[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice. But the how sometimes elusive that Makes Total Sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Okay, so I'm going to keep myself together today, Dr. Shanaiquar.
I promise. I'm going to keep myself together. Sometimes it's hard for me with therapists, counselors, psychology folks to not turn this into something, but I just saw my therapist yesterday, so I feel like we're probably okay. I feel like we're probably okay.
I'm here, if you haven't guessed it, with Dr. Shaniqua walker Barnes. We're going to talk about her most recent release, which is sacred self Care daily practices for nurturing our whole selves. And I've already mentioned this pre recording, but I just want to say this out loud, kind of for the record kind of thing. This book is such a gift. It was a real gift to me to receive this, to be able to work through this slowly and intentionally, to cry through some of this and to smile and laugh through much of it. I feel like I have kind of like doctor's orders in my head sometimes maybe or maybe not. When I scroll through Instagram, I'm just looking for a laugh. Dr. Shaniqua says I need know. So I find some funny dog videos and anyway, stuff like that. So anyway, this book has been a real gift and a joy to me and really impactful. So thank you so much for it.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: I feel like I don't even know where to start.
I'm going to tell you what I said pre record. Just again, for the record, I was in the intro with this book. I don't think I finished the intro when I had already texted two girlfriends with pictures of the front page. One of them. I think I even sent a voice memo. I was like, you need this book in your life, because I knew that I needed it. And then on day one, I was crying.
But it was because on day one, you give a reminder to the reader of one of the ways that God views us.
And I'll tell you where I cried, and then you can start from there. And this was where, because my husband and I have four kids, okay, we have two dogs. So, you know, you're shaking your head because you already know they are teen preteen, pre teen. But I will say, ever since they were toddlers, when I won't mention who of my kids used to stuff as many DVDs as they possibly could into the player at one time, along with the soil from the house plant that I was actively killing right next door. And we used to just say, this is why we can't have nice things.
So we were like, this is kind of ironic because now we have jobs and a little bit more money and stuff. Like, before we couldn't have nice things because we couldn't afford them. Now we can barely afford them. And we can't have nice things because we have creatures in our home who will destroy those nice things.
You talked about that a little bit, but what if God maybe sees the way that we kind of treat our own selves sometimes?
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I still remember when I wrote that, and I picture the moment vividly when I can't remember if it was after I think it was Christmas. Yes, it was Christmas. When I had gotten this hoodie for my son that I went out of my way to get this hoodie that I just knew would be perfect for him. And he got it. He loved it. Which, I mean, for him to express that he loved it is a big deal. And he takes this hoodie, and then a week later, I notice it on the floor of his room, right? And just like not just like I mean to the floor with a whole bunch of stuff. And I'm like, but wait, didn't you just get that?
Why is it on the floor? Right? And then after that, once school started back up, he wore the thing continue. Like, he loved it a lot, but he wore it so much that within about a week or two, it was soiled. And I'm like, what is even the point? What was even the point of me getting you this great hoodie if you're going to treat it like this, right, in thinking about self care? That's my starting point, right, is that we're a gift from God. Our bodies are God's first and greatest gift to us. We don't come into the world unless God gifts us with the body we exist in. And that's how we're born.
I started thinking, like, is God looking at us like parent of an entitled teenager?
God is like, yeah, this is why you can't have nice things, right? Like, I gave you this great body. I gave this to you for you to and instead of you relishing it, cherishing it, you're abusing it, right? You're wearing it out. You're not taking care of it the way that you should. You're not respecting the gift.
And I think it's especially tragic that it's often those of us who feel called to serve God who are most abusive of our bodies, most abuse of the gift that God has given us.
That's insane.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Insane, but it's true.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: I want you to keep going on that, because one of the things that I love about your approach to this, and I would say, even with self care in the title, that already is going to give most of us a picture in our mind of what she's going to say. Right. We already have kind of some preconceived notions about what you're going to say because it's kind of trending right now, very trending.
