Emergence and Other Plumbing Problems

***Emergence and Other Plumbing Problems***

May was for molting. Shedding every last scrap of paper, every relationship, every object, every place that didn’t belong to my becoming. I did not like this. I did not want this. When I wanted it to be different, I suffered.

So I kept showing up, like the diligent ass I am. I asked for help, which was gratefully received.

Which brought the inevitable realization (again): “Oh shit, life isn’t against me, it’s just teaching me how to edit (again).”

I listened for the next right action and did it, kind of like me writing this now. I should be pulling weeds, but no, this first, then that. Thanks, rain. There is an order to things, and my preferences are irrelevant to it. Weather talks too. Listen.

As Dogen says in the Genjokoan, when you’re out in the open ocean, it looks like a circle. It’s not really: our senses limit. What we can see holds clues to the vast motion of the whole ocean (even enough to navigate!) but what we see is not all of it. It’s enough to realize we are part of it, we are held by it.

When trust in that wavers, suffering slips in between the ripples. This is usually my first clue that I’ve wandered from trust. I feel paralyzed and can no longer listen for the next right action through the clench. Then the freeze deepens, and a stagnant cycle begins.

There is always a next right action. Sometimes it’s stillness. Non-action is sometimes the cleanest expression of our life force–we realize there is nothing to force and lots to notice. Most obstacles disappear in time. The broader system dissolves blockages if we soften the clench. The holy plumber is always on call, especially when there’s a flood about.

When it’s time to mop, mop. Mopping is very simple and we can all do it when not future-f*cking ourselves into catastrophe. Just mop.

It’s not the outer circumstances, it’s my response to them.

Repeat: It’s not the outer circumstances. It’s my response to them.

At least two of you will bring up the holocaust. Noted. Now you don’t need to.

I love that when I say things like this to clients, that it’s not the outer circumstances, and your response is your becoming, life then serves up a hot dish of, “Oh yeah? How about now?”

And at first I’m like, “I don’t wanna.”

And life is like, “That’s why.”

And the roots of my practice grow deeper.

The less I resist, the more ease comes. That seems obvious, no? I would like to add here, that people will often think you’re batshit crazy as you metabolize their deepest fears with aplomb. A lot of people won’t take it as, “Hey what’s your secret?”

But rather, “Holy shit you must be totally out of touch with reality because that’s a nightmare!”

When you’ve alchemized a lot of trauma to the point where it has flattened into biography, it sometimes disturbs people, what you can report from joy. Meh. Boundaries.

When I teach boundaries, my fundamental point is that we move away from what denies life toward what is more fully alive. NOT JUST WHAT FEELS GOOD BUT WHAT IS MORE FULLY ALIVE. Boundaries aren’t a negation, though “No” can be a very good place to start realizing differentiation. Yes, we’re moving away from something, so sure, that’s a loss. Let grief open the cocoon. Not your twitchy hands, but grief itself.

There’s no need to knock on closed doors. There are open doors a little farther down the hall. Always. Even if the hall looks dark. Get down on all fours if you feel wobbly. You’re fine. You’re needed. Keep going.

This is slippery when the closed doors are in my own mind–When I point my head toward loss instead of turning my whole body toward emergence and adjusting my position to where I am enveloped in love again.

When I feel the clench come on, I ask myself: “Where can I stand in relation to this person, place, thing, sensation and feel love?” Stand there. Are you backed up all the way into a stand of birches? Fine. That’s the spot for this moment. Touch them. They love the feel of your cheek.

Where can I stand in this moment to be enveloped in love? That feels very different from “holding a boundary”. The only relationship it’s seeking to shift is the one between me and my life force.

Where’s the hairball in my pipe keeping me from that free flow? If I say, “But that’s my hair, that’s ME! Those are precious hairs from MY HEAD! You can’t touch that hairball!” Well then, the holy plumber is not going to stop by because it’s hard to work with toddlers around.

If I can humble myself enough to say, “Yep, that came from my head. That was mine once. That hair looked all good and shiny and pretty and went ping in the sunlight, but I don’t need it anymore and now it’s just blocking the flow. I’m ready to release it.” Then the holy plumber will get to work, spit spot and there you are, quenched and flowing. When this is my sincere request, the result is often this immediate.

We have all manner of trauma responses/habits/hairballs in the pipe. They share our DNA, but they are no longer us. Can we withstand being engulfed in not knowing quite who we are or who we’re becoming long enough to emerge in good form, without pushing pulling and putting our energy on that emergence? Are we going to require forceps and vacuums, or do we trust our body already knows how to do this? Can we not slash open the chrysalis and righteously declare, “See, I told you there was nothing in there but goo!” Can we remove all distraction and dishonesty and attend with humility to the task at hand? That’s all we have to do. Just this.

Can we?

Can you?

Can I?

If you’d like support in this process, I’m a pretty handy plumber’s assistant. My Pocket Coaching program (it happens mostly via What’s App) is open again for June. DM for details.

Now to the weeds, give beauty room to grow.

Ease

Emergence beyond embodiment. Spacious and permeable skin. Surrender to ease. There’s no need to force anything.

You’re naturally splendid. What you do is as obvious and inevitable as what a plant does. You simply move with the time. You are revealed as it is revealed. You emerge from causes and conditions without friction. Your body knows what to do. Let it lead.

When things move in this way, you know you are with what is yours, doing what is yours to do. You don’t feel confused, do you? No more than the sun and moon are confused about exactly where they belong in this moment and what they are doing. Weather may obscure their light here and there, but sun and moon keep showing up.

Yield to motion like sun and moon, steady and reliable. They make vast and easy progress across the sky, illuminating everything. You are their companion, luminous like this.

You are out of danger of self-abandonment as you feel the ease upon you now. The self of non-self: embedded, embodied, enacting.

You don’t need to wear yourself out going against the way. Continuous ease. Ease brings stability. Relaxation, stability, clarity. Patient, kind, and nourishing. Eternal, intimate, pure, and joyful.

Power flows now, supple as a summer river. Be grateful for this time of ease. Respect what is sufficient. No need to push for more. No need to push at all. Allow the river to run through you. Don’t dam it. Put your feet up and let it carry you. No gushing, just flowing.

Our culture mistrusts ease. I mean, if we embrace ease, can laziness be far behind? Their very different. Only one has self-compassion in it. Don’t confuse them. You will be received how you receive. Receive and be revealed. Only your responsiveness is in your control. Open your system to all available free energy, move with it and order will emerge.

A lot of people confuse slave mentality and work ethic. A good work ethic doesn’t demand extraneous effort. It’s not about showing how hard you can push, but how you can do what needs to be done. Can you feel the difference in your body?

Ease begets confidence. Extra effort limits. When we talk about that je ne said quo or “it factor” that someone has, it’s usually ease.

