a spiritually orientated (self-)care approach to human rights

Abstract

In recent years, there have been significant challenges to women’s rights. In addition to external attacks, internal challenges include a dichotomous, oppositional and gendered framework of human rights, as well as the problem of burnout and trauma in the field. Feminists have been addressing these problems by offering a reconceptualisation of rights, developing the concept of spiritual activism, emphasising the power of erotics and pleasure in activism, as well as incorporating self- and collective-care practices. Taking into account feminist contributions and work that still needs to be done, as well as my own personal experiences in the fields of human rights, self-development and spirituality, in this article I engage with the concept of care and spirituality to propose changes in the conceptualisation and practices of human rights, with a view to developing a feminist spiritually orientated (self-)care approach to human rights.

Introduction

In recent years, there have been significant challenges to women’s human rights (Antić and Radačić, 2020; Shameem et al., 2021). In addition to these attacks, the (women’s) human rights system ¹ has also faced some internal challenges, which undermine its goals and effectiveness, including fragmentation based on narrow and exclusionary identity politics, such as for example the recent ‘TERF wars’ (Pearce, Erikaines and Vincent, 2020), and burnout in the field. While significant progress has been made in the past decades on women’s rights, the progress is uneven and far from satisfactory. Women make up the majority of people living in poverty. Violence against women is rampant, as are violations of reproductive and sexual rights. Women are still underrepresented in political and economic decision-making, while their caring work is not only undervalued but a factor driving their exclusion and discrimination. These problems are compounded for groups of women in particularly disadvantaged positions (UNWGDAWG, 2018).

From the beginning of the movement, feminists have criticised the framework of international human rights as individualistic, dualistic, oppositional and gendered. ² It has increasingly been recognised how the dualistic paradigm of human rights furthers separation and divisions, rather than the unity consciousness that it strives to achieve (Sharp, 2021). A part of oppositional politics, human rights have not been able to achieve radical social transformation (Keating, 2013). Furthermore, critical legal scholar Peter Gabel (2014, p. 676) has argued that the liberal paradigm of rights, which ‘corresponds to and expresses our fear of each other, and masks, obscures, denies our inherent bond and our longing for mutual recognition … has now become an expression of the very problem we must overcome if we are to realize our true social nature as inherently loving and generous social beings’.

In addition to these conceptual problems, and connected to them, are the issues of exhaustion, trauma, depression and serious burnout in the human rights field, which have until recently been neglected. ³ Human rights activists are often exposed to traumatising situations and face security risks, while simultaneously dealing with heavy workloads and different work demands, which can result in serious health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. This problem is particularly pertinent for women human rights activists, who are under-resourced and operate in hostile patriarchal environments, with heightened risk of facing serious traumatic experiences, including violence, intimidation, surveillance, persecution, repression and criminalisation, both for what they do and who they are (Hernández Cárdenas and Tello Méndez, 2017; Chamberlain, 2020; Cordero et al., 2023). Women’s human rights activists experiencing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and disadvantage such as those belonging to indigenous groups, minority and migrant women, women with disabilities, LGBTQI women, as well as those working on certain issues perceived as particularly threatening to the patriarchal order, such as sexual and reproductive rights, are particularly at risk (UNWGDAWG, 2018). In addition, the ‘culture of martyrdom’ that undermines activists’ well-being (Chen and Gorski, 2015) is particularly alive in women’s rights movements (Barry and Ðorđević, 2015; Hernández Cárdenas and Tello Méndez, 2017; Chamberlain, 2020). Not only are women socialised to be(come) selfless caretakers and to neglect their own needs, but the dire situation in the communities with which many women’s rights activists work imposes a sense of urgency that leads to exhaustion (Emejulu and Bassel, 2020).

