Introducing In Tending
A new focus for this newsletter
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
– Mary Oliver
For the last few years, I’ve been moving through one long initiation.
Those of you who have been here from the start know that I left a decade-plus stint in the classroom as a K-12 educator in 2022 for a year-long writing sabbatical, which has turned into two years. You’ve read along as I shared the reasons for this longer sacred pause: pandemic-related burnout, a late pregnancy loss, a living child with needs inadequately supported by our society, and now, a move across state lines.
It has been a long season of wintering, as
might put it (or a Long December, as the Counting Crows might put it).But I’m ready, now, for a new season to begin.
As Jungian psychotherapist Satya Block puts it: “The portal might be seen as the work of people who have participated in everything society expected of them on one level or another, and are finding themselves wanting more out of life — and want to find more purpose in life as change makers.”
Block adds that “the experience is more intense if you’ve been heads-down — absorbed by parenting, by your career, by an illness, by something — for some time.”
Raise your hand if this describes you too.
For me, this initiation has involved:
Taking the time to slow down and integrate major life changes after being, as Block says, “heads-down,” for much of my 20s and 30s. The death and birth of loved ones, the illness and aging of my body, the many shifts in career focus and perspective.
Becoming curious about how to relate to changes like this without attempting to fight them, control them, or take them personally — as change will obviously continue to come for us all.
Figuring out how to pursue continued creative and spiritual growth as a caregiver who also spends large swaths of the day tending to other people and their seasons of growth and change.
Claiming a new identity as not just a maiden or a mother, but a community elder-in-waiting, charged with caring not only for my nuclear family or my students, but also my fellow helping professionals and parents, my neighbors and friends, and the larger world.
In this next season, I’d like to take my newsletter in this direction — talking more about how we can balance the work of tending ourselves with tending others and our larger world.
So, in this post, I’m announcing a few important-but-subtle shifts to this newsletter’s focus. I hope you’ll come along for this next initiation.
1) I want to talk more about mindfulness.
2) I want to talk more about caregivers.
3) I want to talk more about how mindfulness informs the caregiving experience and how caregiving informs the mindfulness experience.
4) I am changing the name of this newsletter accordingly.
I’ve been working on this a while, so below are answers the FAQs that have come up in the process. Feel free to post any comments or questions below!
Shift 1: I want to talk more about mindfulness.
What do you mean by mindfulness?
Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”
Kabat-Zinn, a medical professional who popularized and secularized meditation for the masses in the late 70s under the term Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, is himself riffing on the collected wisdom of thousands of people who have been doing this for thousands of years. That is, people who have gone looking, as I have, for ways to ease the impact of the everyday suffering that comes with living through seasons of big change, by cultivating a way to work skillfully with all the feelings and sensations that arise.
Why mindfulness, though?
Mindfulness is the #1 answer I’ve found to the question of “How the #$% am I supposed to do this?” within every initiation I’ve faced. And I think that is also the question that many subscribers here are asking. What’s great about it, though, is that it really just leads us to a different, more fruitful set of questions.
What kinds of things will I see about this in the newsletter? Will you still be writing essays and interviews and semi-bad poetry?
I will still be writing those things. My hope is to include small bits of information within these forms from the aforementioned collected body of wisdom — from the historical Buddha to modern-day thinkers like Kabat-Zinn — that may feel specifically relevant to readers here. These might include:
Resources on buddha mind, which relate to tapping into the innate wisdom of the mind, heart and body during seasons of change. Things like this meditation, this journaling prompt, this essay, and pretty much every interview I’ve done here.
Resources on dharma, which relate either to the nature of reality itself, or to the skillful means of working with it as conveyed through mindfulness teachings. These will continue to include the same notes on ancient texts and practices, modern-day teachings and teachers, interviews with wise friends, observable everyday phenomena and embodied experiences that I’ve always shared in this space, plus new ones.
Resources on sangha, which relate to being in community with other people. Especially those who are also attempting to answer the sticky, annoying questions that come up as we try to apply the wisdom we glean from the above to our everyday lives. Community structures are already somewhat built into the way things work here. There’s the comment section, which I sometimes paywall for more intimate sangha-like discussions; you can find me on Notes, which writers on Substack use as a kind of digital watering hole; as as a subscriber, you can also respond to any post from your email and I’ll receive it right away. Additionally, I host occasional open-to-the-public gatherings for caregivers on Zoom like this one; I facilitate closed support groups here especially for loss parents; and occasionally, I co-plan retreats. I hope to do more of this in this next season of our sangha.
