Erotic Ladies of an Uncertain Age

What is a “Karen” but a woman who’s stopped touching her p*ssy? A woman whose stagnant eros erupts as rage?

Cut the thinning hair, cover the jiggly arms, and for God’s sake leave that pussy alone. It’s no longer fully alive, like you! Shame on you for subjecting us to your wrinkly face, soft belly, and arm waddles. Nobody wants to see that. You’re embarrassing yourself. Let him close his eyes the whole time he makes love to you, it’s only fair. Embodying eros in midlife form just isn’t appropriate. What are you–French? Don’t wear that thing that makes you feel like you’re at a party where people might skate. You look like a bag lady who lost her cart. Stake no claim in eros though your heart still beats, your lungs still breathe and your pussy still throbs. Doesn’t it?

Those are the kind of thoughts that birth a “Karen”, purveyor of dry brushfire. Does it come from the culture? Sure. But we decide how intimately we collude with that narrative, how wide it manspreads in our minds.

We can learn to hold boundaries within our own minds. Those are ninja-level boundaries and not without risk. No thank you, culture, I’m not interested in that story. Will we get pushback? Sure. And we can take that bullshit as nourishment like a peony does. So much is optional. Not death tho. That’s the real bit here. That’s what this whole thing is about, underneath. Trying death on. Who wore it best? Can you dance in it? Can you sit? Can you breathe? I like this midlife cut, it has stretch in it.

I’ve been leaning into the phrase “middle-aged lady” lately. I am also “of a certain age”, which is certainly 48. I’ve noticed people go out of their way to avoid being a “middle-aged lady”. Why? The middle way is a great path to walk. In the middle of those twin portals–birth and death–is ripe treasure that I’m not about to squander. I live in the middle of a lit paradoxical field. I have my full permission to be a middle-aged lady, exactly as I am.

I haven’t welcomed menopause yet (Shatavari!). From what I’ve heard, it has a way of clearing the field. I hope my hot flashes will bring with them a blaze that cleanses the stagnant bits of maiden left in me. Behold the crone and her earth magic. Womb writ new in full emptiness.

How much of middle aged lady misery comes from clinging to the maiden bits because there is no valued new identity culturally available? I mean, clinging to any identity just brings suffering, but still…

How do we meet that absence? By craving the facial paralysis of Botox? Does it really muffle the whisper of skull? I can’t think of a more literal refusal or our full expression. I love the lines that reach from my eyes all the way down to the middle of my cheeks when I’m really happy. No harm no foul if you’re into it. I think our bodies should express our essence just as we see fit.

But in our culture it’s go maiden or go home. Be young or stfu.

So how to live that crone life lit?

I find the first sticky bit is needing to be an object of desire. What if desire requires no object? What if we allow desire to just be the force of nature it is?

Can I just feel the wind in my hair, or do I need someone to notice me feeling the wind in my hair and put me in their spank bank for later to recognize eros in all that sensation?

When we’re tangled in the effort of pushing, pulling, and putting our desire on something or somewhere, we lose our own voice and the luminous perfection of an eggshell. They are not separate. Delight in both of those things flows with ease from embodied awareness. When we’re performing instead of experiencing eros, we lose touch with ordinary joy.

When I let go of being an object of desire and allow desire itself to penetrate me freely, I am restored to radiance. I am it and it is me, like moon and moonlight. I see the erotic perfection in an eggshell is not separate from the perfection of my pussy. Life force energy coalesced into perfect form. Each is necessary, just as it is. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be here.

My erotic life and my sexual life are related though not the same. They feed each other. Sexual confidence in middle age goes against so much conditioning. I don’t dismiss that, I notice it until it scampers off. I let it draw me deeper into the miracle of my body. Deeper into the mystery of sharing my body with another. The smells, the aches, the new softness of all of it. I could bemoan not “keeping it tight”, or I could revel in my suppleness. I think it’s pretty clear which one leads to orgasm, though that’s not the goal. There is no goal. There is no winning, just more playing.

Just this, just now. Just a middle aged white lady, being the be: wild heart, wet pussy, wind in hair.

You have your permission.

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.

Where Do You Belong?

Right where you are. Don’t feel it yet? Drop deeper out of your head and into your feet. What do you smell? That’s in you now, just by smelling it. Every spore in your every pore. You belong to it. We belong to each other.

I’m often struck by how often people feel like they don’t belong and how this story that people tell themselves really cuts them a lot of nasty slack around how they treat themselves and others.