Ease increases your attractiveness tenfold.

Ease is a metabolic byproduct of Boundaries and Belonging–or is it the other way around?

No matter–it’s all part of the session I’m holding on Saturday Morning. It’s a half-day. It’s 85 dollars. I cap it at 10 people. DM for more.

Let’s Talk About Middle-Aged Online Dating

One useful thing I learned over my last two rounds of app dating is this: A man who wears sunglasses in his main pic is avoidant 100% of the time. Give it about 10 messages and it’ll be clear. You can also give it a year–the data comes out the same. I don’t have a giant sample size, but big enough. Do with this data what you will.

I’m 48–a middle-aged woman–and by all accounts I should really hate online dating. It should make me feel terrible about myself, less than human, disenchanted with humans. I would have had to feel pretty terrible about myself already for this to be the case. Like all of our social media tools, feeling victimized by them seems a dishonest position. Yes, they’re manipulating our attention. Exercise discernment.

My mother suggested I leave Maine and move back to Philly where the numbers would be better. I told her I only want one and was far more likely to be resonant with someone who loves Maine as much as I do.

This time, I added in my bio, “What’s your attachment style?” I figured some self-awareness around this icebreaker would be a good way to vet. It was. When they didn’t know I offered a link to this NPR quiz. https://www.npr.org/…/whats-your-attachment-style-quiz

No one said no to taking it and sharing their results. This surprised and delighted me. It led to some interesting conversations about the value of such a metric, how it changes, and how we’ve been and how we’d like to be. It was heartening. There were also jokes. It opened the field to vulnerability from the start. And why not? Nothing squashes pleasure like defense. And why not meet each online dating encounter from a place of pleasure?

Also tho, in the app-based stage of a connection, I don’t give anyone the “benefit of the doubt.” What is that anyway? If I have doubt about someone in the space of ten text messages, there is unlikely to be benefit in continuing. There’s mutual curiosity or there’s not. There’s openness and play or there’s not. By the time we’re 20 messages in, there’s a plan to meet. I have lots of wonderful online friends. I’m looking for irl smells.

This has made the whole enterprise feel like an adult round of duck duck goose. Not everyone was up for play. Some people really see online dating as more of a job interview. Some people feel really resigned about the whole thing. Some people really hate their lives. Some people tell jokes about murdering their wives. That was just one guy, but still…

I had just one full yes right up my midline this time. He was way outside my usual preferences. He is an unvaxxed, gun-owning, libertarian who listens with actual interest to Tucker Carlson and has only the vaguest notion of who Beyoncé is. His love language is, “Underpromise and overdeliver.”

Instead of clutching my delicate liberal pearls, I found this polarity irresistibly hot. When he gave me a hands-on archery lesson, I found it even hotter. Preferences! They really do swap surprise for suffering.

He is those seemingly unaligned things. He is also open, present, comfortable in his skin, has a deep secular spiritual life including being expert in human design (?!), plays guitar and sings, has mad skills, and I feel seen and cherished. I’m received how I receive. I’m available for that.

Will it last?
Does it matter?
What is happening?

I only ever ask that question when I mean “What WILL happen?” When I just can’t abide the uncertainty. What IS actually happening in this moment is usually pretty clear. Clarity is received, not grasped at. And even more than that–it’s fun to be surprised by what emerges. Like really fun, if that’s how you’re turned.

Emotional investment is in this moment. Relationship is in this moment. We can agree to have more moments, but everything else is wide open. I welcome this deep play.

So yeah, I’m basically just writing this today to celebrate all the replenishing pleasure in my glorious middle aged white lady life as I hum along between the portals of birth and death and find this spot drenched. Do the swiping! Do the swiping! It’s just people, just like you.

I’m also letting you know I’m holding a Boundaries and Belonging session on Saturday April 23rd which is a half-day where we pick up a whole lot of litter from your field so you can have a clearer view of what belongs there and what does not. It’s fun to be surprised by what emerges there too, even along the wet cave wall.

There’s also a new 3 month F*ck Suffering group starting on 4/26. DM for more…or email hi@reihance.com

Walking in the Bewilderness

This week I met an interesting man and also found out that my landlady already rented my apartment to someone else at the end of my lease in 2 months. I was not anticipating either of these things.

Where will I live? I don’t even like this apartment! An emotionally available man? I won’t have to f*ck my way across a chasm? Well, there’s a different experience of eros…Should I go full feral and live on my land for the summer? But how will I serve my clients without internet?

You get the idea.

Lots of mental flippity floppity jibber jabber until I found myself all tangled in my head, dragging my body around like a laundry bag and listening only to some distant tinnitus.

I know I’m not alone in wanting certainty when a truckload of “I don’t know” is dropped in my yard. The events of this week were novel and full of possibility really, but my thoughts put a pillow on their face, muffling the life out of the actual events and snuffing the vital moment that was for real real in front of me. The demand for certainty is a blunt and suffocating instrument. It’s the seed of greed.

Nothing calls me to self-pleasure practice faster than the feeling that I’ve left my skin. But I have to notice the tingle of the tangle first. When I’ve gone to my head full stop, seated meditation or sound work or breath work just aren’t as helpful.

What does my self-pleasure practice do? It’s non-orgasmic, so it cultivates, rather than releases, energy. It builds my nervous system capacity. I can move with big surges of energy without avoidance.

On noticing a surge, I draw my energy out of my head and back into my body, into my root. What could be called anxiety could also, more neutrally and usefully, be called a surge. I consider it being summoned to the bewilderness. Self-pleasure and meditation have taught me how to hold that energy without skittering about like a squirrel or other small prey.

Drawing the surge from my head back down into my body, shifts the penetrative urge to PUT IT SOMEWHERE or DO SOMETHING WITH IT and instead opens me to allow all that frantic energy to permeate out beyond my skin in a radiant, rather than a jagged way. It lets anxiety become radiance.

But I have to notice. I have to lie down first. I have to step out of reactivity. Like the old fire drill commercials: I have to stop, drop, and slow my roll.

After about 15 minutes of this, I found my feet again and was ready to go for a walk in the bewilderness. I have a cabin there, like Red Riding Hood’s gramma, so I don’t turn down that invitation. Ever. It’s an ancient call that summons my present response.

The bewilderness is a vast and intimate place. Best to go in permeable, so self-pleasure is good prep. Something will happen there, and I have no idea what it is yet. Someone will come out and with some boon or other, and I don’t know anything about either yet. I trust this. I don’t need a map, or any other facsimile of the bewildered territory.

I’m not trying to find a way out, I’m letting myself go deeper in. Letting myself go… “She let herself go.” I think it’s worth interrogating that terrifying phrase and the vicious ways we wield it. There’s a call from the feminine inherent in every time a woman, “Lets herself go”. What if we reframe that to: “Damn, she’s wandering in the bewilderness. Can’t wait to hear about that adventure. She’s going deep!”