On the other hand, women human rights defenders and funding collectives are also pioneering different self-care and collective-care (community-care) projects, ⁴ which include different practices, healing modalities and organisational set-ups aimed at enhancing well-being and building the resilience of activists and the communities they serve, thereby ensuring the sustainability of these movements (Barry and Ðorđević, 2007; Oliveira and Ðorđević, 2015; Hernández Cárdenas and Tello Méndez, 2017; Taylor, 2021; Cordero et al., 2023). Such projects have been found to be beneficial not only for the activists but also for the whole human rights movement, as empowered activists bring more energy to the field, which ensures the sustainability of the movement. For example, the participants (twenty changemakers from forty-five countries) of one eighteen-month inner development project reported change not only at individual level but also at organisational and sectoral levels (Severns Guntzel and Murphy Johnson, 2020).

This has important implications for the human rights field and requires a paradigm shift in the way human rights are conceptualised and practised. We need to overcome dualistic thinking and action, and foster wholeness and interconnectedness—between body and mind, one human and another, one generation and the next and inner selves and outer environments (ibid.). In shaping the future of human rights, feminist scholarship and practice have a lot to offer. Feminist contributions to the field include the reconceptualisation of rights as relationships (Nedelsky, 1993), inclusion of the ethics of care in the discourse on social justice (Held, 2006), the development of the concept of spiritual activism / spiritualised social justice (Anzaldúa, 2002; Fernandes, 2003; Keating, 2008) and the post-oppositional politics of change (Keating, 2013), as well as emphasis on the power of erotics (Lorde, 2007 [1984]) and pleasure in activism (brown, 2019). These contributions also include self- and collective-care practices developed by different feminist activists and groups.

Based on this scholarship and emerging practices, taking into account their contributions and weaknesses, as well as my own personal experiences in the fields of human rights, self-development and spirituality, this article engages the concept of care and spirituality to propose changes in the conceptualisation and practices of human rights, with a view to developing a feminist spiritually orientated (self-)care approach to human rights. Spirituality, as I use it, refers to the recognition of the underlying unity of all existence, of our interconnectedness and interdependence. ⁵ This spiritually orientated approach to human rights is not avoidant of human experiences of suffering. On the contrary, the understanding of our interconnectedness calls us to act to challenge different forms of injustice that cause a lot of our suffering. It instils in us an attitude of caring and encourages caring behaviours towards others and our environment. Care, under this approach, is employed as a central concept of human existence characterised by the interconnectedness of all life. A caring approach thus refers to the perspectives, attitudes and behaviours aimed at sustaining life. ⁶

A spiritually orientated caring approach to human rights views humans in a holistic manner which includes their spiritual nature and believes that social transformation cannot happen without spiritual transformation—outer and inner work have to be interlinked. The approach does not prescribe certain forms of spirituality or self- and collective-care practices. On the contrary, what spiritually orientated (self-)care practices will mean to differently situated individuals and organisations in different contexts in the human rights fields is to be defined by them. The approach does, however, require addressing the dichotomous framework of human rights (us and them, inner and outer, spirit and human, body and emotions, male and female), moving away from the ‘fighting’ paradigm, and putting the well-being and (self-)care of activists and communities at the centre of the human rights field.

This study is a reflexive feminist research practice that challenges the established boundaries of theory and practice, personal and political, and researcher and research (Bungay and Carter Keddy, 1996; Fook, 1999; Freshwater and Rolfe, 2001). It includes not only a literature review and an overview of different well-being practices but also my personal experiences. My perspectives on this topic are informed by my academic and activist work, my work as a UN independent expert on women’s rights, as well as my self-development and healing path, which includes four years of integrated body-orientated psychotherapy training, Kundalini yoga teacher training, tantra training, sacred-drumming training and many other courses and workshops, as well as holding women’s circles and different workshops. My motivation for this topic comes from observing problems with the conceptualisation and practice of human rights and gaining new insights into these problems through engaging with the fields of self-development, well-being and spirituality. Hence, my experiences are part of the research field, and my research is simultaneously a process of personal inquiry (Freshwater and Rolfe, 2001). It is politically and ethically engaged, as its purpose is to open spaces for new forms of knowledge and practice.

