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This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil
How To Practice Radical Self Care with Shelly Tygielski | 302
00:33:47
Shelly Tygielski challenges the cultural lie that self-care is selfish. Instead, she shares how radical self-care is a necessary act of courage, activism, and community connection in a burnout-driven world.
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- [00:11]
Nicole Kahlil
I am Nicole Kahlil, and you're listening to the this Is Woman's Work podcast, where together we're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing woman's work in the world today with you as the decider. Whatever feels real and true and right for you. That's your way of doing woman's work. And that is meant to be motivating and inspiring, personal and global. But it can also feel a little overwhelming and daunting. Right? Like I'm the decider. How the hell am I supposed to know? And who has the time to figure out what feels true and real and right? And even if I did know, how do I do that without facing a barrage of expectations and other people's opinions? And here's the thing. We all have our own journeys, paths and processes, but one way we may all want to consider is self care and not the self care that's been hashtagged to oblivion, plastered on overpriced candles, and turned into a marketing juggernaut. Yet despite all the talk about bubble baths and spa days, most of us are still running on fumes. So what if self care wasn't about escaping your life for an hour of me time, but about transforming your life and possibly the lives of others, by showing up for yourself in a radically different way? What if self care wasn't selfish and wasn't for sale, but was instead a profound act of activism, connection and courage? Think about it. When was the last time you felt deeply cared for by yourself? And what would be possible if you did? What if you walked into your relationships, your career, and your passions, often already cared for? How would that change just about everything? Because the truth is, many of us have bought into the lie that self care is selfish, indulgent, or worse, a luxury which has us meeting everyone else's needs while putting ours last. We're praised for being selfless and feel judged when we prioritize our own well being. It feels like an impossible tightrope act. But here's a thought. What if the most radical act of self care is to stop even showing up to the circus? I'm not the expert, but I found us a guest who is. Shelly Tegelski is the powerhouse in the world of radical self care. She's the author of Sit down to Rise up and founder of Pandemic of Love, a global mutual aid organization that's rewritten the script on giving and receiving support. Called One of the 12 most powerful women in the mindfulness movement by Mindful.org, shelly combines mindfulness with activism in ways that are as impactful as they are inspiring. Today we'll talk about how self care can be a form of activism, while positive thinking can be toxic, and what it really means to show up for yourself and your community. Shelley, welcome to the show. And I want to start with this idea of self care and activism because you call yourself or describe yourself as a self care activist. So what does that even mean?
- [03:23]
Shelly Tegelski
Yeah, you know, first, first of all, self care and Audre Lorde actually penned this. Self care is a radical act, a political act of defiance. It is a radical act of. Of activism. And a self care activist is someone who is not just pursuing self care for individualistic reasons, but really looking to build community and weave safety nets that actually change the paradigm of the type of world that we're living in and existing in.
- [04:00]
Nicole Kahlil
I guess then let me ask the question of. And I kind of alluded to this in my intro, and please feel free to challenge or provide a different perspective to anything that I said. But how is what you're talking about different than how we're seeing self care talked about all over the place today?
- [04:20]
Shelly Tegelski
Well, self care and the concept of self care, like many other kind of things that have to do with wellness or philanthropy and the concept of what charity actually is, for example, have been hijacked by, by industry, by capitalism. And so what we have right now and what we've been seeing for a really long time, for decades, in fact. And I would say that, you know, as somebody who is kind of studying when these shifts started to take place, the last wave of when self care kind of became the self care Industrial complex or the part of the wellness industrial complex was after 9 11. Around the same time of 9 11, people started to talk about self care again. And then after that, it became incredibly hijacked by people trying to sell you quick fixes and the seven steps to do this and the five steps to do that and, you know, self care in five minutes, et cetera. And so the self care that I'm talking about really has. It doesn't cost money. It has nothing to do with needing to have a certain socioeconomic status or the ability to purchase something. It's really about connection to yourself, and it's mostly about connection to others. So when we're talking about self care, there's a misnomer there, right? Like the word self is in there that's misleading because people think, oh, self as in I me, the individualistic self. Right. But actually, when we're talking about self care. And when I speak about it in the book, and people, I think, who are really involved in kind of grassroots activism, people who are involved in building mutual aid and community, are speaking about self care in terms of communal care. And we still use the terminology of self care because if we say communal care, people go, huh? And they don't really understand what that means and also how it can benefit them. So it's really important to sort of, you know, widen the aperture, widen the scope of what we think of as self care, as being individualistic and shifting it into a definition that really means communal care.
