35: Discouraged with Self-Care with Taylor Elyse Morrison

Self-care is a term we hear EVERYWHERE right now, and you’ve heard me talk about it over and over again. Today’s discussion is around the disillusionment of the self-care industry that I’m feeling, along with many others. I’m joined by Taylor Elyse Morrison, the author of Inner Workout: Strengthening Self-Care Practices for Healing Body, Soul, and Mind. Taylor is a founder, facilitator, coach, and serial entrepreneur, and she uses her coaching, mindfulness, and movement training to meet people where they are and offer actionable steps toward avoiding burnout. I’m putting Taylor on the spot by asking questions and picking her brain about common self-care struggles, and she is up for the challenge! Let’s see how this turns out!

Show Highlights:

• How the consumeristic quality of today’s self-care movement ignores the marginalizations and barriers that many people experience that bring distress and hopelessness

• Why Taylor urges us to ask, “Is it the Self, or is it the System?”

• Why Taylor created a self-care assessment to give people “practical starting points”

• How Taylor’s self-care assessment is based on the five yogic dimensions

• Why self-care is often confused with pleasure as the hard work of self-care is overlooked

• Why part of self-care is holding onto yourself in the presence of other people

• Why wisdom is a part of self-care, along with the components of presence, self-trust, and aligned action

• How curiosity and self-compassion play into effective self-care

• Why Taylor is satisfied with the feedback she is getting from her book

Resources and Links:

Connect with Taylor: Website, (Buy her book, take the free self-care assessment, and join her newsletter group.) TikTok, and Instagram.

Find Taylor’s book on Amazon:  Inner Workout: Strengthening Self-Care Practices for Healing Body, Soul, and Mind.

Find Inner Workout on TikTok and Instagram.

Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning

We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes

• Transcript

  KC Davis 0:05

  Hello you sentient balls of stardust. I am your host, KC Davis. This is Struggle Care. And today we're going to talk about self care and the disillusionment of the self care industry. And I have Taylor Elyse Morrison with me. She's the author of a new book called Inner Workout: Strengthening Self Care Practices for Healing Body, Mind and Soul. And Taylor, I'm glad that you're here with us. First of all, thank you so much for coming. And thank you for writing such a wonderful book.

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 0:33

  Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to get into this conversation always. But like, especially with you,

  KC Davis 0:39

  okay, so I didn't tell Taylor this. But well, here's what I'd like to do, I want to tell you something that I have been struggling with, and maybe you can give me back some hope and encouragement. Let's do it. All right, I hope you like being put on the spot. Here's the thing when I was reading your book, I was reading even just like the intro, and one of the things that obviously stood out to me is that early and often you talk about how the self care industry has really focused on this idea that we can all just sort of bubble bath our way into a great mental health and excellent life. Like there's this real consumerism behind self care. And you talk really beautifully about how that doesn't really take into account people's intersecting kind of marginalization, and privileges, and community, and all these things that actually affect our lives. And so here's something that I wanted to ask you, because of you writing this book. And so not everyone can see you, but you are a black woman. And that's a really unique perspective that I think you bring to this book. And so, you know, I know, we don't know each other, but I'm just gonna sort of word vomit on you for a minute, I have been doing this work around self care, and trying to make content that can really help people that are experiencing real barriers in their life, recognizing that so many of people's problems is happening because of this intersection of where they are in society, the barriers that they have in society, that marginalization that they experience. And I've honestly kind of found myself, like swung so far away from the idea that individual choices can just self care our way out of distress, that now I'm experiencing discouragement. I'm experiencing almost like a little hopelessness about like, well, what can we do anything? Like how can we help somebody have self care in the midst of things in their life, they cannot change that is absolutely creating this difficulty and this distress in their life. And I can feel myself shifting that far, and feeling that hopelessness. And I think that it came from a pretty like a good place of me looking at my own privileges and recognizing like, you know, I can't just go half cocked and tell someone, well, I do this. And it's so helpful, because the reality is sure, that might be a helpful practice. But how much of my life's enjoyment is really coming from other things like being financially secure, like having a marriage that isn't abusive, you know, by not being afraid every time I leave my house. And so I'm kind of in this spot where I'm almost like, afraid to speak. And I don't know, it feels so hopeless. And so I'm hoping that maybe because of the book that you wrote, you can speak some to that about how do we reach people, and validate that the things in their life that are causing distress are real and in many ways are systemic? But is there any place for us to help ourselves in that?

