Kristi Schultz Broughton Liberal Arts Essay Contest

The Connections between Self-Care, Mindfulness, and the Liberal Arts

Self-care and mindfulness are two concepts that have become common points of interest in order to live more stimulating and thoughtful lives. In what ways has your liberal arts education and its attendant experiences allowed you to better practice self-care and mindfulness?

Power in Pause

by Blake Hall

Growing up, I watched my single-parent mother raise two kids, hold down a full-time job, and earn her bachelor’s degree online. Money was our stressor. Productivity was our hope. Before Butler, I was taught that education is a means to an end. That my value is measured by my output. Now, as a senior preparing to leave this institution, I also leave behind the mystery of who this dream really belongs to: the bourgeoisie who profit off our exhaustion. My peers and I have faced an era of instant access to globalized media via cell phones, a pandemic, an increase in mental health disorders, and political chaos. There is a constant flow of information, a persistent noise that never ceases. I entered college believing that success required unwavering grit and non-stop work. But my liberal arts education—through courses, study abroad, and engagement with Black feminist thought—taught me the power in pause, the value of self-care, and how mindfulness is more than a fad; it’s a form of resistance.

When the pandemic hit five years ago, I remember feeling existentially unnerved. For a few weeks, I had zero obligation to my academics, extracurriculars, or work. I played video games with my friends until sunrise. I bonded with my newborn brother. I watered flowers in the greenhouse in my backyard. I had nowhere to be for the first time, and the lull was freeing. But then my dad passed away, and the free time grew to feel lonely. I had no schoolwork to bury my grief. No sports for release. No hug from a friend to relieve the ache. When I arrived at Butler in Fall 2021, I began attending Butler’s Counseling and Consultation Services (CCS), where I confronted my grief. Through CCS, I deepened my self-awareness and developed tools for emotional regulation. Mindfulness became a way to navigate uncertainty.

Three years later, in Fall 2024, I embodied these lessons as I spent six months studying in Sydney, Australia, and for one month of it, I lived in a van with my best mates and road-tripped the east coast. From Bondi Beach to the Great Barrier Reef. We surfed. We laughed. We chased waterfalls and hiked canyons. We arose with the sun; the rays spackled the morning sea with orange as the kangaroo hopped by. The only other time I had felt so free was during my faculty-led Mediterranean Diet & Culture class trip to Florence, Italy. I hand-made pizza at a Tuscan Farm and studied Galileo’s depiction of the cosmos. The trip was not just about culture but about life—about how engaging in physical movement, investing in relationships, and practicing an unhurried rhythm to life create a holistic sense of well-being. In these moments, I was enriching my own life rather than making someone else richer. Not working toward a goal, just existing. And yet, I felt more alive than ever.

One of the most significant lessons I have learned is that self-care is not just a concept, it is also a market selling a fantasy: expensive wellness retreats, influencer morning routines, “clean” and aesthetic eating. Self-care has been commodified by the bourgeoisie—the corporate elite exploiting the working class, lobbying politicians, pushing productivity, and commercializing self-care products. In my Resistance for Social Change course, I read Kaitlin B. Curtice’s Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, which reframed self-care as reconnection—to the land, to people, to oneself in a way that goes deeper than consumerism. I began to see how rest is resistance, and how capitalism’s productivity myth perpetuates people feeling overworked and disconnected.

Further cementing this idea was my attendance at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Fall 2023 as I listened to the opening keynote conversation between Kimberlé Crenshaw, Paula J. Giddings, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, with special greetings from Angela Y. Davis. Absorbing their words on intersectionality—not as a buzzword, but as a framework describing the layered systems of oppression in our institutions that disproportionately affect Black women—opened my eyes to self-care as a form of self-preservation. Black feminist thought teaches rest as resistance by challenging capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy demanding subjugation, reframing rest not as lacking work ethic but as a radical act of reclaiming agency, well-being, and liberation from exploitative systems.

We are trained to work, not to live. As kids, we spent eight hours a day, five days a week, for twelve years confined to classrooms—our schedules regulated by bells, our lunches confined to thirty hurried minutes. We were taught to absorb information, spit it out for grades. Go to college. Secure a job. Contribute productively to the economy. The optimized workforce. Conditioned to measure our worth by our output. Conditioned to cope with exhaustion until it becomes daily life. Drained of imagination. But my liberal arts education disrupted this conditioning, teaching me not just what wellness is, but what it is not. Wellness is not a reward for burning out. It is not a trend to capitalize on or a privilege for the wealthy. I no longer see self-care as indulgence but as an act of defiance—a radical, necessary refusal to be drained of life.

On this Spring day, March 11, 2025, I sit alone at home. This is the last spring break of my undergraduate journey, and I cannot stop bouncing my leg when I sit. I am at the cusp of celebrating one of my greatest achievements—earning my bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Butler University—and yet I can only focus on arranging plans for what comes next.

But then I go outside. The rays of sun after months of gray inject warmth into my skin. The wind is strong today, as the trees dance and the birds take flight. They chirp and they sing. Glimpses of rejuvenation. I am surrounded by green and blue and gray. And I pause.

For so long, I thought rest was something I had to earn. Now, I know better.