2022 Turnings — Movement, Poetry, Wholeness
I had every intention of weaving together many of the insights, lessons, and stories that I gathered in 2021 and sharing them just in time for the turn of the Gregorian calendar, both for my own ongoing integration and to fulfill a promise I made to a handful of people. But life had other plans, as she often does. So instead I captured just a few with the hope that despite the incompleteness some small bit will resonate with you and move you in some way towards the greater potentials you’re feeling within and without.
I take refuge in my body, which moves.
In her book, Welcoming The Unwelcome, Pema Chödrön reminds us that we all need places of refuge — places we go when life gets difficult, when we get scared, or need rest. The question becomes: are we choosing those places consciously? Are we going somewhere out of habit because it once made us comfortable amidst a difficult situation? Or, are we going somewhere that actually nourishes us so we can lean into challenge, fear, and discomfort? Netflix or Nature?
In my case, one of my historical places of refuge has been work. I looked to my career, my job, my resumé to absolve me of my own internal suffering, namely, my feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness. Punchline: in the long-run it didn’t work. Eventually, my nervous system started to give out on me. My mind, my most prized possession (at the time), stopped working in the ways I relied on. Terror.
Looking back, it really was a blessing. The first major cracking open of many to come (and still coming). That said, it also really sucked at the time. Complete disorientation. Groundlessness. Anxiety, depression, etc. I tried to take refuge in new things: retreats, yoga trainings, therapy, learning. An improvement — these things were nourishing and actively chipping away at the elaborate defense system I thought I needed; disrupting a constrictive worldview — but they were still something external, something other. It was only when I found my way back to my own body that things took a drastic turn.
Last year I began dancing again, something I was fairly certain I would never do. The scars left behind from over a decade as a ballet dancer run deep. So, when a friend told me to “just show up” to a somatic movement practice that was deeply impacting her I was skeptical. Something like, “Why would something that caused so much hurt help me now?” It’s a blessing to have friends who instill a bit of blind trust. With it I followed the inner whisper that beckoned me beyond the fear.
I discovered, rather, I experienced what ancient wisdom and modern research has elucidated: the body is a temple; the body keeps the score. I learned that I could do all the talking and meditating that I wanted, but I still needed to cultivate a nervous system with the capacity to hold the full spectrum of my emotions, sensations and thoughts without collapsing or shutting down. I, like so many others, I feel and think a lot, so that’s no small feat.
As I began moving, I began to thaw out the paralysis and numbness keeping me stuck in looping patterns of thinking and being. Unconscious stories revealed themselves in my movement (because the body doesn’t know how to lie). I welcomed them in, as is, and I wrote new ones. In doing so, I have begun to radically repair the severed relationship between my body, mind, heart and soul. By no means is the work done, nor do I think it ever will be, but I have already recovered parts of myself long lost, regained access to vast pools of energy, and remembered wisdom passed on to me from ancestors through my bones.
We are all born into these bodies,
these minds, of celestial architecture.
Do you even know where you are?
Designed, a guided tour in disguise; a labyrinth;
openings, doors, walls, secret passages, unfinished rooms,
an intelligently curated experience to reveal; to lead us
to our perfect place.
Isn’t it funny that we forgot our own blueprint?
So,
we welcome ourselves back in,
and walk around like a stranger,
bumping into walls, locking ourselves in rooms;
missing some spaces entirely, remodeling others.
Until that moment when we remember
the grand idea we once had
and finally rest easy within the space we built
just for us;
to dance,
to live.
I’ve learned that while I still find supportive refuge in nature, friendship, poetry, music, and art, my most sacred and reliable place of refuge is myself: my body, my own company. I’ve learned that I can consciously work with every emotion and sensation that arises — as opposed to denying or dismissing — by welcoming them in; bringing movement to them; alchemizing them with pleasure and balancing energies; trusting they will transform and move on in their own timing. I’ve learned that it’s possible to surrender control without losing agency. I’ve learned that my body is my home; it travels with me anywhere. And paradoxically, it has become the ground for me to step beyond my need for refuge and move into spaces where I’m on my growth edge.
For me, living on this growth edge has required me to first develop (and continue developing) deep, embodied intimacy with myself. (Re)learning to trust; learning to be with fear and not collapse; learning to expose myself in the face of it; learning to have my own back; learning to lead with heart; learning to have more humility; learning to move with abandon; learning what freedom feels like; learning to dance on the edge of chaos and newness — an edge that creates incredible awareness and sensitivity to the unseen.
In my experience, this emerges within safe containers rooted in deep awareness, trust, seeing, truth, and compassion that hold us as we risk what we think we know, let go of control, experiment, make mistakes, and learn; when we form relationships and community that agree to consciously uphold these states of being for oneself and each other. As we do, we spontaneously bloom into authentic intimacy with each other. This deep intimacy — with self and others — is the womb from which immense life force and creativity arises. The kind that reminds me how interconnected we are. The kind that reminds me of the beauty of deep relating. The kind that reveals the latent wisdom, love and goodness within everyone. The kind I feel we very much need to shift the rigid structures that no longer serve us and keep us stuck, individually and collectively.
As I dance further along my edge, I am devoted to creating spaces where we can authentically come into deeper relationship with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. And from that place, co-create and regenerate a world rooted in dynamic balance, wellbeing, compassion and life for all beings, on their own terms. This is my work.
So, what’s stuck? What wants to move?
I am a poet. Because I write poems.
