Tag: carers

Showing Up for Community Care

Shelly Tygielski is an advocate for translating mindfulness practices and related self-care approaches into community action.  Shelly herself epitomizes this translation, being a trauma counsellor for surviving victims of mass shootings in the US and for refugees from Ukraine in Poland.  She advocates strongly for both self-care and community care and argues that you cannot do the latter without the support of the former, otherwise you will suffer “compassion fatigue” and burnout.

Shelly sees meditation and other mindfulness practices as central to self-care.  She is a meditation teacher and herself practices meditation and what she calls “micro-practices”.   These are brief mindfulness practices that can be employed by anybody throughout the day, particularly at times when you are time-poor and feeling stressed, distressed or anxious.  

Shelly indicates that these micro-practices can be linked to some action you already undertake during the day, e.g. she employs the yogic technique of 4-7-8 breathing  when washing her hands.  This involves breathing in through the nose for four seconds, holding the breath for seven seconds and breathing out through the mouth for eight seconds (there are various combinations of these breathing processes, but basically the outbreath is longer than the in-breath or holding your breath).  This breathing practice can be used when waiting for traffic lights or waiting for the jug to boil or food to cook on the stove.  Richard Wolf in his book, In Tune: Music as the Bridge to Mindfulness, offers alternative breathing practices that are linked to the different times in music, e.g. ¾ time.  He also offers deep listening approaches that can be employed as micro-practices.

How to show up for community care

Shelly provides the answer to this question in her new 10-day online course, The Power of Showing Up.  I recently purchased this course and I am very impressed with the way she has structured the course to literally “take you by the hand” and lead you to self-empowerment and the capacity to undertake community care.  She is not only a very inspirational speaker but totally transparent, sharing her own struggles and ways she overcame them.  It is not as if she immediately fell into the practice of community care.  She herself had to overcome the scars of being kidnapped at the age of two and inheriting “intergenerational trauma”.  

Shelly provides support for developing our inner landscape and overcoming negative thoughts such as “I am not good enough” or “I don’t know enough” or “I feel like an impostor” (“impostor syndrome”).  She strongly encourages us to overcome these obstacles (that she herself has experienced and overcome) and offers knowledge and pathways to develop a community of care – epitomized by her own creation, Pandemic of Love, which has matched the needs of 2 million people with other people who can provide concrete help and support.

Shelly’s course offers ways to help others in need so that they feel valued and appreciated.  In the process, she helps us to understand our own inner world and what is holding us back.  She offers a way to live a more meaningful life, aligned to our values and utilising our core knowledge and skills for community care. 

Reflection

I was very inspired by Shelly’s presentation at the Self-Care Summit and since then have joined a community of care, ExtendaTouch (Caregivers Supporting Caregivers).  I joined this community after receiving an invitation following publication of my blog post, Conscious Aging: Reframing for Health and Happiness.  

As I participate in Shelly’s course, I am working on developing an online Community of Care that will involve people sharing their mindfulness practices, approaches to self-care and strategies for overcoming daily challenges.  I hope to progress this community to a stage where we share our “self-care plan” and hold each other accountable for its implementation and ongoing refinement.  As we grow in mindfulness together, we will be able to develop the necessary self-awareness, courage and creativity to overcome our life challenges and help others (in our online community and elsewhere) to do so.

Shelly also provides added inspiration and insight in her book,  Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World.

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Image by fernando zhiminaicela from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Self-Care for Community Care

Shelly Tygielski – activist, author and mindfulness teacher – was recently interviewed by Fleet Maull as co-host of the Self-Care Summit.  Shelly’s lifetime focus is on self-care with an emphasis on transforming self-care into care for the community.  She is a living example of her beliefs and has worked with trauma sufferers including refugees from Ukraine and provided trauma-informed counselling and healing to victims of the Buffalo supermarket shootings. 

Shelly is accredited as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) facilitator.  The creator of this intervention process, Jon Kabat-Zinn, describes her as “the real deal” – she genuinely and uniquely practices what she preaches.  Her commitment to community action is also reflected in her creation of the Pandemic of Love – a global, mutual aid community that connects people in need with people who can provide help and resources.  It has grown from one person, Shelly, posting a simple matching process online to more than 3,000 volunteers.  Shelly was inspired by the fear and traumatising needs arising from the pandemic, such as the fear of one’s young family running out of food.

Shelly provides a range of resources to assist people with self-care, including a weekly guided meditation that is conducted with thousands of people.  Her podcasts and webinars also provide insight into her philosophy and approach and the inspiration to engage in self-care for community care.  Shelly’s experiences, insights and practices are also capture in her online course, The Power of Showing Up: Learn how to best support yourself and others.  