But one of the aspects of how I appreciate your approach in this is this holistic nature of self care. And so you just talked and you named, and I think that's I hope that picture stays with me of our bodies being the first gift, first great gift that God gives us. But you also and I use this little tool that you gave us of a self care inventory because it allows us to see some of the different areas of self care. So not to compartmentalize or break it down in that way, but just to give us maybe a little bit of clarity about kind of what areas might be getting worn out, maybe faster than others. And it was so helpful for me because when I looked through it and I was going through these questions, sure enough, there was at least one category. I was like, dang, I am completely neglectful in this area. So can you talk about the holistic nature and maybe why your approach is such and it's different than some other approaches that we might have seen.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah, self care has really become in the 20 plus years I've been doing this, both personally and with Women in Ministry, which is where I started, self care has become incredibly trendy right now. You can find commercials about self care, right. And they all want to convince you that you need to buy something or you need to travel somewhere in order to take care of yourself. So that we really see self care really more as sort of something that those of us who are economically privileged can get. And it's this indulgence, right? It is this thing we do every once in a while as an indulgence for ourselves. And part of what I'm really trying to do is help us to think about self care in really more mundane and even boring ways, right.
Not all the exciting stuff, but actually, self care at its basic level is quite boring and sometimes even unpleasant. Right.
I'm having four vaccinations on Saturday, right? Don't want to do it?
[00:09:44] Speaker A: No. My husband's arm is sore today, actually. I came home and he's like, riding the exercise bike. I'm like, you have two bandaids on your arm. Did you get two this morning? He's like, man, my arm is sore. Right? Yeah.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: It's not pleasant. It's not going to be pleasant. I'm already planning for the fact that I might be sick for, like, the day after. But that's self care, and it's important, self care, right? Because I need those vaccinations. Right. And so yeah, so part of it is I'm trying to help us to think about self care in a different way, especially for those of us who are Christians, who are grappling with how to be faithful in this world. That's always teaching us buy bye bye. Do more, do more, do more. Right? So how do we think about it in this faithful way? And for me, I really do start with the body and the body as a gift from God and then saying, okay, if we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves, what does that look like? And what does that look like in ways that help to nourish us, to sustain us and to empower our work, right. Our ministry? How do we keep ourselves healthy so that we can do the work we're called to do, be the people we're called to be in really sustainable ways, right?
I'm a psychologist. I'm a research psychologist by training. And so for me, everything comes to, okay, how do you operationalize self care for people? Right? And so I identify these different categories of self care. There's physical self care, which is about how we eat, how we sleep, how we move our body, right? So the patterns of movement and rest and medical care. There's emotional self care, which is about how we take care of our emotional selves. Also our relational self care because I believe we were created to be in relationship with other people and that relationships with other people are part of self care. They're not like in competition with it. Right, but that's part of it. And then there's sort of the mental self care, the life of the mind, and of course, spiritual self care. Right? It is how we are intentional about nurturing our relationship with God. And so part of the book is this Self Care Inventory, this Sacred Self Care Inventory where it invites you to say, how am I doing? And you're absolutely right. I have this experience too, because I do this, right. This book comes out of my own lived experience. And every few years I will retake the sacred self care inventory. And usually at least once a year, if I'm not even doing it literally, I'm thinking through it and thinking like, where am I not? And there's always this one area, right? So for me, it's relational self care. I'm an introvert, I'm a minister, I'm an academic, right? I have learned to put relationships on the back burner in order to do the work that I'm called to do. And every year, every year I look at it and I'm like, I'm still not doing relational self care well. Right? And so, yeah, for me, that's a tool for keeping myself accountable. It's not the idea that you're reaching perfection, but it helps me to say, okay, if I'm doing kind of strong in and here's this one area where every year I'm struggling and I feel the impact of it. Right. So, yeah, it's helpful for me in that way too.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it was kind of striking for me, but it's helping me to pay attention. And I think that that's one of the things is paying attention and going back to the mundane work, even the relational stuff, right? That's mundane. This is like everyday kind of kind of work. And I think that one thing that I took away from this book in my own life is even like, we can talk about the rule of life later if we get there. Hopefully we will.
