To celebrate Black History Month while cultivating my commitment to mental wellness and self-love on this blog, I invited one of my mentors, Dr. Kesha Moore to help me share some tips on practicing self-care as we work towards elevating our lives beyond just merely surviving but thriving.
Dr. Kesha delves deep into why is self-care so important for black women and how it has played a major role in the resilience of black women throughout history. We also discuss why self-care is even considered an “act political warfare” especially for black women. And finally we talk about how black women can practically apply self-care when faced with daily micro-aggressions.
You can listen to the recording by clicking here
About Dr. Kesha Moore
Kesha Moore, PhD is an educator, author, speaker, and executive coach who helps professional women maximize their productivity while creating lives of balance. Dr. Moore is the CEO of Life In Focus Coaching. She is also the author of the book Your Life as a Celebration: Accomplishing your goals with less stress and more joy.
Through her writing, teaching, and coaching activities, Dr. Moore provides female professionals with the most effective, research backed strategies for their personal and career development. She presents this information in a manner that is easy to understand and apply. Dr. Moore’s recognizes and has compassion for the significant challenges professional women face in fulfilling the competing demands of career and family. She discusses her challenges in this area and openly admits that “I was my first client.”
Key Highlights from interview
• Self-care is a lot like cherishing a newborn. It is loving ourselves, nurturing ourselves, protecting ourselves, and not because we’ve accomplished anything. It’s because this is who we are. We are already people of tremendous value, unique and irreplaceable. So it’s not that we deserve self-care because we’ve achieved this goal, or hit this income or level of education, we deserve it because of who we are. And if we can love ourselves in those ways, then we do want to eat healthy, give ourselves the pleasure of taking a nice warm bath, or reading a good book.
• You can begin a practice of self-care by ritualizing the way you start and end your day.
Examples are: Journaling, Meditation, Reading a daily Devotion, Exercising, and Prayer
• We talk about who truly reaped the benefit of creating the stereotypical “Strong Black Woman” referencing the speech that originated with orator, Sojourner Truth and later called “Ain’t I a Woman?” or “Ar’nt I a Woman?”
• When dealing with micro-aggressions we can look at self-care like an immune system. There are germs all around us and sometimes we can get sick and sometimes people are in that environment and don’t get sick. The difference is the quality of their immune system. Your immune system is able to take the things in your body that mean to harm you and process them and expel them from your body without doing so much damage.
Given the fact that we live in a racist and sexist society it’s a given that there will be daily assaults on our dignity, and on our humanity and so it’s essential we practice self-care regularly because that is our immune system. Self-care is how we are able to keep ourselves healthy, and to keep ourselves functioning in a dysfunctional context. So when we are practicing self-care, we are reminding ourselves of our own inherent dignity and value.
• We can accomplish this by connecting with other people who are like us and have experienced similar pain. We get a chance to finally say, ‘ok I’m not crazy, this just happened right?’ and someone is there to say like ‘yeah! That happened!’ This is self-care because we are exposed to these things {micro-aggressions} in such a pervasive way it can make you feel like ‘I deserve this’. So having communities of people that remind you that you’re valuable, you’re not what they say you are, that you deserve more, helps to heal us, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. There is a lot of research around the physical benefits that come with being in supportive communities.
The point is to get the thoughts that are running around outside in the society that says we aren’t valuable, that we don’t deserve 5 minute breaks that we don’t deserve to make more money, that we don’t deserve to be treated with dignity…all of those ideas that exist out there expelled from our body without them becoming parts of us and taking root in our minds. So we are able to preserve our minds through our immune system of self-care.
• We explore the concept of flourishing to reach our optimal potential. In her book, Your Life As A Celebration: Accomplishing your goals with less stress and more joy Dr. Kesha discusses how we can transform our lives into a celebration of us. We can create a life that affirms our core values and engages in our life purpose.
• We also open up some fun dialogue about Art as both a reminder of our value and way to visualize ourselves thriving and not just getting by. (The quote I was trying to reference was “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” by Oscar Wilde.) We even nerd out about afrofuturism for good measure.
Until Next Time…Peace!
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