Shelly acknowledges that she herself suffers from intergenerational trauma which involved, in part, the way women were treated in her own family line.  She readily shares that she herself has had to deal with a lot of issues but has found that this makes her more empathetic to others and helps to build rapport and authenticity with the people she is attempting to help in whatever context she is working in.

Principles and practices

Underpinning Shelly’s approach and dedicated community service is a set of principles and practices that she shares generously with others in her writings, workshops and speaking engagements.  In the limited space provided in this post, I can only hope to scratch the surface of what she provides elsewhere as a source of inspiration for others:

  • Self-care is self-preservation: self-care is not self-indulgent.  We all need to care for ourselves so that we can manage the ups and downs of the waves of life, including the “dumpers” that leave us floundering.  Without self-care, we can “go under” – drowned in the misfortunes, setbacks and failures we experience in everyday life.  Carers and people in the helping professions tend to ignore self-care at the expense of their own physical and mental health – they identify with their role of care giver, not care taker.  They see self-care as self-indulgence and in their view can ill afford the time to attend to their own needs. 
  • Self-care is community dependent: we cannot survive without the support of others. One of the main causes of depression and addiction is disconnection from others – being isolated from the “helping hand”, the thoughtful word and the kind action.  GROW, a peer-led mental health program, reminds us that “You alone can do it, but you can’t do it alone”.  We need the support of others – we may be “down” and de-motivated when they are “up” and providing energy and inspiration by their example, enthusiasm, commitment or encouragement.  Shelly recommends having a personal self-care plan that we share with a “community of care” that can keep us accountable for our planned actions.  She suggests that this is the way to achieve “sustainable self-care”.
  • Self-care is for community care: we are all interconnected and interdependent.   The pandemic has highlighted our dependence on doctors and nurses, transport workers, farmers and farm workers, shop assistants and anyone who provides products and services.  It deepened our sense of the pain and grief of others who experienced illness and/or loss of friends and family.  Shelly’s Pandemic of Love provides a constructive way to help those in pandemic-driven need. She leads by example and asserts that self-care in isolation does not recognise our connection to others in all walks of life.  Shelly argues that self-care for the community is what is ultimately important.  She maintains that if we are depleted, cynical or depressed we cannot show up for others in need.  Self-care re-energises and re-builds us to provide the help and support that members of our community need.  This lesson was particularly brought home to Shelly after leaving behind the devastation of the lives of refugees from Ukraine whom she had been helping – besides experiencing emotional and physical exhaustion, she felt shame and guilt on returning home to peace, access to the healing power of nature and support of family and friends.  She found that her self-care, micro-practices helped her to restore her perspective and energy.

Reflection

Kelly’s message is not only to engage in self-care but to transform this into community care through caring for others within our capacity and in accord with our knowledge and skills – the theme of her course, The Power of Showing Up.  She acknowledges that many of us are “time-poor” and often feel guilty for taking time for ourselves, particularly if we are in a carer role.  With this in mind, she highly recommends micro-practices which she utilizes extensively herself.  Shelly shares her insights and practices in her podcasts and her recent book, Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World.

Shelly contends that we have a moral obligation to show up for others in need.  We can create “ripples of influence” by joining with others to create social movements.  The recent example of the success of TEAL candidates during the Australian Federal election shows how community activism around a shared set of values can cross the divide of location, socio-economic status and prior conditioning.  TEAL is a loose connection of independent political candidates (not bound to any political party) who share a commitment to the common values of climate change, political accountability and gender equity.  This solidarity led to unseating previously-elected members of the ruling political party who failed to demonstrate true commitment to these values, and, in some instances, had actively worked against them.

My takeaway from listening to Shelly and observing her vast array of actions and activism is my need to join or develop a community of care.  To this end, I have purchased her course, The Power of Showing Up, so that I can engage more actively in community care. I also need to maintain my self-care activities in the form of Tai Chi, mindfulness activities, micro-practices and the reflective writing of this blog.  As we grow in mindfulness through these kinds of activities, we can gain the necessary self-awareness, emotional regulation, self-care and courage to show up in the world and use our gifts to support others in their daily lives.  

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Image by Angela Huang from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Carers Need Self-Care

Much of the focus in the resources on mindfulness is on ways to help people who are suffering from conditions that are debilitating such as mental illness or chronic pain.  Very little of the resources focus on ways to help carers in their role – ways to manage the physical and psychological toll of caring for someone else on a constant and extended basis.  Carers are the overlooked group – forgotten by others and themselves.

