Counting Ways to Care for True Self
Loving, Caring, Sharing, Imagining, Celebrating?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s counting poem, her Sonnet 43, is ingrained in our collective conscious. I bet you could have finished the second phrase without a second thought. We may count our blessings, count the days, count our money; we even count on each other to help out if we have the courage to make a request.
What metrics do you use to measure the meaning of your life? What have you been “counting” lately? When we reach milestones, it’s natural to count up the successes. Maybe, lately, it’s been number of protest signs painted, rallies attended, 5calls made. For me it’s all that, and it’s also books published, pages created, keywords and metadata uploaded for two more forthcoming books.
This week, I’m stopping to pause and celebrate. Because this week I’m counting the blessings and the years since publishing two books this week in 2023 and 2024! It’s a pairing worth sharing.
Let me count the ways. What if we reframed “counting the ways” as “imagining the ways” of loving and caring? Imagining invites in creativity, creative courage, and engages the heart with the mind. While we might imagine the worst-case scenarios, which can light a fire under our complacency or anxiety, we can also imagine the kind of world we want to live in. Imagine what’s possible when people come together with broken-open hearts, open so the light can get in (as Leonard Cohen sings). Imagine all the people, as John Lennon sings, living life in peace.
Creative courage requires the imagination. Rollo May, author of The Courage to Create, writes that imagination is “the capacity to ‘dream dreams and see visions,’ to consider diverse possibilities and to endure the tension on holding these possibilities…”. Whether we’re trying to nurture our own self-care, or care for others during health-challenges, or a long-lasting marriage, we must learn to hold the tensions in life-giving ways. Cultivating that capacity is care of true self.
It takes courage to write books that show readers how to hold tensions and imagine possibilities—and that’s what these two books offer. Imagine finding ways to care for yourself so that you have energy to care for others and also change the broken systems. Imagine ways you can keep growing as a couple long after the wedding vows, parties, and cake.
Caring for Self & Others Turns One!
Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss by VA-psychiatrist David R. Kopacz, MD, offers a transformative journey that delves into 10 dimensions of being fully human—with a comprehensive 31 transformative practices and meditations for nurturing your body, emotion, mind, heart, creativity, intuition, spirit, context, time, and leadership.
Caring for Self & Others recently won the 2025 Nautilus Gold Award in the category of health, healing and wellness. June 25th is the book’s 1st birthday. Learn more about the book here.
Two Years Young: Side by Side
An award-winning book for lovers called Side by Side: The Sacred Art of Couples Aging with Wisdom & Love is celebrating being 2 years young on June 27th! Caryl & Jay Casbon give us an insightful collection of 13 real-life couple’s love stories (+ their own) plus practices, proving it’s never too late to love more deeply. Side by Side won the 2023 Nautilus Silver award in the category of relationships and communication.
Unapologetically spiritual and refreshing, Side By Side demystifies shared introspection and supports truth-telling about the hard stuff while bringing in the spirit of grace, mercy, and kindness. A reader’s guide offers nearly 200 questions and practices that create a safe space for reflection and trustworthy conversations among couples or small groups.
A Continuing Conversation on Courage
Each book I’ve published, or that’s in the works, are part of a continuing conversation on creating more courage for the complexity of being human. As Parker Palmer wrote in Let Your Life Speak, “Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline. Truth cannot possibly be found in the conclusions of the conversation, because the conclusions keep changing.”
Awesome Shelly! 🙏❤️