Creating Space for Yourself

Many of us struggle to give ourselves time and space that isn’t taken up with work, family, friends, television, music, anything to distract us from silence.

But reconsidering your normal, and living with your values and the impact you want to create, takes time. It requires that we learn how to pause, how to get comfortable with stillness, and care for ourselves in ways that are more than just a bath bomb.

India and Erica discuss how they make space to reconsider their normal and to care for themselves, and share their thoughts on handling their schedules, getting comfortable being by themselves, and honoring your nervous system when things are tough.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• How India and Erica approach taking real time off for rest

• Why doing nothing and staying in the present with ourselves is so hard

• What the culture gets wrong about our nervous systems

• How to build in time to live your values

Reflecting on 2022

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica Courdae (she/her) says that for her, 2022 has been a beast of a year, with a lot of lessons, a lot of undoing and relearning, and rewriting scripts.

India Jackson (she/her) agrees, but says she’s not sure if it’s the year or the particular season of life she’s in that has been full of transition, integration, and reviewing and reconsidering her values and how she takes action.

She recalls that at the beginning of 2022, she set a phrase of the year for herself and decided to hold space for that phrase for at least the first quarter, then reevaluate if that phrase still needed more space.

That phrase was “demonstrating culture,” and she says she had no idea how much “time, space, and lessons would come from the decision to demonstrate the culture I wish to see, and how much of my own personal crap it would kick up.”

Erica says that for her there’s been a lot of movement and growth, but that always comes at the cost of leaving things behind or outgrowing them. 

“This year has been more about a juxtaposition of being in a different place, but almost having a hyper-awareness of what you are and are not here to accept or continue to perpetrate because that’s just what was happening.”

She’s gained awareness of other ways of doing things that are more in alignment with her values, but acknowledges that that’s not always an easy process.

Making Space to Rest

India asks Erica to elaborate on some of the norms she has been exploring and reconsidering in 2022.

Erica says that as part of this ongoing process, she’s fortunate to have people like India in her life with whom she can share what she’s learning, what resources she’s found, and “the rabbit holes we go down,” and vice versa.

While their lifestyles are different, Erica says she’s noticed herself and India going through some similar things this year and having some common threads come up with a lot of people in her life.

India says a big thing this year has been considering how to make time and space to reconsider her normal in the first place. She says at one time, she absolutely would have put work in her schedule ahead of anything else, and time off, or time to think, journal, reflect, and care for herself last. Even her vacations had strict itineraries.

Erica replies that she doesn’t have that issue with vacations, and has been pretty comfortable with doing absolutely nothing if she’s on vacation, but what she’s noticed is that a lot of people aren’t able to find a middle ground.

“Either it’s all scheduled and it’s work, or you are face down, nothing, kind of incoherent. You’re done, you’re not doing anything. Where’s the space of like, I’m here, but I’m off and I’m doing what I choose to do?”

She does get stuck in old paradigms and stories about what she “should” be doing, but she reminds herself, much like what the Nap Ministry discusses, that “Rest is a form of resistance, especially for Black people. I don’t want to do things all the time. I don’t care what it is. Sometimes I need to not.”

Staying Present in the Silence

India recalls a piece of Erica’s writing that addresses why we might struggle to allow ourselves time to do nothing.

She reads:

“Time alone is scary

When there’s no errands, no calls, no responsibilities you’re duty-bound to fulfill

Where there is nowhere else to put your energy, no other being that you can claim to have to be responsible for in that moment, it’s just you

The loudest silence ever

The most obvious, your discomfort and your own comfort, has ever been

The moment when you realize you want others to do what you can’t do, just be with you, just because

No other reason than because they want to, but you don’t want to

You don’t want to just sit with yourself

Your presence doesn’t fill up the room enough for you to be in it and feel good

You decide to stop, get silent, be still, and listen, observe, feel

Begin the path of learning yourself, to learn who this stranger is, to feel empathy and compassion for their plight

To see what makes the core of them tick

Learning to love yourself, to like who you are in the unseen moments, to want to spend time with this person

You make this commitment to them

You make this commitment to you

You commit this to the soul inside”

Erica says she can’t remember if at the time she wrote that she was referring mostly to herself, or if it came more from witnessing people around her struggling with those feelings. But she says that silence and being by herself has certainly been uncomfortable for her in the past. In her twenties, she filled silence with music or TV and space in her day with work. 

Now, she is more comfortable with silence, and will do things around the house with no background noise, except for what her kids have on. 

But, “if I’m watching TV, I’m watching TV. If I’m listening to music, I’m listening to music…Silence doesn’t feel uncomfortable for me. I’m still working on some discomfort around doing nothing, but I am much more adept at it than what I used to be.”

One way she keeps herself spiritually in the present is through tending to her plants.

“There's a very different type of presence and a type of permission that I give myself to not fill the space because of my own discomfort.”

India says she can relate, and for her specifically, it’s tied to her journey of healing from trauma, and being comfortable in a heightened nervous system state.

“My nervous system was thriving in an amplified state because that’s what it was so used to, at least that’s what I told myself…But I began to question, is that actually thriving?”

As a result of that questioning, she’s explored alternative ways of transitioning her body into feeling safer and more stabilized.

Erica adds that the concept of what it means to be thriving is something that she and India, along with others in her life, have had to reconsider and rewrite multiple times as adults.