And I've written rules of life and mainly for school. I've done these as exercises in seminary.
But one of the things I took away from this is I have used this time that I was working through your book to be kind of experimental with myself in self care. I felt like in some ways you gave me permission and also ideas for being kind of experimental with this. But these are experimental in these mundane and even kind of weird ways, right? So I'll give you an example.
This is so ridiculous. I recently discovered that this little exercise bike we have, it's not a peloton, but it's kind of the same concept, right? It'll give you a trainer or whatever. Well, it has an accompanying app, and the app has workouts that aren't on the bike, right? So you can do weights, workouts or stretching or something, or yoga. So, lo and behold, there was this little series, Yoga for Self Care. And I thought, okay, Dr. Shaniqua would be.
So here I start this little series. And the other night I tried to listen to my body. I had forgotten that I had woken up, like at 430 because I was up and so I was awake. So I got up and started working on some schoolwork and I was feeling really tired, but I wanted to exercise that day and I hadn't done it yet. And I flipped through and I thought, what if I do the next yoga in this series, right? So the trainer was really great, and of course, she's on a beautiful beach in Jamaica and I'm in my bedroom on an exercise mat.
But she was doing these kind of wild poses and breathing, and we were lions and we were touching our hands to the earth and bringing our hands to make our manes and these weird lion breaths. But it was totally fun. I was doing it kind of in private and I felt amazing when I was done, I slept really well. My body just felt so great. I was so glad I had listened to my body and done something like that rather than hop on the bike and done something really intense. But the point is that it did feel like self care for me, but it's nothing that I would have really even thought to do or name it as self care if I had thought to do it, right. It might have felt like an obligation or it might have something like that. So I don't know. Can you talk about maybe either some aspects in your own story or with people that you've worked with, where this kind of discovery process that's inside of self care.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
So using the words attention as you did, like paying attention and discovery, I think, really, this book, for me, it is an invitation for people to pay attention to themselves.
And it's an invitation into a journey of self discovery because many of us don't actually know what we need to take care of ourselves, right? A lot of us are in that situation where we have not been trained to think about our needs, right? Many of us as Christians, especially women, we are trained not to think about our needs. And we might be hyper aware of other people and their needs, but we can't really name our own.
And that was my problem when I first began practicing self care. I didn't actually know what I needed.
I was like, I don't know. And so I just started experimenting. And for me, it's been this process of, okay, let me try this thing and see how it works. Right? And sometimes I try things and I say, that doesn't fit me. Right? I'm putting that one back on the shelf, right? And then sometimes I try things and like, oh, that was it, right? That one I need to do regularly. But it's been this process of discovering and reflection, right? So paying attention, how did that land? How do I feel after I did that? And so, in some ways, the book and the strategies it uses, it's sort of using a process of teaching us to pay attention to ourselves, right? So try this, see how it felt, right? Did you like it? And then if you don't, there's no obligation, right? It's just, okay, you did it. It didn't work. Let it go. Sometimes those practices, at other times they might work. We'll be like, Let me try that again. But sometimes that's just not the thing for us, right? Because self care, there are some things that are common to everybody, but a lot of it is also individualized. And what I wanted to do is to give readers permission to claim the care that they need and not feel like we have to do the thing that everybody says we have to do.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Right? Because since it's trending, everybody does have an opinion, right?
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Everybody has an opinion, right?
I was at a campsite recently, and it was for an event, and so there were vendors and somebody was selling, I think, sea moss, right? And of course, everybody was like, you've got to drink the sea moss because now you have to have sea moss. Apparently.
We didn't know all these years that this was the thing we needed. And I was just thinking and yeah, so before this, it was like acai or kelp and what will be the next thing that they tell us we absolutely have to have, right?