To feel like I don’t belong means turning away from life and then blaming life itself, the world, my parents, the tree that covered my car in pollen again and, how about Russia too–for how terrible I feel. This becomes most poisonous when that separateness becomes specialness. If you saw what I saw…If you went through what I went through…You have no idea…

We spend so much of our lives protecting, rather than metabolizing, our wounds. We build identity like walls around the holes inside us so we don’t fall in. The fortress of victimhood is not a safe place, it just has thick walls. It’s good to build some doors in there. It sucks to have to scale those walls every time we need food. Fortunately, no matter the builder, the fortress of victimhood is not a closed system.

As long as I’m alive, I belong.

I’m embodied in the dynamic stability of where I am right now, whether I like it or not.

I’m impacted and impacting.

The less responsibility I take for this relationship to all my relations, the more I suffer. The more I suffer, the more I want to put it out of me and throw it at someone “out there”. This means I’m only living from a portion of myself, the rest I am deliberately throwing away, hoping someone will love the parts of me that I can’t. Without those parts I lose structural integrity. This brings not connection, but collapse.

Eventually, people grew weary of being pelted with my orphaned shards. I lost so many people in my life behaving this way (and with such self-righteousness!). Did rough things happen? They sure did. Did I believe that was all that could happen? I sure did. I made sure that what happened aligned with my story of what could happen. Until I didn’t.

Individual relationships can be fragile, but the field of belonging is robust. When I refuse my own integrity, when I keep slinging orphaned shards, I have trouble with boundaries, with nervous system regulation, with intimacy. I am out of my own skin and from that dislocated place I have limited access to my life force. It leaks out all over the place, making a mess. I squander the resources given me to do what I’m here to do. I become paralyzed in my expression, holding back, playing small, living scarce. I am robbing the whole ecosystem of the part I am here to play in it. I am lost to myself and the world is absent me. The ripples of those losses add up quick.

Every noticed breath regains.

Just to breathe is to be in relationship. It’s easy to see that the ground is teeming with life, but so is the air. We have such trouble not believing what we won’t see. We create such trouble not believing what we won’t see. We have an impact with the generosity and consumption of our every breath. One less spore hits the ground, one more whiff of carbon dioxide for that maple leaf. We belong to the whole system and remain specific af.

Our specificity is discovered in relationship. We learn who we are and what is ours to do. Through all our relations we learn how we are the same and how we are different. By metabolizing this friction and allowing it to shape us, we fit perfectly. We begin to see our assignment clearly. Our place in the garden. I learn what kind of flower I am and bloom like that. I don’t need a purpose or goals any more than a peony does. I am just this human. A peony is just a peony. I do what is mine to do as only I can. I nap when needed. I am not lazy. I am at ease. Big difference.

I hope it’s clear how simple this is, and how essential it is to first come out from behind the fortress walls and build a healthy compost pile with every rotting thing so that vital nourishment may be restored. Blame goes into the compost. Resentment goes into the compost. Boundaries emerge easy as heat does out of all that deep and mundane alchemy. The difference between what is dead and what is alive becomes clear. What is dead serves new life. Happy Easter.

Exiting the fortress on your own two miraculous feet is always an option. If you would like support in doing this, DM me. There is a half-day Boundaries and Belonging session next Saturday and new F*ck Suffering Group starting next Tuesday. They’re not free but you can be.

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.

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.

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.

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 a 1:1 session, email hi@reihance.com. 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.

Safety Kills Intimacy

I asked the question last week, “Do you want safety or intimacy?” Most of you wanted both. Good luck with that.

I think these notions are often confused, much to the diminishment of eros.

We starve for intimacy, even as we push it away in pursuit of safety.

The pursuit of safety is an attempt to make external circumstances “just so” for our comfort. Intimacy requires risk. All true things do, as they’re always changing. We crave the stillpoint, but as soon as it comes, it’s on its way to becoming something else.

A peony in full, glorious bloom soon drops its first petal and begins another cycle of renewal. The peony doesn’t clench and cling. It would only limit the renewal already begun again at the point of ripeness. We tend not to respect this cycle in our relationships. We bring the capitalist ideas of limitless growth and consumption to our most intimate spaces.

We reject the ecology of erotic emergence, but it hasn’t gone anywhere–we ourselves have turned away from it. We ourselves have brought about our own starvation. We only have to turn back toward the whole of ecology of which we are a part and welcome the full energetic range of life without arrogance or self-loathing.

