The practice of self-tending
On noticing what we need, telling ourselves the truth, and being willing to act on it
In self-tending, we are both the gardener and our garden
I came across the concept of self-tending through the work of Dr Susan Wardell, a social anthropologist at the University of Otago here in New Zealand. Her research traced burnout amongst faith-based youth workers -- people who had given themselves to caring for others. What she found, underneath the exhaustion and collapse, was a neglect of the self. A kind of trained inattention to their own needs became part of identity. A subject I could relate to deeply, as a former midwife and nurse.
Susan and her collaborators called the antidote, self-tending. Not self-care -- a term that has been so thoroughly colonised by bubble baths and productivity hacks that it has lost most of its meaning. Self-tending is older and quieter than that. It is the practice of attending to yourself the way you would attend to something you genuinely valued. A garden. A person you love. Something you want to last.
The concept has stuck for me because of what I see in myself and in my clients. We know what we need. Not knowing is almost never the problem. The problem is the gap between knowing and doing. The place where we override ourselves, talk ourselves out of what we need, and keep going long past our actual capacity, in the service of our drive to look after everyone but ourselves.
Self-tending isn't just about knowing what you need. It's about being willing to act on it.
There are two kinds of self-compassion at work in genuine self-tending, and we need both.
The first is tender self-compassion. This is the soft response -- the warm hand on your own shoulder, the voice that says: I see you. This is hard. You're not failing - you are carrying a lot. Tender self-compassion is what most of us mean when we talk about being kind to ourselves. It is the part that soothes, that validates, that allows us to stop for a moment without shame.
It's necessary. But on it's own, it's not enough.
The second is fierce self-compassion. This is the part that loves you enough to tell yourself the truth. It's the inner voice that says, with real warmth: you know this isn't working. This isn't serving you. The part that stays with the knowledge of what needs to change.
Fierce self-compassion isn't the inner critic that punishes you for falling short. Fierce compassion acts on your behalf, from a place of care. It stands up for what will serve you. It cancels the thing that you didn't want to do. It says no when you mean no. That puts down the phone and takes you to bed.
Self-tending requires a particular type of noticing
Not the kind of noticing that leads to comparison or another list of things that you need to be doing differently. Neutral noticing. The quiet, non-judgmental observation of what is actually true.
Where am I acting in my own best interests right now?
Where am I not?
That question, asked honestly, is one of the more confronting things you can sit with. It can be painful to see the ways that we habitually abandon ourselves.
We know we aren't sleeping enough. We know we are saying yes when we mean no. When we are consuming things that don't nourish or restore us. We know when we haven't done the thing we said we would do for ourselves.
Noticing, and caring, is the beginning. The next is the fiercest bit -- deciding that what you noticed matters enough to act on it.
That decision -- to act on what you notice, to take your own needs seriously enough to change something -- is the core of self-tending. It's also, not coincidentally, the mechanism that leads to developing confidence and self-trust from the inside out.
“Backing yourself starts with being willing to tell yourself the truth, and finishes with doing something about it.”
