaders did not talk about were the spiritual and emotional challenges of facing inequality and dreaming of something better.  There’s a reason so many of us turn to television, alcohol, shopping, overeating and other forms of immediate pleasure.  Looking head-on at inequality, exploitation, war, and racism is painful.  Daring to dream that we might be able to change it – especially when there is so much money and power pushing toward more inequality and more pain – is a deeply courageous undertaking.   What my first mentors did not teach me about was how to name these more emotional and spiritual needs, or where to look for resources.  So, like so many others, I battled depression, anxiety, and spiritual sorrow by trying to deny them.

And my emotional and spiritual resources were scant. As a girl brought up by tough-minded, country-living, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps parents (one of whom waged a life-long battle with deep depression and self-loathing), I am not naturally inclined to embrace self-care.  In fact, when I first entered the more urban milieu of college and people who had thought about their “needs,” I was puzzled to understand what people were talking about.  I remember actually wondering if I had any of these “needs,” too.  I grew up knowing I should be stronger than that.  That I shouldn’t need to pause for this soft, self-indulgent nuturing.  I should be above this navel-gazing, individualist thing that in our (white, middle-class, U.S.) culture comes packaged as talk-therapy, anti-depressants, yoga, exercise, meditation, walking, taking baths, etc.

So I have wrestled with these two seemingly opposite pulls for a long time.  On the one hand there is the longing for real nurturing: for soft hands on my aching back, loving ears that would allow me to voice my deep fears, the indulgence of allowing myself pleasure without questioning whether or not I deserve such a thing.  On the other hand: the voices that first told me I that I didn’t deserve any of that because you have to earn love, and later the voices that told me I didn’t deserve these things because I was a white woman who could never give enough to the movement to make up for my privilege.   A woman who, by the very nature of my questions about self-care and self-sacrifice, demonstrated my weakness.

My wrestling process has taken me down an important spiritual path.  I went to church and cried.  I went to therapy and cried.  I moved away from full-time organizing work.  And I counted on my radical community, especially other friends who had gone through healing processes and could listen with experienced ears.  My partner is one of those amazing, caring listeners who has walked next to me through some dark times.  He challenged his own biases against “care” in order to support me in finding the care I needed.

Then three years ago my life changed course drastically.  I spent seven months pregnant, watching other new parents and imagining how our child would grow up at meetings and actions and surrounded by social justice work.  But then my son was born limp and unable to breath, and I felt the ground fall out from under my feet.  As doctors revived and then kept him alive, my partner and I faced months of the absolutely unknown.  We didn’t know if our son would live, would walk, would breath on his own, would ride a bike, go to a school dance, or ever have the language to tell us about his experience of the world.  Facing that chasm of the unknown, I felt a deep hollowness in my being, a sadness much more physical than anything else.

My community was there for me in every way I could have asked for.  They loved our son, including his disabilities, from the day he was born.  And they put organizing skills to work to support us.  Friends checked in with us and then called each other so we wouldn’t have to repeat the day’s news.  When we were ready to see people, they came and sat in the hospital with us.  When we didn’t know what to ask for, a friend organized a calendar for meal deliveries, and warm food rolled in for months.
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But my grief was too big for family or community or friends to fully address.  I had no idea what to begin to ask for, but I knew that in when I had felt overwhelmed in the past, yoga had helped get me through.  And so I went to a small, gentle yoga class.  And as I lay on my back and breathed and twisted and stretched – as I learned how to take care of myself in the midst of fear and grief – I felt the first bits of deep release.  It was a tiny step, but that class – and that room full of strangers – allowed me to begin to reconnect to my body.  Over the next months I kept going to yoga classes, finding profound relief in breathing and moving mindfully.

I could go on and on about the importance of self-care resources being available to people searching for spiritual healing.  The first time I said in public that I had given birth to a baby who was in intensive care, with no end in sight, was in a yoga class.  I needed someone who had dedicated her life to holding sacred space to be in charge the first time those words came out of my mouth.