When we realize our role as co-creator and bring self-compassion to every breath, trust and intimacy emerge naturally. So does joy.

Intimacy asks us, “How willing are you to be fully alive?” Turning away from this question, we instead ask people to validate us and demand they behave in all manner of ways to provide certainty, no matter the deadening. Pursuit of safety is asking the world and the beings in it to remain the same. I hope you can see the absurdity of this demand. The peony laughs, her petals scatter.

We demand to be kept from the edges of our fear, so our fear stays in place. When we pursue safety we are asking others to reiterate our fear. This leads to stagnation. Intimacy moves. Intimacy is fully alive. Intimacy trusts and so is fearless. Trust is our capacity to meet the world just as it is, whatever it is in any particular moment. We trust that since we’re still here, we’re held by life. We trust that whatever causes and conditions life is presenting now are ours to meet, intimately, in all their rich flux. The petals open, the petals drop. The fragrance persists.

Our capacity to trust brings stability. Stability is not coming from outside, it comes from within and welcomes the world. Trusting that you can metabolize whatever comes is the only true stability. Trust demonstrates our willingness to be fully alive. Ours. Each of us, together.

There is nothing for anyone else to prove to you about trust. Trust is yours to share, not to demand.This notion that someone must prove they can be trusted before we can open is really limiting. It’s also manipulative. It allows no space for that person to just be who they are. The “prove it” position asks for their every move to be devoted to establishing your comfort. You are asking them to open you, instead of you having the confidence to show up open and welcome the truth. The arms-crossed and tight-lipped “prove it” position doesn’t invite much, it only demands. Where is the bottom of the burden of proof? What would be enough for you? Who wants to take on that burden? Who wants to kiss that tight little mouth? We are received as we receive.

If we are skillful in setting boundaries with people who turn out not to be trustworthy, we don’t have to stop and clench in the “prove it!” position when relating to anything, be it a peony or a person. We can put our face right in and inhale deeply. To demand proof ahead of relationship is to thwart relating from the first instance. I see so much of this on dating apps and the way conversations move on those platforms. And then people blame the apps, like blaming a hammer for hitting your thumb. It’s not the tool, it’s the skill with which you use it.

In my experience, those who are keen to tell you they are trustworthy are those who most often aren’t. Sincerity permeates. It requires no adornment.

I don’t say any of this lightly. I say this as a veteran of two abusive relationships who had to do a lot of letting go of old stories in order to meet the present as it is, without historical overlay. For a long time I thought I had a fear of intimacy. What I actually had was a deep desire for intimacy and a terror of being hurt again. I had to move toward one and away from the other. I had to commit to that choice and take full responsibility for it.

I had to learn how to set boundaries, so I could live in trust and intimacy with all that is. Boundaries allow us to hold ourselves as mature adults rather than foisting off the things we don’t like about ourselves to another in a ragged game of hot potato. Only when I held those hot, sharp shards of me in my own warm hands, could I witness them and the stories they stepped out of, like the fictional characters they were. Once witnessed, they were free to go.

What shifted for me? I stopped asking people to hold the parts of myself that I couldn’t and wouldn’t love. I learned to be with the discomfort of holding them myself, of witnessing what I deemed unlovable about me, the parts of me that I devalued.

When we ask people to hold those parts of ourselves that we can’t and won’t, when we make this a prerequisite for trust, we kill intimacy. When we know how to set a clean, loving boundary, we are able to go deeper at a pace that honors our edges and keeps us growing past them. We are able to titrate our trauma and be witnessed as we do. When we practice boundaries and self-compassion, we invite those in relationship with us to do the same. This opens the field to deepest intimacy.

Safety is avoidance of risk. Intimacy is meeting risk with open arms. Trust is our stability in that flux, the liminal flux of not one, not two. There is always the risk of abandonment and the joy of union available when we are willing to come together and move apart, fearlessly.

Safety is knowing.

Intimacy is not-knowing.

Trust is your becoming.

The Care and Feeding of Anxiety

Care and feeding? Of anxiety?

But this feeling is terrible! I don’t want to care for it, I want to annihilate it. Make it stop.

My heart is pounding and I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin. Make. It. Stop.

Energy is blasting thru me like geyser erupting from forces I can’t see or understand! Is this anxiety? Or is it just surging? We surge to meet demand. Even Uber does this. Sometimes the rest of us doesn’t want to come along. Our vital life force energy is waking us up anyway. There is no need to hit snooze. There is a need to notice what’s being demanded.

