Ritualizing self-care with Kelly Newsome Georges

Women + Wellbeing Interview #2

“You are a most important thing.”

~Kelly Newsome Georges

For this second installment of the Women + Wellbeing interview series, I wanted to talk to someone about self-care. More than anything else in the wellness industry, self-care has become conflated with superfluous products and services like luxurious skincare, elite spa memberships, and even overpriced yoga.

There is no doubt we need to take better care of ourselves, our health, and our well-being. But we do not need what most of the wellness industry is selling.

Meet Kelly Newsome Georges

I met Kelly back in 2012 when I participated in Jonathan Fields’ inaugural year-long mastermind immersion program, the Good Life Project. If you ever have the good fortune of spending time with Kelly in person you will be immediately enchanted by her calm presence. This woman lives by what she teaches. She models care in the most inspiring, yet simple, way. I knew I had to get her take on the state of women and well-being because she is a true expert.

Kelly Newsome Georges is a “married single” mom to 3 tiny humans, bonus mom to 3 young adults, and self-care educator and coach. She’s obsessed with teaching other women that self-care is not a “treat,” but instead a tool that helps us take care of every aspect of our lives.

Kelly is the founder of ritualcare.com, a self-care coaching practice with private client sessions, corporate group classes and downloadable online tools.

She fell into the wellness world by accident, as a burned-out business lawyer who turned to self-care to help her heal. She later started a private yoga and wellness company to help other women lawyers find time for themselves. Soon, she saw a bigger problem than busyness: our collective idea of “wellness”—flooded with popular, ineffective self-care hacks and pricey products—is off-base. And that can make us feel worse, not better.

Kelly started coaching, teaching classes, and creating an arsenal of conscious care techniques to help women stay sane in our chaotic world. She is trained in intuitive healing, mindfulness, yoga, birth & postpartum, perinatal mental health, pediatric sleep, breastfeeding, myofascial release, and stress management. She holds a Positive Psychology certification from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, a B.S. in Psychology, and completed her undergraduate thesis on mother-child interaction under Stephen Porges, the founder of Polyvagal Theory. Before founding Ritual Care, she was named one of the top three yoga teachers in Washington, DC.

She currently lives in Provence, where she can be found hanging out with her small people by day, buried in a laptop at night, and drinking all the coffee.

The interview

As I was catching up with Kelly before I officially started our interview, Kelly jumped right into the conversation. This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.

KELLY NEWSOME GEORGES: Speaking of the word self-care, I have to use it, but I hate to use it. I spent years trying to think how else I can describe this. Even if I found something that felt accurate people wouldn't get it. I remember writing a sales page and I just wrote, “Are you tired of the bullshit?” I just feel like so much of what we're sold is that. Even in my newsletter when I do, “Here's what's inside my care kit,” or, “Here are five products I like,” I always have a disclaimer at the top. You don't need to buy anything. You don't need these products. And I think that is a really important message. It's not the most profitable message, but it's the truth.

I believe that we’ve got to play the long game. It's like parenting. I don't know if this stuff is actually working, but I think so. We'll see in 25 years. Every time I ask what my child needs, and they're like, “Well, I think I need big love,” or “This person said no with their bodies,” or whatever it is, they’re getting it. It's sinking in. If you choose a career in wellness, it's a little bit like that. You're going to have to give out the information that you can and see what people do with it. It's tough because I don't believe that we can just teach, do A, B and C. It's really not that simple. I think that if you're a self-care professional, you're trying to teach people how to live. And because everybody's life is different and everybody's circumstances are different, you're essentially trying to teach the process of something as opposed to the result or the action that happens. That makes it a little bit more complicated, but also a lot more interesting.

ASHLEY ZUBERI: What does wellness mean to you?

KELLY: To me, I think wellness is being able to look at your life and wake up in the morning knowing there are going to be parts of your day that you're really looking forward to. I think that it means going to sleep at night and feeling, “I like where I am in my life.” It does not mean you're going to like when your kids spill the chia seeds. I'm still freaking cleaning up from last week. I'm never gonna get them all. But it means that overall, I like what's happening every day.

