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.

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 the F*ck Suffering practice group, DM me. We run the whole range, together.

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.

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.

Playing with the Four Noble Truths

Do you know the four noble truths? Or as Stephen Batchelor very usefully translates them, the four great tasks? They really are an assignment. They’re seeds, not just some dusty old rules lying limp on an altar to be sniffed at like incense or ripe cheese.

Truth is just a theory if it’s not embodied. Worse yet, just dogma. Seeds have to be planted in living soil to reveal their essence. Like everything, the four noble truths are renewed by the ecology of erotic emergence.

Here are the four noble truths/great tasks:

The classic version:

1. The truth of suffering.
2. The truth of the causes of suffering.
3. The end of suffering.
4. The causes of the end of suffering.

A soft core version:

1. I have so many preferences!
2. MEET MY PREFERENCES! GIVE THEM TO ME! WHY WON’T THIS STUPID WORLD GIVE ME WHAT I WANT?!
3. Maybe my preferences aren’t useful.
4. I can welcome and metabolize this moment, just as it is, regardless of my preferences.

A hard core version:

1. The world is f*cked.
2. I am all alone, f*cking myself in a f*cked up world.
3. I don’t need this to be different.
4. I allow myself, embodied and un-self-centered, to be intimately f*cked open by the world.

The four noble truths examine the human condition and offer a balm. An activating balm. Like Tiger Balm, maybe. All schools of Buddhism slather this balm liberally—no matter how they spin off stylistically from here. This is the core. Yes, to be a human being involves suffering. If I metabolize it, it nourishes all beings and me. If I turn away, it amplifies. How loud a scream do I require?

To f*ck and be f*cked by suffering is to be fully alive. This includes not just tsunamis of grief, or my response to social and ecological cataclysm; but the ten thousand minor annoyances like the slow driver in front of me, or the boss that doesn’t appreciate just how much I really do, or the husband that doesn’t load the dishwasher the way I like, or the friend who doesn’t want to get vaccinated–any encounter that gives me a free pass to separate myself.

THEY are wrong.

I am right.

THAT IS THE CORRECT ORDER OF THE WORLD YES IT IS YOU ARE WRONG!

When I am no longer available for this childish behavior from myself, I am free. Free to be mature. A state of being we tend not to value. Which might explain a lot about why we consider these toddler antics normal.

But it feels so alive to feel that hot blaze of outrage running through my midline like a vivid imitation of eros itself!

I like it so much I want to feel it again because opening to eros means I would need a sense of play where there is currently a sense of righteousness and how can I maintain an identity that notices that identity itself is an adultish game of dress up?

I might have to just go put a tutu on for real and prance around the kitchen.

What if the neighbors see? Who am I when no one is telling me who I’m supposed to be including myself? Can’t I just keep embodying the four humiliating lies?

The four humiliating lies:

1. Everything I think is right.
2. People who don’t align with my rightness are wrong, even that dandelion. Get off my lawn, dandelion!
3. People who don’t believe what I believe are harmful and I should separate myself from them.
4. If I work harder, everything will be as I want it to be.

Do I have to keep reiterating this rejection of life? Can I be pulled instead? How’s my magnet?

Can I follow that homing signal that runs through my body even when it’s not aligned with my preferences or the story that I carry about who I am? Can I play with life and let it play with me? Can I meet it in the sandbox and feel the grit chafe my butt crack?

Can I touch the bark of one tree and notice what kind of tree it is and what that mutual intimacy feels like when we touch? Is that my responsibility too? Is that on my to-do list?

Can I trade childish for child-like? Can I trade certainty for innocence? Can I embody eros as innocence?

Eros is how I move with the world, not what I’m grabbing at along the way.

How can I maintain an erotic, playful state of being?

I regulate my nervous system.

Is my nervous system mine or am I enslaved by it? Do I have the skill to regulate myself and my reactions?

Belonging to my own body is the portal to noticing I belong to the world. There is a family in my gut. There is a consensus among all the causes and conditions that make you, all the beings of your body when your life force runs up your midline like a thunderbolt.

This is a no.

This is a yes.

If this is a maybe, it’s a no for now.

Life is too short to move from a maybe and long enough to wait for the yes.

If you don’t know, abide in uncertainty.

Radiate and bask there.

Play there.

Taking responsibility is a willingness to play with life rather than taking my ball and going home in a sulk.