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Can't believe we've survived all of these generations without the CMOS.
This is how not on trend I am. I didn't even know.
I did know about the Isai, but I mispronounced it. My daughter corrected me the other day. I was like, I'm so off trend that this has been out that we've had to have had this for years. And I still don't know how to pronounce it. I see it on the Smoothie King sign, and I still can't do it. But anyway, just tells you how often I've had it. Almost never, maybe. Yeah, I did. I felt that. And each of the little prompts that you gave at the end of each day, I felt that giving permission, do this if it feels comfortable. Do this if you feel comfortable doing that.
Maybe that would be a good time. Can you talk about kind of the way that you set this book up? Because that felt really good reading it.
That felt comfortable.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So the book is set up as a devotional, and that is because it started as this sort of instagram challenge during Lent in 2021, at kind of the end, as we were wrapping up our first full year of the COVID Pandemic, right? And so I did that year, this instagram kind of challenge invitation for people to join me in my practice of using Lint as a time to reinforce self care.
And so with Lint, you can only do certain number of characters, right? And it became this way of saying, okay, how can I get a message out there? How can I distill what people need to know about self care into these daily prompts? Right?
In some ways, it also lends to my experience as a therapist. Because as a therapist, if you want people to change behavior, you usually don't start with something huge. Like, you don't say, I need a complete overhaul of behavior, right? If somebody wants to I don't know, they say, I need help losing weight, right? I need help getting healthy. You don't say, okay, so you're going to exercise every day, and you're only going to eat vegan. You're cutting out all processed things. You're not doing any kind. You don't do that because you know they're going to fail. People are going to look at that and be like, that's too much. I can't do any of it. I'm not going back to see that. Therapist, they drop out, right? They just disappear on you. But instead, what you do is you say, what's one change you could make that makes you feel like you would be doing something healthier? And maybe the person says, I don't drink enough water. I want to drink enough water. Great.
You know what? Let's focus on drinking more water, right? How much water do you think you should drink? How much water do you drink? Now we're not even going to go for the whole thing yet. We're just going to say, why don't we try to get you more than halfway to your goal. Right. Let's get you closer to your goal. And then you keep building and building. And once they master that, then you say, okay, now let's add and so the book is really about that process of trying something, adding it, adding on to things, so that by the end of the book, people have felt like they've made progress towards developing their own self care plan. So it's a devotional. And then it's divided into seven weeks because I wrote it thinking about Lent. It's not just for Lent, but because that was how it was birthed. Right. It fits that structure really well. But each week focuses on a different theme. And the themes are not as much about these are the things you need to do for self care. But a lot of the themes are some of them about why can't we do self care?
What are the obstacles? Because sometimes we don't know what we need to do for our care, and sometimes we know and we can't figure out how to get it done. Right. And so it's about then. Yeah. What are the barriers to self care? Boundaries. So there's a whole section on boundaries, because often the problem with our self care is that we let other things take up the space that we need for self care. So we have problems with our boundaries. And so time management is one of them. And then I also pay attention to things that are a part of self care that we don't think as much about. Because a lot of us might think about the physical stuff when we think about self care, but we don't necessarily think about how do I care for my emotions?
How do I care for my mind? And thinking about how mindfulness can be a foundation for self care, what are sort of the self care basics? So each week follows a different theme with the idea that at the end, the last week is about putting together your own sacred self care rule of life. Right. And so it is this journey of self discovery where at the end, you've tried enough things. Right. Because each day has a practice, a short practice, because I believe self care needs to be doable for busy people.
And so it's a short practice. And at the end of it, you can say, these are the practices that I found helpful and that I think I want to integrate in my life on a regular basis. And then other things, you'll decide, that's not for me right now. Right. Or maybe later. Or maybe that just didn't fit.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Thanks.