This article starts by discussing the reasons why we engage in human rights activism to uncover the amount of trauma that we as women face under patriarchy, and the intrinsic motivations that many of us have to alleviate human suffering, which often unconsciously puts us in the position of rescuers against victim–perpetrator dynamics. These dynamics affect the way we engage with human rights, creating the condition of fighting and affirming the oppositional framework. This article then discusses how fighting leads to exhaustion and undermines our well-being, a topic that is often neglected in human rights activism. The article then proposes a paradigm shift necessary for our activism to result in a meaningful and sustainable change, rooted in caring for and sustaining life.

Pathways into human (women’s) rights activism: the role of our own traumatic experiences

Due to women’s general disadvantaged position in society, their socialisation to care for others and the history of feminist alternative visions of ethics, it is not surprising that women are at the forefront of human rights movements, working for social change not only in the area of gender justice but also in environmental justice, racial justice and other causes (UNWGDAWG, 2022). However, there is not much research into what motivates women (or other people) to become human rights defenders. While the existing studies mostly point to altruism (i.e. a concern for the well-being of others) as the main motivation (Hernandez et al., 2018; Hall, 2019), there are studies which show that personal hardship and traumatic experiences, such as childhood exposure to violence, are also significant factors (Barendsen and Gardner, 2004).

Research with girls and young women human rights defenders across the globe (UNWGDAWG, 2022) shows that most of the young activists have faced traumatic experiences, such as domestic and sexual violence, sexual harassment and conflict: forms of which differ according to the different social, political, legal, socioeconomic and familial contexts. Guarcia Oliveira and Jelena Ðorđević (2015, p. 43) note how many of us become activists because of some kind of violence that we or our people have experienced, and warn that how we deal with that violence and trauma ‘determines whether they remain as open wounds, preventing us from moving forward in our causes’.

Indeed, in my encounters with different women and girl activists across the globe, as an educator, activist and therapist, I have heard stories of various traumatic experiences rooted in gender injustice, compounded by other systemic injustices, often of a trans-generational nature, ranging from impositions of patriarchal gender roles in the family and wider society and restrictions on sexual expression and reproductive freedom, to physical, psychological, sexual, economic and obstetric violence, in all its different forms. ⁷ Often, there was unprocessed anger related to these experiences. ⁸

For a long time, my human rights work, motivated also by my experiences of patriarchal harms, was fuelled partly by anger as well as by unprocessed grief related to my wounding. It took me some time to understand that my activism alone cannot address my wounds, and that my wounds shape how I engage in human rights work. I wanted to change the world partly to address my own unmet needs, not always fully aware of these connections. Paying attention to the spiritual messages playing out in my life, I started to understand that I can never heal my wounds through external work only, particularly not through a dominant social paradigm that constantly (re)produces trauma through the different systems of injustice and power disbalances. I began to understand that neglecting my own healing was pushing me further into fighting, something I have been observing in human rights activism more generally. In the many exchanges I have had with different women human rights activists throughout my life, I have observed how often we are not fully aware of the role of our own wounding in how we do our human rights work. To paraphrase Ðorđević, walking with an open wound prevents us from moving forward in our causes (Oliviera and Ðorđević, 2015, p. 43). Having unprocessed anger keeps us in fighting mode.

The dualist, oppositional paradigm of fighting for human rights

The well-accepted, if not dominant, phrase in describing human rights activism is ‘fighting for human rights’. ⁹ Indeed, the dominant approach to social justice has been defined as conflict orientated (Fernandes, 2003) or oppositional (Keating, 2013). But history has shown that fighting is not conducive to peace and justice; rather, fighting creates more fighting. As Thomas Merton has already argued:

the frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. (Merton, 1966, p. 73)

Moreover, fighting presupposes oppositional logics and the existence of perpetrators and victims. While these concepts might be useful to describe the reality of suffering and human rights violations, they also create certain problems. In the context of feminism, they might support rather than challenge the gender binary of female victims / male perpetrators. Moreover, these concepts simplify women’s experiences, overemphasising victimhood at the expense of agency, which has been a critique of some feminist approaches (Schneider, 1993).