When I’m responsible for cultivating innocence, the four noble truths can be clear as hopscotch, chalked out and played anywhere. Like hopscotch, the four noble truths are an old form, passed down through generations, meant to be joyfully embodied.

Play is essential in erotic engagement. Eros dissolves separation. When I trust in belonging, I’m free to keep playing. If I’m in my head and not in my body, I’ll miss it.

Balance is Bullshit

By the time you’re feeling in balance, you’re already ripening into something else. Like the tempered bullshit I spread out all over my garden, both balance and bullshit are always already giving way to new growth.

Balance is of the moment. When it arrives, I love it. When it departs, I love it.

Balance emerges from the reversals, like you.

My capacity to welcome and metabolize whatever comes, to absorb what nourishes and shit out the rest, is my lifetime practice.

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.

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.

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?

No Grabbing

My practice has shifted far away from the NorCal days of, “I’m pretty sure that’s not your spirit on my chin, can you grab me a tissue? Oh no, totally, I’ve been fully illuminated by your wand of light, thanks!”

I’ve been practicing celibacy this year. Why? I wanted to be responsible for my heart. I noticed I’d been handing it off like a relay baton. “Will you please hold this sloppy thing? It’s making a fucking mess.”

I didn’t expect my year of celibacy to be the most erotic of my life.

Taking the craving for another person off the table, I’ve been able to move into deeper intimacy with the world itself. Opening more to shared breath, shared space. Who is in the popcorn aisle in the supermarket? Oh, hi. We are in an intimate relationship. I mean, I don’t say that. That would be creepy. I just quietly open to the resonance.

I can’t help but notice the intimacy of breathing in and breathing out and be lit by the quick tilt of presence and impermanence. There’s already someone else in the popcorn aisle. It’s only ever just like that.

Once I commit to being wider, deeper, softer–more permeable to the daily string of tiny intimacies–I open to a fundamentally erotic orientation with life itself. I’m alive with the interpenetration of all that is.

Coalesce.

Deliquesce.

Repeat.

I experience people differently.

There is a reliable tenderness.

There is a reliable resonance, as if each person were secretly humming and as I enter their field we meet in a chord.

This is totally possible in the popcorn aisle.

It feels very nice.

I highly recommend it.

Then what is there to crave with all this intimacy all the time?

Lol. I’m a person. The soft animal gets hungry.

Like what do you do if you encounter a tone that feels so resonant for some unexplainable reason you think your heart will quite possibly explode like actual popcorn? How do you not crave that? Or run from it? Is there a middle way?

Oh, good question.

Follow up question:

CAN I BE SO WIDE AND SOFT AND STABLE THAT I CAN DISCERN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOLLOWING RESONANCE AND CRAVING?

That’s a REALLY good question.

Following resonance is tough sell, I know. it’s the making love to craving’s fuck.

It takes time and attention. It emerges from presence. It requires mind, heart, pussy to all be on board and in line.

That’s quite a bit of wrangling. There’s more ease in softening.

Following resonance means no grabbing for anything outside myself. When I want to grab, I ground. Like just sit right the fuck down on the actual ground. Not in the supermarket. Later.

This does not, it should be said, make me want to stop grabbing. It just puts my grubby hands in my own damn lap for a minute, so I can notice their twitch. It keeps me still so that I can’t inflict my grabby crave on unsuspecting bystanders. It reminds me that my impulses are my responsibility to metabolize.

I love the twitch. I’m alive. The twitch reminds me. I can let it leave my hands like baby bird. I’m still here.

The thing about following resonance over grabbing is, it requires absolute trust. If it’s resonance, it’s resonance. If it’s grabbing, it’s fiction.

The only way to know is with an open hand.

Boundaries and Belonging

If separation is a lie, what is skin for?

The permeability of my skin shows me that I’m specific but not separate from the ecology I’m emerging from. I’m part of everything around me, the human and more-than-human.

Boundaries allow me to drop down fully into my skin so that I can notice the space I inhabit beyond my skin. I can notice the radiant heat of my skin going out beyond me like a scent. Never lost, always moving, I leave traces.

Do those traces pollute or clarify?

I’m responsible for noticing this.

Who I am is always emerging, not solid. What remains through the emergence is a note that is sung in multiple songs over time. A note I came into the world with. A hum under my skin. A clear essence that is distinctly mine. Not special, but needed.