Something caught my attention. I'm wondering if you'll go back to it, and that is the obstacles to self care. Because we started off talking about this, and one of the things you mentioned early on was that in this trend, people who are advertising self care are asking you to buy something. And so I think that's how a lot of us think about it is to say, I actually just can't put that in my budget. I can't do self care because I can't afford a weekly massage or I don't have the time to do this, that, or the other because I'm working or something like this.
I'm not a real housewife, right, of whatever. So I don't have whatever city you're in, so I don't have the time, space, money to do that. And so that, I think, is maybe kind of common thinking. But with your more holistic approach to self care, what are some of the obstacles that everyday folks have when it comes to self care? Or that we see?
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah, an easy one is I don't have enough time.
Right? So for me, my personal struggle every single morning is that I might get up and I might reach for my phone first. Right? And I start scrolling. Like, I don't know, because I feel like something well, we're kind of in a world where it seems like things are happening all the time, right? So I feel like I got to check social media, check the feeds. What happened overnight? Where are we? And before I know it, I've spent 20 minutes on that. Well, I need to meditate for 20 minutes. Did I just give up my meditation time? Because I was like, doom scrolling?
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Like your volume just got louder right now.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Did you?
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Dr. Schnik was saying some things right now, but anyway, fine.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Sometimes it's where we're choosing to put our time, right? And these distractions that we have. Other times, though, it is the real demands of our lives. Like, we have little people in the house in the morning that when we wake up, they seem to have this radar for when we wake up. I don't know. It's a special gift they have. We move and they're like, yes, life.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: In the house again.
Yes.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: And sometimes it's because there are people, our responsibilities that are demanding our attention and our time and we're struggling with, do I exercise or do I get this project done that my boss needs? Right. Or do I take the kid to Scout? Right? And so we're juggling very real responsibilities. Our world is not set up for us to care for ourselves very well, particularly in America. We live in a world that our worth is determined by how much we produce. So the ideas we're supposed to produce, produce, produce. Some people work jobs where you get a 30 minutes break or you have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom.
People work jobs like that. How do you then take care of yourself in that context? You don't have the time to cook a healthy meal.
We eat at our desks, right?
Eat on the go. Like, my 15 year old has gotten this habit where he's trying to rush out of the house in the morning and he eats breakfast standing up.
He won't even sit down to eat breakfast, right? And so part of it is the world that we're in. So time is a very real obstacle. But then another one too is that many of us quite simply don't believe that we're worthy of our time even when we haven't.
We've been socialized women, Christian women, we've been socialized to focus all of our energies on taking care of other people, right? And so we think we're just supposed to sacrifice ourselves. We're not supposed to care for ourselves. We give it to them, right? Whatever time we have. And if I'm exhausted, well, if I did it taking care of other people, helping out at the church, well, that's all that matters, right? We're just going to pour out our lives over and over and over again, never getting refilled. And so many of us, for me, when I started this, I had to remind myself, and sometimes still do, I'm worthy of my five minutes.
Can I not take ten minutes? Maybe I feel like I don't have 20 minutes to meditate today, but can I give myself ten? I'll give ten to other people easily, right? My students show up and they need to tell, sure, come on in, right? Everybody else. But for me to say, no, I can have ten minutes. I'm worthy of my ten minutes, right? And so for many of us, it is convincing ourselves over and over again, sometimes daily, that we are worthy of the time and energy it takes to take care of ourselves.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: I'm going to ask you to say more there, okay? Because I don't know if it's everywhere I speak from much of my faith life spent in conservative Bible belt world where that is reinforced kind of almost every direction that women look that is reinforced right now. What just came to my mind is this is a space where we don't have to talk about this, but I want to name it kind of though that a lot of times, even with clergy, you're talking about Christian women and women serving other women.
There's kind of this it's kind of a laugh to keep from crying kind of thing. But there's this joke of like a lot of times churches will hire a husband basically getting a two for one because they know the wife is going to just work herself to the bone.
