77 | Navigating Election Season: Self-Care for Practitioners

Welcome to this episode of "In the Clinic with Camille," hosted by Camille Freeman, a clinical herbalist and nutritionist. In today's episode, Camille suggests creating a a self-care plan to navigate the stressful months leading up to the US election in early November.

Camille discusses the importance of staying informed without getting overwhelmed, drawing inspiration from a class by Beth Pickens. She emphasizes the need for boundaries around media consumption and shares her personal strategies for maintaining mental, physical, and emotional health during this period.

Join Camille as she encourages practitioners to develop a care plan that allows them to show up for themselves and their communities during this crucial time. Tune in for a friendly nudge to stay balanced, informed, and proactive in the lead-up to the election.

Resources

• Learn more about Beth Pickens (the program I'm in is called Homework Club)
• Morning Coffee Sessions with Firefly Creative Writing
• Register to vote or check your registration status 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Well, hello there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman.
I am a clinical herbalist and nutritionist. And in this podcast,
I share little tips and tidbits that might be helpful to other practitioners.
So today I want to talk to you about creating a plan to care for yourself,
protect yourself, navigate the months ahead between now and the election that's

(00:23):
happening in the US in early November.
If you're like me, there's quite a bit of stress leading up to this event.
I get wrapped up in elections in general, but this one in particular,
and it's easy to get swept away in the drama that goes along.
There are lots of moment by moment, you know, updates on what's happening and

(00:45):
the polls and who's doing what
and who said what about whom and all the different things that happen.
And I think that as we get closer and closer to the the date of the election,
we're just going to have more and more of this taking over our newsfeeds,
our consciousness, our awareness. It's going to be everywhere.
In fact, it already feels like it is everywhere in some places and in some cases.

(01:07):
I'm not advocating in this podcast or anywhere, just pretending like it's not
happening or not understanding, staying out of it, that sort of thing.
I certainly hope that if you are eligible, that you will register and vote.
I think there's a lot at stake here, but I do think that we need to draw lines
and boundaries around how much of ourselves we can give to being informed.

(01:32):
There's a line between knowing what's happening, understanding,
having enough information to make good choices, not only for the presidential
part of the ticket, but for all the races that you're eligible to vote in on
down the ballot, but not getting overwhelmed with the information.
It doesn't necessarily help us to know every single thing that's happening every minute of the day.
So what I'm encouraging you to do is to think about how can you navigate the,

(01:58):
how do we want to call this,
the news environment over the next few months, such that you are preserving
not only your own kind of mental and physical and emotional health,
but also your ability to do the work that you are meant to do.
This is all inspired by a class that I took last month with Beth Pickens.

(02:20):
If you don't know about Beth, she is a, she does fantastic work supporting artists
and she works with visual artists and authors and so forth.
But anyway, she really works to help people kind of do the work that they're
meant to do and to bring their art into the world and out of themselves.
And I, anyway, I'm in one of her programs and last month she had a whole section,

(02:41):
a whole section about how to, think about this upcoming election season.
How do we protect our time and our work and our health and our attention as
we lead up to the election?
And I had never really thought about it in that terms before.
There might need to be a special type of care plan leading up to these few months

(03:03):
so that I personally don't get swept down the rabbit hole of information overload.
Again, I want to have enough information to make good decisions and participate
in debate and conversation, but I don't want to spend extra brainpower and extra
space in the drama of it all and the worry of it all.

(03:25):
So one of the things I really appreciated about the conversation Beth brought
to her group was really talking about how do we protect our capacity and how do
we show up and be of service to the world during this stressful time?
So I really, you know, I think that Beth's work is for artists,

(03:45):
and you may or may not identify with the word artist, with the idea of being an artist.
But I do think that most of us as practitioners, we are creatives in a lot of
ways, even if the word artist doesn't work for you, it doesn't resonate for you.
The work we do when we are creating healing is inherently creative.
We are meeting with another other person, the two of us together,