Energy is fundamentally neutral. Anxiety is what we sometimes call an energetic surge, a turbo boost. It would be a response to danger, if there were danger, but these days it’s more a reaction to an old mental loop. “What fires together, wires together,” goes the old neuropsych saying.

How often do you wire a surge into an anxiety circuit?

The more we choose to adorn a surge with existential dread when no actual, physical danger exists, the more we get to call ourselves “anxious” and the more we allow the misfiring thoughts to wire into identity.

“There’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just an anxious person.”

What if you’re a high-energy person who just doesn’t want the full responsibility for what you’re capable of doing with all that vital force? I mean, that would be a pretty big responsibility, I can see why you’d resist it. As a species though, we kind of need you to paddle onto that wave and stand up. This takes practice. This takes failure. This requires you to let the thoughts be released from the surge.

You can’t outrun the energy you’ve been given. You can expand the capacity of your nervous system until you can receive whatever comes with ease. When we call it a surge, we can soften and expand. When we call it anxiety, we clench and restrict. It’s harder to feel victimized by a surge and a bit easier to feel invigorated by it.

When a surge comes to move you, move. Move toward what is yours to do. Welcome the uncertainty until the next right action becomes clear. Let yourself feel fully overwhelmed. “Overwhelming overwhelms overwhelming…” as Dogen wrote. Which is to say, allow yourself to be engulfed and taste what is engulfing you.

Give it time. Let that all that sensation permeate your stillness. Wait for what it feels like to truly be moved.

If you’re still here, life is holding you. I learned what anxiety was made of by having my existential dread scenarios actually come true. Grief and failure whittled me down. They revealed my true shape, hidden for so long in a block of wood. Everything that fueled my anxiety actually happened. And I was still here. What seemed like a full decade of catastrophes, freed me. There was actually nothing to be afraid of. Surrender really is the most powerful position.

Nothing revives anxiety for me as reliably as procrastination. My body and mind are primed to serve. I’m full of energy. Poised and potentiated for all I am required to do as my essential self in the world. But fuck, what would that mean? What would be required of me after this thing in front of me? Like, another thing? And another thing after that? Wouldn’t that soon be a pile of things? How would I do it all? What if people don’t like it? What if I am not pleasing? What if I am despised? What if I am abandoned? What if I die alone, smelled before I am missed? Does any of it even matter?

I mean, even if we destroy this world, it will rebalance, it’s really just us destroying ourselves. How we treat ourselves ripples out. How we tend our own bodies is how we tend the body of the world. It’s so easy to let one old loop expand into another until I am humming along, alone in my room, tipping over into paralysis, burying myself alive until I am good and dead inside, too numb to move. Anxiety thrives on this black comedy. I’m being devoured by my own self-abandonment. My own reluctance to be responsible for myself and my gifts. I’ve taken the energy given me for the next right action and squandered it. I’ve used it for self-immolation instead of self-compassion. I’ve brought this on myself. I mean, what can I do, I’m just an anxious person, right? How can I dig my way out of this grave grave grave? How can I use the energy given me to show up instead of leaking it all over the place in a squander wander?

I can learn to hold this energy by learning how to regulate my nervous system. I can learn to hold this energy by increasing my nervous system capacity with practice. I can learn to hold this energy by landing in my feet and breathing deep into my belly with very long exhales. By noticing how all that intense sensation is moving through my body without needing anything to be different. What is its texture, temperature, tone? By building my capacity to notice how much energy my system can handle before tipping over into the clench. By committing to expand that capacity. By committing to notice before I react. By noticing the thoughts that encourage the spiral to drill down deeper instead of trying to banish them. By understanding that what I wrestle with, I lend power to. By realizing that I can just let the surge be what it is without the adornment of existential dread.

I invite the surge to dance. As it breathes on my neck, I ask what it wants. The answer is, “Oh, you know.”

Me, all breathless: “Tell me again.”

The Surge: “To help you do your work, dummy. It’s only your resistance that makes it uncomfortable. If you dance with me, we shall delight. If you resist me, you think you’re dying. Because that is what you’re choosing. To deaden yourself against the motion of life. Move with me. Shake that ass. You’re not in charge here, I am. I am here to serve. I’m here to dance. Are you?”

Me: “I want to feel you inside me.”

