Holistic Self-Care: Looking Back to Move Forward

Like many, I’ve been thinking more about self-care this past year.

Between a global pandemic, an election and perhaps the most important period yet for the Black Lives Matter movement, 2020 demanded more of our time, energy and spirit than we have ever been able to get our minds around. So how do we love ourselves in 2021?

Depending on who you are and where you come from, “self-care” can mean any number of things. Since its birth in and around the 1950s, the self-care movement has grown and evolved, and today the idea is equally at home among trauma therapists, social activists, spiritual gurus and beauty influencers. But self-care is older and deeper than today’s plethora of yoga retreats and sheet masks might suggest.

The roots of self-care

In his book The Care of the Self, French philosopher Michel Foucault echoed Socrates’ belief that self-care should be a practice that helps us care for others: lifelong work on one’s body, mind and soul, in order to better relate to other people and live an ethically driven life. In fact, the self-care movement found its early identity in this very sentiment.

In the 1950s, doctors used the term “self-care” to encourage autonomy and feelings of self-worth among long-term institutionalized patients. The idea soon expanded into psychology, and in the 1960s, academics began exploring techniques, such as a healthy diet, exercise and meditation, for professionals like therapists, EMTs, social workers and firefighters who faced repeated exposure to pain and trauma in their daily work.

The meaning of self-care deepened when it became an integral part of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman,” and in the early 1970s, health-care reform became a foundational issue for the Black Panther Party, which promoted self-care as an essential way for Black people to stay resilient in the fight against systemic and medical racism, and to gain agency over their own health and survival.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988)

This core desire for agency over one’s own health soon spread from the activist fringes into the mainstream. The new idea called “wellness” was at first regarded with skepticism, even disdain. But it gave us what may be the most enduring concept of self-care: that our own minds, our bodies and nature hold keys to our health and happiness.

Self-care today

Self-care moved into a new level of mainstream awareness after the 2016 election. Google searches for self-care doubled, and #selfcare posts on Instagram climbed from more than a million to tens of millions in just a few years.

It’s not surprising that, in the face of a global pandemic, political uncertainty and deepening racial divides, self-care is increasingly used as a way of coping with open-ended anxiety, fear and frustration. In an overwhelming world, self-care has taken on a decidedly more escapist vibe.

Luxe self-care is a new way of disengaging. Most of the self-care posts I saw were aimed at some form of luxury consumption, and that kind of self-care isn’t accessible to everyone. As millions struggle with the economic impacts of COVID, they can’t spare the time or money for today’s self-care solutions. And products and services are often only a temporary fix. A bubble bath feels good while it lasts, but sometimes indulgence offers little more than a brief respite from a bigger problem that needs a better solution.

Self-care, holistically

I’m a huge proponent of a solid self-care game. Like so many, I also struggle with feeling that self-care can be selfish. I try to be mindful of the conditioning that leads me to put others’ needs before my own, and grant myself the grace to love me first.

But honoring the history of self-care can deepen the meaning of our own practices. We can take care of ourselves so that we are healthy and happy. We can take care of ourselves so that we can better show up in the world. And we can take care of ourselves so that we can take care of others. Without this balance, self-care can become a selfish and, in many ways, self-defeating act.

The Oxford dictionary’s philosophical definition of “holistic” is “characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.” Each of us is intimately interconnected, and explicable only by reference to the social fabric into which we are woven.

So for me, 2021 will mean looking at self-care in a truly holistic way: tuning in to what my body and spirit need to thrive, while recognizing that we live in a complex web of interdependence. I want to honor the positive feedback loop that’s created when I care for myself and then for others, because that, ultimately, is caring for myself too.

If nothing else, this past year has brutally and beautifully exposed the interconnectedness of human life on this planet. May 2021 be a time to show up not just for ourselves, but for our loved ones and every member of our communities, and to practice truly holistic self-care.