Liliana Maria Percy Ruíz: You know, self-care is kind of like this buzzword now that’s just thrown about, so I’m curious, as you think about that time when you first started to embrace it, what did it mean to you?

Alex Elle: What it meant to me is showing up for myself so that I could show up for other people. And to put that in context, I became a mother at 18, so at 23, I was a young, single mother. And when my daughter was born, I vowed to myself that things would be different. I would be a different type of mother. I would be a different type of woman. And I would do my best to stop chasing love in places that were rejecting me.

And that required a lot of self-soothing, because rejection is a part of the human experience. And when I was in that early stage of figuring out what self-care meant for me, not only as a mother but as a woman, as a young woman trying to find her way and trying to dismantle generational cycles, I was really called to check myself and become more self-aware. And that’s really what self-care looked like, for me, is getting to know who I was and what that meant for my then one child — I have three children now — and also myself and my potential partner, which I’m married now. So everything really comes full circle, right, and it requires us to show up and get up close and personal with the things that really are uncomfortable. [laughs] And that’s what I learned, is self-awareness has to play a role in the self-care practice.

…

Elle: Choosing to do this hard work, for me — and I don’t know if you can relate to this — but it doesn’t just heal me, it heals my lineage. And I speak about that a lot, how this is intentional soul work, how everything I put into the world as an author and as a facilitator and as a human and a woman and a Black woman, I want it to give other people permission to heal themselves so that they can heal their lineage — and not only so they can heal their lineage, in addition to healing their lineage, because that’s what it does. That’s what our intentional healing does, you know?

And I was speaking with someone about motherhood recently, and I was saying, it is so hard to be the matriarch of healing in your family.

Percy: Oof. [laughs]

Elle: It is so hard. And every time I try — I don’t really try anymore, because what’s the point? But — because it’s meant for me, to do this work, so there’s no way I can like, avoid it.

Percy: Exactly. There’s no trying, there’s just doing, now, for you. [laughs]

Elle: [laughs] Right, exactly. I was going to say, whenever I would try to avoid this work, it would be like, girl, where you going? [laughs] You don’t — no, come here. Come here.

And that’s how I knew that this work that I’m doing is so much greater than me.