The Surge: “That’s what I thought.”

Welcome the surge like a lover. I mean, so many underground forces had to gather in the dark for this geyser to erupt inside me. The surge will eventually run its course. It will come, it will go, it will come again. To pathologize the surge is to squander a gift. To welcome the surge and move with it is to open that gift, this present, and all of the potency it is so generously offers. Anxiety by any other name is here to propel you toward what is required. Why are you turning away?

Separation, Specialness, and Suffering–Oh My!

Your feeling of separation will be roughly equal to your feeling of specialness.

Your sense of suffering will be roughly equal to your sense of separation.

It will be easy to catastrophize the world’s disinterest in validating your specialness.

Craving external validation widens the separation between your life force and your life.

If you compound the feeling of separation with a lack of self-compassion—if you meet it with self-loathing—it drives the root deeper into your body.

You are not special.

You are not separate.

There’s nothing to fix.

Congratulations!

Separation is the source of suffering. Opening to intimate connection on all levels, from finger to fern, diminishes suffering. You are emerging from the eros of ecology. All the time. Hot, right? Moist, even. Why turn away? You know you at least want to watch.

If you disconnect, delusion echoes and amplifies in the chasm between your life and your life force. Severing from intimacy brings suffering—the more dependent you are on external validation and the more addicted you are to the power generated by your identity turbine, the farther apart your life and your life force become.

People-pleasing kills intimacy. No matter how busy you are at it. No matter how good you think you are from all the nice and pleasing things you do. You can’t outrun separation with busyness, goals, and manipulation (which is what people-pleasing is at its cold, dark heart).

The vital impulse to connect will catch you eventually and slow you down, reminding you that you can connect or die. You can call that depression, or you can see it as a summons to notice how intimately connected you already are.

Is it mental illness or is it a call to notice intimacy with your fellow humans and the more than human world that already always is? How does opening to all that intimacy feel in your body? How does it feel to turn and clench like a special, sullen brat?

All that juicy intimacy might not lead to productivity tho, you unrenewable human resource, so we’ll be happy to medicate that for you.

Why do I care about your capacity for intimacy? Because without it, none of us can reconnect to the eros of ecology and the ordinary joy that the ecology of erotic emergence so effortlessly brings.

Turning away from that connection is quite literally destroying our world. A sense that we have to “go to nature” assumes exile. This is a false view. You are nature. Not separate. You are it and it is you. It’s right in your belly, under the button. Ah, that old womb-tether. Remember? A whole universe of you and not-you in there.

Notice.

More cells within your skin are not human than are human. You’re never alone. Are you creeped out yet? You mind has to work overtime to convince you of separation. Notice the thoughts that pave that pitted road.

Separation is mind-made and separation can be mind un-made. Your brain is not separate from your mind, your mind is not separate from your body, and your body is not separate from the body of the world.

Your shitty relationship with your body, your loathing of your own skin ripples out. Get it together. We don’t have time for you to be squandering your life force on your puckered thighs.

Yeah.

They’re puckered.

You don’t have baby thighs.

That would be weird.

They would be too small to hold up your adult body.

Jiggle your jiggly bits like the grown-ass human you are. Rub them up against another human’s jiggly bits. That’s so much more fun than fretting over things that aren’t going to change in your preferred direction this lifetime.

Might as well ditch the preference because you need your adorably dimpled thighs to carry you toward compassionate action.

Stroke those thighs. Stroke that oracular p*ssy. Stroke that regal c*ck. Welcome yourself back into your body and the body of the world.

Hi.

Nice to see you.

It’s been awhile.

You’re just in time, hopefully.

The suffering you create is the suffering you endure and the suffering you continue to create and endure.

We don’t have anymore time to squander on that childish shit. Grow up. We need each other whole, adult, mature. I know, I know, mature is an insult in our consumptive culture. Capital idea, devouring the young and plump.

Who wants mature skin? You should really inject that giant shameful organ with botulism, amirite? Again, grow up. Mature lands right in that sweet spot between birth and death. Those potent twin portals! Mmmmmiddle age. Let that radiant paradox light you right the f*ck up. Go to the supermarket like that.

When we see ourselves and our relationships as nouns, roles we perform and the audience we perform them for, we stultify the ecosystem of relationship.

What is your greatest responsibility?

It’s not to store or hoard or claim a noun, but to embody the verbs between the nouns.

