By Rayla Rutkoskie
There I was, surrounded by nature, my usual space to find rejuvenation and fill my energy tank back up. But as I sat on a bench nestled under a twisted oak tree, I felt anything but rejuvenated. I tapped my foot impatiently and thought, Okay, this isn’t doing anything. Hurry up!
Huh. What a weird thought to have. What’s different now than when I usually go out into nature?
I guess it had been a long time since I’d ventured outdoors and enjoyed it. The last time had been over three years ago in Zion National Park, sitting on the edge of Angel’s Landing and taking in the crisp panorama of trees and mountains.
This time I was in the middle of hot, humid Austin, Texas, in what I like to call trendy nature, man-made parks with dozens of joggers in fancy active wear and the city noise always buzzing in the background. Not exactly relaxing.
I didn’t feel it was the place affecting me though. I was asking for my time in nature to give me something for being there, like a job, which I’d never done before.
As I was thinking about this, I saw a woman my age sit down on a nearby rock, take a sexy selfie, then flounce out of the park and back into her apartment building. That’s when it hit me: nature had become another cheap transaction. I was trying to use something I usually enjoyed to fill a hole in my life, just like that woman who was probably hashtagging about her spiritual awakening in the woods, makeup and filter applied for maximum effect.
What bothers me is that the culture of self-help can be turned into yet another thing to drive myself into the ground, as if I don’t have enough of those lurking in my childhood programming.
I’ve heard that some forward-thinking companies have incorporated meditation and other mindfulness practices into their daily routine, citing how much the employers care about employee wellness. Sometimes increased productivity levels are also given as a reason, but with the focus being on self-care no one thinks to dig deeper. We often don’t see how the label of self-care can turn us into robots trying to create the maximum amount of energy to feed the machine.
This is how it works. When we reach the end of our rope, our energy flags from too much give and not enough take. Having a company, book, podcast, or friend suggest self-care makes it kind and thoughtful. We don’t realize how we’ll twist the idea to fit our agenda. So then we commit to a meditation, self-love practice, hobby, or anything that usually brings us joy. We applaud ourselves for slowing down and giving ourselves love, but it’s only when we’ve depleted ourselves entirely, and then some, that we seek it.
The endgame for self-care can become about gathering enough energy to throw ourselves back into the daily grind, to do more, to have more, to ultimately be more. It’s always about more, more, more.
Whereas true self-love comes from being exactly as we are, knowing that more doesn’t ever enter the equation. If it did it would show our priorities lay in getting ahead in the rat race, and not in appreciating ourselves and enjoying things for the sake of enjoying them.
I’m not seeing religion, spirituality, and the idea of goodness as the only things that bind people anymore. Now I’m seeing people, including myself, sign a contract of docility and overwork, of chosen martyrdom, for other reasons. We have now imposed this self-sacrificing lifestyle on the very thing that gives us the most peace and joy: our BEing.
Instead of feeling rejuvenated by spending time in nature, I was reducing this once-sacred act, an offering of joy to my soul, to an offering with strings attached. If I give you my presence, you give me energy.
And when that deal is done, I take the energy given to me to return to the unsatisfying and seemingly necessary soul sucks of life. I stay glued to my phone to avoid processing feelings and being in the moment. I overwork myself at home and at work. It is only after performing these things non-stop that my depleted soul screams, “Enough!”
Then I promise it love and care, and treat it to all its favorite things. I do just enough of this to earn its trust so we can make the bargain again, and I know it always will because it loves me. It ends up being an abusive relationship with myself, hidden under all the self-love practices and fooling everyone, even me, into thinking I’m doing such a good job at taking care of myself.
The way to avoid this trap is to realize that striking that bargain is a way to edit my experience in the most damaging way, robbing myself of the joy of my own life. Instead of making a deal with nature, I needed to be present with my soul and allow myself to feel happiness through the things I enjoy doing. I’d also be bonding with my soul in the process.
I’d get to spend time with the voice of my soul and fall in love with it again, as I first did as a child. And through experiencing this love, I’d recognize its voice as that constant whisper heard throughout my day, the one that says to take a deep breath, or take a break, or be just a little bit nicer to myself – the voice I’ve learned to ignore lest I fall behind in the imaginary race.
It’s not an easy thing to admit that I’ve ignored my needs in favor of others’, or even worse, to impress the inner critics who are made up of only the ways I’ve fallen short. This makes it impossible to ever do, have, or be enough.
I hadn’t realized this because the constant grind of the city distracted me from my joy more than my slow-paced life in Utah had. It hadn’t occurred to me that my soul was being numbed out in favor of an endless to-do list in a competition where there could never be a winner.
So with this in mind, I sat on that bench, took a deep breath, and tried again – or rather, stopped trying. I abandoned the agenda and ran to meet myself by the trees, and felt the sensations of body and soul, for no reason at all.
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