When you hear the term “self care,” do you think of expensive spa treatments or another item to add to your already overwhelming to-do list? Lesley Ramsey and Joy Windrider Jimenez want to change that. Through collaborative community events, Ramsey and Jimenez are advocating for the idea that self care isn’t only for our individual well being; it’s fundamental to the health, cohesion, and sustainability of our communities.
Ramsey, a yoga teacher and the manager of MBS Studios Yoga Collective, moved to San Antonio seven years ago as she was concluding a 20-year career as a progressive lobbyist, organizer, and advocate. Suffering from burnout, Lesley went further into her yoga practice and began teaching. Reflecting on her own experience, and connecting it to the widespread burnout that she saw afflicting the entire nonprofit sector, Ramsey set up her own nonprofit, BeCause Yoga, with a mission to bring the stress-reducing benefits of yoga into the nonprofit world.
Ramsey’s mission was focused on the local orgs serving some of San Antonio’s most vulnerable populations. But for small, already pressed nonprofits it was difficult to justify allocating resources for perceived nonessential activities like yoga.
“The turnover is so high in the nonprofit sector. And by the time someone gets the experience to become sort of the wiser elder, they’re out of there,” said Ramsey.
“You’re doing community care day and night. You’re experiencing trauma first hand. You’re doing vicarious trauma on a daily basis, and yet your employers just expect you to work that out after hours, [to] get a gym membership or whatever.”
In 2023, Ramsey crossed paths with Jimenez, a teaching artist and trauma-informed somatic coach. They met when Ramsey organized a self-care expo for Close To Home, an umbrella organization supporting a network of orgs that advocate for San Antonio’s unhoused population.
The event provided the workers from Close to Home’s network of nonprofits with a day of free yoga, a sound bath, massage therapy, reiki, and acupuncture. There was also an art-making component in the form of a collage workshop led by Jimenez.
“That first year we had some prompts to help people think about what is going on with their nervous system. A lot of the work I do is around the nervous system. So for me, that’s my gospel,” Jimenez said.
She taught about the concept of plasticity, that it’s possible to reorganize the nervous system by changing how one thinks and behaves.
“Having a healthy nervous system is gonna help us be able to function in life. Through that collage making we looked at that,” she said. “We looked at Polyvagal theory, looking at what’s going on. Am I activated all the time? Where am I?”
The expo for Close to Home was a one-off event, but it provided a model of what it might look like for nonprofits to support their workers with self-care services during working hours. There was a critical focus on replicability, Ramsey said. “We wanted it to be self care activities that you can do. You don’t have to go pay money to do them. You can learn this, you can do it, and it’s yours. It’s a skill, and you can take it with you.”
The emphasis on self-agency is an important aspect of Jimenez’s work also. But she distinguishes self-agency from individualism.
“First of all, self care has to be done in community. And unfortunately we’re living in a society that has taught us the individualistic, capitalist way. We don’t know. We haven’t been taught. So we need each other.”
In 2024, Ramsey and Jimenez collaborated on a second event.
Jimenez queried returning participants about when they last did something to care for themselves. “They said last year,” she recalled. “So this time a lot of the work was just around looking at the blocks of what’s stopping you [from self care]. And it always seems to go back to time and the idea of—OK, well we all have time, so what is it really?”
The key turned out to be guilt, Jimenez said.
“Everybody else has needs and if I don’t take care of them how is it going to happen? So you have these frontline workers who are already in the way, plus they have their lives where they’re caretakers. We started having a conversation about this concept, that self care is community care.
“It’s really really important with everything going on in the world right now,” Jimenez said. “Everybody’s activated. Everybody’s in survival mode.”
Last Year, Jimenez began producing a radio show, The Resilience Within, broadcast on Empower House’s 101.5 FM station, where her guests share their journeys of healing and self determination, answering the question “What are your current challenges, and what is your medicine?”
When she invited Ramsey to be a guest the pair continued their dialogue about self care as community care and the importance of resisting the capitalist framing around self care.
“I see just a lot of the marketing of self care. And it’s all consumerist, and it’s all very much like, your little self is gonna feel better if you pamper yourself in this way, and you pamper yourself in that way. But self care is community care. You’re going to be better at what you do, you’re going to do it longer. It’s going to be better. On the flip side, the world out there needs to know that taking care of each other is taking care of yourself. We must get out of this self care, narcissistic bubble thing and do the work.”
Jimenez also stresses the importance of acknowledging the co-option of self care by consumer culture, asking:
“What are we being taught? You have people who are in overwhelm, and don’t have the skills, don’t have the tools, don’t have the language. Nobody is talking about it, [talking about it] is not normalized. So, when we finally say ‘I need something’ it’s really the overwhelm that’s leading us into trying to find that fix. And we’re so tired we don’t even know how to find that fix.”
Jimenez’s perspective is informed by her somatic therapy practice, which addresses the lingering effects of trauma on the central nervous system. She emphasizes the importance of the mind-body connection, and of learning to regulate our emotions so that we don’t become overwhelmed by our feelings.
“There’s the paralysis that comes with that overwhelm. Then there are other things like the anger, the frustration, the panic, the rage. All of this coming from that place. So how do you take that energy of overwhelm, which really is just a lot of energy in the body, and channel it into something that can make a difference? So that, to me, is where the overwhelm to action part of this event is.”
This year’s event, From Overwhelm To Action: a Self-Care and Activism Resource Fair, is being held Friday, April 18, at Blue Star. It will be an expo-style event produced in collaboration with a number of other artists, healers, and activists. It will feature some of the same elements as the previous events that Jimenez and Ramsey have worked on together, like yoga, art-making, and a sound bath. But it will also feature an activism component. Local organizers and activists will be on site to help participants learn about free speech and labor rights and get policy updates on issues including immigrant rights, climate, LGBTQ+ issues, food justice, homelessness, and reproductive justice. There will also be guidance on “pod-mapping,” or building support networks within neighborhoods in order to better weather the political and climate storms roiling around us.
Ramsey will offer a group movement and dance experience. Artist Alexis Bierman will facilitate a cathartic communal mosaic art project that will involve the opportunity to smash things—and then put them back together. Joyous Windrider Jimenez and Empower House Radio’s Armando Estrada will be interviewing community workers and mutual aid organizations about their work and offerings for the community. And the Breathe & Rise Collective will lead a drum circle at the conclusion of the evening.
