Spiritual Economy
What’s your social standard of healing?
A couple weeks ago I took a trip to Florida to visit family. I practiced my Spanish (this side of my family is Puerto Rican), watched dolphins from the beach, and took my coffee each morning with sunshine. When I returned home I looked at my legs and realized that the stress-induced rash that had been occupying my shins for over two years had finally healed.
The rash began as an adverse reaction to “prolonged exposure to Kevlar”—a bullet-proof material I was required to wear as sleeves when I worked on a developmental disorders unit at a psych hospital. It eventually caused my arms to break out into a rash that spread to my legs where it stayed and flared up in times of stress even two years after I quit that job. Even though I didn’t work at the hospital or even live in the state anymore, the appearance of redness on my legs reminded me of every trauma and frustration I experienced in that messed up setting and system.
Now I work in a field that’s identified by buzzwords like “activism”, “justice”, and “politics”. I work primarily online sifting through endless news cycles to tell the stories that connect the organizations I work for with their communities. And it certainly isn’t without its own forms of stress and burn-out. The average person has plenty to say about the effects of seeing terrible news every day. Imagine having to scour each article about another example of oppression, another corruption, another death, another comments section. But in this role, I get to close the screen. I get to fly to Florida and not worry about my co-workers. I get to have the energy to exercise. I get to connect with the average person and they’re likely able to relate to my stress.
Last night I spent some time with one of my closest friends who still works in that locked-down psychiatric developmental disorders program. Her place is about an hour’s drive away from where I’m staying in Maine and I was really not into driving—especially not my all black car with black leather interior on a 90 degree day. In my head I started adding up the driving I had been doing and would be doing in the coming week to see if it would equal up to an excuse enough to convince her to come to me instead. Then I remembered what it was like working where she still works. Where bullet-proof sleeves are only baseline equipment worn for safety from frequent bursts of aggression from kids. We’d track data on things like a kid’s “emotional dysregulation” when they might be screaming in your face, “self-injurious behavior” when a child might be smashing their head off the wall, and “aggression” that can be defined as anything from spitting at you to a double-fisted hair grab while they bite your head and knee you in the face. We’d track this data to inform the “treatment team” so they could determine the best course of interventions. Although these numbers could reach the thousands in one block of time, though, we never really processed these numbers as things happening to us. We never thought “I was punched in the face 12 times in the past hour”. It was always just data that we passed along to the people in suits and ties behind the closed doors.
I think part of why we, as direct support staff, never processed those numbers as anything to do with us was because we often felt like the only people who truly understood and cared for the kids we worked with. Now that I’ve had some time away from that job I realize the importance of processing my time there through recognizing the amount of physical, verbal, and emotional aggression I endured. But on the job, processing all that to such an extent—admitting that it’s traumatic to get cornered and attacked in an elevator (again) for example—can feel like turning your back on a child who may have only you advocating for them.
Now, I get how that doesn’t sound rational. But for this post I’d like to not consider this aspect of direct care work as a measure of therapeutic intelligence. For those of us in the health-conscious world I’ve noticed that we tend to hold a ruler up to a person’s practice that goes from 0 to enlightened, accepting no excuses from anyone who hasn’t tried to replace their Friday night drinking with yoga or a massage. Instead, we need to consider through the lens of what I’d like to call the spiritual economy.
Beyond just our typical economy where we could say “direct care workers make less money and therefore can’t access meditation classes as often as someone with more money”, the spiritual economy requires us to consider how our position in society allows us to experience things like self-care and healing. There was an article in the New York Times recently titled Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich. Writing about the behavioral differences between wealthy Brits and wealthy Americans, the author at one point says:
So imagine my horror at discovering that the United States is more calcified by class than Britain, especially toward the top. The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.
I have definitely seen and felt this among rich people here in the U.S. What I notice and feel more potently, though, are the ways that people with high-levels of access to self-care are in denial of their level of wealth. I’m not talking exorbitant access to elite doctors nor the ability to afford excellent health care. I mean the ability to step away from your job without feeling guilty for the physical risk it may cause your co-workers. I mean the ability to feel safe in a yoga class because if you break down the teacher is likely able to empathize with what’s causing your tears. The ability to notice your burn out—and actually do something about it. The ability to travel with minimal restriction by your job. The ability to quit your job without months or years of recovery needed after. The spiritual impact of our self-care practices is beyond the measure of a dollar sign. And when I was in my position at the hospital I can assure you that I got more spiritual healing by drinking with my co-workers on a Friday night than by going to a yoga class that might tear open all my emotional wounds, making showing up to work on Monday almost unbearable.
But…when I worked at the hospital I also gave myself a ton of blame and guilt for my declining yoga practice and increasing nights out. Even though I wasn’t abusing alcohol and was still able to be at 7am skating practices on the weekend my spiritual background and community led me to believe that what was holding me together, was actually breaking me down. I’m not advocating for drinking and late nights by any means. I am saying, though, that if I had more yoga and meditation teachers reaching out and attempting to meet me at my spiritual location than teachers marketing the latest research into the cognitive benefits of combining reiki with kale, I believe I would have had more success in my work and in my healing.
Now that I’m surrounded by spiritual leaders, teachers, and activists all the time in my work, I believe this more strongly. It pains me to see people completely burned out when they don’t need to be. Sometimes this pain is out of empathy. More often this pain comes from an anger at knowing what it feels like to burn out with lives depending on you and hardly an option to heal. And often, like rich people who refuse to admit their privilege, I see people refusing to witness the extravagant wealth of spiritual economy they truly have. In an article on Quartz, a description of “Aspirationals” as characterized by sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is quoted:
Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption — like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates.
Again, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t practice yoga or listen to NPR. But we can’t measure how healthy they make us feel as free-range workers then recommend the same practices as imperative to people who cross boundaries most people couldn’t even imagine. And we prescribe healing using tactics that disregard one’s surroundings and relationships. Because we all know and preach that connection and relationship are the true sources of healing. We have full on trainings for how to connect with the communities we are hoping to serve—how to go into a poverty-stricken area or a neighborhood that’s racially different from our own—and to listen before offering help. So why can’t we turn to the people right next to us and listen to what they need before we measure their methods of sustaining against our own?
If I were to speak as a person who still worked on the unit that I used to, I would say that free yoga classes and online meditations would go largely unattended. And no amount of data about their healing benefits would make an impact (beyond making us feel guilty and ashamed for not taking care of ourselves in a system that makes it impossible). But people willing to truly hear our stories, healthy food, political actions that acknowledge the marginalized people we work with, interviews that skip past the psychiatrist and listen to the patient and direct care worker—these things can truly help a person and community heal.