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 3:33

  Yeah, who, I feel that so deeply, I appreciate you sharing that. And it's funny, because I'm like, how much hope am I actually going to be able to provide, as I start thinking about, like, I've been doing this work around self care for about five years now. And as I think about what I want for the rest of my career, and if I read another book, there's so much around community care, and the systems that need to change around care, like that's the conversation I'm really interested in having in the future and the decades and years to come. Because I do think that if you are a person who wants to think intersectionally, about the conversation around self care, you're inevitably going to end up at a similar place where we're at now. And also, I think, and I am someone who has consumed your content, and I know how useful it can be. I think that you're doing a disservice if you don't speak up and share your intersectional perspective. A question that I've offered up to people in my community in the past is, is it the self or is it the system? And sometimes I just do that as a check for myself to say, okay, is this like a mindset, a belief, a habit? That is really coming from me that I can shift and experiment and find something that better serves me, or is it this is happening because there's a system that I keep running up at And I need to accept it and not an accepting it that we should be in this place of systemic inequity. But accepting that this is the reality more from a mindfulness perspective, this is the reality. And instead of feeling like I have to contort myself to change into fit into this, I can just say, Okay, this is how things are right now, my energy can be better spent elsewhere. So when I talk to people, and I have this framework in the book of like the ecosystems of care, I believe that we are our own ecosystem, we exist within ecosystems, we're part of nature as humans, even though we like to forget that I talk a lot, especially in this book about the ecosystem of you. And then looking a little bit at your communities, because that's where we can have the most control it even for some of us listening here, like, I don't feel like I even have that much control in those ecosystems. But it can be helpful to from like a locus of control perspective, instead of getting. So zooming out so far that you feel helpless, sometimes it's helpful to zoom in and say, I can take three deep breaths right now. Or I can get up and stretch for a moment. And that can be really, I don't always like to use the word empowering, but that can be really satisfying, really nourishing to zoom in for a moment, your agency. Yes, exactly.

  KC Davis 6:21

  I love what you said about that. Because that piece of looking for where we can reclaim some agency really struck with me, because that's the piece that I think is different for everyone. And in your example about like, Is this me? Or is this the system? And the example I thought of is like, you know, when I go to the doctor, and they say, Okay, did you apply that ointment three times a week, and like I didn't, because I'm really awful with any type of like, repetitive routine, I always found myself being like, I have to lie, I can't tell them and then recognizing, like, I'm really blocking my access to health care, by not being honest with my doctor. And it was empowering. And it was agency for me to go, No, I need to start being honest, I need to own who I am and say, This is me, I didn't do it. And I need to care more about my getting good health care than I do about the doctor judging me. Because in that example, it was me. However, if I was someone else, that may not have been the same, like if I was someone who was disabled. Or if I was a black woman who have historically been treated really poorly within the medical system, I might be thinking, No, that's not me, that's the system that is if I don't look like a perfect compliant patient, I'm not going to get access to the health care that I deserve. And that's coming up against a system. And that really sort of turned a light bulb on for me when you said that. Because I think that first step isn't just jumping right to here's how you should talk to your doctor. But as acknowledging that question of Is this me? Or is this the system? Because if it is me, then maybe who I am, I get to press into that and reclaim some agency and some empowerment. But if I realized, no, this is the system, like you said, like, I don't have to contort myself, or spin energy there, I can look for a different sort of like carve out in my life to do that.

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 8:14

  Yeah, it just really, it saves a lot of energy. And then when you do want to do the work of changing systems, we could do that being supported by a community instead of constantly. Because honestly, the system is set up to make it feel like everything is your individual problem, and you are a bad person. And so it's really nice to be like, Oh, wait, that's not me. That's how you design this thing. And I don't have to take that as me being wrong. You're wrong. The system is wrong.