It’s not just your partner or your child that is your responsibility, but how you show up in that relationship. How you respond in mutual presence. How present and full you are capable of being. How generously and lovingly you are allowing yourself to emerge from that system. How willing you are to be shaped by that system instead of trying to control it. How deep and clear and self-replenishing your well is.

That is your biggest responsibility.

Tick the box. Kid. Check. Partner. Check. House. Check. Food. Check. Job. Check. Nouns are a solid matter. Verbs are dynamic and always in relationship. They report how we are moving with life. You can stash nouns in a storage unit. You have to be present for verbs.

You don’t need to find your place or purpose in this world. You are already in place and there is your purpose.

The first place to be is in your body. Everything ripples out from there. Far and wide. If you keep grabbing at something “out there” you’re only wandering farther and farther from home. Easy to get lost out there and there are definitely bears.

Emerging Weird

Hello, I’m new here.

I repeat myself a lot lately. I still can’t remember what I’ve said and what I’ve only thought. A year of solitude really showed me just how much my thoughts shape my reality, whether spoken like a spell or not. I could conjure all manner of states, alone in my room. I have developed an enthusiasm for the sound of my own voice which I should probably rein in a bit.

How about you?

What’s your new weirdness?

How’s your foal wobble showing up?

The upside of this messy rebirth is the freshness of even the most fleeting connection; my face in a wild rose, the new, expanded coffee shop around the corner, full of unmasked faces talking, sipping, smiling. So many radiant faces to bask in.

I’m delighted as a puppy who might pee on the floor. Every moment of eye contact runs through me like a thunderbolt. Some people seem put off by this. I’m emerging weird.

I’m meeting myself, as I’m reintroduced to society. I’ve found myself emerging in conjunction with a new relationship, so the newness feels even newer, and even more richly uncertain. I’m meeting him and myself at the same time. We are a little system, each of our selves an emergent property in the ecosystem of ‘together’. I am tender. I am sweet. I feel innocent in a way I don’t ever remember feeling. This is not who I was. She was lost to Covid.

After about 6 months of solo quarantine, running myself through the full human spectrum of feels over and over again, all by myself, I didn’t have it in me to believe my thoughts anymore. Every loop of thought felt like a solo show. The audience was no longer buying it.

When my Vito the Sweeto died last January and there was no touch, no hugs available in my grief, it finished me off.

Around the day Vito died, my sister conceived. This was every spiritual trope I’ve ever heard writ intimate. Birth and death were the same. They feed each other all the time. They nourished me too. What could I possibly still be afraid of?

In February, I went on a night hike in the forest and cried for hours into the biggest white birch I could find. All the losses of the year fell into her and tumbled down into her roots, rose up and out of her branches. I gave her all of it until our quiet winter pulses matched. It was the most intimate touch I’d had in 11 months. I was completely held.

When Vito died, lots of people said, “Stay busy.” Why do we suggest this to grieving people? It’s really the worst advice. I stayed busy like a caterpillar, melting. I kissed all my monsters right on their gooey mouths until they felt loved enough to leave.

I found my bones and found that what I put back on them was entirely optional.

What am I going to carry forward? Nothing but a sense of discovery. I was prepared to be surprised by myself, prepared to emerge from this moment rather than the last one or the next. Just this. Just as it is.

I had conversations with mushrooms. They were like, “Respect the dark, it’s what everything emerges from. Most of life happens where you can’t see. When was the last time you saw your own heart? But you know it’s there, amirite? Trust the dark like that. Don’t over think it.” It was good advice. Mushrooms are wise.

My sense of being an emergent property of the broader ecology rather than a separate self seems irreversible. I can’t sustain the illusion of separation and really, why would I bother? It’s the root of all suffering.

Lately, my foundational belief is Ram Dass’s, “We’re all just walking each other home.” There’s no space for arrogance in that and plenty for confidence. We walk with not just the human each other, but the more than human world. We are all in this together. Every bee, every peony and me. Family.

I can’t measure what the peonies have taught me. They are unabashedly, fragrantly and floridly themselves. They can’t show up otherwise. From the first red shoots that pop from the empty garden in early spring, they grow relentlessly, intimately summoning the ants they need to crawl all over their fat buds in order to open. Then they blossom and get real sloppy. The herbaceous varieties can barely keep their heads up. I have to provide a metal exoskeleton for them of they’ll flop right over into the dirt. They are more than they can handle. Cut some away and they right themselves. They are generous. They are too much and just right. They are definitely my kin.