- [06:48]
Nicole Kahlil
Okay. I'm wildly curious about this. My brain makes the connection of when we care for ourselves, then we. And we know who we are and we're playing to our strengths and bring our authentic selves to the table that we have the higher possibility and probability of impacting others and our community at large. Is that what you're talking about, or am I still kind of in this vein of like, take care of yourself first so you can take care of others?
- [07:22]
Shelly Tegelski
Yeah, well, it's both and. Right. It's not. They're not mutually exclusive. In other words. Yes, of course, we. We absolutely do need to put that, you know, proverbial overused cliche of putting your oxygen mask on first so that you can then tend to others. But the truth of the matter is, is that there are times in our lives when we're just in a state of complete, you know, shock, or we're in burnout or teetering on burnout, or we're in such a place that we're. We can't even remember to do that for ourselves, or we can't motivate ourselves even if we do remember to do that. So I'll give you a concrete example. Right. And I talk about this in the book, actually. I talk about being post divorce, having a toddler son, and recently having had been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that temporarily left me blind. And that I've been actually tending to and struggling with for the last two decades. At this point, and at that moment where I was really feeling at my lowest, I was trying. Trying to overcompensate, as many parents do, especially, you know, women moms, in trying to overcompensate for that failure by being so present for my son, to make sure that he's okay.
- [08:55]
Nicole Kahlil
Right.
- [08:56]
Shelly Tegelski
So tending to him and really felt very lost myself. So I felt lost in all aspects of my life. I felt like a complete failure, as many people sometimes do even if a divorce is amicable or the best thing for you. And I was really struggling health wise, and I needed help. I needed to be able to lean on a community. And I, you know, couldn't afford to wait for people to show up for me. I actually had to do one of the hardest things I ever had to do. And I think that a lot of people struggle with this and that is to ask for help in a really tangible way. And so what I proceeded to do was to invite women to my house. Moms from my son's school, people that were acquaintances and some that were really good friends. And you know, just like we, we can manage to somehow get together for book clubs or we can manage to get together for, you know, a fun night out or for, for wine or coffee breaks or what have you. This was really an intervention that I kind of created for myself in a way. And I blurted out in this group of, of, of all sorts of people, people again, who knew me well and some who didn't know me as well and said, I really need help. I am struggling. I do not have time. You mentioned in your intro that time is, is such a commodity. Like we can't get it back. Don't have time for myself, I don't have time to put the oxygen mask on. In fact, I don't even know where the oxygen mask is. It's probably in some box somewhere that still hasn't been unpacked. And I really need help. And these women mobilized for me in such a real way where they helped me unpack and they helped me create a schedule where twice a week somebody was taking my son to school in the morning so that I would have time in the morning to go for a walk or do yoga or, you know, just tend to myself, have some space. You know, the, the poet Judy Brown says in such a, such a beautiful, long, eloquent poem. But there's a great line, and the poem is called Fire. And it's that the space between the logs is where the fire grows. And so I needed space. I needed there to be space to be able to tend to myself and just have a moment to recalibrate. Because I was in this constant default mode of just reaction, reaction, reaction. And there was no time to actually sit back and like pause for a moment and think about how do I want to respond? How do I make sure that I'm not just reacting both physiologically, biologically, in all the ways, right, mentally, and actually having a moment to just recalibrate, even if it's in tiny little steps that in aggregate over time, actually start to move the needle.
- [12:15]
Nicole Kahlil
Okay, so I feel like several little light bulbs went off while you were talking. For me first, I think I made the connection of what you were saying with communal care because I think when we think of self care, we think about it being something we do with and for ourselves. It's almost a lonely act, which often when we need self care, what we're missing is connection is space, and time is community. And so the light bulb was how much our community is imperative for a lot of reasons in this act of self care. And I'd never made that connection before, so thank you for that. I also think sometimes the way self care is being positioned, I'll just say out there, it feels like another fucking thing to do. Right? It's like, oh, God, there's another thing on my to do list, and that is the very last thing that I need. And self care sounds like it takes a lot of time, and time is the commodity we like as. So what it sounds like you're saying is we need community to create the time, the opportunity, the.
- [13:26]
Shelly Tegelski
The conditions.
- [13:28]
Nicole Kahlil
Exactly. Okay? The conditions that we. That are required to even begin to practice self care.