  KC Davis 8:41

  Yeah. And it can be validating. I think, like, I think that's the goal, right is if you validate, yes, this is happening to you because of a systemic issue. The hope is, is that in itself can be self care to someone of like, Oh, I'm not broken, I'm not wrong. I'm not just a screw up. And then finding those places of agency where we can do something small for ourselves. I took your self care assessment on your website, which I really liked, because again, it didn't point to specific things to be doing, which that's my other gripe about self care is like, okay, if I'm overwhelmed, I don't need another like to do list to fail at. And I really enjoyed the questions that it asked and it asked them questions that I didn't, that I was surprised by. So can you tell me how you kind of came up with this little assessment for self care? Yeah,

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 9:33

  so first of all, that's my favorite piece of feedback is like, Oh, I didn't expect that on his self care assessment. And I'm like, yes, because there's so many opportunities for us to care for ourselves, that we don't realize we don't accept that those things are caring for ourselves. So the way that this came to be is everything that I do the book the assessment, the company is rooted in this idea of the five dimensions of well being which are inspired by The yogic concept of the coaches. And for me, that was a big aha moment to realize that the way I had been sold self care was primarily about caring for my body. And really, it was about making my body look like what the societal standard of what a body should look like was. And so to realize there are all these different aspects of myself, yes, there's the physical dimension, but there's also the energetic dimension, the mental and emotional dimension, the wisdom dimension, tapping into my own wisdom, and the bliss dimension, which is all about connection. And I realized that there are all these instances, when I was feeling stressed, was doing the kind of treat yo self version of self care, which was often me buying something for my body. And I might feel really good in the moment. And then I, a day, a week later, was coming back to this place of feeling overwhelmed and burned out. And some of that was the way that I was structuring my life. And some of that was that I was doing these quote unquote, care things that were caring for the aspect of myself that didn't actually need care right now. So thinking about the five dimensions of well being really shifted things for me in terms of caring for myself holistically. And the assessment I built that at the beginning of the pandemic, I'm an assessment girly, I love having different ways to think of myself, not from a prescriptive way of like, you need to, again, I don't like being confined into boxes, but more I think of them as like conversation starters with myself. And at the beginning of the pandemic, I had just launched in our workout as a company, thought I was going to be doing a lot of in person stuff couldn't do in person stuff. But everyone needed self care a lot. And so an assessment seemed kind of like an a scalable way to get people in conversations with themselves and to give them some practical starting points.

  KC Davis 11:50

  I liked how much it focused, and your book talks about connection and meaning and the questions that asked about like, Do you have a sense of a higher purpose? Do you have a sense of connectedness with people, I would never consider those self care questions. But when I look at my life, and I think, okay, in what way do I feel cared for? And what ways do I feel strengthened to deal with things in my life, and a lot of it is this feeling of having meaning in life having sort of a connectedness to something that is bigger than me. And I also really appreciated the questions about like, do we allow ourselves to feel distressing feelings? Because when you mentioned like, Okay, I would buy something that would feel good. I think sometimes, I think there's a lot of room for a conversation about like, pleasure versus care. Because a lot of times I think self care gets packaged as just pleasure, like you need more pleasure in your life. And obviously, hot pleasure is a very important part of our lives. But not all self care is pleasurable. And so I thought that that was an interesting thing for you to bring out, which is, and then the other questions about like, do I make decisions that sort of align with my values? And so I was wondering if you could maybe speak to like, the hard work of self care?

