When Did Self-Care Become Another Thing to Fail At?

I want to ask you something, and I'd love you to sit with it rather than answer too quickly.

What's on your self-care list right now?

The things you keep meaning to do. The walk you'll take when things calm down. The earlier bedtime you've been promising yourself since January. The yoga class you want to try. The breathing exercise you saved to your phone and never opened again.

How does it feel, carrying that list?

For a lot of women I speak to, it doesn't feel nourishing. It feels like pressure. Another area where they're not measuring up. Another place of judgement.

Self-care and wellness have become another way of telling women they're not enough.

And I think it's making us sicker, not better.

The wellness industry has a problem

We live in a world that's moving faster than the human nervous system was ever designed to handle. The pressure of work and family, the relentless noise of everything, is pushing us further from ourselves than at any point in human history.

And the wellness industry's answer is to give us more to do.

More practices. More protocols. More optimising. More things to add to the list and feel bad about when we don't do them.

This is the same mechanism as diet culture. Diet culture told us our bodies were wrong and gave us rules to follow to earn acceptability. Wellness culture is doing the same thing to our nervous systems - telling us they're dys-regulated, broken, in need of fixing, and here are seventeen things you can do about it. 

It keeps us looking outward for the answer. And the answer is not out there.

What if you stopped asking what you should be doing?

Here's the question I'd like to offer instead:

What if you got quiet enough to listen to the messengers that are already there?

What if you spent more time listening and receiving - tapping into the part of you that already knows what you need?

Not the anxious, striving, keeping-up part. The deeper part. The part that existed before the to-do lists and the wellness routines and the pressure to perform self-care correctly.

Have you stopped long enough to hear that part speak?

This is what yoga has always been about for me. Not the poses. Not the sequences. The listening. The balance - and balance doesn't mean doing equal amounts of effort and rest on a schedule. It means listening to what's actually needed to feel and embody the authentic, confident and joyful self you already are.

If your life is already full of pressure, of output, of giving - then maybe what your nervous system needs isn't another practice to nail.

Maybe it needs the radical, almost rebellious act of doing nothing.

Just being.

Why "just being" is harder than it sounds

We've been so thoroughly trained away from stillness that rest feels like failure. Silence feels uncomfortable. Doing nothing feels like something we have to earn first.

And we are paying for it.

Stress-related illness is rising. Mental health is in crisis. Chronic and immune disorders in women — the ones that doctors often dismiss and women often blame themselves for — are at extraordinary levels.

Our bodies are holding onto everything our busy lives don't leave room to feel.

This isn't meant to frighten you. Most of us already know this - we feel it. So let this be your sign. Your permission to do less, not more.

A different kind of check-in

This week, instead of adding to the self-care list, just notice.

Where on the spectrum are you right now? Genuinely. Not where you think you should be, not where you were last month. Right now, today.

• Are you running on empty and pushing through?
• Are you numb to how tired you actually are?
• Where can you add a little more self-compassion and ease?

Let the awareness itself be the practice. Allowing whatever arises to be present without the need to fix or change it,

A note from me

I wrote this email to my list while recovering from a week of illness, which felt fitting. My body made its point rather firmly. And teaching a slow somatic yoga class from that depleted place reminded me, again, why I do this work.

Because yoga meets you exactly where you are. It doesn't ask you to be better, stronger, more regulated. It asks you to arrive. Fully. As you are.

That's the place that real authentic change can occur. 

Tara Muir is the founder of Warrior Heart Yoga, based in Athens, Greece. She works with women through somatic yoga, yoga nidra, breathwork and deep rest - helping them come home to themselves. Find out more at warriorheart.yoga