Episode 242: Caregiver Self-Care: It's Not About the Leggings

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Episode Transcript

One day about 12 years ago I found myself sitting on an expensive yoga mat, wearing expensive yoga clothes crying my eyes out. I was new to caregiving, maybe 6 months in, and being still, without distractions was too much for me. 

Let’s talk about not being able to buy your way out of caregiver overwhelm. 

Usually, I find that caregivers have one of two different views on self-care. Those who say they can’t afford it and others who throw all the money they can at it. 

In the end, the results are usually the same. It doesn’t work. 

The price I paid for my yoga clothes and the mat I sat on didn’t take away my pain.  And as I sat on a piece of organic rubber. Tears ran down my expensive athletic wear shirt probably in a color with a name like lilac smoke or Dark amethyst and I found myself growing angry. 

Angry that I had invested so much into an act that was supposed to work and I still felt the same, only now with less money in my pocket. I had put on what I thought were the right clothes, found a quiet uncluttered space in my home, and ceremoniously rolled out my expensive mat expecting it all to make things better.

And that made me feel like shit. 

Angry because I, of all people, shouldn’t have allowed myself to get to the level of burnout I was experiencing. I was a full-time yoga teacher when my husband was diagnosed with cancer. I was expected to know how to care for myself and the fact that I didn’t, or couldn’t or wouldn’t allow myself to continue my pre caregiving self care practices made me angry, disappointed in myself and incredibly lonely. 

I had the tools, the knowledge, the access to a world centered on the core belief that staying connected to yourself is how you handle the difficulties of life and here I was falling apart underneath the weight of it.

I’d like to tell you that I figured it out on that day. That I realized what I was doing wrong and it was an easy fix that I can pass on to you. But I didn’t. 

I gave up… 

I rolled up my mat and put it back into my car because even though Yoga and meditation weren’t working for me, personally, I still had a job to do. I still had to lead others into an exercise I now believed didn’t actually work. Worried that someone would find out how much of a fraud I was. 

I tore off my clothes and threw them in a corner. Peeling off my leggings. Almost falling to the floor trying to get them past my feet as if they were trying to hold on while my crying turned into tears of anger. Taking it all out on my clothes, because they didn’t work. 

It’s easy to give up so I get it if you have too. 

Giving up means you don’t have to try anymore. 

You don’t have to be vulnerable.

You don’t have to worry about letting yourself down. 

Because feeling pain, stress, overwhelm and anxiety are things you know. 

You know what to expect. 

Maybe you can’t even remember what life was like without it and, hey, you’re surviving.

You could believe you can’t afford to care for yourself, I get that too. 

As a yoga teacher, I slowly slipped into the belief that what I wore made me better because I started out as a teacher feeling the pressure to look a certain way. My students expected me to look a certain way. Instead of being myself for a while, I became who everyone thought I should be while I took some time to find myself. 

So I bought the expensive outfits and the expensive quarter inch think rolls of rubber to stand on and I played the part. 

I was part of the lie that you have come to believe. Self-care has to be expensive for it to work. You have to be able to buy in to be part of the game. 

Why try to care for yourself if it requires you to pay out with the money you don’t have? There’s no reason to make a lifestyle change if you have no guarantees that it will work. Or maybe you say to yourself that you aren’t that type of person. Yoga is a thing other people do. Meditation isn’t on brand for the type of person you are. You can’t stand writing so why would you journal? 

All the things people say you should be doing to care for yourself are not in your caregiver budget and not worth you learning. 

Feeling pain, stress, caregiver overwhelm and anxiety are things you know.

You know what to expect. 

Maybe you can’t even remember what life was like without it and, hey, you’re surviving.

Giving up before even trying. 

You don’t have to be vulnerable.

You don’t have to worry about letting yourself down.

You don’t have the threat of finding out there might be something that could work. Have a taste of what caring for yourself might feel like. Get a sense of what you’re missing out on when you give up on caring for yourself. 

That was my problem. That’s what makes my story different. 