Carers: people who care and support others

Carers come in all shapes and sizes  – adults looking after ageing parents who may be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease; siblings caring for a family member who has a mental health condition such as schizophrenia, anxiety or depression; or anyone caring for someone suffering from a physical condition such as paraplegia, chronic pain or cancer.  According to Carers Australia, carers are people who provide unpaid care and support to family members and friends who have a disability, mental illness, chronic condition, terminal illness, an alcohol or other drug issue or who are frail aged.

The toll of caring

The “burden of care” can be felt both physically and psychologically.  The physical toll for carers can be excessive – they can become exhausted and/or accident-prone, suffer from sleep disorders or experience bodily symptoms of stress such as irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue or related conditions like fibromyalgia. The physical toll of caring can be experienced as cumulative stress and lead to chronic conditions that adversely affect the carer’s long-term health.

The psychological toll of caring can also be cumulative in nature and extremely variable in its impact.  Carers can experience negative emotions such as resentment or anger, despite their compassion towards the person who is being cared for.  They can become extremely frustrated over the paucity of time available for themselves, the opportunity cost in terms of inability to travel or to be away for any length of time, the lack of freedom (feeling tied down), the lack of improvement in the condition of the person being cared for or the financial impost of caring (preventing desired savings/purchases or home improvements). 

Carers do not have inexhaustible personal resources – physical, psychological and financial.  They can suffer from compassion fatigue which can be hastened by emotional contagion resulting from close observation of, and identification with, the pain of a loved one.  Hence, carers can experience depression, anxiety or grief – reflecting the emotional state of their loved ones who are suffering.

The toll on carers has been the subject of extensive research.  For example, Emma Stein studied the psychological impact on older female carers engaged in informal aged care.  Sally Savage and Susan Bailey reviewed the literature on the mental health impact on the carer of their caregiving role and found that the impact was highly variable and moderated by factors such as the relationship between caregiver and receiver and the level of social support for the carer.

Being mindful of your needs as a carer

The fundamental problem is that carers become so other-focused that they overlook their own needs – their need for rest, time away, relaxation and enjoyment.  Normal needs can become intensified by the burden of care and the associated physical and psychological stressors.  Carers tend to neglect their own needs in the service of others.  However, in the process, they endanger their own mental and physical health and, potentially, inhibit their capacity to sustain quality care.

Carers can inform themselves of the inherent physical and psychological consequences of being a caregiver, particularly if this involves intensive, long-term caring of a close loved one (where feelings are heightened, and the personal costs intensified).  Mental Health Carers Australia highlights the fact that people who care for someone with a mental health illness are increasingly at risk of “developing a mental illness themselves”.

Self-care for the carer

One of the more effective ways that carers can look after themselves is to draw on support networks – whether they involve family, colleagues or friends; broad social networks; or specific networks designed for carers.  Arafmi, for example, provides carer support for caregivers of people with a mental illness and their services include a 24-hour carer helpline, carers forum, blog, educational resources, workshops and carer support groups. Carers Queensland provides broader-based carer resources and support groups.

Carers tend to go it alone, not wanting to burden others with “their” problem(s).  They are inclined to refuse help from others when it is offered because of embarrassment, fear of dependency, concern for the other person offering help, inability to “let go” or any other inhibiting emotion or thought pattern – in the process, they may stop themselves from sharing the load.

Carers could seek professional help from qualified professionals such as medical doctors or psychologists if they notice that they are experiencing physical or psychological symptoms resulting from carer stress.

Mindfulness for carers

Carers can use mindfulness practices, reflection and meditation to help them cope with the physical and emotional stresses of caregiving.  Specific meditations can address negative feelings, especially those of resentment and the associated guilt.  Mindfulness practices can introduce processes that enable the carer to wind down and relax – such as mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful eating or using awareness as the default when caught up with “waiting” (a constant companion of the carer role).

Carers can employ techniques such as body scan to relax their bodies and release physical tension.  Deep, conscious breathing can also help in times of intense stress such as when experiencing panic. For people who are religious, prayer can help to provide calm and hope.

Dr. Chris Walsh (mindfulness.org.au), offers a simple mindfulness exercise for self-care by carers in his website article, Caring for Carers.  The exercise involves focusing, re-centering, imagining and noticing (thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations).

As carers grow in mindfulness, they can become more aware of the stress they are under and the physical and psychological toll involved. This growing awareness can lead to effective self-care through social and professional support and meditation and/or mindfulness practices. Mindfulness can help carers develop resilience and calmness in the face of their stressful caregiver role.

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Image by Sabine van Erp from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.