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 13:06

  Yeah, I love that. You mentioned this. And I think, actually, one of my former teammates, this was this might have been who was first introduced to your work is because they sent me a video where you talked about like caring for yourself in the present, and thinking about past versions of yourself and future versions of yourself. And I think that speaks so well to the hard work of self care. Because when we are focused on pleasure, we and I can speak from the I do this, I want to feel good right now. And so I'm gonna eat something that I know, like, I'm lactose intolerant. I've known this for like three years, I still have more dairy than I should, especially when I'm feeling stressed out and I'm like, I know I'm gonna pay for this. My stomach's gonna be hurting. But in the moment, it feels good to have that ice cream. That's a very like, pleasure centric idea of self care. But if I was thinking more holistically about myself, I would think, Okay, is there another way that I can be with myself, I can tend to myself, the definition I use for self care is listening within and responding in the most loving way possible. When I'm thinking holistically, there's probably something else I could do besides have that ice cream that would be listening to myself, would be responding with love and would also respect a future version of myself who doesn't want to be doubled over and stomach pain for a while. So I think for me, it's going back to this continuing listening and responding with love. And knowing that like you said, love and care doesn't always feel like sunshine and roses. Sometimes it is sitting with yourself in the sadness. I'll like full disclosure, I was crying on my kitchen floor last night. And I was having this conversation with myself where I was like, I wrote a book on self care. I own a self care company. Shouldn't I not be feeling this sadness should may not be struggling right now. And that's actually part of the work. Part of the work was for me to allow myself to cry, allow myself to feel these feelings because there was a toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing version of myself who felt like I was bad and wrong, if I was having those emotions he was trying to kind of trickle out. So doing the creating, for me, a certain level of structure that I can play within is a way that I don't love structure naturally. But it actually is really good for my ADHD brain to have structure, or I don't want to have this conversation with my husband. But I know that on the other side of it, we're going to be stronger. Those are all things that don't feel good in the moment, but are supporting you for the long term.

  KC Davis 15:47

  Yeah, that's really good insight. I'm going to pause for a second have a word from our sponsors, and we'll be right back. You know, for some reason that word self care is so overused, that it almost like doesn't have meaning anymore. And it's like one word. And when I find myself, instead of asking, like, what self care can I do today, instead of asking that asking, like, how can I care for myself today? Because I think that puts a little more in perspective. And just like you said, like, if I think about how do I care for my animals, right, like, caring for my animals isn't like, a lot of it is pleasure, and love and affection, and those sorts of things. But some of it is also like stuff that is going to be really uncomfortable for them, but I know supports their health, sometimes it's going to be like not letting them go outside, right, like not letting my cats go outside, even though that would give them more pleasure. But that would, in fact, put them in more danger and sort of learning to look at self care like that for myself. And I have a friend that's a therapist that used to mentor me, and one of the phrases that she used, that I really loved was talking about being able to hold on to yourself in the presence of someone else. And so she would talk about, you know, when you brought up like having a conversation with your husband, so I'm like that too, I'm kind of conflict avoidant, especially if I know that I'm gonna say something that he's gonna have feelings about. And she would talk to me about, you know, part of what the goal of caring for self is, is so that, you know, you can stand in front of this person, and be honest and be authentic, and then hold on to yourself in the presence of his emotions, like not spend so much time trying to couch it a certain way, or avoid it a certain way so that you can control his emotional reaction. But instead, like, how can I address myself so that I can allow him to have the feelings that he's going to have? And I'm obvious caveat, like, I'm talking about like a loving, respectful relationship, I'm not talking about like, I have to do things. So I'm not abused. But that reminded me of what you were talking about when you were saying, you know, what do I need in this moment, to sort of do the things that align with my values that are going to set me up for greater like quality of life tomorrow,

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 17:58

  I love that perspective that your mentor offered, of being able to hold on to yourself, and as we were talking about in the beginning, like self care and community care, and being a human who lives in systems that have varying degrees of being able to support us, this idea of coming back to yourself and grounding in yourself, and holding on to yourself just seems even more important. And I think that's why the way that I talk about self care is a conversation with yourself, and being able to find these loving responses in the midst of all of these different circumstances, loving responses that consider all of these different facets of you is just really important. And I think I joke around sometimes I'm like, Why did I choose this career talking about self care? That is this nothing word right now. But when we get to these places where we're talking about caring for ourselves, caring for other people actually feeling cared for and experiencing care, I get teary eyed because it's like, if everyone were able to access this on a day to day basis, if our systems were set up for that, but also if we set up our life's for that, to the extent that we're able, like, how different would our worlds be? How beautiful would our world be? It gets me Yeah, gets me a little teary eyed.

