The internet may deliver a particular version of self-care, but the notion of self-care has deep roots. We probably wouldn’t be talking about self-care were it not for people of colour and feminists who promoted self-care as social justice practice in the 60s (recall Audre Lorde’s famous quote, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”) And yet, the roots of self-care extend further back.
In his series of lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault argues that the idea that greek philosophers were primarily interested in self-knowledge is inaccurate--we should better understand their preoccupation as with the care of the self, or care of the soul. In other words, our current notion of ancient philosophy as primarily an intellectual exercise reflects our own focus on mental life. But when we look carefully at the history, practices, were at least as important as argument, and the goal of such practices was spiritual knowledge.
Such practices involve turning one’s gaze within, to analyze what is ethical, what is true, what is good. There have been different practices of self-care throughout history. One practice was to repeatedly imagine different possible iterations of one’s death, so as to be prepared for it (not quite what we’d expect on Instagram). Another was to go through the events of the day at night, so as to decide what was done well, and where mistakes were made, so that one might do better the next time. Another was to understand reading itself as a practice of meditation, and dialogue as a practice to clarify ideas.
My intention isn’t to list all the kinds of practices, nor to suggest that there are no problems with this history of thought. The point I want to make is that practices we engage in here--such as my writing, and your reading, of these words--participate in an ancient history. As do the many practices that we engage in from meditation to energy work to astrology to magic to therapy to journalling.
For all the faults of this culture extending from Greek and European thought, there are nonetheless threads of wisdom and spirituality that we might draw on as resources. And we might even use those very resources to reflexively analyze the traditions they derive from--that reflexive process is actually definitive of the tradition. We are not floating, without ground, in some new-age soup. There are roots, thick and deep, that we just need follow down a little beneath the surface to find life-giving wisdom and spiritual nourishment.
I think many of us feel unrooted. Many of us no longer follow the traditions of our family. Religion no longer holds the place it once did, and without that grounding, many of us feel untethered. And yet even religions exist within a broader history, of which we may be able to gather the disparate chords to understand ourselves as actually moored to something--or many things; many interwoven spiritual traditions that our current history largely neglects: esotericism, magic, alchemy, mystery schools, mystical religious traditions, witchcraft, ancient threads of shamanism. All these are still present with us and our culture and inform our practices. We are not making this stuff up out of nothing. We are supported. Supported by our invisible histories, by our ancestors, by the very culture that is also simultaneously so problematic.
Self-care isn’t just what we do to mitigate oppression or to survive in bleak times. For one, it fosters selfhood: selfhood is bolstered (or perhaps even created) through the reflexive process of inner analysis. The more we understand ourselves, our ethics, values, options, desires, the more we open up pathways for living and responding according to our Self, even if those are options are limited by the world we live in. The alternative is to act in the world according to what other people expect or want of us.
Isn’t self-care then an act of resistance? Doesn’t it make possible acting in the world in ways that are not merely according to the power that be? Those in power use all sorts of subtle tactics to control populations, including manipulation, coercion, and ideology. How will we resist these unless we have our own sense of what is right, what is desired, what is good. Without an inner sense of self, we will be blown about by external forces.
I don’t believe it’s some intentional conspiracy, but isn’t it interesting that people will have you believe that selfhood is illusory, that we are just a collection of neurons and genes unthinkingly reacting to the environment? That philosophy is dangerously convenient for those who wish to have power over us. The notion that the soul does not exist is the most dangerous idea. We don’t have to believe the soul is some metaphysical thing in order to believe in it.
The most modest argument: soul is what we mean when we talk about the experience music has on us, or the desire for freedom, or our dreams. Soul is how we understand ourselves and each other as human, as sacred, as subjects. Soul is how we know that other people have interior existences and feelings and hopes of their own. Erase that, and what do we have left? A world of automatons blindly doing what they are told? A justification for treating other beings as objects? No thanks.
All this to say that self-care runs deeper than pedicures. When you engage in self-care, you are empowering yourselves and others to have more freedom, and deeper interiority, and more integrity. And, I believe, it makes the world a better place, for you, and everyone else.