(04:08):
are creating a healing path forward.
Maybe if you're an herbalist with the herbs as well, the three of you together,
or however many plants are involved as well.
But we create relationships. We create things that we write and we show up in
spaces, whether it's virtual spaces or.
Real life spaces. I shouldn't say virtual isn't real life, but whether you show

(04:30):
up in person or in virtual spaces, those are all acts of creation.
So when we think about the work that we do as healing work, it's not just on
an individual level, but on a community level.
And our communities are swept up in the drama leading to this election.
There's a lot at stake. It's reasonable for our communities,

(04:50):
ecosystems, et cetera. There's a lot on the line coming up here.
And when we stay grounded in the work we're meant to do, we can show up as the
healing presence that we are.
We can use the tools available to us to not only keep ourselves safe and grounded
and to navigate this whole thing as smoothly as possible,
then we can show up for other people and help them do the same,

(05:12):
which maybe does give people the capacity to make really good choices over the
next few months to be healthy enough to make our voices heard in this and in other ways.
So we think about being of service to our community starts with ourselves staying
grounded and calm, being informed, but not being overwhelmed.

(05:35):
And then how do we support our communities to do that as well?
So with all of that, one of the things that Beth encouraged us to do is to really
think about and to come up with an explicit care plan for ourselves over the
next few months to think about what kind of media we choose to consume,

(05:58):
when and how much, and how to make sure that we are carving out time to do our
creative work or our healing work in our cases.
How are we making sure that we have that time really protected so that we're
not, you know, draining our brains in other ways and unable to do the healing
work that actually could really make a difference for people.
So this is just a little bug in your ear to encourage you to think about what

(06:24):
you might want to do differently just until November, early November, let's say.
Please let it all be over by then or at least on to the next thing.
But what do you want to do?
What parameters or boundaries do you want to create over these next few months
if you're listening to this in September, which is when I'm recording it?
What do you want to create for yourself to navigate this as smoothly as possible

(06:47):
so that you can show up for yourself and others.
In case it's helpful, I thought maybe I'd share with you some of the ideas I
came up with for myself, which include really making the time to do my mindfulness
practice in the mornings.
I find that even if I spend five or 10 minutes every single morning,
first thing, doing some deep breathing, doing a mindfulness exercise,

(07:09):
something like that, the whole rest of my day goes more smoothly and I'm more
present. So I'm really prioritizing that just over the next few months.
I kind of, my schedule over the summer was so...
Erratic, that I didn't have a good rhythm with that, but I'm really making it
a priority, at least through the election.
I have also decided to join a daily journaling, I don't know if it's class,

(07:37):
it's through Firefly Creative Writing every morning at nine.
Weekday mornings at nine.
They have a program where you just show up and there's a little writing prompt
and you write with a bunch of people and then they end with a poem.
It's like 20 to 30 minutes.
And there you go. So I have decided to do that because I feel better when I,
create and when I make time to sit down and just write something.

(07:58):
So I'm doing that. I have decided to check the news in the mornings and not
in the afternoons and the evenings.
I have a tendency to listen to podcasts a lot and I have a subscription to the
newspaper and that sort of thing.
And I I find that if I look at it in the evenings before I'm going to bed or

(08:19):
after dinner or whatever, that it just, it makes it harder to fall asleep.
It doesn't help to know right before I go to bed versus first thing in the morning.
So I'm going to be limiting the time that I'm consuming news,
and I'm going to be doing that in the mornings via podcasts and reading online,
whatever else I want to do.
So those are some of the things that I'm planning to do.

(08:40):
And then to just be really, really intentional about getting in as much movement
as I can, because that helps me to dissipate tension and stress that builds
up over the day. So that's my plan.
Again, this is just a nudge to see if you might want to have a plan as well.
Not a forever plan, but just a couple months worth of a plan to see how this

(09:03):
lead up to an election season could potentially be better than it has been the last few years.
Okay, so there you go. It's a friendly nudge to register to vote if you haven't
already or check your registration.
And I hope this was helpful. I'll be back soon with another podcast.
And I hope you have a really wonderful day. All right, take care.