And that's what it means to be kind of a quote, good pastor's wife or something like this, part time women's ministers working full time jobs. But even women who aren't in vocational ministry, that is still just what you just named is really reinforced, know, at least in my it's everywhere. It's in the home, it's at the know we have to be the PTA mom and the cook, everything from scratch mom. And at the church, every time the doors are open, mom and the friend. Who's always at the coffee shop and the volunteer who's always at the shelter, and you're like, you can't do all of the things.
So I named that. But I'm wondering, what do you say to that woman? That woman comes into your office and you're like, have you thought about this? And she's like, I don't have time for that.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: Or whatever. There's no way could we just pause for a minute and can I ask you to speak to her?
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
Part of it is and I don't know if I would say this to her directly, but I think part of what we as women have to realize is that much of the world, especially the church world, profits off of our unrewarded, not necessarily unpaid, but unrewarded labor. All the places you just named the church is one of the places where women are incredibly disempowered, especially as it relates to access to ordination, access to the pastorate, even just access to paid ministry work. Right.
And yet I remember a seminary professor saying, at least since the Middle Ages, it has been women who fund the church is and I think the number was about 70% of the church is funded by women.
Wow. It's supported by women. Women are doing the labor. It is women disproportionately who attend church. Right. Literally, without the women, the church could not exist.
Schools are very much like that. Right.
I'm just always amazed when I go to meetings at my kids schools. We are a mostly middle class community. There are a lot of two parent families in our neighborhood. You would not know it if you show up to a school meeting that isn't a football game.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Any school event disclaimer, though, that isn't a football game.
[00:34:41] Speaker B: That isn't a football game. Right.
I'm like, Where are the fathers? I'm looking around and I'm like, I know these kids. I know they have fathers. Where are they?
So, yeah, so there's this assumption that we just had an election, and every year I'm like, let me elect a man for this position because I want to make sure there's male representation yes.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: In this school leadership team.
I was shocked that one of my sons is going to a new school, and they were celebrating the former PTA president, and he was a man. And I thought, I think this is the first one I've ever seen.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Ever. Yes.
It's insane, the way and so part of this is that women are taught that we have to do all or the majority of the work in each of these areas. Right.
And it starts very early. Anytime that you have this sort of service, because we are socialized to serve, and then the church teaches us that service is the hallmark of a good Christian, where we're going to take those two messages, stick them together, and we're just going to give all that we can, no matter how little we receive in return.
And no matter how much it actually hurts us, right?
And then when we do practice any form of self care, we'll feel guilty about it. So for the moms, isn't self care selfish? That's the thing I used to hear from women all the time and still do.
And again, I'm not even talking about a spa day. I'm not talking about not buying your kid food so that you can go get a pedicure. This is not what we're talking about. We're talking about did you get enough sleep?
Did you just get enough sleep? How is that selfish? Are you drinking enough water? Are you eating healthy foods? Are you involved in relationships, friendships, family relationships where people pour into you the way you pour into them? And women struggle with the idea that that's selfish somehow men never do. I've never had a man ask me if self care is selfish. Never.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: Isn't that wild, though?
I just thought of this just now when you were saying that my family actually it was just me at the time, a long time ago, as a member of this gym in town, it wasn't like a chain gym, it was just like a local little gym, but it had childcare, right? So I was a stay at home parent.
And I had it in my mind in those years that if I went to the gym, I had to be like real quick about it and I had to do this really efficient workout and blah, blah, blah. And this gym had an indoor and an outdoor pool. And I remember one time my husband said, like, maybe I shared with him that one of my girlfriends who was also a member of that gym, she said sometimes she just goes and she just puts her kids in childcare and she just goes and lays out by the pool for an hour.
And I said that to him kind of like, how dare she? Kind of thing. And he says, if that was my gym, I'd totally do that. He's like, I do that all the time. And he just laughs about it. But I was appalled. I mean, my kids were really little. I was appalled. I was like that. To me, I mean, this is crazy now because now we have a different place we're a member of. And a couple of weeks ago, I teased my kids. I was like, you know what, there's nobody at the pool at 10:00 on a Wednesday morning. They're like I was like, yeah, sure enough I did. I went and read by the pool.