I already knew what caring for myself felt like. 

I could still remember the indescribable feeling of calm I would have after a meditation session. 

How much more focused I could be after my own yoga practice.

How empowering doing something for myself felt. 

So when I gave up on trying to do something for myself it created a deep pain inside of me because I knew what I was giving away and I knew how badly I needed it. 

But the anger kept me away for a while. In my first year of caregiving, I largely found myself angry that my life had changed. So anytime I tried doing things the way I used to before caregiving and found it not working I’d get angry… even throw a mini temper tantrum from time to time. Because I couldn’t make the way I used to care for myself fit into my new life. 

So caregiving got real hard for a while. I was scared a lot of the time. Worried all of the time and anger popped up at any moment with a quickness. And I cried…. A lot. At anything. As if I had a perpetual hallmark commercial running in my head. 

Because I knew how life felt when I cared for myself. Because I could still recall the feeling of calm and the power of resilience. Because I hated hearing the words that came out of my mouth when I reacted to life instead of taking time to respond instead. 

Because I couldn’t continue to live life the way it was any longer, I took another chance and tried again. 

So I put my expensive yoga clothes back on… rolled out my overpriced piece of rubber, day after day. Now doing it out of spite. No one was going to get in the way of me making yoga work for me not even myself. 

I made it complicated. I judged every yoga pose I stepped into. Criticizing the body I had now limited by the emotional weight I was carrying. I tried to bring back the very involved process of meditation I used to do every day before caregiving. Angry that it was impossible for me to do. 

Each time I found myself on my mat, my eyes full of angry tears, feeling worse than when I started.

Until one day I let myself fall back on my mat. 

Looked up at the ceiling through the tears in my eyes… and breathed. 

It’s not often that we have moments of clarity as caregivers if we are always trying to keep up with everything life throws at us. So when I stopped trying to do and allowed myself to just feel I realized I had to make things simple again. 

Life before caregiving had room for things to be complicated. 

After becoming a caregiver it had to be direct, to the point, easy to do and take up very little time. 

I realized I what I did to find calm had to fit into my chaotic life. Not the other way around. 

So I just breathed. 

At first it was just a minute here and there. 

I didn’t wear any of the fancy clothes or even used a yoga mat most of the time. 

I’d just focus on breathing. 

Deep breaths. 

As I did this I began to feel the promise of the calm I used to have every time I’d finish a yoga class or meditation session. 

Taking time to focus on just breathing took the power away from my anger, fear, and worry.

There has to be a moment you can still remember when you felt that everything was right in your world, even if it was for just a moment,

Maybe you were genuinely laughing with someone. Or you were alone and caught yourself feeling good. 

You have to want more of those moments to make caring for yourself work. 

We all know caring for ourselves is something we really need to do. We all know that if we don’t care for ourselves we will need our own caregivers in the future and won’t be able to care for our loved ones. We all know that it should be a priority. 

There just has to be something that flips that switch inside you in order to start to make positive changes in your life. 

The problem is no one can flip that switch but you.  

Because you can buy all the things. You can take time to organize when you will start to try something new. You can schedule those 5 minute walks into your phone but in the end… the only thing you need is yourself to do the thing. 

Caring for yourself can cost nothing. It doesn’t have to be complicated. 

It has to be something that actually brings you joy not an activity on a list that someone else wrote. 

Will it be difficult? Yes. What in life hasn’t been difficult for you over the past few years? If you are a caregiver you automatically have a track record of being able to do difficult things. 

Will there be some trial and error? Of course. Doing something new means you aren’t an expert at it. You’re bound to have to course correct at some point.

Will it be worth it? Absolutely. Having the opportunity to smile more, breathe deeper and enjoy your life small moments at a time will become addictive. 

I just hope that through my stories and the courses I offer online, I can make it much easier for you than it was for me. 

I hope I can ease some of the loneliness many caregivers feel.

I hope I can help you find a way towards loving your caregiving life.

Thanks for listening.