Furthermore, the focus on fighting highlights suffering and undermines the role of pleasure and joy in activism. Very few scholars have examined the role and the importance of joy (Simmons, 2019) and pleasure (brown, 2019) in social justice movements, even though these are the vital creative forces that sustain our activism and help us imagine and build alternative futures. On the contrary, these concepts and experiences have been seen as politically problematic in certain settings. As Laleh Khalili (2015) has observed, resistance to pleasures has, in certain contexts, been seen as an activist act. Hardship and suffering have been seen as an inherent part of human rights work, while self-sacrifice and martyrdom remain important values for human rights activists.

In this framework, human rights activists become the martyrs/rescuers saving the victims from the perpetrators. ¹⁰ But the narrative of women in positions of privilege ‘rescuing’ their ‘less fortunate sisters’, which in a global context has, inter alia, racial and colonial dimensions, is problematic and has been subjected to critique (Mohanty, 1984; Kapur, 2002). Not only does this categorisation reflect unequal power dynamics but it also undermines the agency of people. This is vividly demonstrated by a participant in my research on sex work, where this dynamic is particularly played out. Asked about radical feminists’ perspectives of sex workers as victims, Nina explained the problems with this perspective:

The worst thing you could do is make the person a victim. If you are only a victim, you are stripped of … I don’t know, humanity, of everything. […] People should be empowered in all, even if they were a victim of something concrete in a specific situation. Let’s empower this person! (Nina, quoted in Radačić, 2017, p. 98)

In addition, the exclusionary categories of victims, perpetrators and rescuers obscure that these are roles we all play at different moments ¹¹ and which we can consciously outgrow. To consciously outgrow identification with these roles based on our different positionality in relation to suffering is not to minimise the significance of personal and intergenerational trauma framed by unjust social structures for our identity formation and social position(s), but it is to constantly open ourselves to relating with others from a position of unity, rather than separation.

As Leela Fernandes (2003) argued, we cannot achieve transformative justice if our dominant paradigm is one of conflict-based retributive justice and if what we are asking for are simply demands based on identity, as this will foster separation and exclusion. Instead, we need to engage in the process of disidentification, which involves both confronting the real effects of identities (both disadvantages and privileges) and detaching from them, in respect to not only social identities but all forms of ego-based attachments (ibid.). This requires us to base our identity in spirit, which involves spiritual transformation.

However, the dominant, conflict-based paradigm of rights is focused only on political transformation. Under the dominant framework, spirituality is separated from politics. It is still predominantly seen as ‘essentialist, escapist, naïve, or in other ways apolitical and backward thinking’ (Keating, 2008, p. 55). But as Audre Lorde stated:

The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings. (Lorde, 2007, p. 56)

Exclusion of the erotics from politics and activism is linked to the predominance of rationality and mind over intuition and body. The focus of the mainstream human rights movement is on changing political power and social norms and structures through employment of rationality and intellect. The importance of internal change and healing, which involves embodied practices, is neglected. Under this framework, which over-values outer actions, the activist’s (well-)being is neglected.

The neglect of activists’ well-being

The well-being of social justice activists has until recently not been a topic of interest. ¹² This started to change when recent studies identified the extent of trauma (both direct and vicarious), depression and serious burnout in the human rights field. ¹³ For example, a 2015 study related to the mental health and well-being of 346 human rights advocates found that 19.4 per cent met the criteria for PTSD diagnosis, 18.8 per cent met the criteria for subthreshold PTSD and 14.7 per cent met the criteria for depression (Joscelyne et al., 2015). As stated above, a significant number of people joining the field of social change also have a history of childhood trauma, which shapes the way they identify with their work (Barendsen and Gardner, 2004) and how they handle work-related trauma (Joscelyne et al., 2015).