Sometimes I don’t like what emerges in the shadows of the bewilderness: Poison ivy! A rabid raccoon that wants tickling! A bear ate my muesli! Baba Yaga is f*cking with me again! Anxious attachment is actually avoidant attachment!

As I step back from what would harm me, can I keep on trusting that being pulled away from one thing means I’m being drawn toward another? Something more resonant? No? That’s okay. That will also change. If I change with it, it will be easier, delightful even. Peril practiced becomes adventure.

Having my preferences violated is one of the deep dark pleasures of the bewilderness.

I notice them better as they depart.

My life has been one of trial and error. I’ve had to try everything–not once–more like three times before I knew it was not for me. I’ve been a good fool who let no precipice pass without throwing myself off of it. All those falls gave me definition. They showed me who I am. They taught me to remember. They taught me that my body will always bend toward life, but my mind might go ahead and kill me–slow or quick–if I don’t train it to sit and stay. Then it becomes a loyal companion.

I’ve always been more interested in vitality than comfort. This has meant I’ve spent a lot of time walking in the bewilderness and I’m no longer afraid the beings there. Lots of poison allies to be found. I’ve befriended them before. We remember each other. They’re my relations. I belong here, and have since before I was born. This is my place. In this ecosystem, we are making and re-making each other in cycles of vital and fatal surrender. There’s nothing to defend. Remembering that is the better part of protection.

Wandering through the Bewilderness is not unlike Little Red Riding Hood’s visit to grandmother’s house. Sure, ancestral wisdom is waiting there, but so is that egoic wolf, poised to devour. He’s sexier than gramma, to be sure. So furry! He just wants to play! If I listen well, he walks at the end of my leash.

I have the wolf and the gramma in me, and I am also Little Red Riding Hood. We all are. Gramma is that ancestral observer, the mitochondrial presence in my every cell that teaches me about energy and the elasticity of time. Not the mother. The mother’s mother. A broader level of compassion and insight. An orbit out from primal wounds.

That’s the vast bit. On a practical level, my grandmother calls me to her lap for tea and pizza when she notices I’m going off the rails. I’m still a goddamn fool, but grandmother is always there, ready to swaddle me in her cloak and offer me a slice. With her watching out for me, I’m free to play and explore and f*ck up. She’ll always set me straight.

Ignoring her and acting from the wily child without remaining permeable to ancestral supervision is not for a grown-ass woman. My Gramma heart is the spiritual maturity that tempers and tends the brat in me. Gramma keeps the brat alive. And ffs, let the brat live. She’s fun. She risks the bewilderness with verve.

What is risked anyway? Insulating ourselves from risk is a perpetual, creeping death. I mean, I don’t throw myself off any old cliff anymore. I use discernment. I ask myself: How does this risk meet reality? Is it bringing an incontrovertible clench or can I meet it from the ready position: knees bent, soft and bouncy, relaxed and alert. Poised and agile. I can’t be the response if I can’t hear the call and I can’t hear the call if I’m clenched.

Everything I need is here, in the bewilderness. And yet it never looks the same twice, which is fine with me because I have a terrible sense of direction anyway. This has been helpful. I never feel lost because I’m always wandering, right here, where I belong.

If you’re ready for a full-on guided tour through the bewilderness, I’m offering 8 week 1 on 1 intensives now. If you want a swaddle and some pizza as you dip a toe in, Pocket Coaching is always available.

After I Was Raped

Three days after I was raped, I called a friend. She had been a volunteer at a rape counseling center and I thought she would be good to call. She didn’t come to give me a hug. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to put her out. I didn’t want to know what would happen if I was held. I didn’t want to know what would happen if she said no. I needed a rote task. I needed someone to tell me what to do. I could not abide whatever was happening in my body. I did not want it. Nothing fit together. My small sentences sounded like they were coming out of another person’s mouth. I’d been severed from my body and the body of the world.

The friend made me an appointment at the counseling center and told me to go there.

I pulled down my skirt to show the counselor my blackened pelvis and told her how it hurt when I sat down. I gave her some small sentences so that she would give me sense. I expected that transaction from this stranger. I wanted her to hold what I could not. What happened? I don’t remember. I woke up in the next town over and two men were still asleep. Can you tell me what happened to my body? Can you tell me what comes next? Today is the last day you can get a kit done. You will not have to press charges if you choose not to. We will not report this to the police unless you want to. Do this today and you will have time to decide what is right for you.

I was traumatized and ungrounded. I had an urge to feel safe when I didn’t. This urge is the true source of danger.

No one can give me safety when I am out of trust. Turning away from the reality of the moment and throwing it at someone else to hold like a ragged hot potato was very expensive. It took me six years to pay it off.

We drove an hour to a place in her car. The one where these things usually happened was closed today, so we were going to the one where they did rape kits for children. Kit is an imprecise word here. It is a forensic exam. When I left, they gave me a blanket and a small teddy bear wearing a tshirt with the name of the hospital. My dog didn’t want it, even after I took off the tshirt, so it went to Goodwill. The rage about the teddy bear came long after it was gone.

“I’m a state-mandated reporter, I have to report this to the police.”

This is what the forensic nurse said while holding the kind of camera I’d only seen on Law and Order before. She’d been taking pictures of my pelvis, which was too damaged to allow me a choice. My body wasn’t mine now, was what she meant. It was a crime scene. My panties went into an evidence bag and the nurse left the room. I lay on the exam table naked from the waist down, with my legs still in the stirrups and I shattered.

“You were supposed to protect me.” I sobbed. Big sobs. Old sobs. Deep sobs. The rape counselor was on the other side of the curtain, so I said it to the fluorescent lights.

“I’m so sorry.” She said, this stranger I gave my trust to, because of her job.

Because I was severed from my body.

It didn’t even occur to me to get off the table and take my panties back out of the evidence bag and leave.

It didn’t occur to me that I could determine that this was my body again and not a crime scene.

It did not occur to me because I was severed from my body.

I can’t set boundaries when I’m not in my body.

And I was told to think of the others. The possible future victims. It was for the greater good. I felt the lead cloak drop. I stopped crying. I felt nothing. I took the rape counselor out for Pho and made jokes. My treat. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. People watching would have thought we were pals. Doubling down on this-never-happened. Preserving that murderous self.

I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a trauma response and a real-time no for a very long time.

I didn’t tell anyone else for a year. That didn’t go well. It was beyond the capacity of the person I told. They hung up on me. I deepened into the story of how broken I was: I will never be fixed. I will never be loved. I am barely human. Again I found myself sobbing, “You were supposed to protect me.”

