I fell in love with self-love. As a young person awakening to systemic oppression and situating my own life experiences as a South Asian Muslim in the diaspora, self-love and self-care felt like acts of resistance. They were potent calls to mend both the invisible and visible scars I had accumulated over the years. Messages about my worthiness, or lack of it rather, had soaked into my core the way my teenage skin absorbed the “whitening” creams I earnestly applied.
The ethos of self-love was a propulsion. It moved me toward healing; a way of releasing both systemic and personal traumas from my body.
Fast forward a few decades later: Social media is now a thing. More than a thing — a behemoth.
I felt a pit in my stomach form as I scrolled through platitudes encouraging me to “put myself first,” “heal myself to heal the world,” “be empowered,” “treat myself,” and all other sorts of odes to self, often attached to a product being hawked. The pit in my stomach grew to a full-on allergic reaction.
I fell into a spiral of confusion. What could be wrong with these encouraging statements? How could this concept of tending to and nurturing oneself feel problematic? This was, after all, a concept I had found beneficial and often encouraged for myself and others.
The confusion gave way to curiosity. I threw myself into the words and wisdom of beloved ancestors, movement elders from the recent past, and those from my family’s culture and religious traditions. It dawned on me that self-love had not only been co-opted and commercialized; it had morphed into yet another “industrial complex.” The self-love industrial complex; a system perpetuating self-hate, loathing, and dis-ease with one hand while delivering us right into the arms of a highly profitable “solution”: the $4.5 trillion-dollar (and growing) wellness industry. (If we were to factor in the “leadership development industry” — a close cousin of wellness — that figure grows by another $300-plus billion.)
The capitalist machine didn’t skip a beat in manipulating concepts of self-love and care, with its roots in Black liberation movements, alongside appropriated Indigenous and Asian spiritual practices (à la sage smudging, yoga, meditation) for financial gain. And why would it? The wellness industry, dripping with self-affirming messages, has proven incredibly lucrative.
As American Detox author Kerri Kelly puts it, “[Wellness] is extreme materialism masquerading as spiritual practice to make us feel good while emptying our wallets. It is the commoditization of political ideals like ‘self-care’ and ‘empowerment’ as something you can buy.”
Meanwhile, the root causes of our dis-ease, the very reasons we are compelled to apply self-love and self-care in the first place, remain obscured. Growing income inequality, police brutality, and other forms of violence, discrimination, lack of universal healthcare/childcare/parental leave, climate chaos, forced migration, environmental destruction, pollution, and toxic water are but a few of the reasons our collective well-being is suffering.
The more I unpacked self-care through this sociological lens, the more I understood why my nervous system was on high alert. Self-care, extracted from its context of origin — community care — was simply pushing the onus on individuals to “fix themselves.” In essence, we were being left to “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps,” or rather, by the straps of our yoga mats.
Tack on the ways in which liberatory frameworks and cultural traditions were being hollowed out and sold back (at a premium!) to the very Black, Brown, and Asian communities from which they were extracted, and it’s no wonder I was sick to my stomach.
Meanwhile, I was beginning to experience a rupture on a spiritual level as well. My Islam was pushing me to cultivate roots in what could not be seen, touched, or felt; to draw strength beyond resistance to current realities. This was not a pass to ignore suffering or the pursuit of justice. (“Spiritual bypassing” is yet another American phenomenon arising from the extracting and hollowing of others spiritual traditions.) Rather, it is a call to hold both. If there’s anything my faith is honing in me, it’s how to be in this world — to resist, to serve and build community, to support wholeness and healing — while belonging to another. This brings to mind a quote from early Islamic leader Imam Ali: “Aim to live in this world without allowing the world to live inside you, because when a boat sits on water it sails perfectly, but when water enters inside the boat, it sinks.”
As I further anchored into my cultural and spiritual traditions, my focus moved toward a decentering of self, dissolution of ego, and an embrace of our inherent inter-/intra-connectedness. The self was never a solitary self in this context, but rather an inextricable component of broader Life. This is a core message that pulses through the spiritual fabric of not just my own, but many other global majority (Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, Latine) communities. (Scroll to the end of this article for a few quotes and examples).
In alignment with my spiritual practice, I began distancing myself from phrases like self-care (or any term, really, that begins with a “self” and is followed by a hyphen). But this is highly specific to my own journey. Many people I love and admire are advocates of the phrase, “staying connected to the roots” and ethos of self-love as championed by bell hooks, Audre Lourde, Dr. Angela Davis and others. Folks the world over find resonance, healing, and support by way of these concepts. I am deeply grateful for this.
The crux of the issue is not so much in the words we apply but in our practice of discernment: to see the bright pink “self-care kit” full of nail polish and makeup marketed to young girls for what it is. There is nothing wrong with pampering our bodies. The rub is in believing materialism will somehow “save us.”
Loving and caring for self are necessary responses to the overwhelming challenges of our times. Yet, the dominant system has proven itself, time and again, incredibly sneaky; morphing and hiding in words and concepts that appear helpful, innocuous even. As Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé of the Democracy & Belonging Forum states, “[W]e have been trained to reproduce sounds and images with which we are already familiar … the solutions we throw at our problems reinforce them.”
To be spiritual is to have imagination; a push to step beyond the familiar. It is a call to practice, to bring into our bones the world we long for. To stay connected to our roots and essence. To make room for being and nurturing ourselves both within and beyond the paradigm of resistance. To love ourselves and care for ourselves, not for our own sake, but because we truly understand what it means to be a “self.”
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Below I’ve shared a few of the “threads,” or commentaries on “self” I have been exploring in the spiritual fabric of different Black, African, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian traditions:
Elmer P. Martin and Joanne M. Martin describe in their book Spirituality and The Black Helping Tradition in Social Work, “the self of African-American autobiography is no mere ‘lonely sojourner’ … The self belongs to the people, and the people find voice in the self (Martin & Martin, 2002).”
Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, a poet and psychologist born in Nigeria to Yoruba Christian parents, shares this wisdom: “You are not a self … as such. Curious as it seems, the self is what emerges when you focus on a single, impoverished aspect of the processes that create ‘your’ experiences.”
Native American traditions draw from an “interdependent relationship to all natural phenomena” as foundational knowledge.
Queer, feminist Chicana scholar Dr. Gloria Anzaldúa said, “With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings — somos todos un país.”
In Buddhist traditions, the notion of “individual self” is considered an illusion. “It is not possible to separate self from its surroundings.” Thirteenth-century Muslim poet Mawlana (Rumi) described this same illusion: “You’re clutching with both hands to this myth of ‘you’ and ‘I.’ Our whole brokenness is because of this.”
