Self care for professionals/academics/activists

This workshop is aimed at those of us whose work involves caring for others and/or trying to change the world. This includes therapists and other practitioners, activists or academics.

Whether we’re trying to address things on an individual level (by helping people who are impacted by the current social situation) or on a social level (by raising awareness and trying to change things), we all need to retreat every now and then, and to consider how we look after ourselves and get support.

Hopefully this workshop will be a form of self-care in itself, will enable participants to reflect on the ways in which they can build self-care into their lives, and will prompt an exploration into the links between caring for ourselves and for other people and the wider world.

The workshop will be divided into four parts. During the first session we will discuss why self-care is important in our lives, and how we currently engage with it, sharing examples of possible practice and our sense of how it relates to our work. In the second session we will try out various forms of self-care with a focus on tuning into ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, and our bodies. In the third session we will start to explore more outward focused forms of self-care, including reaching out to others, listening to each other, and community-building. During the final session we will return to the question of how self-care relates to our work, considering the possibility of developing compassionate networks, and thinking about the ways in which our treatment of ourselves, others, and the wider world are intertwined.