I didn’t talk about it again for two more years. Doubling down on separation. Doubling down on I don’t belong. My mind lapped it right up because it meant we could keep doing what we were doing. Nothing would have to change.

The rape happened in year six of an eight-year dark night of the soul. That’s a lot of nights. That’s a lot of lost years. It precipitated a descent into alcoholism, depression, an extended period of living in my car, and overwhelming urge to be as dead outside as I felt inside.

I had fallen for my mind exclusively. No one else was welcome, not even my body. My mind and I were completely enmeshed. There were no boundaries. It was a self-centered and joyless coupling and the sex was non-existent. My mind was very controlling. Abusive and prone to gaslighting. I needed my body back–but my mind had me drinking to blackout from morning till night to numb the call.

Fresh from a rare shower, bloated and sad, with eyeliner I scrawled across the bathroom mirror that quote from Rumi, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” A part of me knew. A part of all of us always does.

I realized that no one was coming to save me. I realized that no one could save me. I realized that my mind was an abusive asshole.

I could just stop. This could just stop. This could stop right now. None of the things I’m afraid of are happening. Not even one. What if I have everything I want right now? What if this squandering is all I want because it means I never have to be seen again? Never have to be responsible for my life?

Uh-oh.

I think of these as uh-oh moments rather than ah-ha moments, because let’s face it, do any of us really delight at the thought of all the change and uncertainty that just became totally f*cking inevitable?

I mean, that nude and bloated moment was my uh-oh, but I was on my way into an afternoon blackout, so it was another 5 months before I really let it all the way in and decided I wanted to live. That meant having no idea who I would become because everything I’d already been was dead beyond your wildest necromancy.

That meant uncertainty and her sidekick existential dread and I were about to get real intimate. I was going to have to let myself be loved by others when I couldn’t love myself. I was going to have to let myself be seen. Not just regular seen, but seen by whole rooms full of strangers while in sloppy cycles of rage and grief. I was going to have to get down on my knees and atone for shitting all over life like that. For rejecting my body so violently. For trying to kill it with vodka. For declaring so much war.

I was going to have to belong to my own body and the body of the world again, as was my birthright all along. No one took that from me. I gave it away because I did not want the responsibility for what I’d been given to hold. Until I did. Until I loved those gifts so well it felt like Christmas morning.

I tell you this because metabolization is not complete until what has nourished me comes back out as nourishment for others. When I have fully opened it, it becomes my gift to give. I have fully opened the gifts of that time.

One of the greatest gifts of my lifetime has been restoring my body to full trust, full eros, after rape. I crawled through mud and fire for as long as I needed to, according to my very stubborn nature and for as long as I needed to stay deluded about the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Which was almost exactly eight years. My mind has been through a whole lot of training since then and like a good companion, it shits outside and sits nicely. It’s quite a lot of fun, really. Ever-curious and always up for a caper.

I want to be very clear here that I don’t blame myself in any of this. I don’t blame anyone in any of these events (anymore). This is my path and I feel very tenderly responsible for walking it, even for the times I crawled it. The seeds of compassion were planted in this loam. Somehow, they sprouted.

That’s why I can and feel I should write about it and share it with you.

There was so much shame in me for so long that drew in new relationships that led to new trauma that confirmed and calcified the old. I had to fully embody the whole cycle of trauma and retraumatization by bringing in so much of what confirmed the story I was carrying about myself until it became clear that it was false. I don’t see those years as lost anymore. I see them as training.

“You were supposed to protect me.”

This phrase is the seed of so much trauma and retraumatization. And the slow hissing leak of life force that victim identity brings. When that is lovingly witnessed, first by myself and then by another loving human who does not try to fix what is not broken, my trust is restored. When I move out of trust and expect safety to come from outside first—when I ask to be rescued–I move away from freedom. When my trust in myself and in all-that-is is primary, I know when I am safe. I trust when I am not safe. I trust myself to set and hold a boundary that will move me away from what will harm me and toward being fully alive. I trust others because I trust myself first. I trust my embodied intuition. There is no other kind.

Violence is carried in our own minds and ripples out. It severs us from our bodies and the body of the world.

Peace is carried by our own bodies and ripples out. It grounds us in our own bodies and the body of the world.

Releasing suffering is intimate work, no matter how vast the need for it looks from a distance. Whether it’s war, rape, or the grinding poverty of a working family who has to chose between gas and food now–how we meet and metabolize it matters. How we witness it in our neighbors and around the globe, matters.

We are all in this together, with every breath, every sound, every beat of our very messy human hearts.

Portals of Potent Surprise

Is it a crisis, or a portal of potent surprise? Loss opens. Let it. When the losses have been lost and your call echoes in the empty cup, something will come to fill it. Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum. She loves it, she comes to fill it everytime you empty it. She is a very good hostess.

You find the portal of potent surprise too scary? Are you worried there are monsters in there? What comes from avoiding it is much scarier. Ghouls breed in neglected places.

Trust that people will come and go according the homing signal you transmit. Follow resonance. When you follow resonance you won’t have to state a boundary because you’re living it. It has the sillage of good perfume. It lingers after you’ve gone, without ever overwhelming. Like that perfume, you don’t have to say a word.

What does a peony say? It doesn’t scream. It opens. Bees come. Faces come. Ants come at just the time they’re needed. Is the transmission chemical? What is it made of? Who cares. It’s the transmission. Trust your transmission.

What belongs with you stays with you. What doesn’t is a burden. Be who you are, sincerely and responsibly, and whatever doesn’t belong with you will fall from your field. Like Magic. Just like magic, actually. As Mary Poppins said, “Spit spot.”

If it’s stagnant, clinging makes it so. If it’s a crisis, clinging makes it so. A crisis is being in fine moist loam screaming to remain a seed. The cotyledon is lying in wait for causes and conditions to align. The seed is a waiting room, poised to unfurl. A plant can’t be other than it is, but the seed has to open first. Painful things can be welcomed with the generosity their inevitability calls for. Otherwise, it’s violence.

There are still, quiet moments in that emptiness between. The sound of your heartbeat echoing in the cup amid the absence of familiar sounds. The absence also echoes. Our ideas about emptiness are so confused, like it’s something to be avoided, like the empty places within us need to be stuffed with something stat, rather than naturally filled in good time. Addiction is no balm. Neither is taking what isn’t given or any other greedy pull.

Pulling for validation instead of opening to connection is keeping you from embodying your boundaries. It’s keeping you in your head and out of your skin. Do you wonder why you’re in this relationship pattern again? Do you wonder why you have that kind of client again? Do you wonder why you are getting the same response you got the last time? That’s why. You’re available for disrespect. And part of what you’re transmitting is that you’re available for disrespect. No matter your words, the fragrance lingers.

