if you’ve been around the thrive phd universe for a minute, you know that i started this whole business because i felt left out of so many conversations and spaces in grad school. my body, my brain, my community - we all needed a LOT of care to get through the dissertation process. in the best cases, people understood that my chronic illness, and my brain that tended toward anxiety, had different needs and they left me space to care for myself. but in the worst cases, my yoga practice was viewed as a luxury, my time in therapy an indulgence, and my boundaries around work one of many signs that i didn’t have what it took to be a “serious academic”.
luckily for me, one of the things that the aforementioned therapy sessions helped with was putting these comments into context, and giving me the permission and skills i needed to do my work, but also live my life and take care of myself. and luckily for a lot of us, the conversation has moved on in the years since i was actively dissertating, and self care has become more openly discussed. but with that increased discussion has also come a whole host of other complications: increased commodification; privileging white, affluent, able-bodied voices; a culture of victim blaming that places the onus making time for and practicing care exclusively on the individual, among others.
but even more luckily for all of us, a new book has come out that made huge strides in creating an actionable, inclusive set of tools for approaching self care in a holistic, multifaceted way. inner workout: strengthening self-care practices for healing body, soul, and mind by taylor elyse morrison is part assessment (you know i love an assessment!), part toolkit, part context for understanding how and why you might have arrived at your specific relationship to self care. taylor is the founder of inner workout, which has created an ecosystem of seminars, meditations, trainings, and tools to help people develop easy, sustainable self care routines, and you can see the breadth and depth of her experience in every page of the book. beyond her impressive CV, i appreciated that taylor wrote this book from the perspective of someone actively caring for themselves, and not doing it perfectly all of the time, or maybe even most of the time. the book is not a gospel from a self care god, speaking to you from high atop the mountain. taylor writes this book as a fellow traveler, maybe a few steps ahead of you on the path, but moving backwards and forwards all the time, as we all are. the difference is refreshing.
the book guides you through the context of self care as a theoretical framework used by many cultures, at many points of history - including so many normally left out of the conversation, like indigenous cultures and religious spaces. and then you take the “take care” assessment. your relationship to self care is measured in terms of five “dimensions”, each with corresponding subdimensions that map elements like relationship to your physical body, and your your connection to community and larger purpose. i love how the assessment is meant to be repeated (taylor recommends seasonally) - it feels like less of a scorecard and more of a self portrait. and because i’m a show and not tell girl, here is the snapshot of my results as of march 2023:
the image has text that says “Your Snapshot: here’s a visualization of how you’re currently relating to self-care. the size of the circle is relative to your positive relationship with that dimension.” there are five circles of various sizes and colors, listed here in descending order of size: bliss, mental and emotional, wisdom, energetic, physical.
the book continues to detail each dimension and sub dimension, with personal stories, exercises to deepen your understanding, playlist suggestions, and more. you can read it straight through (like me, highlighting like every single page) or flip through it as you need.
after taking my assessment and reading the book, i felt inspired to engage with my physical dimension more frequently. not surprisingly to anyone who knows me, and probably relatable for scholars everywhere, i spend a LOT of time in my head, and the relative disconnection i feel to my physical body is a something that i am continually working on (and probably always will be!) the book felt like a compassionate way into that relationship, and not like another thing to add to my already long list of things to do. i’m not instantly more embodied, but i can say that i have been inviting myself back into my body more often in the last week, and that’s not nothing!!
this book is definitely for you if you’re looking for some support for your self care that feels personalized, inclusive, and written with overlapping systems of inequality and privilege as the foundation, not a footnote. if you’re looking for a book about self care written by a Black woman who lives her ambition and values her care, this book is definitely for you. i read a lot of books, listen to a lot of podcasts, and do a lot of work with self care every day so take it from me that this feels different: more actionable, more approachable, more inclusive, and more fun.
(i’m not being paid to write this review - i bought the book with my own money and wrote this of my own free will - it was just a really good book that i felt like you should know about!!)