  KC Davis 19:21

  I remember being in rehab, and, you know, learning about sort of this idea that things that like sort of your inner child, right, and that like things that you go through as a child really stick with you, and sort of shaped the way that you react to things going through this process of like, visualizing myself holding myself as a child, and comforting myself as a child. And I would come back to that visual like, every night as I was going to bed as things were so hard. And you know, I was getting a lot of feedback about my behavior and the ways I was showing up in the world and things that needed to change. And it was hard hard for that like inner child to hear even valid criticism about my behavior without feeling like, you know, oh, that means I'm worthless. And I kept coming back to this visual of like, now I'm the adult, I wasn't until I was like 16. But it's like, now I'm the big person who can consider this feedback. And like, it just was the reality that nobody was going to step in, and tend to that inner child for me, even though that's what I deserved. And I kind of had to learn to do it for myself through that kind of like visualization. And that's the memory that I came up with, as I was reading through some of your material. And then the last thing I really wanted to ask you about was you have a section on wisdom as self care. And I've never seen that before. So I'm curious if you could talk for a bit about the idea of wisdom as self

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 20:52

  care. Yeah, so the wisdom dimension of wellbeing, that's what it's talked about, again, like this was inspired by the coaches. And for me, what I kept coming back to is, so many of I mean, myself, first, I'm always patient zero, but also the people in my community, the people that I've gotten to work with one on one, one of the things that makes it so hard for them to care for themselves, is that they don't trust themselves. They don't trust their inner knowings. They, if they do get to the place where they can even hear what their inner voice, whatever you want to call it, their inner wisdom is telling them, there's a huge gap between hearing that and then feeling like they can do something about that. So the three sub dimensions of the wisdom dimension are presence, which is all of our focus, which is all about being present, and living in the present moment, which in and of itself is something that is so hard. And again, the systems, the software's everything around us is not set up to support that, especially if you have any type of neuro divergence. And then there's the self trust, and the aligned action. And those two go together a lot. Being able to hear yourself know that watching something doesn't serve you I think I talked in the book about how like, I couldn't watch skin squid games, because I'm a highly sensitive person, that's too much for me, and everyone was talking about it. And I kept being like, ooh, should I want to like watch what everyone else is doing? I had to be like, No, or it could be career decisions that you're making, or realizing that you need to read negotiate relationships or renegotiate how you structure a part of your day. And there's one thing to know that to feel wherever if you're ahead a heart or a gut person, but to feel that over time. And it's another thing to do something about it. And it can be so scary. When everyone else seems to be thriving, doing something that is not serving you to be able to step out. It is so caring, like right now. I'm back on like a sober, curious journey from alcohol. In the first time around I did it I was so uncomfortable being telling people like, Hey, I'm not drinking right now. And seeing a lot of times what was other people's reactions and perceived judgment of me making a decision. And so taking them out of line to action can be hard when you're in an environment where everyone else has a different status quo.