Standing in the portal of potent surprise can bring nausea, of the existential variety. The vertigo tug. Luckily, the portal is groundless. There’s nowhere to go splat. Let yourself be tugged between the poles. Notice how this feels.

Notice everything. Notice everyone. Remain receptive and embodied. Sometimes you’ll step into the portal and sometimes surprise party guests step through. Your next teacher might be the weirdo fondling broccoli with too much mayonnaise in their cart. Treat everyone with reverence. Everyone is your teacher now, especially the more than human world. There is nothing to defend. Nothing to hold on to. There’s so much delight here. So much ordinary joy.

What was constructed has collapsed and the reformation is not yet complete. It’s emerging. Listen for snips. Gather niblets. It’s a treasure hunt and the map is written on your body in an ink you can’t yet see. Patience.

When do you move and when do you wait?

What does life say about it?

Does the floor need to be swept?

Do the plants need to be watered?

Does the dog need to be fed?

Is the light calling you outside?

Are you listening with your skin to every nuance?

If not, what’s muffling the call?

What’s muting your response?

This really cuts down on blame and resentment and opens up a lot more love. Allow alliances to reshuffle at will. Leave the gate open and give everyone ample room to go, including you.

Move when you are moved. Step into the heart of things without fear. Take another breath and then another step. Slow. Get out of the stroller and walk on your own two miraculous feet. You are not a baby. Feel each foot bone meet the floor in slow and perfect order.

Stand at this point of space and time wholeheartedly.

Let every shadow pass from your heart.

Let your little light shine until it’s not so little.

Everything is fresh and new.

Boundaries and Belonging is tomorrow morning at 10am. DM to join.

Holding a Boundary Through Loss

Breakup suffering came from:

1. Wanting my partner to be different.

2. Fear of loss

3. All the things I made it mean about myself. (A solid break out of self-compassion and into self-centeredness)

4. Fear of uncertainty. The chasm that loss opens.

5. The visceral loss of one body to another.

These are all the same sources of suffering that keep people from holding boundaries, holding your sovereign self. The threat of loss is very real. Self-abandonment leaves deeper scars. I owe it to myself to be absolutely authentic so I know who belongs with me and who does not.

It turns out that the man I had been in a relationship with for the past year does not.

The grief happened when the loss became clear.

The suffering happened when I wanted it to be different.

There’s an important nuance within grief around suffering. How much am I going to resist? Resistance is the measure of my suffering.

There is no loss of love. Love, like all energy, is never lost. Untethered, it finds a new gradient. My love for him ran deep. The boundary had matching roots. Right in my own field.

I didn’t abandon myself. I held the boundary and I kept my skin intact. This meant stepping away from the relationship. There’s so much love in that, too. I guess that self-compassion practice is going pretty well after all. I can eat the blame, and with it cleared from the field, take a good look around. Where is the love and innocence here? I know it must be here somewhere. I’ll back up until I can see it again.

When that backward step is the next right action, it’s clear.

When I found out he lied again, I went for a walk. I was shaking like a dog, let go let go let go. The thunderbolt ran up my midline and made my legs shake. Shake it off. It wasn’t the down-drop of a lead cloak, the way a trauma response pulls me, though I had plenty of that with him too. What’s current feels like a current. The clarity could no longer be denied.

What am I willing to know?

How much am I willing to suffer for this preference?

If I can ask myself these questions, I can be responsible for my choices.

For awhile there, I was willing to suffer for this preference. There was rich soil there and an essential seed. If I left too soon I would have missed it. I had to find out the difference between a trauma response and the “no” happening in my body right now. I honed that with him. I couldn’t have honed it without him. I thought I had. I hadn’t. The stakes were too low alone. There are places we can only touch in love with another.

I can love him as he is, from back here, back home. I’m not interested in extracting anything from the people I love. What’s not freely given is not mine to have.

Once it became clear what was being given freely and what was not, I had to make a choice. Am I okay with this? Am I being an entitled brat asking for what is not being given freely, or is this a place for a boundary? I had to sit long and soft with that, until I didn’t.

Because it hurts, we still ate pizza and slept in the same bed one last time. I left in the morning after a hug that had all the tender distance of a last hug.

Why do I share this with you? Because when I say fuck suffering, I don’t mean avoid it. I mean let it all the way in. Let it make a fucking mess. Clean up after it, it’s your toddler. You are responsible for it. I cleaned up as best I could. I drank the tea he made. I swept the kitchen floor. I left.

Boundaries aren’t toys. If you can’t hold them, don’t set them. It might take a couple of tries to really honor them, but if you keep setting a boundary without holding it, it’s manipulation, not love for yourself or anyone else. Boundaries aren’t for changing someone else’s behavior or landing a hook. They’re not a rejection, they’re protection. They’re a f*ck yes to trust.

They emerge from everything I know of myself and the world in this moment and allow me to restore intimacy with everything I don’t.

Is this situation incongruent with that knowing?

Is this situation repeatedly incongruent with that knowing?

Yes? Then it’s time to step away, back into the intimacy of not-knowing.

When I trust myself, holding a boundary through loss doesn’t have to be hard. It can be very very soft.

It doesn’t make it hurt less, but it does let it hurt shorter.

I’m holding a one-day Boundaries and Belonging practice session on 2/26, while it’s fresh. DM for details.

Belonging is Our Birthright

It’s been a really challenging couple of weeks. Every time I thought I’d opened, I took a deep breath and opened wider. I also learned when to close. I’ve become a better asshole, basically.

It’s been a tender time, where I’ve learned intimately all the places I’m held. I’ve softened into this trust in a way that is new for me. I’m standing in a place I’ve never stood before. It’s scary and it’s not easy, but there is so much ease enveloping it. I hope that makes sense. It’s not for the mind, but a felt sense in my body. There is trust enveloping the fear. And so much love.

I got this message from a client yesterday, that he gave me permission to share with you. It came right on time, as things do.

If you’re looking for this kind of support, DM me for a one-on-one, or the F*ck Suffering group. Or you can go right to my website www.reihance.com The start for the group has been pushed back to March 1 while I give myself some space to grieve.

Working with others really does help me realize in my bones that we’re all in this together. We’re never alone. Belonging is our birthright.

Here’s part of Daniel’s message:

“It’s like a seed was planted and something very beautiful has began to grow. I’m sure you speak with many people and don’t remember every detail of our talk but one of the main points you brought up for me was to listen. I have taken that and ran with it. Lately, I find myself wanting to speak only if it improves the silence. I’ve really began to put into practice listening to my partner, loved ones, my manager etc. without that selfish, bad habit of preparing my responses based on my own feelings.

Since I’ve put my meditation first, I find myself relinquishing all control. Life is fucking messy, complicated, constantly evolving, and it will always remain that way.