Buddhists call these three important things (buddha, dharma, sangha) the Three Jewels. Think of them as akin to a set of good cookbooks and proper knife skills, as well as our own common sense and gut instincts, which can help us to work with the raw fruits and vegetables that grace our tables each day. The Three Jewels offer valuable, but universally accessible, ways to work with the raw material of reality.
Why are you so into mindfulness? And why should I be interested in what you have to say about it?
I did my first downward dog in a yoga class over twenty years ago. I began my formal meditation practice about fifteen years ago. I traveled to my first Buddhist monastery in Asia over ten years ago. I became a registered yoga teacher in 2018. I have offered mindfulness guidance to one community or another regularly since then, from stressed-out teens during the pandemic to perinatal loss groups in the post-Dobbs era. Mindfulness has saved my life more than once during this time.
I also hold one degree in journalism and two in education. This means I have little patience for B.S., whether this means counterfactual takes on basically good ideas, or spiritual spaces and people who promote oppressive beliefs. But I have a lot of patience for crafting careful, inclusive, easy to understand explanations for complex things, like mindfulness, for people who are curious and willing enough to learn.
Why now?
Many of the initiation stories I have featured here have taken place against the backdrop of a very tumultuous world. There is violence surrounding us at home and abroad. There is an earth that is calling for our attention, in louder and louder ways. The rise of technologies like AI offer much promise in terms of helping us solve the logistical problems we face, but they also require us to think more deeply about what it means to be fully human.
Mindfulness can help us to respond actively and purposefully to these challenges, without causing further harm.
Shift #2: I’d like to talk more about caregivers.
What do you mean by caregivers?
Anyone who spends a significant portion of the day tending others, tending community, and/or tending the earth.
In my mind, this does not just include teachers and nurses, but also body workers, food service professionals, farmers, adult children who care for elderly or sick relatives, and parents of all gender identities who work inside the home.
That said, you do not have to be the parent of a living biological child to be here; having experienced infertility and loss on the path to family-building, I would never gatekeep the term “caregiver” in this way. I would even argue that people who are battling chronic illness, infertility and loss on this path are spending a significant portion of the day tending someone — themselves.
What I’m saying is: for now, it’s a big tent. I leave it up to you to decide if it’s the one for you.
Why focus on caregivers?
Caregivers make up a large portion of my existing readership here, as well as the people who surround me in real life. So there’s that.
Zooming out, though, it’s because caregivers hold enormous power to shape the present and future, because they are often the ones most responsible for regulating and even shaping the nervous systems of the people around them. If they are dysregulated — often as a result of being unsupported — they hold the power to cause harm that resonates through generations. If they are regulated, however, they can create infinite ripple effects in the other direction, leading their families and communities to become less violent, more connected and embodied, and more skillful in the ways they work towards peace and justice.
So, I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe that when we invest in caregivers’ inner peace, we also make an essential investment in future world peace.
Shift #3: I want to focus on how the notions of “mindfulness” and “caregiving” intersect.
How do mindfulness and caregiving intersect?
Intuition, sharing wisdom, building and maintaining community — all of these things require care. And good care requires these things.
This seems like common sense. But let’s go one step further.
I think a lot about this bit from Desmond Tutu:
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Through fate or vocation, caregivers are the ones “pulling people out of the river.” We are the experts on the ways in which our current crises are impacting our most vulnerable beings. We have a lot to offer modern mindfulness communities in this regard (not to mention modern policymakers).
However, Western meditation spaces or yoga studios often emphasize individual growth at the expense of the collective. While they can offer welcome sanctuary to those fleeing religious trauma, they often lack what Glennon Doyle calls the “coffee and daycare” aspect of community that is so often found in more overtly religious environs. That is, a cadre of caring neighbors willing to help care for the young, the old, the sick and the struggling, so that their exhausted caregivers can sit in another room and go inward. The timing, pacing, pricing structures and overall vibe of meditation and yoga spaces in the West can also feel less-than-inclusive for those who are not also white, able-bodied, young, thin, neurotypical-presenting, and/or upper-middle class. This leaves out a lot of people who would otherwise benefit.
So, creating a community in this kind of digital, asynchronous space — one we can access in the fleeting moments when the people for whom we care are otherwise engaged — feels like the best way to bridge the gap between what caregivers can offer to mindful communities and what we need from them. It is my hope that by creating a sangha together, we might better position ourselves to discuss collective ways to keep the vulnerable beings in our care from “falling in,” and then share these findings with the people who need to hear them.
