I would give people permission to reimagine what rest can be. Resting is anything that connects our minds and bodies and souls. Resting could be daydreaming, resting your eyes. It can be a longer shower in the morning. It could be not returning the text immediately. Detoxing off of social media and technology. From a biological standpoint, when we rest, our brain is doing so much beautiful work. It's really in a productive state of downloading new information, helping our organs to heal. And so, even from the biology of it, we really need to uplift rest and center it in our lives just for our health and wellness.
My particular angle, or contribution, is that trauma is really a somatic issue. It’s in your body and, because of that, yoga has great relevance, because it goes directly to sensing and befriending the body. While talking and knowing what happened and being able to articulate it is an important part of treatment, the most important part is starting to regain ownership of your body and be comfortable in your own skin.
For Black people, in particular, you're on high alert most of the time because of the nature of the cultures we live in. We don't even know it, and we don't even realize that we're under stress because we've adapted to it. You need a place to rest, relax, and let go. We are training the nervous system to be safe in stillness.
In this context, I try to think of self-Care not as a solution to burn-out, but as an ongoing, political practice of love between myself and the world: a space of agency, not relying on the subject only but generated instead through ways of knowing, not-knowing, or knowing differently. 'Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,' Audre Lorde writes. Loving yourself as a political act, is to connect the personal and the civic responsibility of the self. Care as a continuous movement, a powerful tool.