Caring for others requires me to take care of myself. If you are caregiver, you have to learn how to care for yourself too. We can’t give care to others when we are not caring for ourselves. An ethic of care promotes care that spreads evenly throughout a social network. That means that when I take care of myself, I am in fact preparing myself to take care of others. The same goes for you and anyone else providing care. Being martyrs who sacrifice ourselves does nobody in our network any favors in the long run. It is recipe for burning ourselves out and finding ourselves feeling deep empathic distress. Compassion for ourselves and others and feeling connected to others prevents this from happening. It gives us access to a deep and wide reservoir of love, nurture, and compassion. These are the essential resources of caregiving.
I have created a list of websites that provide resources for maintaining your emotional and spiritual reserves. You can think of using the tools these websites offer as ways to keep yourself energized. Many of these tools are designed to take only 5-15 minutes of your day. If you find that even 5 minutes is too much time to spend on caring for yourself, I invite you to find 1-2 minutes for a self-care break. Find any margin you can for a moment of getting in touch with yourself and what you need. And when you find yourself feeling guilty or judging yourself because you neglect your self-care, just use this feeling to prompt awareness of your need and change your behavior. Feelings of guilt are useful because they prompt us to change. They are less useful when we wallow in our guilt.
As I am building this website, I will continue to add tools to this list. It will very much be a work in progress. When this community of persons who hold themselves responsible for caring for themselves and family who have dementia grows, I hope we will all dialogue and share ideas about possible resources that we can use to care for ourselves and others with more skillfulness. I am going to keep the list in alphabetic order, so you can locate and retrieve the resources with greater ease.
Greater Good in Action – I suggest trying any of the compassion or awe practices. These tools have strong good research behind them and can be quite effective in helping me feel more in touch with and connected to myself and others.
Kristin Neff and Self-Compassion – The beautiful thing about Kristin Neff’s work is that she designed her own research tool that is statistically valid and generalizes across contexts. Since she designed the concept of self-compassion in 2003, she has been assiduously researching it in ways that confirms its validity, and other researchers independent of her have also conducted studies that show self-compassion is strongly connected to caregiver wellbeing. Neff makes her research available for free, and she also applies it in specific caregiver settings in the healthcare disciplines. I love her self-compassion exercises because they are brief and produce benefits almost immediately.
Minimalism and Self-Care – The Minimalists inspired the construction of this website because a chaplain friend I deeply respect and admire used their blog about creating a blog as a way to guide himself and me to building a website. I added this link because it does a masterful job of talking about how we project our own needs, wants, values, and norms onto others. When we actually adopt a curious approach to others (including why they act certain ways as persons living with dementia), we can discover in us and our relationship the possibilities of empathy, compassion, and change.
Lion’s Roar – As a Zen Buddhist, I love reading practical articles on mindfulness and compassion practices in journals that offer free content online. Lion’s Roar has really good content that reaches a broad audience and meaningfully contributes to the cultivation of spiritual practices that improve wellbeing for caregivers. I recently read this beautiful article by Shauna Shapiro about cultivating resilience in tough times. They key to her message is seeing struggle and distress as a point of connection with others.
Opus Peace – Created by a really interesting V.A. nurse named Debra Grassman, Opus Peace is a Christian-inspired approach to moral repair and soul injury. It was originally designed for veterans who experienced trauma and suffered from psychological fragmentation after committing acts in wartime that went against their morality. My favorite aspect of this practice is “anchoring,” laying a hand over my heart and wishing myself to be deeply cared for and free of all kinds of pain and suffering. I made an Instagram reel about this that you can find here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CwsBpE-ukm_/. I do this before I then wish others to be free of pain and suffering. Once I have prepared myself to feel freedom from what ails me, then I wish myself to feel peace and ease in my body. Finally, I wish other persons to feel peace and ease in their bodies. When I anchor by laying my and over my heart, I use touch as a powerful tool to care for myself, and this frees me to care more deeply and compassionately for others. The beautiful thing about anchoring is that we can apply it as a healing practice to ourselves, our own bodies, and our personhood, or we can also use the anchoring technique to provide a healing presence through touch to those for whom we care, provided they are comfortable with us touching them in this kind of intimate way and give us permission.
The Tallahassee Chan Center – I belong to this community of Zen/Chan practitioners. My primary spiritual practices teacher is Jimmy Yu. He is a professor who studies the history of Chinese Buddhism. He also teaches Chan Buddhist practices. Chan is an umbrella term for the set of Chinese Buddhist lineages that focus on koan practice and sitting meditation practice. In Chan we call this sitting meditation “silent illumination,” and this name brings together the natural tendency of the mind to experience clarity and calm. In fact, Chan teaches the mind to recover its natural clarity of wisdom by rediscovering its ability to remain calm in all circumstances. Enjoy exploring the spiritual practices of Chan by checking out the teachings in the menu section or attending a retreat or online sit. Or find another community of spiritual practice near you that supports your own calm and clarity, so that you can give wise and compassionate care to yourself and others.
