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.

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.

After I Was Raped

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I was severed from my body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh-oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were supposed to protect me.”

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

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

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

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

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

Portals of Potent Surprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When do you move and when do you wait?

What does life say about it?

Does the floor need to be swept?

Do the plants need to be watered?

Does the dog need to be fed?

Is the light calling you outside?

Are you listening with your skin to every nuance?

If not, what’s muffling the call?

What’s muting your response?

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

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

Stand at this point of space and time wholeheartedly.

Let every shadow pass from your heart.

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

Everything is fresh and new.

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

Holding a Boundary Through Loss

Breakup suffering came from:

1. Wanting my partner to be different.

2. Fear of loss

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

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

5. The visceral loss of one body to another.

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

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

The grief happened when the loss became clear.

The suffering happened when I wanted it to be different.

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

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

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

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

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

What am I willing to know?

How much am I willing to suffer for this preference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this situation incongruent with that knowing?

Is this situation repeatedly incongruent with that knowing?

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

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

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

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

Belonging is Our Birthright

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s part of Daniel’s message:

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

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

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

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

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

–Daniel LA, CA

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

Blame, Boundaries, and Belonging

When I blame someone, I get curious:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not such a great option.

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

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

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

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

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

Truth and Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what are they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to be an Asshole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is so much to learn from assholes.

How to Open When You Want to Close

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.