I feel one follows the same rules for meditation as one would when experiencing psychedelics. A taboo statement I’m sure but it definitely feels that way. I sit with myself as I am allowing all thoughts to flow through me without any control or judgement. I do not resist. I come innocently to the practice not forcing or “trying” to have an experience.

The only difference of course and most rewarding thing is it is teaching a sober, clear mind. Resistance only brings suffering & my god, it’s like a light has turned on. I feel like Dorothy returning from Oz. We all have the power within us. It just takes one particular journey for each individual to believe in it.

While I’m still learning & by all means am no master of this, it has created a yearning to continue to dive deeper and return home to myself. I feel you’ve really helped me shape a very important focus and for that I thank you immensely.”

–Daniel LA, CA

Even though there’s lots of loss around here over the past week, there is also so much to be grateful for, so much to love.

Blame, Boundaries, and Belonging

When I blame someone, I get curious:

1. Was I asking someone to love a part of me that I don’t?

2. Was I afraid that if I held a boundary and didn’t abandon myself that there would be loss?

3. Am I seeing the situation as “abandon yourself or be abandoned”?

That’s one of the more painful false dichotomies, over time.

If I’m pushing blame around on my plate, I’ve moved out of compassion.

If I’m self-abandoning instead of holding a boundary, I’ve moved out of self-compassion, which is the prerequisite for sincere compassionate action toward others.

If I’m blaming anyone for anything (including in the public sphere—try it!) I’ve left my fundamental trust in all-that-is behind. I’ve forgotten (just for a moment!) that I’m held by life itself, that we all are.

I’ve forgotten that clinging and aversion are the root of suffering. Pain is inevitable and suffering is a choice.

I can return to being held at any time, just like Dorothy only ever had to click her heels.

Eating the blame is not taking the blame. The first metabolizes, it nourishes if I take it all the way in and let it break down into its rich components in my very own belly.

Taking the blame is holding and hoarding and cultivating it, allowing the atonal hum of resentment to reverberate through every part of my field.

That’s not such a great option.

If my field is full of resentment, there’s no place for love to grow. I have to do some weeding. Dandelions too, are nutritious.

Every emptying leads to a filling, even if I can’t see it yet. The tide comes in. The tide goes out. Twice a day. Invisible forces made visible.

The tides teach me to trust what I can’t see. They trust me to metabolize blame, wherever I see it. The less I try to do this, the better. I can stand very still in the sand and listen to what I can’t see, be moved by what I don’t entirely understand.

When the tide goes out, all manner of life is revealed on the shore.

Want to practice this with me? Msg me to join the Fuck Suffering group, next one starts 2/15.

Truth and Consequences

When do I suffer? When I want things or people to be different than they are.

There’s been a lot of suffering around here lately. I’ve been continuously f*cked open by it. Grief has opened me wider and rage has made sure to clear the field with its holy fire.

Recently, I’ve been feeling like someone I love has been doing everything possible to avoid intimacy, jumping from one distraction to the next in search of numbness. There’s been proximity, but that is no substitute for intimacy. Really, proximity without intimacy is one of the loneliest situations. And a reliable generator of anxiety—which is a vivid call to action.  

When I stop trying to control and start being honest (starting with myself), everything becomes easier. When I let people’s positions be in alignment with their character, everything becomes easier. When I stop asking people to be what they’re not, gentleness replaces resentment. Sometimes it takes awhile to really see someone’s character, especially if they’re fundamentally good, just not very good for me.

After commenting on one of the brilliant Hannah Taylor’s posts, she reached out to ask a little more about my comment. I told her a little more and she said, “It seems like the part of you that wants to know is in conflict with the part of you that doesn’t want to know.”

I decided to let the part of me that wanted to know win. And, as is so often the case in these situations, I learned that the part of me that didn’t want to know was protecting me, like any reliable trauma response. Getting stabbed in the heart again in that same way that I was 7 months ago wasn’t fun. But it was true. I needed to know how I was valued (not much!). I needed to know that the man I loved was more interested in the validation and ongoing attention of other women than being honest with me or anyone else, including himself.

A little openness, or willingness to take responsibility for hurt caused would have gone a long way in this situation. It would have gone just about all the way, really. I have nothing but respect for eating the blame. Once eaten, it’s cleared from the plate and things can be seen clearly. Another great thing about eating the blame is that it becomes pretty clear in time if you’re the only one eating.

Jeanette Winterson once wrote, “What you risk reveals what you value.” This sentence landed deep from the first time I read it over 20 years ago. I didn’t really understand it at first, but it has grown in me like a koan these many years.

Painful decisions get easier the more painful they become. Pain is a signal that something is out of alignment. Or that some hard thing has hit your soft tissue, even down to the bone. Pain has a way of making the risk inherent in change more welcome. Could my next compassionate action result in less pain and suffering? Can I let this pain move me instead of needing it to be different? Can I thank it for being just as it is and alerting me to this lack of alignment instead of complaining about it? Not that there’s anything wrong with complaining, if you know how much it costs.

The risk of walking away, away from pain and numbness, into uncertainty, reveals what I value. What am I prepared to sacrifice for those values? Comfort? I’m always ready to sacrifice comfort for my deepest values.

And what are they?

Responsibility, practice, compassion (and that starts with self-compassion), intimacy, honesty, love, and humor. I find the other good stuff, like trust, emerges pretty easily from those and not without them. The gifts those values provide are something more abiding than comfort, though they often bring that too. Not the kind of comfort that requires my control of all manner of nouns, but the kind of equanimous ease that comes from looking at exactly what is, just as it is, without needing it to be different. Even when my preferences are something very different indeed.

Let me say it again: Needing things to be different is the root of all suffering.

Just noticing when where I am and what is in that spot with me is not nourishing, leads me to the next right action, eventually–comfortable or not. What I risk reveals what I value. The bigger the risk, the more clarity I get on the depth of the value. Each time I am required to shed my preferences in order to complete the next right action, my values root deeper in me, and my character grows.

The rage subsides once it has done its clarifying job, and I eat the blame again, gratefully nourished. I was hungry after all that rage! It lit the whole field!

As I unbutton my pants and lay back on the couch (so full!) I have time to ask myself–Why did I continue to chose this situation after the first few times I was shown how little I was valued? Why did I instead beg to be valued? There’s still a tiny battered old part of me that I thought I’d held and loved so well that it had scampered off. A part that still believed begging for love and honesty was how to communicate desire, instead of choosing to be in relationship with people who emerge from love and honesty and can’t help but give it freely. It’s an old way of being loved and protected on someone else’s terms, based on scarcity. It turned out I had one more ride on that drama carousel left.

Healing is not a game we win, but a game we get to keep playing, always on a new and deeper level. Love is same same. So much of healing is how willing we are to emerge from love within this fluxy and uncertain world, in the matching field of this body.