Various kinds of trauma and burnout have a particularly high incidence in women’s rights fields, which are often under-resourced and where the work takes place in high-risk environments. The study by Cordero et al. (2023), for example, reports the following traumatic experiences that activists face around the world: intimidation, surveillance, persecution, criminalisation, stalking, physical, sexual and digital violence, including attempts on their lives, in addition to witnessing the trauma of populations with whom they work. The problem is heightened among women activists experiencing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. In their comparative study of women-of-colour activists in six European cities, Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Basel (2020, p. 3) exemplified how the context in which marginalised activists work creates exhaustion: ‘it is the insidious ways in which austerity, xenophobia and fascism operate in different contexts that evoke exhaustion’. Unlike many others who define exhaustion as a problem that often leads to withdrawal from activism, these scholars indicate that it can also be a moment of ‘rebirth of activism in different configurations’, acting as a ‘structure of mutual recognition within precarious collectives [which] binds activists together’ (ibid., p. 7).

While mutual recognition and solidarity between ‘exhausted activists’ can indeed open space for alternative political spaces, self- and collective-care practices (of different meanings and kinds in the different specific contexts) are of great importance for building communities, countering exhaustion, enhancing well-being and sustaining social-justice work. For example, the study by Cordero et al. (2023) shows how care, which has many components related to digital, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions, is essential for many activists not only for their own well-being but also as a political act that can destabilise power structures. In particular, the activists emphasise the importance of collective creative spaces that can set the stage for the recognition of traumas and for mobilising healing processes, at both the personal and collective level.

However, until now, little attention has been placed on healing and well-being in the human rights field (Human Rights Defenders Hub, 2019), particularly outside of feminist movements. There is limited space for self-reflection, contemplation and care in the human rights world, as the emphasis is placed on doing. Moreover, many activists have expressed resistance to self-care practices, seeing them as self-indulgent acts that diverge attention from more important work (Hernández Cárdenas and Tello Méndez, 2017).

But as the study by Jeff Severns Guntzel and Nora F. Murphy Johnson (2020) found, well-being inspires well-doing. After engaging in an 18-month inner-development project, the participants—social justice activists—reported not only that they felt better but also that they engaged more deeply with communities, worked more collaboratively across silos and built or restored bridges, leading to more holistic outcomes. This led the researchers to conclude that there is a connection between inner well-being and the way social change happens: that systems change from the inside out. Supporting well-being and self- and collective care therefore lies at the heart of effectively addressing social challenges (Human Rights Defenders Hub, 2019; Severns Guntzel and Murphy Johnson, 2020; Cordero et al., 2023).

Paradigm shift: caring connections based in the understanding of our spiritual nature

The above findings suggest that we need a paradigm shift in human rights discourse and practice(s). The current dualist, oppositional paradigm of self/other, inner/outer, spiritual/material, as well a focus on the need to change the world that surrounds and is separate from the activist, not only undermines activists’ well-being but also compromises a holistic approach. A holistic approach recognises our interconnectedness and understands the importance of addressing our traumas through inner work and healing (in addition to changing social structures). As AnaLouise Keating (2013, p. 3) has noted, the current oppositional paradigm saturates us and limits our imaginations: ‘we define “self and society” in antagonistic, conflict-driven terms that prevent us from obtaining a more ample awareness of the realities of the universe and our connections in it’. Hence, we need a shift from conflict-based justice approaches to transformational approaches, which include spiritual transformation (Anzaldúa, 2002; Fernandes, 2003; Keating, 2013; Anzaldúa, 2015).