You guys were all in school, sorry, sucks to be you.
But anyway, so times have changed. But I was appalled by even that and that he was like, yeah, I would do that all the time. So proving kind of both the points. Like I couldn't believe, right, that my girlfriend I was like, internally judging this woman who was doing it right?
But then my husband had no qualms about it whatsoever. But I was overwhelmed with guilt by the thought yes, of spending an hour instead of doing hardcore cardio, which whatever, going to the gym and just spending an hour laying out by the pool. I was appalled. I was so overwhelmed with guilt that I would even do that. But it's like why?
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Because we have especially as sort of the labor of motherhood keeps increasing. And so there's this idea of being a perfect mom and it means that we have to be involved in our families lives all the time.
We're on call, we're already on call. But we feel like we have to be. Hi, anybody need anything?
And so anything we do that is not that we think is actually taking away from us as parents when it's actually the opposite. It actually benefits us as parents. It benefits us in all of our relationships if we are feeling our cup, right?
So on the plane when you get on there and they go through the whole safety spiel and they tell you like, we know if there's a loss of cabin pressure, take the oxygen mask, put it on yourself first and then put it on the child or whoever it is. That depends on you, right? If you're caring for someone else. And I know many of us, when we hear that the first time, we're like, wait, why would I let my kid be sitting there and not getting air? But it's because the airlines realize something. And my uncle who retired from the Air Force recently said it takes 6 seconds to pass out from a loss of cab.
Only say you only get 6 seconds. So if you put the mask on your kid first and then you pass out because now your kid doesn't have a parent, they actually can't navigate the rest of that emergency because you didn't take care of yourself first. Right? And so part of that is for us to see, oh, self care. That's what self care is. It's about putting the mask on ourselves first so that then we can tend to these. But many of us, we think about it the opposite. We think, take care of all of our responsibilities first and then if there's something left over, I'll take care of myself.
But there's never going to be a leftover, right? Because we live in a world that is structured to take as much from us as we will give. So if we're willing to give 100% of our energies to the job, the job will take it, even if it kills us in the process. And then they'll be like, we really miss her. How soon can we get her replaced?
[00:41:57] Speaker A: That's right. Get that job posting.
[00:42:00] Speaker B: Get that job posting out, right?
A lot of us have. That's how we're socialized. We think, give our attention to everybody else and then take care of ourselves when for most of human history, it's been the opposite. Taking care of yourself was the most fundamental thing. People spent their whole days doing the things that enabled them to take care of themselves. You need food. You got a garden. You got to hunt. You got a fish, right? You need a place to live. You got to tend the house, right? That was what we all did for most of humanity. And then once we moved into industrialization and capitalism came in and took over, it became, how much time can we put in on the job? How much money can we make for other people? And these other things involving self care, we don't really have time for that. That's the leftover.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right. Thanks for indulging me on that.
I love these conversations because sometimes you just don't know where they're going to go. But I'm appreciative.
I think maybe we could start wrapping up kind of where you wrap up in the book. And I'm going to ask about the rule of life, because only a few years ago, this concept was foreign to me, and so I'm guessing that it probably is foreign still to a lot of folks who might be listening or who might pick up the book. And even the title of that sounds scary, especially to people who not like my husband, who hate roles, but anyway, but like, some people who are like, I don't need a rule.
Don't do that. It feels too structured. Maybe just the title.
Can you walk us through a little bit and how a rule of life can be? What is it, first of all, and how can it be a good tool to help us navigate our self care journeys?
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I didn't learn about a rule of life until I was in seminary, and mainly it was because I went to seminary with several people who were involved in kind of new monastic communities. So they lived an intentional Christian community, and so they would talk about the rule of life for their community. And then when I became a professor, I was teaching a spiritual formation class.