Our son eventually came home from the hospital, and I went on to become a yoga teacher.  I am a yoga teacher because I want to be able to offer what those teachers gave to me – the shared space in which we connect breath with movement, building the foundation from which we all might look inside, and outside, at what is terrifying and what is beautiful.  And ultimately I want to help my friends, my community, and absolute strangers connect to their own inner wells of healing potential.  I especially want to offer this radical vision of wellness to the people and institutions that make up social justice movements.  I want to bring this kind of self and collective care to activists in part so their work might feel sustainable.  But I also want us to be building our organizations and communities today to reflect a vision of the kind of just, caring society that we are trying to build.

I recognize that this experience (and now defense) of yoga comes from a place of privilege.  In fact, as a family we have enormous privilege.  Because of inherited wealth, my partner and I were able to put most of our paid work on hold while we continued to pay rent and show up for our baby in the hospital every day and still have some time for self-care.

I feel distraught about this – knowing that we had the resources to set everything down while we focused almost exclusively on our family’s emotional and physical wellbeing for three months, while the family of the baby in the next room had to continue to hold down two full time jobs.  When did that new mom and dad have time for yoga?  Or meditation, or church, or a long walk?  I feel angry at the injustice, both out of solidarity and guilt.  As I tried to take care of myself, I wanted my newfound wellness practice to be simply that – health and wellness, not another institution muddied by structural inequalities.  But yoga and meditation and rest and much of self-care in our country continues to reflect the larger culture, including our painfully deep separation.

So I understand being angry at the limited availability of self-care.  But the problem with tearing down self-care is this: we don’t have an alternative in place right now.  Or, where there are burgeoning alternatives, they are still too nascent and dispersed to respond to all our needs.

I want to envision a place where our community connections are built of a web so strong they can hold us in our times of darkest sorrow.  I want badly not just to be part of that conversation, but to build the communities.  My partner and I dream of living collectively, but that dream feels daunting given the way that housing is currently built and distributed.  Among other challenges, we need a wheelchair accessible house, and we want to live in a place with a good quality of living that is also affordable to our friends and comrades.  Many of the models of collective, multi-generational family living that we’ve seen are extremely time-intensive.  So we wonder whether it is worth it to dedicate that much of our limited time and energy to our own, small community building.  Maybe we should instead accept living as a nuclear family unit (along with the nurses that work in our home), and instead put our time and energy into building the organizations that do the social justice work we care about.  Or maybe we should figure out how we might link healing, including my yoga teaching, and disability justice and movement building in a broader way in our city.

On good days, when the challenges of parenting, social justice work, isolation, and disability don’t get us down too much, we lay in bed at night fantasizing about opening a community center that would bring all of these things together.  A place that combines collective living, space for social justice organizations to gather and hold events, and a place for radical community care, with yoga, acupuncture, herbs, and classes.  Maybe even a gym big enough to host Seattle’s first power wheelchair soccer league.  But on the hard days, our creative juices aren’t big enough to fathom what this space might look like.

Fortunately, we’re not alone in this dream.  I’m inspired by the community health and wellness clinics that are sprouting up around the country, including our friends’ work at Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn and the national network of community acupuncture clinics. I’m learning about feminist led self-defense collectives, like Home Alive in Seattle, that offer individual and collective tools for self-care in a way that also takes into considerations the conditions of violence beyond the control of an individual.  At the 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit I met people with disabilities and their caregivers and assistants who are re-envisioning the basic relationship of care giving and receiving by building radical care collectives.  And of course we stand on the shoulders of past generations who have engaged in community care – everything from mutual aid societies to midwives, the Black Panther’s community health clinics to the disability rights movement’s Centers for Independent Living.

I’m excited to keep dreaming about radical care together, and ready to throw my full self – mother, organizer, yogini, dreamer – into the work.  When I look around, I see not just the lack of community, but also a deep longing for opportunities for meaningful healing and connection.    I hope we create these communities of care together, not by slashing some of the scarce resources that are working, but by asking how we might transform them into something even more liberatory and more beautiful.