- [13:35]
Shelly Tegelski
That's right. To do it consistently, to do it, you know, mindfully. To do it in a way that doesn't feel like an absolute drag, but actually begins to be woven into your life as, you know, a tapestry is woven. So I talk also about self care as rhythms in our life. Right. And how we can really design self care to fit the rhythms that are daily, that are seasonal, that are annual for us. Right. And I think that a lot of times, you know, like you said, you know, you're. If we're looking at self care as another thing on our to do list, I. E. Oh, I didn't work out today, you know, and then we're now feeling guilty, we're feeling bad about ourselves. We're now adding secondary suffering to that primary suffering of I didn't do this thing. And that really is ineffective completely. I think when we look at what are the daily rhythms of our lives, where can we create, as I said earlier, the space between the logs, rather than thinking of it as these inordinate huge chunks of time that have to happen on a daily basis, how do we think about things in the form of a rhythm? So if I just look at my life on a daily basis, and even maybe a smaller chunk, if I look at my life in. At three intervals per day, my mornings, the middle of the day, and my evenings, where am I able to without completely shifting from one moment to the next? Right. And this is why many resolutions don't work, by the way, because things are so drastic. But where can I easily start to shift some of those rhythms? And how do I sort of begin to build this like snowball and how do those days and those rhythms in small aggregates and quantities and minor shifts begin to actually create a shift on a weekly basis and on a monthly basis and on a seasonal basis, et cetera. And so, you know, I get into this in the book because I, for me it really was incremental. It had to be. There was no way that I was going to suddenly, you know, create these enormous shifts in my life because it just wasn't possible unless suddenly, you know, my community was able to provide me with full time child care, unlimited funds and resources, you know, like a private chef, a driver, et cetera. Like, it's just that, that really is just an. And I think that's what we're striving for. That's what the world is trying to sell us on. And that's why we're always feeling so deficient, we're feeling inefficient, we're feeling like complete, you know, failures when it comes to tending to ourselves and why our self care is so inconsistent because we don't have that safety net. We don't have the ability to say, I couldn't get to this this week or for many days in a row and let me figure out what the obstacle is. Why couldn't I get to this, you know, and can somebody help me remove that obstacle if I can't do it myself? And I will also say that, you know, the next step, the next iteration of that, and this is something that I was so happy to be able to do when I came out of my fog like 16, 18 months after that initial self intervention, if you will, is you're able to turn around and say, wow, I finally feel like I'm not treading water anymore and now I have the space to be able to support somebody else.
- [17:44]
Nicole Kahlil
I think because this is such a radical and different expression of self care than we're hearing. I would love maybe some examples of these daily, seasonal, annual, especially as you said earlier, that don't involve great deals of time or unlimited funds. What are some ways or some examples of practices of self care.
- [18:13]
Shelly Tegelski
So you know, fast forward to seven or eight years after that kind of incredibly low point that I had that I, that I had just shared with you at that Point I was remarried. I was working in the corporate world. My son at that time was in middle school. And I had an incredibly intense job, but also a really long commute every single day. And every single day, I would, you know, feel that morning rush. I know that a lot of people listening to this would be like, yeah, we get it, you know, where you're. You're rushing to get yourself ready for work, rushing to make sure that your. Your. Your kid or kids are ready. You're making breakfast, you have to deal with, like, making lunch, and you have to get out on the road on time. And lo and behold, of course, you know, 50% of the time, there's always some sort of something happening on the road and on the highway that prevents you from actually getting where you're going on time. And so there's that morning stress, right? And at the end of the day, I would experience that as well. Every single day, I would come home and I would bring the residue with me into the house, right? I would literally just be all day long from the morning moment, I woke up completely, you know, stressed out and freaking out and, like, on. On this, like, timer. And then on my way home, same situation, I would get home, I would park in the driveway and walk into the house. And of course, this may resonate with some, you know, some of your listeners or even with you. You know, one of the first questions that you get when you walk in after a long day is, what's for dinner? And that would just completely set me off, too. And so what I decided to start doing is create these, like, metaphorical mud rooms in my life where before I actually would enter from one room to the next or one task to the next, I would just take a minute. A minute. Like, I would literally talk to my phone and say, hey, put on a minute timer. And I would just pause and recalibrate. And sometimes I would do, like, a breathing exercise, but sometimes I would just sit there in silence with the, you know, car engine off before I actually walked into the house so that I wasn't bringing all of that residue into the house with me and kind of tracking all that mud in. So think of it as a. Right, that's your mudroom. And when we have a mudroom, what do we do? We take our boots off. We take off our dirty, you know, shoes, our dirty coat. We don't track all of that mud into the house or into work or into, you know, these other types of. These sacred spaces or places that we hope are safe spaces for us. And we certainly want them to be that for other people as well. And so I started to really just incorporate these like 1 minute spaces into my life. Even before at work, going into a meeting, rather than rushing from like I'm answering emails to now I'm going into the next meeting or I just got off a phone call and now I'm going to, you know, respond to these emails. Like from task to task to task. I started to create these little vignettes, these little windows. And that in the, again, in the aggregate really started to create huge shifts for me because I was able to show up in a very different way just by being conscious of like, what am I bringing from the day into this moment, into the future, what am I kind of dragging along with me that I can actually let go of and just hang on that hook and maybe never pick it up again or maybe, yeah, pick it up again tomorrow.