India agrees and recalls that several years ago, her idea of thriving was buying a tiny house and being able to travel. But she’s since realized that while she does love to travel, “much of that is still the constant having something to do, think about, navigate, and might I actually benefit from pausing more often, being present where I am?”

Erica says she thinks that for people who have experienced trauma as part of their stories of origin, it can feel like peace and self-discovery can’t happen in places where they also experienced trauma, and it can feel like they have to get as far away as possible.

“And if far away is five miles, then that’s far. But whatever it is, it’s like…all of it does not exist here. It exists somewhere else.”

Getting Comfortable with Blank Space

India asks Erica what aspects of her upbringing and background might influence how she creates space to take care of herself and what form that takes.

Erica says she wasn’t ever really taught to care for herself. The programming she received emphasized her ability to care for others, whether a partner, children, or clients when she was in the beauty industry. And now, when so much of the popular rhetoric of self-care is tied to consumerism, it can be difficult to envision self-care that isn’t getting a massage or dropping a bath bomb in the tub.

She asks herself, “what does stillness feel like for me? What does quiet feel like? How does that fill me? What is the move that my body needs?…Sometimes it can be lifting weights, sometimes it is literally the caring of my plants.”

Spiritual exploration and connection also play big roles in how Erica cares for herself, as does connecting with the people who matter to her.

“It was being able to even consider what it was that I needed, what are the practices that I’ve begun to uncover that work for me? And understanding that I have leave of any and all of them, or none of them at any given time, based on what I need. Cuz sometimes you don’t need nothing…Blank space is safe.”

Accepting that blank space is safe isn’t always easy, and sometimes Erica needs to remind herself of it.

India also notes that, “I think about my ancestors and [recognize] that blank space was never normal for them.”

Learning to be comfortable with blank space is part of India’s ongoing work of decolonizing herself, “and yet, I still have more blank space than they ever had. And yet, I feel like for me there’s still so much more room to find what balance or thriving…is for me…There’s still more room to grow.”

Honoring Your Nervous System in Difficult Times

Erica says that one of the lessons of hustle culture is that you need to increase your tolerance for stress, when the exact opposite is true.

“I wanna challenge us, as well as anybody [taking in this content] to really question where is it that you’re giving your nervous system space to feel however it feels, and to question where you’ve raised the bar too high for it.”

She recalls an instance where she had witnessed a very challenging situation, and was able to notice that her nervous system was elevated, but still struggled with the “itty bitty shitty committee” telling her that she should be able to handle it and that it could have been worse.

And the expectations of what they can and should be able to carry are higher for Black women. But, “just because I can, doesn’t mean I want to or I should.”

She doesn’t want others to have to be on that level, but “there is a real piece of those of us that can shoulder more carrying that for those that have chosen to opt out…I just want things to be easier.”

Erica says that one difficult situation in her life recently has been the experience of giving up her salon’s physical location, and she’s needed to create space to care for herself in that. 

Erica had been in the space for over ten years, her kids grew up with it, they did homeschool in her office during COVID closures–the salon was part of her identity. And when she hit the point of knowing she was done with it and set things in motion, chunks of space opened up in her schedule.

“And years ago, my immediate response would’ve been to fill all of that time. And there was a point that I tried to, and I was like, ‘uh, that’s probably not a good idea.’ And so I gave myself space to give some of it back to work…but I also left one of those [weekdays] in particular for me…And it still feels a little bit like an act of rebellion to do it.”

In setting her schedule going forward, she had to make sure she wasn’t putting pressure on herself to accommodate others and to do what worked best for her.

She also had to deal with physically moving, and sorting through what to throw out, keep, donate, or give away. “And I accepted help, which I think is a big thing.” 

India notes that Erica actually blocked time off for herself for that sorting process, which doesn’t always happen for everyone when they’re getting ready to move.

Erica says she’s done the get everything on and off the truck in a day kind of moving before, but she deliberately wanted to build in time to not only take stress off of herself, but to allow herself space to “properly mourn and give reverence to the purpose that it served, and what it gave, and what I learned along the way, those that I was able to support along the way, and those that supported me…I wanted to make sure that I was giving the proper homegoing as this…was being released.”

Living Your Values Takes Time

India says that creating space to take care of yourself starts with creating space. Both she and Erica have committed to blocking time off in their calendars before anything else, and have found it makes a big difference in sticking to actually taking time off.

She also notes that when you’re trying to do things in a DEI and values-conscious way, some things will simply take longer. 

In Erica’s move, that meant making the time to sort through and gift, donate, or sell usable items rather than throwing everything away. It takes a lot more time, but can have a major impact environmentally and interpersonally when done consciously.

“We are fighting against societal norms that are not necessarily considering DEI, that are coming from a consumerist and capitalist perspective, and if those are our societal norms, then making the space to reconsider those norms and do things differently as things come up in our lives and in our work, requires us padding in a little bit of extra time.”

Ready to Dive Deeper?

In The Pause on the Play® Community, members have on-demand access to Ixchel Lunar’s workshop called “Decolonizing Time: Centering the R.E.S.T. Recipe.”

Ixchel shares how our concept of time has been colonized, stolen, commodified, and outsourced, and how we can liberate our flow and create conditions to partner with time rather than getting caught in the hustle.

This workshop is just one of the evergreen resources available to Community members, along with live workshops, Q&As, co-working hours, and conversation with others on their journeys of Imperfect Allyship®.

Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/community