  KC Davis 23:24

  The I love it. It's always called sober curious, because one of my other like therapist mentors, he uses curiosity a lot, where he'll say instead of asking, like, why did you do that he'll be like, so I'm curious about that. Tell me more. And he talks about, like, even being curious with yourself. And he'll literally say, like, get curious, get curious with yourself, like, how is this affecting you what's going on with you? And I think that that has been, you know, I talk a lot about self compassion. And I think that it's like one of the most powerful tools at our disposal for caring for yourself. But I think that other aspect of curiosity, right, so whether that is a sober, curious journey, whether that is, you know, what would it be like if I were to quit this toxic job, not saying I am or I am not? Not, you know, instead of getting caught up in like, well, I can't, I can't because of this and that in the end. It's like, okay, like, I want to validate that for some people. That's true. However, don't let that prevent you from being curious about but what if I could What if I could in five years, what would I have to do today to be able to quit this toxic job in five years? Because I think sometimes, as we're validating systemic things, we can sort of accidentally get ourselves stuck in places where we're not recognizing where we can have some agency and being willing to be curious about like, what would it be like if when I said this hard thing, I just was quiet because I always want to over explain myself. And I think that when you pair that, like the wisdom of being curious with self compassion, that's when growth just skyrockets. Because, yes, I'm going to be self compassionate when I make mistakes. Yes, I'm going to be self compassionate when I come up to my human limitations. But I'm also really passionate about that curiosity of, you know, I got an email today from someone, and it was literally an email just cursing me out about my book and how they thought I did it wrong and how, you know, I had like, further traumatize them, because I hadn't structured it in this way or whatever. And like, of course, I want to respond to that and be like, Well, good thing. It's my book, not yours, right? Like, I want to defend, and I want to go with that gut feeling. But that curiosity of like, what would I lose? If I responded to this with kindness? And not permissiveness? Right, like, what would it be like, if I were to stand up for myself, and be kind? What would it be like if I because I don't want to be a doormat, and I don't want to roll over other people. Like, I don't want to be a doormat. But I also don't want to make other people a doormat. And I sat with it for a minute. And I responded, and I was like, first of all, thank you for your feedback. Here's some explanation as to why I did those things that way. And I ended the email by saying, like, you know, your email was really aggressive. And I can tell you're very upset. And I have to imagine, and I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe you're in a lot of distress in your life, and you're really struggling, and you came to this book, hoping that it would help you. And maybe it didn't help you as much as you had hoped. And I can imagine, if you're already in distress, being further frustrated by a book that is supposed to help you is probably pretty upsetting. That being said, you could have given me all this feedback without that rude and aggressive and mean basic. And I said to them in the future, I'm not going to respond to emails from you that are written in that manner. Your feelings are valid, but this behavior is not you deserve kindness, but I do too. And I think a lot of us struggle with the black and white of like, you know, standing up for myself means pushing over someone, but showing them grace or kindness or benefit of the doubt means laying down and being a doormat. And that curiosity of like, well, what if I just did something slightly different? Like, what if you could do those things at the same time? And when you talk about like being willing to feel those feelings? Like what if I just sat with this feeling for one extra minute? So I love I just all of that, I think is really helpful. Is there anything else you want to tell us about your book that you are really proud of?

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 27:28

  I appreciate that question. Because that's actually a lot of my inner work right now is allowing myself to be proud of things. I felt we could sit here for a long time and talk about all the reasons why it's hard for me to be proud of things. But that's been something I've been stepping into more. I think what I'm really proud of is I tried as best as I could to write a book that was practical and accessible and intersectional. And the feedback that I'm getting a people like, there are points when I felt this book was talking to me. Or I could see myself in this book in a way that I couldn't see myself in other books like that. I like speaking of inner child stuff, like the part of me who was like, on my little desktop computer as a kid writing stuff. And it's just like doing cartwheels that other people are reading this and seeing a positive impact in it. That means a lot to me that people can see themselves in it and that people feel like it's meeting them where they're at, because that's what I want. I like I'm not interested in being anyone's guru. I've been starting to sign a couple people's books. And the inscription I always write is that, like, maybe these words lead you closer to yourself, may they lead you closer to your inner wisdom. I'm not doing my job. If you're just like, oh, Taylor is really cool. My job is that you realize how cool you are and how worthy you are of care, and how much insight you have to offer based on your lived experience. So yeah, if you're looking for something that like talks about self care, but is not in a goofy way, then I think the book is a good fit for you.

  KC Davis 29:03

  I definitely think you should be proud of that. Because I know that feeling of I want to write something that's going to be helpful for anyone that picks it up. But how do you generalize something that is so personal, that everyone in different circumstances can come and walk away with something and I think that you've achieved that and I do think that that's something to be really proud of. So thank you for sharing that with the world. The book is out now where can they find it? Where can they find you? You know, go ahead and self promote for a bit.

  Taylor Elyse Morrison 29:31

  Yeah, if you go to inner workout.co not.com There's a button right there to buy the book. There's a button right there to take the free assessment if buying the book doesn't feel accessible for you right now. And then joining our self care Sunday newsletter is the best and most consistent way to hear from me and to hear from in our workout. I'm on Instagram at Taylor Elise Morrison and in our workout is on Instagram at and our workout, same handles on Tik Tok. luck as well. But honestly, speaking of things that aren't serving us, we don't do a ton on social media. The newsletter is where it's at and our podcast, but you'll find out that if you're on our newsletter,

  KC Davis 30:10

  Awesome, well, we will link all those things in the show notes. Taylor, thank you so much for coming. And I really recommend that you guys if you're a book person, check it out. Is it going to be on audiobook as well? It will be later this year. Okay, great. So check that out. Thank you for coming Taylor and we will I will talk to you guys next time.