I have ended my relationship with scarcity. If it comes for tea, we’ll have tea, but it definitely can’t stay over. We’re just not compatible. Scarcity struggles to grow, for obvious reasons. I see it for the hungry ghost it is–gaping mouth, pinched throat, muffled heart, insatiable belly–unable to be nourished. I can bake scones all day for hungry ghosts, but they have to remember how to eat. And my scones are even more delicious than blame.

My BF and I Had a Fight Yesterday and Here is that Practice

I can show you this part of me. This part that yearns. This part that yearns to be seen whole. The part that yearns to be love and be just as I am. These things are not mutually exclusive. They amplify each other.

I won’t ask you to love a part of me that I won’t. I can promise this. I won’t require you to extract my courage, but to witness it as an emergent property of my much bigger trust, not just in you, but in everything. In the creaminess of white beans made in the slow cooker and the coming blizzard. Those things are also shaped by so much more than I can see.

We all made those beans together–the whole system. The bird that shit in the soil to feed the beans that feed us. The microbes that coaxed the roots open to nourishment. The farmer who harvested. The truck driver that brought them to the store. The people that built the highway. The person that invented the machine that bagged them and the person who fixed it. The beans come through time and space into this crockpot. We are also this miraculous.

Under my deepest fear is my deepest yearning. My fear is protecting the yearning and keeping the thought in place: this yearning can’t be met. I can’t have it. I can’t hold it. The fear keeps everything my mind believes in place so I can keep being exactly as I am, justified in my fear, entrenched in this identity. When I think I have to win, when I’m afraid that love is scarce, please remind me, all of you.

How can we be better people, for ourselves, for each other and for the world? Is that not somewhere buried in our deepest yearning–that generosity? That intimacy?

We live in a culture that would have us feel separate and like we are competing in a game that has winners and losers and are we clearly indoctrinated into wanting to be on the better side, the “winning” side. That’s Game A. It means we need someone to lose and that won’t be us. No way. No matter what it takes, we’ll achieve those goals and reign triumphant, amirite?

But what if we knew that the only objective of the game was to keep playing? The ordinary joy of that. The love. That’s Game B. How can we shift our lens from Game A to Game B first with our most intimate thoughts? I don’t need my yearning to obtain something. I need to allow it to run free. To allow it to free me. I allow it to blow me open to the world and all that is emerging in it in this moment, right now, just as it is. Embedded in place, encountering people. There is no person, place, or thing that I can hold on to, including my own body. I can only cherish what’s here. I can also cherish the way it ripples out into all the other forces I can’t, from here, perceive. I receive them anyway. I meet them right here. I can make wind with my hands. I am that powerful.

I’m emerging alongside the weather, rather than grabbing and needing to turn the process of life itself into a series of object-anchors so I can remove myself from the intimacy of not-knowing. Can I love this person in front of me as he is? Can I love this aging skin I’m in as it is? Can I love this impending blizzard as it is?

This moment is where I am embedded and embodied. It’s where I belong. How welcoming and permeable can I be to all that is here, regardless of my preferences? Could I be of better use if I emerged like that, from that? Well, duh. Will I always do it? Of course not. You can’t keep playing the game if you keep trying to play it perfectly.  

How much of how we perceive the human condition comes from how we’ve internalized the myth of Game A? What if the human condition were much vaster and softer and more ecological? What if we didn’t privilege our consciousness over that of a bee? What if we de-centered ourselves and listened like whales to the space we’re in rather than the space where we used to be or the place we’d like to be, surrounded by the things we’d like to have?

Would that global intimacy be bearable? Would it be excruciatingly erotic? I find Thich Nhat Hanh’s sense of interbeing fundamentally erotic. Interpenetration is just what it sounds like: the ecology of erotic emergence. Every pore a portal. Every petal, ditto. Devouring and devoured. Can I let the world fuck me open like a peony? Can I be that intimate with everything? Can I welcome the world with that much generosity? Be that fearlessly fragrant?

Game A is embedded in me. I embody it every time I spin out into comparison, control and complaint. Every time I believe I have to take something in order to have it. Every time I believe there isn’t enough.

Every time the part of me that trusts emergence, has total confidence in emergence turns away from that fundamental truth and clenches in jealousy, insecurity, greed.

What’s the benefit of my practice? What’s the benefit of community? Noticing. Having people reflect for me the part of myself that I’m losing to Game A, in myself, in relationship, and as a systemic element in the broader ecology. To remember, as Ram Dass said, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

We all lose Game A. We are all actively losing in Game A. There is something so much more ordinary and miraculous emerging in each of us, for all of us. We can’t play our best until we notice every last Game A routine that we circulate and carry. We all have this option. We all have this responsibility.

Every complication is an invitation to deeper intimacy.

In our own bodies, the bodies we touch, and the whole big body of the world.

I’m clumsy AF and wholeheartedly committed. How about you?

If you’re interested in the F*ck Suffering practice group, DM me. We run the whole range, together.

How to be an Asshole

Assholes really get a bad rap. Calling an inconsiderate human an asshole is akin to calling a weak person a pussy. The negative connotations are out of keeping with the organ’s essential power. Agile sphincters sustain life. Assholes are very considerate.

Your asshole navigates brilliantly around your sense of inconvenience. It syncs up with social norms and meal times and aligns your metabolism with the particulars of life–barring any obvious metabolic overload, like poisoning.

What if you let your body’s wisdom guide all of your actions like this, if you allowed your whole body to run your psychospiritual metabolism much in the same way your asshole is a portal for your physical metabolism?

Noticing when the “yes, now” emerges in your body before you take action can be a knowing as deep and clear as when it’s time to poop.

When the action is complete, that is also clear. Your asshole knows. Your asshole lets you know. You are your asshole and it is not you. It knows how to stay out of its own way. That’s its whole purpose. To allow everything to move through without obstruction. How are you doing with that?

You can trust your asshole. You’ve been doing it your whole life, with minimal thought. Thought just interferes. You can also trust life. The preferential mind largely interferes here, too.

Once your mind’s preferences and old patterns are heard for what they are–historical noise, or a little recreational future-fucking–you trade what you wish to be or what used to be for what actually is. Just stay with the moment it takes for this one essential action.

Let go of the big picture, for just this moment, and honor the physical finale of nourishment. Do you really need distraction, even on the throne? How does it feel to let that go and just allow this one simple action? Can you open to the moment long enough to honor the mastery of your asshole?

It’s a deep skill to know when to open and when to close. A fit psychospiritual sphincter is one of the finer fruits of practice.