There were a couple of books that had come out and that were starting to talk about a rule of life for individuals. And so the rule of life comes from the monastic communities. Like the monks, when they lived in community together, they needed to figure out how to live together, right? These group of unrelated people that were living together as a way of witnessing and testifying to God and out of obedience to God, they had to have some rules around their common life for how we're going to live. Like, what are the rhythms of our day, when do we engage in silence? When do we speak? When do we work? How do we work? And so each community had a rule of life that said, we're going to structure our day so that it draws us closer to god, not just as individuals, but also as a community.
And then at some point seminaries kind of there was sort of a rediscovery of this tradition and seminaries started teaching this as a way to think about our spiritual health, right? So for people in ministry, what is your personal rule of life? So rule of life like the way you will live in order to enhance your sense of relationship with God, your sense of connection to God and to the church. When I became a professor and I was teaching a spiritual formation class where we were using this, but I had also been doing the self care and teaching self care for a long time. And I thought, but the spiritual disciplines are not the only thing that matters for our health and our functioning in ministry. We can be doing all of that and we can still be very unhealthy.
And so I began to expand it and I really just played around with this for a few years with my students in my class. We're going to expand how we think about a rule of life. And of course, because I gave them an assignment, that meant I had to do it. And so I developed my own personal rule of life and started following it. And I've been using it now for maybe about seven years, and I've redone it a few times over that seven years. But my rule of life are the holistic practices that I need to sustain myself as a human, but especially to sustain myself as someone who is called to minister to God's people, to God's world. And so the rule of life that I invite readers to create on their own and I provide a template for it and some worksheets for thinking through how you develop one is really about saying, what do I need to be healthy and to function well? What do I need in terms of my spiritual well being? What do I need in terms of physical, emotional, relational and my mental well being? What do I need in each of these areas? How often do I need it? And for me, my rule of life becomes a tool of accountability.
So people listening can't see this. But right beside me is my planner. And in my planner every year, I print out my rule of life and I actually paste it into my planner. And occasionally I can't say, I'm not even going to pretend like I do this every day, but occasionally I'll flip through and I'll say, oh, physical, oh yeah, minimize sugar. Not doing so great at that.
Or I look at that area, that relational. That's how I figured out that consistently I'm not doing this because I had it written down and I'm looking, I'm like, oh, there's a lot in that area I'm still not doing. So then I'm okay, how can I get better? What's one thing I can do to try to get better in that area. And so this is sort of the end of the book is really the beginning of another journey. It's okay. You've tried on all these things, you've worked out your first rule of life. Now you live into it, right? You live into the rule of life and you continue to reflect on it and to revise it based on the needs of your life at different periods in your life.
[00:48:38] Speaker A: Thank you so much. I want to ask you, as we close out, what's the place on your website where people can go and find some of these tools that they can start exploring? I'm thinking, like, if somebody's ordering this from their local indie bookshop or waiting for it to come in, where can they go? If they're like, yeah, I want to do that self inventory right now, or.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: I want to look at this rule.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: Of life right now, where can they find that?
[00:49:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so if you go to Drshaniqua.com and there's a section of my website that says Resource Guides and you click on the Resource Guides, there's a Self Care Resource Guides. It has all of this stuff. It has the sacred self care inventory. So you can go ahead and do that inventory. It has the planning worksheets for the Rule of life. It gives you a link to a template for the rule of life. So the way that I design mine, I've created a template where you can just go and plug in your own stuff, right, and then print it out and you've got something nice and pretty you can stick up around places, right? But that really is the best way to start off. It gives you access to the resources that are in the back of the book.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
I just can't tell you how grateful I am for this conversation, for your work, for this book, and it's felt really encouraging and life giving to me today. So thank you. Thank you for being with me.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[00:50:12] Speaker A: Again. The name of the book is Sacred self Care Daily Practices for Nurturing Our Whole Selves. It's out already by Dr. Shaniqua Walker Barnes, and I will put the link to where you can find it in the show notes. Thanks again. The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the Show Notes music and podcast production by Seth Busetti. Be sure to give us a review on itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit
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