These proposals have gained new salience in this time of constant and multiple crises, as the deficiencies of our system(s) have become fully exposed. It is becoming increasingly clear that our political and socio-legal systems—based on individualistic, profit- and power(-over)-orientated motivations, which degrade all that associated with feminine traits (including the Earth) and do not recognise our spiritual nature—are no longer sustainable. We can no longer neglect our interconnectedness: what happens to any one of us affects all of us.

A spiritual approach to human rights

A spiritual approach to human rights is based on this recognition of our interconnectedness, our inter-dependence, of the same life at the core of all living beings, which motivates us to base our actions—however small or big they are—on love and compassion, with a view to achieving the liberation of all living beings from suffering related to social injustices and exploitation. As Keating (2013) explains, spiritual activism at the epistemological level posits a metaphysics of interconnectedness and employs relational modes of thinking; at the ethical level, it includes specific actions designed to challenge individual and systemic forms of social injustice.

Centring our lives in our spiritual nature, in our life force, does not necessarily result in spiritual bypassing. On the contrary, the recognition of our interdependence might motivate us even more to expose, challenge and work to transform unjust social structures. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa (2002, 2015), Keating (2008, 2013) and Fernandes (2003) shows that spirituality can sustain and assist us in our efforts to transform social injustices. As Anzaldúa has argued:

We have the capacity to recognise the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings—somos todos un país … You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label. This conocimiento motivates you to work actively to see that no harm comes to people, animals, ocean—to take up spiritual activism and the work of healing. (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 558)

Importantly, a spirit-inflected perspective can give us a sense of agency and strength necessary for our social justice work. Ana Castillo has written:

Acknowledgment of the energy that exists throughout the universe subatomically generating itself and interconnecting, fusing, and changing … offer[s] a personal response to the divided state of the individual who desires wholeness. An individual who does not sense herself as helpless to circumstances is more apt to contribute positively to her environment than one who resigns with apathy to it because of her sense of individual insignificance. (Castillo, 1994, p. 159)

While not resulting in the withdrawal from social justice work, spiritual approaches ¹⁴ to human rights and social justice call us to contemplate linkages between inner and outer peace, and to connect social and personal, political and spiritual transformation. The spiritual approaches call us to apply the principles of social justice in all our everyday practices and to act from love and compassion in our interactions, constantly engaging in self-inquiry. If we take this seriously, ‘the question then becomes not just what activists may need to do to successfully advocate for human rights but also who they need to be and what qualities they need to embody in order to better cultivate the change that is sought’ (Sharp, 2021, p. 38).

The move from doing to being, as a part of spiritual transformation, is a significant one and requires re-examining gendered assumptions about what is valued and important and our ideas about independence and power. Moving from doing to being is a move from the head (associated with the masculine) to the heart (associated with the feminine), where we—through our own inner gnosis—can feel that we are interrelated. From this place, we relate with each other with care, from power within (sourced in spirit rather than material circumstances of privilege) and not power over, and our actions are for the benefit of all living beings.

This understanding of our nature as spiritual, interdependent, interconnected beings automatically elevates the values of care in human rights and social justice and places well-being, self-care and collective care (care here is defined holistically to respond not only to our psychical, emotional, mental and psychological but also spiritual needs) at the centre of human rights practice.

Self-care, collective care and pleasure

While feminists’ work on care ethics has extended to the field of human rights and social justice (Held, 2006), the concept of self-care has not yet featured prominently in discussions of human rights and feminism outside of some activists’ circles. On the contrary, in the human rights movement, self-care has often been seen as an act of selfish, individualistic indulgence under capitalist conditions, which diverts resources from the more important work of helping others. However, such an understanding of self-care is narrow and misconceived, as we can only genuinely help and care for others when we care for ourselves. If our actions are not based in (self-)care, they can be manipulative and oppressive, for both us and those we care for/about. We cannot give if we are empty; in such cases the giving can be an attempt to fill ourselves. We have to include our own mind-body-spirit in our caring for the world. This is also what an understanding of our spiritual nature calls for.