- [22:30]
Nicole Kahlil
I love the metaphorical mudroom. I love the concept of this. My therapist actually taught me something similar. At the end of the day I have a 10 minute buffer and it's a little bit of like, what do I need to let go of from work? Whether it's put it on my to do list tomorrow or write a note or just like, okay, I need to like let set this aside, I'm not going to solve this problem tonight type thing. And then how do I want to show up at home? And I don't drive, I work from home. So it's literally like a 30 second walk and it happens to be through my mudroom. So I love that. But you know, sort of this cleaning off of one and sort of recalibrating who you are and who you want to be for the next. I've never thought about doing it in the morning and I think every person listening can relate to that chaos at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. So I love this and one of the things that I really like about it is there is a proactive element to it. Whereas I think a lot of times the way we're sold self care as is a reactive thing, like, oh, life is so hard and you're so exhausted that you need to escape as opposed to doing things that put us in a better position to create a life that we don't feel like we regularly need to escape from.
- [23:47]
Shelly Tegelski
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, life is hard. Let's just like put that on the table, right? It can be very hard. It can be blissful for sure. But life is on the daily, on the regular when we Sort of like look at the whole life can be. Have its challenging moments on a daily basis. And so if we don't, if our default mode is to just create these pockets of escape every now and then, that doesn't work. Because, you know, and, and studies, by the way, scientific studies have proven that that doesn't work. That actually, you know, especially if you're teetering, even on burnout, like you're, you know, you go on vacation, it takes you like a day for your kind of vagus nerve just to like recalibrate and get, you know, for you to mentally get into a good state, for you to physiologically get in a good state. And then as soon as you get back to your routine, if your routine is not in check, if your routine does not actually support the type of life that you want to be living, then you're just within 48 hours hijacking your system again, right?
- [25:00]
Nicole Kahlil
So how important is it for us to regularly check in with ourselves of like, what do I need right now? Because there's such an easy default to like, what other people tell us we should be doing, right? Like other people tell us, oh, we should move or meditate or breathe or go to the spa or buy this product. Right. It's so easy to get caught up in it. So any advice as to how we can check in with ourselves with what we need on any given day, season or year?
- [25:34]
Shelly Tegelski
Well, I check in with myself like an inordinate. I don't even know if I can give you a number, but times a day, it's, it really just has become a habit that I've cultivated because I grew up and for a very long time was a people pleaser. Right. My love language is acts of service, which is not shocking if you kind of look in my body of work. But ultimately, like, if you're constantly like looking for validation on the outside and you want to people please and you're serving others, you're, you're forgetting to service yourself. And so I would take on so many roles and so many tasks that I really should not have taken on. And I, you know, even, even meetings, you know, like, I've gotten so much better about. I used to take meetings back to back to back to back to back without building like space in for myself or saying, no, you know what? I'm carving out like these windows where there's absolutely no meetings that can be scheduled for me during this time at work because I need time to actually do work and to think and to have like breathing room and space. You know, so you start to like create these non negotiables for you. But the way you kind of get there is to check in with yourself. And I, I actually have this habit and I always have, but like I actually really, I put one or both hands on my heart center and I, I do that throughout the day actually. Like I've always found it soothing and I, it's, it's interesting because my mother and I were recently talking about the fact that I've been doing this for, you know, the, the greater part of my life. So I think it was just like something that was ingrained in me from like a really or was soothing to me from a very young age. But I tend to do that and I tend to just like pause for a minute and say like, what do I need in this moment? What, what, what am I feeling into in this moment? And I think so many of us are conditioned to again react or you know, do for others or you know, be so heart centered that we kind of forget that we have this other really incredible resource available to us, which is our gut check. And so many of us just don't tap into that often enough. So I would say wherever you can, you know, build in these like moments to check in with yourself, it doesn't take long. It could be a 15 second check in actually and, and, and listen for a moment because when you get quiet, things actually can get incredibly loud, you know, and you could do this when you're even, you know, on a conference call or on a zoom call. Like I think also we're also so conditioned to like respond to things right away, you know, and, and, and not pause for a minute and just think. And it's okay to do that too, like when you're in meetings, you know, to, to just give yourself that moment to say, what do I really think about this right now? You know, how do I feel this about this at this moment? There's this sense of urgency in our society that I think is in many cases really self imposed or has just been ingrained in us, but is actually not there. It's not real.