Now rest. Now sprout. Now leaf. Now bud. Now blossom. Now shed. Now replenish. Now rest. Do this next. Just this. This is how you emerge. Okay. I can do that. Thanks, peonies. The next right thing is always clear, even as the why is uncertain.

When I paddle out, the ocean looks like a circle. The ocean is not really a circle. I trust this without proof. I’ve only ever really seen the whole ocean on a map. I will never see all of it at once. It reveals itself with each stroke, each felt bob of my little plastic boat.

Hello, I’m new here.

I just keep showing up, wet-winged and enthusiastic. Can I stay in beginner’s mind and not try to establish a self again? Can I tolerate innocence? I don’t know. I don’t need to. It’s way easier to love not-knowing, even when it’s uncomfortable, than to flail about grabbing at straws. I’m developing a real kinky love of discomfort. It’s most erotic.

Which is to say, I’m just going to keep emerging weird. You?

How To Be Too Much

“I’m too much,” is an old story I told myself about myself. Feeling like “too much” was the paradoxical companion of feeling like I was not enough.  A paradox is not a problem. It’s a potent field with lots to notice. Ricocheting between the poles of too much and not enough, trying and failing to control myself, convinced of my brokenness, I felt there was plenty to hide.

Here, look at this sparkler!

“Too much” is distraction and defense. You won’t be able to see me if I’m swinging a sparkler around and that was just the way I wanted it. I found myself leaking energy all over the place, eager to find someone, anyone, everyone other than myself to hold what I could not.

Nothing sincere is ever too much, no matter the vivid volume. But when the ego is so busy trying to please, save, seduce, blame, and otherwise manipulate some food into its belly, it’s hard for sincerity to break through the sludge.

Confidence arises from the ability to fearlessly face the ego’s neediness, even when it feels unbearable.  The love my ego grabs at outside of me, is already in me. Not until I notice that I’m already full can I sincerely share. If I believe something’s missing, I’m constantly grabbing at anything I can to fill that hole. That’s addiction and it’s not just for addicts.

If I can BE the hole, just abide in emptiness, I fill like a self-replenishing well.

Does that sound mysterious or just uncomfortable? I find it easier when I approach the hole with spacious awareness, then I get a real good sense of how it fills. I come to trust this.

Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum, she embraces it. Emptiness, when we notice it, is as elusive as balance. There but for a moment before ripening into something else. Which means I don’t have to force-feed myself or anyone else. The grab and clench is insatiable, because what I would fill is already squeezed shut by the grabbing and the clenching. This is how to become a hungry ghost. Always too much and never enough. The hungry ghost can get no nourishment.

I went from having shame around being “too much” to wearing it as a badge of honor: “You better fucking believe I’m too much, and here’s some more!” But if I really want to connect, expressing myself that way is insincere.  I had to learn to be right-sized and tempered by self-compassion, which will spill out all over the place if you let it. That’s a generous sort of spill. Very different from the self-centered mess of leaking.

There’s value in having the skill to modulate my expression, to wield my energy with agility so I can be responsive and better received. If my full expression just shuts people down, what am I really in service to? Not connection. And if I’m not really connecting, I’m not in service to anything at all.

Being responsible means learning how to hold anything and everything that comes through me. Not hold it in, clenching; but hold it steady, soft. Let everything I am becoming rest within my skin, expanding it, allowing it grow more permeable.

Being responsible is not asking anyone else to hold what I won’t. I don’t throw parts of myself that I can’t or won’t love at other people like a ragged hot potato. Anymore. I used to do that a lot. “Here, hold this thing I think is shitty about myself and prove to me that it’s not. You’re my lover/partner/friend/family. Validate me! That’s your job!”

No, it’s not. It’s no one’s job to validate you. Witness you? Sure. Validate you? No. And if they did? Then what? Like an insatiable hungry ghost, you’d just be back for more tomorrow. No one can transmit confidence to you. No one can transmit self-compassion to you. No one can rescue you. No one can oppress you. The only thing anyone can do is witness you noticing where you are blocking what is already there and point out some clogs you’ve missed. You find compassion in yourself, for yourself, and let it spill. Not until you open enough to give it can you really begin to receive it from anyone else.

When you allow self-compassion your life force starts to flow unabated again and you can see that you are a ridiculous, flawed, and sovereign human. Responsible. Powerful. Loving. Free. There’s never been too much of that, but here’s hoping.