The self-care approach advocated here is not to be associated (only) with the behaviours that immediately make us feel better (like going to a spa or a self-development workshop, for those who can afford it) and it is not connected particularly with any single practice, such as yoga or meditation. Although it can involve different practices, including simple ones such as spending time in nature, it is much more than a single practice: it is a path of listening and responding to our needs at the different levels of our being—physical, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual—from a place of love and compassion. ¹⁵ This is not always easy. In my experience, it requires a lot of unmasking, which can be a lonely path in the world when we are valued primarily for the masks we wear. It demands that we trust ourselves and the Universe enough and care about ourselves enough to reject the practices that oppress us and change them for the benefit of all living beings.

Our relationship with ourselves and our experience of the world is the base from which we relate to others, from which we (co-)create the world. Hence, self-care is one of the most radical things we can do to change the world. As shown above, there is now evidence that self-care practices have a significant impact on wider communities. All of us whose work on social justice has led us on the path of self-inquiry and self-change can testify to that.

But self-care and individual healing are not and cannot be divorced from a wider community (Chamberlain, 2020). As Nakita Valerio (cited in Dainkeh, 2019) puts it, ‘shouting “self-care” at people who actually need community care is how we fail people’. For Valerio (ibid.), community care is ‘people committed to leveraging their privilege to be there for one another in various ways’ (ibid.). While we have the power and responsibility to care for ourselves, we do so in community with others: this is where both the injury and healing can occur. We are constantly relating to each other and can never truly be healed while we are not all healed, hence we need to adopt a relational approach to human rights. As our problems are rooted in collective issues, we have a responsibility to support each other while we work on addressing these issues. If we start from the understanding that we are all interconnected, self-care and collective care become interlinked endeavours.

Historically, however, women have tended to focus on caring for others while neglecting self-care, in line with dominant socialisation models. It is now time that we started caring for ourselves. This is not an act of self-indulgence; rather, as Lorde (1988, p. 125) wrote, ‘it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’. Hannah Coombes explains:

Self-care in the feminist sense is about protecting and preserving women’s mental, physical and emotional wellbeing in a world that continuously exploits women’s labour with little rewards and is hostile to a number of identities … It is about moving away from society’s predefined roles for women and pressures of capitalism, and instead recognising and defining your own needs and working out how to meet them. Self-care is a form of fight back, an insistence that personal meaning for women matters … (Coombes, 2021)

Self-care practices need to include connecting to and enhancing our pleasure, as it is from ecstasy rather than suffering that we change the world. ¹⁶ Pleasure, however, is not to be confused with capitalist consumption; rather, it is connected to ‘a tapping into natural abundance that lives in us’, as adrienne marie brown (2019, p. 8), one of the fiercest advocates of the power of pleasure in activism, writes. In brown’s (ibid., p. 7) words, pleasure activism is ‘the work we do to reclaim our whole happy selves from the impacts, delusions and limitations of oppression’. Attending to our pleasures and taking actions from the place of ecstasy, which are also part of taking care of ourselves and our (many) communities, are all the components of spiritual activism.

This is all interrelated: the shift to a relational perspective in the human rights field would automatically result in spiritually orientated care practices in the different interconnected circles that activists and communities inhabit. These might involve women’s (and men’s) circles, ¹⁷ therapeutic or healing sessions and workshops, conscious dance and movement practices, meditation and contemplation. They also require organisational and institutional changes that address power imbalances, strenuous work demands and other oppressive practices in the human rights fields (Chamberlain, 2020).

The path of healing and connecting to our erotic power

In order to co-create new practices and institutions, we need to be willing to unlearn social conditioning and to resist re-creating the injustices we are aiming to address. Our efforts should be aimed not (only) at demanding rights under the current framework but also at transforming that framework, which requires questioning it, decentring its power and dreaming a new framework.