Boundaries let me keep that note clear. Boundaries acknowledge my conditioned identity and land me back into my essence. I can feel the tone change when I clench. When I’ve gone out of tune, I know I’ve stepped off the path.

When do I clench? Usually when I’m trying to push myself into a sense of belonging. To attach myself to people or situations despite a lack of resonance. To wedge myself in where I don’t belong.

What’s mine never needs to be forced. When there’s resonance, there’s ease. The song is simply sung. Things flow. Boundaries are needed when ease stops. Boundaries perpetuate ease.

When a push is coming from me rather than through me (this nuance is in the body, not the mind) I know it’s time to pause and pivot.

When my nervous system is beyond capacity, I pause. I can’t set a boundary if I’m spinning out in my head. I can’t set a boundary with a dysregulated nervous system.

I can’t state my skin when I’m not in it.

Boundaries bring me back to my body, the instrument that emits the tone. Where I attune from. When I am unboundaried and in fear or anxiety or people-pleasing or some other form of self-abandonment, I go flat or sharp. I’m in depression or anxiety, if you like the psychological model–but if I chant those diagnostic words long enough, loud enough, I no longer hear the native hum of me.

Those labels keep me separate, broken. Believing there’s something wrong with me that requires eternal, external fixing. There’s nothing to fix. There has never been anything to fix, not even the past.

I give primacy to a spiritual, rather than a psychological, point of view. In that view, I have always been perfectly myself. When I go out of tune, it’s because I’m squandering my spark on things that are not mine. I’ve let my preferences push my note out of tune. I’m using my spark for brushfires when I could be using it for a hearth fire.

This is not pathology. I am being summoned to turn toward truth, despite my comfort and my preferences. Ease is not always comfort. Ease doesn’t stagnate.

When I go out of tune (and this is a felt sense, rather than a thought) it is a call to set a boundary within, around my preferences–and without, on those who would insist I keep attending to what’s not mine.

When I discover that what I wanted doesn’t belong with me it can be painful. That’s when self-compassion is so important. If I let self-compassion fill me, it will spill out. I can release with love. I can’t know compassion until I surrender control.

I can realize grief as an almost unbearably potent expression of love. When our hearts are open, they’re woven together in belonging. When we clench, we cut the threads. Grief is inherently wide and soft. It becomes hard when we resist it.

Only when I allow my own shadow to lie across my lap, can I look it in the eye. Poison can be medicine when I temper the dose. Medicine can be poison when I don’t. When I can trust myself to set and hold boundaries, it’s easier to regulate my nervous system. It’s easier to see that everything is medicine.

How can we know when to hold a boundary when we’re conditioned to mistrust ease? When we’re taught that pushing through to exhaustion and beyond is a virtue? What would happen if when we fell out of ease, we set a boundary?

What if we said:

“I have to pause here.”

“I’m not available for that.”

“This doesn’t feel good to me.”

“I need some time and space to listen for what the next right step is.”

“No thank you.”

Would this require us to dissolve bonds? To change jobs? To dance more? To open our throats and sing our note, even when it chokes out as a sob? Would that be unbearable? Or would abandoning our essence be more unbearable?

When I pause, I can titrate. I taste a little of what knocks me off the path and metabolize it before I can know whether I need to taste it again. I take the space to notice if this is my reaction coming from an old story or fear or if what’s presenting itself is just not mine. I can ask myself in the pause, “Is this my old stuff or is it the truth of this situation?”

Boundaries let me see that I have everything I need, even when I can’t seem to get what I want. When I’m surrounded by what belongs with me, there’s ease. There’s clarity. There’s ordinary joy everywhere I look. I’m exactly where I belong. This keeps me open and boundless in my capacity to receive. It keeps me generous with myself and others.

Boundaries deepen embodiment. When I’m at home in my skin, I can really listen. I lose the whirr of my identity turbine and realize how perpetual its background dissonance is. I can hear the harmonies of entangled life and witness them with delight.

When I know how to set boundaries, I also learn how to let them go. I gain the skill to adjust the transparency of the veil between myself and the ecology I am always emerging from. I trust that what’s mine will hear my note in all its native clarity.

I move through life as life moves through me.

Boundaries lead to belonging, belonging leads to boundlessness and again and again and again.