I love to reflect on death. I'm a little bit morbid that way, but somebody asked me this question, “If you were to die in six months or a year what would you do now?” And I've got to say, I would do what I'm doing now. I may not worry about some of the small things, but when I look at life overall, I would do what I'm doing now. To me, that is a real sign of getting something right. I feel well in my life. That is wellness to me—being able to look around and say, “I like my life.”

ASHLEY: And how do you think that's different than health?

KELLY: I think that health tends to focus more on physical wellbeing. You can look at physical health, mental health, emotional health and if you take all of those things together, I think that the combination of those things ends up being wellness. You can have an ailment that makes you physically very sick but you could still technically be well.

I really like this question because we do tend to say health and wellness and what really is the difference? I think wellness is something that's a bit more intuitive and it's a bit more woo-woo. It’s not something that we are really defining all the time through scientific measures.

ASHLEY: So I want to ask you about that too. Currently, I'm working on a piece that is looking at the difference between science and spirituality, and how they fit together, if at all, or are they mutually exclusive. The context is that I've been doing some reading and looking at someone in the health and wellness industry who is a doctor and she’s bringing in a lot of the science and this idea of living an evidence-based life. I know that in your work you like to bring in a lot of  science and have that back up a lot of what you teach. For me, the science is great. I'm not anti-science at all. And, there are some things that science will just never be able to prove. We can't have peer-reviewed studies for everything. Sometimes you just have to trust yourself. Like you said, there's a little bit more of an intuitive piece to well-being and sometimes science can really dismiss that piece. So I want to hear your take on where science and faith or spirituality or whatever you want to call it sits for you. How do you work with both of them?

KELLY: I think you have to really know your audience. If you're constantly depending on science to justify something that you feel or experience, you’re also constantly extending your power outside yourself. That continued practice leads you to trust yourself less and less.

I think science is really fun. When I started my wellness career it was really important for me to grasp onto the science, the anatomy, and the physiology. And I love learning about neuroscience and the brain. I liked to nerd out on that. However, along the way, I think my practice has really evolved as I've done more intuitive work and training over the last 15 years. I don't really focus on the science as much any more.

For example, when I would do classes for a law firm, lawyers love science. They want to know exactly how things work and what you have to back up what you’re saying. They want to know who you are and what your background is. If that's my audience, if that's what makes wellness accessible to them, if that's what lets them sit there long enough to open up to the idea of stillness, awareness, consciousness, using mantra, then I can use it. But I don't really use it much in my work anymore because my audience has shifted to people who have done that work and understand that they can trust themselves.

I think it's interesting that science tends to come along and back up everything that Eastern meditation and Eastern wellness work has been saying for thousands of years. If you need a 30-year-old peer-reviewed study at Duke to tell you meditation works, fine. But I don't think we can depend on it. If you refuse to believe anything about your body or your own experience until science tells you that it's true, you're going to be waiting a really long time because scientists disagree constantly. I just do not believe that it's a substitute for the faith that you need to have in an actual intuitive, internally-based wellness practice.

ASHLEY: Can you speak to that idea of faith and intuitiveness? You are working with mothers mostly…

KELLY: A lot of mothers, not exclusively. My specialty for a long time was between zero and five or really in pregnancy. And I still really love that age. Birth and postpartum is definitely a sweet spot in my heart. But I have since given my doula books away and I've started to expand because I love working with transition. I love working with very difficult experiences. I love working with chaos, and pregnancy/postpartum is just one of the most chaotic transitions you could be in. You can also be in everyday chaos. You can be in any shift that's happening in your life. You can be starting to take care of a parent. Motherhood is such a huge part of my life that it's something I know very intimately. But those same techniques, you can carry them on through the rest of your life.

ASHLEY: So what do you see? Do you see that women in particular struggle with learning how to trust themselves and have faith in themselves?

KELLY: Oh, yes.

ASHLEY: Can you speak more to that?