We need to be ready to face and address our own traumas, if we are to stop continuing down the path of suffering and transmission of trauma. ¹⁸ We also need to get acquainted with our own shadowlands of anger, hatred and resentment, so as not to project them onto others and play the game of victims, perpetrators and rescuers. This is an act of self-care and self-responsibility, which might open a path for different ways of relating with other human beings, bringing to the movement more collective care practices. Attending to our wounds might open the space for the pure ecstasy of (one) life moving through us, which might help us heal the separations, including the separation between our inner feminine and masculine, which is a precondition of ending the gender wars. No change of laws or policies alone can do it.

As Lorde explained, we need to move from suffering to connecting to our erotic power:

when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. (Lorde, 2007, p. 58)

This requires that we take the path of (self-)care and of healing and (re)creating communities of care. What constitutes this will be different for different people. On my path, I have been guided by my intent of understanding myself and the world better and bringing more balance to the masculine and feminine relating (within and without), which has lately shifted to experiencing life, as it constantly moves through me, in interrelation with others. I have found body-orientated integrative psychotherapy, Kundalini yoga, meditation, tantra, conscious dance and shamanic practices (including plant medicines) all helpful. I have witnessed in my own life the power of my intention and have continuously played with it (I would call that a ritual). These practices are for me based in a (spiritual) understanding of the ultimate reality as unity, held by the unifying force of love, where the inner and outer worlds are interconnected. Hence, clearing our inner world from the distortions of values reflected to us in the outer worlds, and imagining and intending an alternative reality, particularly when practised in a community, helps us dream this world into being. As brown (2019, p. 6) notes, our imagination is a ‘tool of decolonialisation for claiming our rights to share our lived reality’. The concept of dreaming the world into being is not new; indeed, it is one of the core concepts of different indigenous communities (see Mitchell, 2018; Topa and Narvaez, 2022).

An understanding of the interconnectedness of all life leads us to ‘unity consciousness’ and calls us to heal separations. One such separation is between the mind and body, ¹⁹ again linked to a masculine/feminine dichotomy. Somatic embodiment as well as shamanic practices can help us challenge the dominance of mind and rationality (overvalued as ‘masculine’ in patriarchal settings) and connect us to the power of our erotics: ‘a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling’ (Lorde, 2007, p. 53). These practices connect us back to our bodies and our sexuality and open our hearts for joy, resilience and hope. From this place, we can envisage a different world and we can start co-creating it with others, from a place of deep inner peace and interconnectedness of knowing our spiritual nature. We can bring care, pleasure and healing into our activism.

Concluding observations

This article provides a critique of the current dualistic paradigm of human rights and the neglect of the well-being of human rights activists. It offers a model for a more holistic spiritually orientated caring approach to human rights. The article opens by discussing the motivations for women’s rights work, to show how we carry a lot of traumas based in gender and other forms of injustices, which, if not attended, could place us in a victim-persecutor-rescuer dynamic in the paradigm of fighting for human rights. It shows how this paradigm supports dualisms, which further separates and is thus unable to achieve the radical social transformation we desire. This paradigm also results in burnout and neglect of activists’ well-being. Following the proposals for more transformative, spirit-inflected approaches of Anzaldúa, Keating and Fernandes, and taking into account promising practices in the women’s rights movement around self-care and collective care, as well as my own personal experiences, the article calls for a paradigm shift in human rights and offers a proposal for a spiritually orientated (self-)care approach to human rights. This proposal is based on the recognition of our interconnected and interrelated nature, the same ecstatic life force at the core of us. It calls for shifting attention to care, including self-care. Self-care is not to be equated with self-indulgence, but rather with listening to and attending to our needs at physical, psychological, emotional, mental and spiritual levels so that we can allow this life force, rather than our limiting personalities, to lead us. This can create new worlds free of oppression and social conditioning, where power is sourced within, rather than over, someone.