- [29:08]
Nicole Kahlil
It feels like this could be the foundation of both self care and authenticity, right? This developing the practice of just checking in with yourself. How do I feel? What do I need? And I would imagine at least some of the times the answer to the question of what I need is I need some help. As you said earlier. Any tips for asking for help?
- [29:32]
Shelly Tegelski
Look, asking for help is incredibly hard and especially if you are the type of person that is the helper. And that was really the case for me where I was like, wait a minute. I'm always the one that's like, showing up for other people. And this doesn't feel right. It feels strange. I would say that honestly, like, if you're nervous about asking for help or what you need, first and foremost, go back to checking in with yourself. What do I need right now? I think sometimes we may think that we need help and then we're so ambiguous about it, and then we get frustrated when people don't show up for us. I think the more tangible you can be, the more specific you can be in what it is that you need help with. And I don't necessarily mean that it has to be like a specific task. Right? I mean, like, identify the obstacle. This is the obstacle that I'm facing. This is the challenge that I'm facing at this moment. I need help with ideas to, you know, eliminate that challenge or help me overcome this obstacle or alleviate, you know, some of the stressors that it is creating in my life. And these are some of the stressors that it's creating. So it's really about, like just sitting down, taking the time to actually fully write down what it is that you need, where the deficiencies are, and giving people enough tools to be able to help you.
- [31:06]
Nicole Kahlil
And I think sometimes we avoid asking for help for a lot of the reasons you said and because there is this feeling that we're a burden or that we're inconveniencing other people. And something you said earlier, I think could be really helpful to remember in these moments is this is seasonal and reciprocal. So there will come a time where you're in a position where you get to help people. And, you know, I think maybe having that come from will lessen that feeling or we just need to practice setting it aside, regardless of what. But Shelly, I could ask you 1 million more questions. Unfortunately, we're out of time and I know people are going to want to find you and learn more. So, friend, you can find and follow Shelly on Instagram Indful Skater Girl and you can get your hands on her book. Sit down to rise up. We're going to put the links to those as well as all the other ways to follow Shelly in show notes. Shelley, thank you for eye opening and compelling conversation. So much good stuff in here.
- [32:08]
Shelly Tegelski
Thank you so much, Nicole. I appreciate you having me.
- [32:11]
Nicole Kahlil
Okay, friend, I'm going to close us out with this. If self care is a truly radical act, one that goes beyond bubble baths and spa days, then it is also a deeply personal and communal act of courage and connection. It's showing up for yourself in ways that feel real and true, even if the world tells you it's selfish or unnecessary. It's walking away from the tightrope and the circus, the constant pull of expectations and opinions, and deciding powerfully, unapologetically, to care for yourself and each other. And here's the thing. This isn't just about you. When you show up already cared for, you show up better for the people and the causes you love. You break cycles of burnout and create space for more joy, more energy, more authenticity. If today's conversation with Shelly has sparked something in you, don't stop here. Check out episodes 223 where we talk about why we brush off the idea of self care. Episode 147 on getting your needs met, or even episode 267 on how to breathe, which, let's be real, may be the most fundamental act of self care. You'll find all those linked in show notes so you can continue exploring what this looks like in your life. Bottom line. And hear me when I say this. Self care isn't selfish. It isn't indulgent or a luxury. It's necessary. It's revolutionary. And you know I'm ready for a revolution. How about you? You being cared for by you and each other might just be the work that changes everything. And that is woman's.