BOUNDARIES AND SELF CARE

As you work with folks and gain their trust, they may begin to share with you all sorts of personal things they’ve never told anyone – or they may share juicy family gossip – or something in between.

 

This can be difficult when the subjects are loved ones. People may bring their deepest suffering or break down in tears. The impulse for most of us is to intervene, to give support, or to take away the suffering of the person as quickly as possible because it is unbearable for us. 

 

The most skillful response, though, is to not intervene, but simply to bear witness, as we learned about in our Deep Listening Circle.

 

Remember to be empathic, but neutral. Especially when it comes to anything related to family members. You never know what is really true and what isn’t, and in many cases it doesn’t matter anyway. 

 

What we're really talking about is setting healthy boundaries for yourself.  How do you avoid taking on too much, including a dying person’s pain? You have to open yourself up and let the pain move through you. It's not yours to hold. 

 

To help you build specific strategies for setting boundaries and bolstering your self-care, read Chapter 12 in Being with Dying – Wounded Healers, The Shadow Side of Caregiving. In it, Joan Halifax does a beautiful job of describing the various motivations of caregivers – conscious or unconscious. Do you see yourself in any of her descriptions?

 

Our responsibility as Yogi-Doulas, is to first ensure that we have a robust self-care practice in place and are able to appropriately set healthy boundaries. It's only then that we can truly bear witness and provide the kind of service our end of life clients need.

 

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“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

 

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.” 

• Heidi Priebe, This is Me Letting You Go, 2016.

 

In this work, we’re around death and dying on a daily basis. Our experiences can be emotionally and physically draining, which is why we’re big proponents of taking time for ourselves and taking good care of ourselves.

 

Along with breath work, we find these practices very helpful:

 

• Acknowledge the significance of the experiences with patients and the effect on us.

• Debrief with others who have experienced similar situations in order to normalize the experience.

• Remember that being strong and coping well does not mean the absence of emotions.

• Allow ourselves time to grieve the death of someone we cared for.

• Allow others to support us emotionally.

• Remember to take time to renew ourselves through meditation, prayer, music, writing, nature, walking the labyrinth, or other healing activities that are meaningful to us.

• Health and fitness are vitally important – make movement or some sort of exercise, healthy eating, proper hydration, and good sleep among your top priorities.

• Create rituals and daily practices to fill our cup.

• Check frequently that we have balance in our life: rest, recreation, prayer/meditation, and work. Keep life simple.

 

Nurturing ourselves with a daily routine of self-care will enable us to better serve others with a clear and calm presence. The next opportunity you have to care for our end of life Guests, look out the window at the sky for a moment. Listen attentively to the sounds in the room. Touch the dying person mindfully. Take a few sips of cool water. Be fully in the present moment. 

 

Then breathe deeply and relax the tension in your body as you exhale. Cultivate the habit of attending to the breath continually. Use the breath to stabilize and concentrate the mind. On inhalation, you say “breathing in, I calm body and mind.” On the exhalation, you say “breathing out, I let go.”

 

Remember why you are doing this work.

 

ABODE offers the unique invitation to be with others in critical moments of life. It’s through self-discipline, professional commitment, community service, and loving compassion that all of us are touched in positive ways during the dying experience.

 

Below is an ABODE Staff Pick that invites us to consider that not all self-care is “salt baths and chocolate cake.” We love this piece – we hope you do, too.

 

Self-Care is Often a Very Unbeautiful Thing

By Brianna Wiest

 

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

 

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything all the time, and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

 

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

 

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake – it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

 

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

 

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

 

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

 

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot to do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

 

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

 

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

 

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.