KELLY: Every now and then there's somebody who believes in themselves right off the bat, but I think it's very rare and it really largely depends on very solid parenting that most parents just didn't have generations ago. I just don't think it existed. Life was different. Education was very different. Parenting was really different. It's evolving now where I think we're going to have many more self-aware women and men in the next 20-30 years because of the efforts that we're making now as parents to raise our kids more consciously and to help them identify what they go through and how they feel. Like we were talking about before, it's about playing the long game.

So I think that's going to shift. But do we have women, or even men, who trust themselves now? It's less popular to trust yourself because we're just not really trained to do that. We're trained to believe in the machine, and the system, and what's outside of us, and other people.

If women were taught to be really powerful society would have a hard time running the way it exists. Women would have knowledge, they would have confidence, they would have the ability to say no to things that right now a lot of women feel, “Well, this is how it is, this is what I do. I'm a woman, so I'm going to take it all on.” Or, “I'm a woman, so I'm going to stay home with my kids.” Or, "I'm a woman, so I'm going to be the primary parent.” We've assumed these responsibilities that are really ingrained, and have been ingrained for a very long time, in order to essentially make a society profitable off of the free and invisible labor of women. And that doesn't really work if you have a bunch of empowered, competent women rocking around.

ASHLEY: Vive la révolution!

KELLY: If you know and trust your internal self I think that you would listen to a voice that we're taught very early to hush. You will demand to be treated more equally and fairly. It doesn’t make sense for the rest of society to function in the way that we've all been trained.

ASHLEY: Do you see differences between France and the U.S.? What about the parenting books that talk about the different styles of parenting between the two countries?

KELLY: They're fun. Some things are accurate. I do think that French kids tend to eat more vegetables. I know French kids who only want to eat cordon bleu, which is a breaded chicken patty wrapped over ham and cheese. I absolutely believe that my work supporting women, especially postpartum, has a much stronger sell with American women.

ASHLEY: Really?

KELLY: French women are interested in it. It's not that there isn't a client base, but there is more social support. If you have a baby you actually have a maternity leave that's paid. If you have a second baby you get more maternity leave. If you have a third you get even more. The medical care is incredible. You can go to the doctor and you can pay a very reasonable rate. You can get medication. There are just things that you have that are built in. There's a crèches system, which is a daycare system that's wonderful. There are assistantes maternelles, which are like nanny shares. My daughter goes to one of those with three other kids. I mean you should see these menus. Today they had filet mignon with a pomme de terre (potato puree) and a side of carrot salad. The kids have this really wonderful upbringing. I have the freedom to talk to you right now because I know that for a very reasonable cost, I can actually afford that care.

That is something that I think that America does terribly. America is failing its mothers. It's failing its teachers, it's failing a lot of people, but it's really failing its mothers in supporting them in the way that they need to be supported. That makes everything more difficult.

I think French women have a bit more breathing room. I don't have to work on a Sunday. The idea of working on a Sunday—why would you do that? You know, I worked every Sunday for years. I want to go run errands on a Monday; I can’t because half the stores are closed. I want to go to a store and pick up something for lunchtime; it’s closed because it's lunchtime for two and a half hours. Of course it is—there’s a different kind of life here that's slower. There's a trade-off for that. The salaries are not nearly as high but when I was a lawyer making a very high salary I also had to have a personal shopper drop stuff off at the office because I was never able to leave long enough to actually go shopping. You can find pluses and minuses either way, but generally speaking, I think French women are more aware of their state of well-being. In the United States it's much more accomplishment-driven and goal-driven.

ASHLEY: Why do you think it's so hard for women to be well? Is it hard for them to be well?

KELLY: I don't think that it's hard for women generally to be well but I think that it really depends on where you are in your life and I think it depends largely on mindset. You just can't deny the fact that there are physical realities that make wellness seem very inaccessible. I can sit here in my wonderful warm house because I'm not worried about paying the electric bill. I'm going to have a very different experience than somebody who is working three jobs like my mom did when I was a kid.