Sometimes when you are in relationship with someone (yourself?) whose primary impulse is to close when feeling anything, a person with painful psychospiritual constipation and bloating, you might think that if you try to open more–if you force yourself to open wider and refuse to close–they will see this and receive you with a similar aperture. I like where you’re going with that, but forcing isn’t allowing. You’ll probably tear something, hurt yourself. This is at the core of much anxious attachment–this relentless, unreceived opening.

Opening to surrender is not collapse. I think this bears repeating, as I’ve often said that opening when you want to close invites intimacy. Opening to surrender is not collapse. Don’t land like a soft turd in someone’s lap and expect them to sculpt something.

There is an important nuance between opening when you (little you, full of preferences) want to close (out of pattern, habit, old story) and when Big Surrendered You understands it’s time to step back behind a boundary. Not to hide, but to reconfigure your skin. If you continue to hold yourself open where there is no one to receive you, you invite collapse. You make a mess. Can you feel in your body how to close without clenching? This is the kind of thing your asshole knows. This is the pinnacle of asshole wisdom.

A good psychospiritual sphincter is a prerequisite for freedom. We need our collective assholes to be fully elastic. Each of our sphincters are so skillful at knowing when to open and when to close that we only notice them when their wisdom is inconvenient, when we prefer something else–different timing, different place. You can try to force things, but at the end of the day, we’re all on asshole time. This is great, because they’re always making room for what is, right here, right now. All your shit. They don’t even blame you putting it there. They understand that able metabolization is the fruit of practice.

There is so much to learn from assholes.

How to Open When You Want to Close

To open when you want to close is to let things your mind makes hard rest softly in your body. Your body opens when it’s time to open.

You dilate, and if your mind impedes this sweet effacing, you cramp. You harden around a point in space and time the way muscles cling to a stabbing blade. This is how trauma embeds in the body. It takes more conscious effort to pull it out than it took to put it in.

When you soften, fewer things land like a stab—they have a chance to land like a poke in the belly of the Pillsbury dough boy.

To open when you want to close is to crawl into the lap of the world like a grandmother and breathe with all beings through her. The pace and scent of your breath are your signature. You are signing up for the work that is yours to do. What is the thing that no one can do quite like you can? What summons you at 3:33 in the morning? Do you remember? That’s way more helpful than thinking you know.

To open when you want to close, love people as they are, including you. You can’t know compassion until you surrender control. A crow doesn’t do what a fern does. There is no surer poison than comparison. Metabolize it. Find the medicine there. To open when you want to close, listen like whale, with your whole skin enveloped in home. Receive each subtle homing signal with every open pore. Feel who is beside you, humming even in silence.

To open when you want to close: soften, soften, soften.

Boundaries

Setting and holding boundaries is the most essential form of self-care.

“No, thank you,” and “I’m not available for that,” Are great boundary-setting phrases for low stakes, baby step scenarios. Practice saying them out loud until they fall out of your mouth effortlessly. Now sing them. Doesn’t that feel good? Do it again, so everyone can hear you.

Boundaries are not for controlling anyone else’s behavior. Boundaries are for letting someone else know the parameters of your skin and that they will not be allowed to get under it. Boundaries aren’t walls, they’re a statement of skin. You don’t confuse skin and walls irl, do you? Only one of them is rather nice to bang your head against.

We are all interdependent and reliant on connection. People pleasing and other forms of seeking external validation are not connection, though that mistake is common as greed.

Boundaries beget belonging.

Does that sound counterintuitive?  

They enable us to approach all manner of situations with fearless intimacy, because we trust ourselves. Your ability to set boundaries is your ability to have your own back. To not abandon yourself. You’re not waiting to be rescued. You understand that safety’s overrated anyway. You are willing to be fully alive.

Once you consent to that risky business you realize that you’ve been part of the whole wide world all along. You open to the breeze on your skin. You taste the mushroom. You make like a blade of grass, inseparable.

Boundaries are your emotional immune system. They protect you from foreign bodies that would invade your system, deplete vitality, and make you ill.

Boundaries are your interface with the world, not your interference with it. Fence your field well, keep the fucking litterbugs out, and lovelier people will appear at the gate. That sounds magical because it is.

Boundaries aren’t just given by us, they also need to be received by us. Part of boundary mastery is taking in and respecting someone else’s “no”. This can be especially tricky for people who like to rescue—they are sure they know better. Saying no can feel threatening, bringing up all manner of fears around confrontation.

What if they don’t like you anymore?

What if they think you’re a terrible selfish asshole?

If you need someone to tell you you’re a good person, they’ll manipulate you for as long as you let them.

Be prepared for loss. The upside is that it won’t be a loss of self. There is no greater pain over time than the pain of self-abandonment. However, when you start setting and holding boundaries, you will probably lose people. You will see who was only interested in your yes. It can still be hard to lose them. There will be grief that will have to be met with a soft front and a strong back. Let grief do it’s dissolutions until there is nothing left of you but human being.

Some people will just need to step back and squint so they can see you fresh, get a good look at where you’re standing now. Some people will walk away and find themselves a new supply of validation. Some people will keep violating until they feel consequences. Some people will be so happy for you, that they will relish your ‘no’ as they have been loving you and waiting for you to stand up straight for years now.

If you’re offering love where it can’t or won’t be received, keep taking steps backwards until you are where love can be received. You might find yourself in a stand of birches. Just be there.

Boundaries have no force in them at all and they hold a lot of power. If you go to set a boundary with someone and you feel resentment, pity, anger, contempt, or even glee or any other high energy state, you’re not in a place to set a boundary. Boundaries are best communicated from a grounded place of clarity and connection. De-escalate your charged state through the body using a much longer exhale than inhale for as long as needed so you can state your boundary cleanly while staying calm and connected.

You know what’s hard? Holding boundaries with your own preferential thoughts and habits. It takes a lot of skill to set and hold boundaries between your Big Essential Self and your little egoic self and be responsible for enforcing and accepting those consequences.

How do you notice a boundary violation (usually a preference—“BUT I WANNA!”) from your little egoic self against the truth of your Big Essential Sefl?

The body discerns the difference.

Always go back to the body.

A habitual trauma response will pass and shift as you welcome and stay present with it. After all, it’s not happening now. It’s an energetic relic.

A summoning by your life force will persist.

If you have a tendency to self-abandon, there might be flushes of anger as you start to set boundaries. You will begin to see how much of your life you have squandered trying to be “good” and appease people so they will tell you you are “good”.

If you have a tendency to self-abandon, find where you like it. Be brutally honest with yourself about the charge you get. Do you get a thrill in being relieved of responsibility for yourself?

Is it a bit of a self-annihilating kink for you?

Does being held down in your own shadow feel like release?

Are you more habituated to this thrill than holding a boundary?

This work is not all love and light. That’s a pretty good baseline, but first we have jungle to excavate. There’s untold treasure there. The treasure you were born with.