Sound on: Golden Hour, Kollen
I started writing poetry in 2020, mostly when I paused to sit by the river on my daily walk. To be honest, I didn’t read very much poetry prior. And I certainly didn’t know “how” to do it. But I did it anyway, instinctually. It became a tool to connect with parts of myself within and aspects of nature without that I often missed because I wasn’t pausing long enough to look beyond pre-patterned notions and notice what is. It was more of an opening to something than a doing of something.
After a few months I cobbled them together into a chaplet and emailed them to a few close friends as a thank you for the ongoing support and inspiration they offer me through their very being. When one of them sent me a box full of them, printed and bound, I nearly fell over. First from the deep love and care transmitted in the gesture, but then from the intense exposure I felt surging through me.
At some point last year I attended a local poetry jam where everyone was asked to submit anonymous questions that we would collectively muse on as a group between readings. I asked, “How do you know if you’re a poet?” When it was offered to the crowd, someone responded, “You write poems.” (Silence.)
Sometimes it’s that simple. Sometimes we put entire professions on pedestals and in doing so generate an enormous amount of creative resistance. Sometimes we assume we’re an outsider when we’re actually standing in a doorway being invited to step in. I’ve decided to stop doing that. I’ve decided that I am a poet, because I write poems. Like this one…
Maybe this low burn,
with a little bit of yearn,
and a sense of home,
is the ember of something
smoldering
in the pain of denial.
Maybe it’s catching fire
in the winds of departure.
Where are you holding back? Where are you being called to step in?
And yet, I am unslottable. (Neither are you.) Because, wholeness.
Sound on: Vision, Steven Gutheinz
I used to dread the moment someone asked me “what I do.” While I have no problem weaving my forays into engineering, design, systems thinking, regenerative development, psychology, art, poetry, mindfulness, somatic movement, and spirituality into a coherent story, I struggled to find a single category or label to encompass it all. “Depends on the context. Depends on the day. Depends on what the moment is asking of me.” (Cue confused look.) One day I was walking outside talking with a friend about this and she said, “You’re not slottable.” I recall pausing on the sidewalk and loudly proclaiming the full body, “YES!” that I felt. How freeing.
I understand that we need language, labels and categories to communicate with each other and organize ourselves. That said, I also believe that when we place emphasis on these things we also potentially create stuck-ness and constriction. Not only do we reduce our plurality into a single statement, but we risk masking an important truth: we are free to be many things and evolve, which beckons us to be mindful of context, tune into the call of present moment, stay curious about our own potential unfolding, and become more complex, interrelated beings as we do. You and I are allowed to be multipotentialites if we choose.
Over the last several years I’ve worked out another fundamental truth: we are relational beings living within an interconnected, infinite reality. As we’ve sliced and diced the world around us to serve the mind’s craving to categorize, classify, and comprehend the incomprehensible, we’ve created illusory rifts, leaving deep scars of trauma within and without. In many cases, we’ve become so enamored with ourselves — both our own ego and even our own striving towards our essential Self — that we fail to see when we’re fracking in our effort towards wholeness. And yet, the truth is that everything is always connected with each other, even through absence. There really is no such thing as without. We cannot escape the web of with. We cannot be truly separate from ourselves, each other, and all that exists beyond. We are whole.
I believe we must remember we are whole so that we can live from a place of courage knowing we are an ever-forming mosaic within a grand mosaic silently waiting for us to take notice of its grandeur. To get to know and be curious about all the “pieces,” examining each one — it’s surface, edges, depth — reveals how they fit with one another; how they are an integrated whole; how wholeness was present all along; how cracks and scars create an illusion of non-wholeness; how those same cracks offer texture, depth, intrigue, and insight into the very patterns of our nature. Which looks something like,
So, as I dance onward I’m committed to less slotting and more wholeness, which means staying curious about people I meet and seeking to see more of their plurality, their dynamism, their essence, and their potential.
So, what makes you, you?
By the way, in case you’re also not into starting with, “What do you do?”, here are some alternative conversation-starters that I’ve generated or borrowed from others:
- What are you trying to create; bring into being?
- Where do you give your energy? Where do you get energy?
- What are you being?
- What’s it like to be you?
- What sound or image captures part of your essence?
- What’s alive for you of late?
- What’s inspiring you?
- What are you curious about?
- What are you musing on?
A few more musings I may elaborate on later…
- When we get into real conversation, a relational field emerges from which newness and evergreen truth emerges.
- Exposure is the cost of growth. To ask for breakthrough is to welcome breakdown.
- Maintain rhythms instead of routines by aligning with the womb, moon, planets, and seasons.
- Art as a transformative process: am I shaping the clay, or is it shaping me?
- Creative warriorship is warriorship.
Where should I start?
And, some new questions I’m moving with…
- How do we see, set, and hold boundaries within a paradigm of interrelated wholeness?
- What is masculine and feminine leadership?
- So, web3…how can it support regeneration and more life on planet Earth?
- What social conventions are no longer serving me/us?
- How might we create deeper awareness of the importance of embodiment in our work environments?
- What instrument do I want to play this year?
- Where should I travel to next?
- What book should I fast track to the top of my pile?
I’d love to get into conversation with you if you have musings that arise in response to these questions or anything written above. I’d also love to hear how you’re being lately, what’s alive for you, and/or what you’re curious about.
Deep gratitude to all the beings who accompanied me through 2021 in some way.
Wishing you and your loved ones wellness and blessings in the days and months ahead. Sending love.
P.S. It’s worth saying that everything I share here is a temporary knowing that remains open to disruption as I stay curious about what I cannot yet see, what I don’t yet know, and what I have yet to feel. Here’s to being disrupted, again and again.