I think that wellness is accessible to everyone. I think that you can find ways to take care of yourself without buying any extra stuff, without spending a lot of extra time, but it's going to look different depending on your life. We cannot ignore the realities that some people are going to have a much harder time than other people.

I like to think of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Or, you can think of the chakras. You have the first chakra, your first level, where it's survival-based. If you're in survival mode you are not going to be in lovey-dovey land with your heart chakra. It's just not going to work. You have to check the boxes that are baseline and then you can move up into the heart, head, voice. I like to work within heart, head, voice—these fourth, fifth, sixth, maybe even seventh chakras—depending on the client. I think that's a really fun area to work with. But the reality is that even though self-care is accessible for the lower chakra levels, it's going to feel different. It's going to look different. And it's probably going to be harder in many ways.

ASHLEY: What are some of your practices that help you feel well?

KELLY: I'll answer this a couple of different ways. The first thing I will say is that I really believe that self-care is not a treat. I think that it's a daily practice that is built on really big principles: boundaries, self-awareness, honesty, courage and a commitment to evolving and growing. For me, self-care is always helping move the needle on those things. These are lifelong things that we're working towards.

When I think about care, I think about three Cs. First, self-care has to be this combination of things that are ordinary and extraordinary. I firmly believe that ordinary care is the foundation of self-care for all women. This is going to be your boring, basic stuff. This is going to be the stuff that some blogs will say, “Oh, that's not self-care. Taking a shower isn't self care.” Fuck it isn't. I am going to count every single thing that I can get in because my kid is two-weeks old and colicky and that's all I can do. I'm going to count it. So it has to be this ordinary stuff. It has to be your skincare routine. It has to be the mantra you use when you wake up in the morning. It has to be the two minutes of meditation. It has to be the fun song you listen to in the car. It has to be all of those things. When we start to understand that the umbrella for ordinary care is really big and that it counts as self-care, we can start to say to ourselves, “You know what, I am taking care of myself.”

One of the things that makes self-care the hardest is that we don't acknowledge the things that we do to take care of ourselves. We just walk around thinking, “Oh, I suck at this. I never take care of myself. Everybody says I should do it and I never make time and I'm terrible.” And that's not really the case. We can do ordinary things throughout the day.

And every now and then you need these extraordinary things too. Maybe that's once a week, maybe it's every couple of weeks, maybe it's once a month, maybe it's once a quarter. These are the bigger things that you might want to do with yourself that I would say most of the world would agree, “Oh, that sounds self- carey.” Like going to the spa, that's a very cliché example, but something that's kind of big like that.

To specifically answer your question, thinking about that first C, I do almost all ordinary care. And then once a week or so I will do something that's a bit more extraordinary. For me, extraordinary now in my life looks like taking a 90-minute yoga class. That used to be normal. Now to fit a 90-minute class in, ooh, that's a big one. For me to go to our osteopath, that would be something extraordinary.

I like to take "Me Monday Mornings.” Basically on Monday morning I will often block off three or four hours to do whatever I want. It might be laying down, it might be writing, it might be reading for a few hours. That's an extraordinary measure for me. That feels fantastic.

My ordinary stuff is what you might expect. I exercise four or five times a week. I think that movement is a critical part of our mental wellbeing. I do meditate every day even if it's only for two minutes. Mantra is a very big part of my self-care. When I'm working with people, especially lawyers, who like to say, “Oh, mantra, that's weird. I don't want to use that,” I will often say, “You're already using mantra, it’s just negative. If you really pay attention to your thoughts, you're using it, we're just trying to shift it so that it's positive.” So noticing my thoughts is a very big part of my practice. A lot of the ordinary things that I do are really geared around awareness.

I think that awareness and consciousness is a very important part of your care. I write quite a bit. In fact, I have a new product that I just created this year that specifically helps people begin to journal. I don't like journaling. I'm terrible at it. But I've learned how to do it in a way that really makes sense to me. The traditional, “buy a journal and start writing" stuff feels weird to me. I've never been great at that. I've created a program that’s once a week. You sit down and you have one to three pages of free writing to just speak with your pen and then three very simple guided prompts that you fill in the blanks. For me, that works. Somebody's started it and done the heavy lifting and now I can go in and just explore whatever is happening with me.