Why mindfulness for caregivers? Why not just mindfulness for everyone?
Having the time to tap into intuition, share wisdom, and feel supported in community — these things are essential for caregivers, for the reasons I stated above (ripples of change, etc). They’re also uniquely hard for caregivers.
By definition, caregivers can rarely hand off all of our responsibilities to head out on an extended solo spiritual journey, a la Buddhism’s founder, Siddhartha Gautama (who left a newborn baby and a wife behind in his quest for enlightenment). Our path is closer to that of his partner, Yaśodharā, who raised her son alone for the better part of a decade while her husband went off into the woods — and who still managed to attain enlightenment anyway.
As we say in education — representation matters! It is time caregivers saw ourselves better reflected in both the literature and in modern mindfulness spaces. It’s time for these spaces to better reflect who we are and what we need. It’s time to create those stories and spaces where they do not already exist. I want to do just that, here.
Shift #4: Given all of this, I’m ready to introduce a new name for this newsletter: In Tending.
What does In Tending mean?
To me, this new approach is all about:
Creating a place where we can be in a constant state of intending. Of releasing attachment to outcomes and perfection. A place where we can set and re-set our intentions, again and again, without turning on ourselves if our caregiving responsibilities upend the goals or routines we’ve tried to create for ourselves.
Cultivating a state of turning one’s tending efforts inwards, as a way to ease caregiver burnout and compassion fatigue.
Cultivating a space where we can be in tension, too. Readers and interviewees here, it is clear, find deep meaning in the tending we do for others and we want more time to go inward, to tend ourselves. Caregivers have non-negotiable obligations to those close to us and we want to find ways to contribute to the collective liberation that go beyond that. This can be a space to sit with the questions that can arise from that tension, without necessarily knowing all the answers.
Embracing a state of being in it, fully immersed in tending and in these tensions – what Jack Kornfield refers to as “the laundry” — without making this a problem.
How will this be different from all the self-care stuff I’ve consumed before? Some of it is really annoying, tbh.
I too have consumed that stuff. Here’s what I don’t love and thus will not be sending you:
Breathy meditations with distracting New Age music in the background.
Content that is religious in a preachy way.
Content that is whitewashed to the point that it lacks appropriate credit, context or critique when it comes to the specific cultural or historical roots of a particular topic.
Content that is not intersectional — that is, that does not acknowledge the stressors and obstacles faced by mindfulness practitioners and caregivers who experience any marginalized identity, or several overlapping ones.
Content that pressures you to feel #grateful for your burdens. Or to feel any specific way at all.
Content that will fill up your inbox with sanctimommy-esque exhortations to churn your own butter, mindfully, at the expense of your dedicated self-tending time.
I have a full inbox of client emails, a physical body with its own unpredictable needs, and a bunch of Legos on my floor, and I will never pretend otherwise.
I will still, in short, be myself. Whoever that is, these days.
I am hoping to show that it is OK, in mindfulness and in this space, to be yourself too.
You can be covered in kid poop by day and perimenopausal sweat by night here. You can be grieving and wondering if you’re taking too long with it. You can be wrestling with feelings of anger, jealousy and resentment towards other people who seem to have it a bit easier than you do right now. You can melt down right next to your kid on the kitchen floor after a long day. You will still belong here.
We can do mindfulness practices all day and still wonder, in short, how the @#$ we are supposed to do all of this. Even as those same practices begin to allow us to enjoy some blissful, terrifying moments of not knowing.
There is a well-known Buddhist saying along these lines I’ve always liked: No mud, no lotus. Lotus flowers, often seen as symbols for enlightenment, bloom in bog-like conditions. Here, we’ll talk about the fertile muck of tending. We don’t have to pressure ourselves to grow a lotus out of it. We might just try trusting that the lotus is, and always has been, right here.
In the meantime, thank you for sitting with me, in the mud of my own personal grief and growth, for a year and a half here. While Initiation Writes will soon be composted to create space in my life for this new project, In Tending, the heart and soul of it will still be you, the readers who have made this all possible. Together we have grown a sangha, a community of practice that now spans 38 US states and 29 countries. Who knows what this next initiation will bring for us?
I love the idea “no mud, no lotus.”
I got chills reading about your evolution, and your intentions. Thank you for sharing and allowing us to witness.