Writing is so miraculous for understanding who you are, for finding your voice, for trusting what's happening inside of you, for giving you yourself. It’s a chance to hear your own thoughts. And quite frankly, after you have children it’s very hard to see, “What do I think again? Who am I and what is it that I want out of my life? What am I doing with myself every day?” You just want some time to hear yourself think. So writing is a wonderful way to encourage yourself to be still and be aware. And to let you meet yourself over and over again. That's a really big part of my practice now too.

Those are a few of the rituals that I have but at this point in my career there are about 200 or so that I teach.

ASHLEY: Wow. That's awesome.

KELLY: Your care also has to be consistent. Good self-care is consistent. All the things that I mentioned are things that you would do on a relatively consistent basis. You don't exercise once every twelve weeks and expect to feel good. One of the biggest differences between an actual self-care ritual and a habit is that habits are missing that element of consciousness that actually brings things home into your heart. If we're not conscious of the things that we're doing you don't really feel the reward and the benefit. That bookmarks the behavior in your brain. And that’s the third C—your care needs to be conscious.

ASHLEY: I can see how that makes such a huge difference. Anything else that you wanted to add about wellness or self-care?

KELLY: One of the things that comes up for me are the common barriers that I see for women to not take care of themselves. You mentioned one of them with this idea of wellness being too hard. Even if your physical circumstances do make it harder that doesn't make it impossible. One of the biggest barriers that I hear a lot is that there's just no time.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

KELLY: I think this is a very important one. If you or any of your readers hear themselves ever saying, “I just don't have time,” it's very important to know that you and everybody else feels like this. But I always believe that there is time to take care of the most important things. I want to remind every woman who's reading this that you are a most important thing.

I say this everywhere that I can. There's always time to take care of the most important things and you are the most important thing. If you look at how you're spending your time during the day you'll start to see a pattern. You do have time to do something for yourself, even if it's only two minutes or five minutes. It doesn't have to be long. In fact, I really recommend that care is small, simple, and sacred. When you hear yourself say there's not time during the day, it's a myth. It’s an ingrained pattern. It's one of those messages that society has taught us. We have internalized it and we think it's our own voice, but it's not right. It's this idea that “I don't have time to take care of myself because I'm not as important as all of these other things on my list.” But that's actually not true. I would challenge anyone who's going through that and remind them that you are a most important thing.

Self-care is not a treat but it's really about the relationship that you have with yourself. And the longest relationship you're ever going to have is with you. When I work with women who are sixties and up, they are starting to get to this idea of, “Oh yeah, this is going to stop at some  point. Have I spent my time doing the most important things? How have I spent my hours, my moments, my days, and my months nurturing who I am and this relationship that I have with myself?”

It's like a marriage with who you are. The proper care rituals will actually help you take care of it. Sometimes I say it's like dating yourself. You do it enough and you're like, “Oh, I kind of like this person. Now I'm in love with them.” That's my goal. I want to help you fall in love with who you are.

That's my own story. I certainly liked myself when I started. Through these little things—these tiny, small, simple, sacred actions— I started to wake up and be like, “Oh, I think I love myself.”

My goal in my work is to help women, but really anyone, see how beautiful they actually are. And that's why I'm so passionate about this practice because I think it's one of the only things, probably the only thing, that can actually help you meet who you are on a day-to-day basis.

ASHLEY: Powerful words.

KELLY: I think it's the truth.

Kelly sent me this after our interview:

It is worth noting: self-directed care isn’t a cure-all for critical emergencies, mental health crises, and trauma, which often require professional care and support to help your healing. It also isn’t a substitute for systemic, environmental changes that may be contributing to your situation. But exhaustion and stress tend to be soothed with solid self-care. This is where your power lies. This is where your journey starts—in a safe structure, including the structure of yourself.

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