Zed and Amy take note of December’s Winter Solstice and describe why Body Trust is taking the month off. Our shortest podcast ever (00:02:12)!
See you in January. 🙂
Music: Grateful to Little Dog Big Ears for their Creative Commons licensed music She Sees Mice (intro and outro). Make sure to subscribe in iTunes or Sticher. And give us a 5-star review in iTunes, it helps us reach more beloved explorers.
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Pause.
Alex, Amy, Lizz, and I were retreating this past weekend, reflecting on 2017 and planning 2018, and also looking at our larger strategy and trajectory of where we’re going. (That last part is mostly guided by Amy.)
Here’s some of what’s coming up:
Portals of Pleasure
You’ve already heard that Portals of Pleasure will happen July 18-22 at the Bodhi in Albuquerque — it’s our TENTH YEAR of meeting together (including the Pulse history). Who knows what we’ll do in celebration! Registration will open in early 2018 — meanwhile, save the date.
Meditations in January
We are starting up morning meditations in January — twice a week, Monday and Thursday, at 7am PT / 10am ET on Zoom. Here’s the Facebook event with more information — come join the Facebook group to keep track of it.
Call for Collaborators
In 2018, we will be producing Portals of Pleasure, but we don’t have any other workshops on the books yet … But not because we don’t want to! We just need some folks who will help us with finding a space and gathering attendants and being in juicy conversations with us about how to gather the circle. Is this you? Let us know if you’re interested and we’ll talk more about the details.
Bye! We’re taking a December break
It’s been a pleasure to work and play with you all, and to circle up so many of you beloveds in many different ways this past year. We’re officially taking a break from all Body Trusting in December. The winter solstice is time to pause, time to take stock, time to bring it all into our beings and let it settle before the emergence begins again in the new year.
Talk to you in January!
Love,
Zed, Lizz, Alex, and Amy
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What defines your limits?
Sometimes I need to find some relief from the onslaught of news
Part of resilience and self-care is knowing when I’ve had enough, when my system needs some “down regulation” as Lizz likes to say, and when it is necessary to intentionally search for something positive. When those moments come I sometimes turn to Positive.News.
That’s where I found this article about folks defying the limits of age. Whether the dancer who began his career at 79 or the man who began primary school at age 84, I am inspired by them. It’s not so much because they are defying society’s stereotypes but because they are defying any internalized ones. They’ve had the courage to lay claim to their desires, even if they seem crazy, and go after them, knowing they are unlikely to become ‘superstars.’ They have been willing to find the outer limits of their aliveness, even as that edge of potential shrinks with age. They have found resilience in the push/pull between possibility and death.
What are you longing for? What’s the thing you’ve always meant to do? Now’s the time!
— Amy
source: Helen Cathcart/Bolder
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What catches your eye today?
What catches your eye today?
That was the game I played as I walked outside between sessions.
For the next few months there will be filtered light with long shadows during the daytime. Usually the rain will stop and offer clouded gray or sometimes sunlight bursts. The light on this drizzly day offered brilliant colors and moist surprises.
There is a beauty conversation taking place between my visual receptors and my heart.
I am thankful for that.
— Alex
Amy talks with writer, performer, and educator Jen Cross about her new book and how writing is an embodied practice available to all of us, not just to heal trauma but also to celebrate our passions.
Find out more about Jen here: http://writingourselveswhole.org
Jen’s recently published book is Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma
If you are in San Francisco, come to the book’s launch party on December 5, 2017 in San Francisco (more info here)
Other resources mentioned:
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
Pat Califia, Macho Sluts and other books
Dorothy Alison, Bastard Out of Carolina and other books
Pat Schneider, Amherst Writers & Artists method
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, The Trauma Stewardship Institute
Music: Grateful to Little Dog Big Ears for their Creative Commons licensed music She Sees Mice (intro and outro). Make sure to subscribe in iTunes or Sticher. And give us a 5-star review in iTunes, it helps us reach more beloved explorers.
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celebrate with me
“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” — AA Milne
won’t you celebrate with me
By Lucille Clifton
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
I love this poem … thought I might share it with you as part of our month exploring the theme of resilience.
Don’t we all have that thing that we were born which makes us different? I didn’t have models for queerness, for butchness, for non-binary expressions, for sacred intimacy, for kinky topping and play. I too had no model. And I love this question: “What did I see to be except myself?” Would that I could have that kind of resilience.
I love the idea of celebrating this survival. Celebrating our resilience. Things do come after us, daily — the microagressions, the racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, prejudice — and we don’t have to survive it. Not all of us do. But hey, I’m writing to you here today, and we have. You and I have both survived it. Not only that, but here we are, ourselves.
Celebrations all around!
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I’ll bury my nut my own way.
November’s theme is all about resilience. Think of those squirrels burying their nuts in the ground in preparation for the coming winter*.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking of resilience not in the sense of planning ahead or bouncing back, all in an effort to avoid or get out of discomfort. Instead, I’ve been thinking about resilience as the capacity to stay in discomfort and to find inspiration in that friction.
Alex and I had long conversations about this very topic during the Wonder Body Connection Tour. Perhaps this comes from my New England Puritanical roots but, as we discussed the “healing power of pleasure,” some part of me resisted that concept, hearing in “pleasure” the concept of hedonism, at worst, or pacification, at best.
When I think of resilience, I want to push towards something else. I want to, at worst, develop the capacity to stand in the discomfort and, at best, have the courage take action even when discomfort still exists.
Many years ago, I remember standing on a high log element of a ropes course (yes, a real log stretched between two trees, 40′ up in the air, but me on belay with rope and harness—in other words, real fear but not real danger). My legs were shaking so much I could hardly move. I waited, thinking eventually they would stop and then I could dance with grace across the log. But they didn’t stop. They continued to vibrate like a sewing machine. Finally I realized that I would have to find a way to move *with* the shaking, instead of waiting (hoping?) for it to stop. And so I took that first step—awkwardly and without grace—and then another, until I found myself mid-log, suddenly clear that comfort is not a prerequisite to action.
This concept was re-inspired for me recently at the National Center for Civil & Human Rights in Atlanta where an amazing experiential exhibit allowed me to viscerally imagine what it might have been like to sit poised and determined at the lunch counter protests, even in the midst of screams and threats. Would I have had that type of courage?
And so I wonder, how do we cultivate the capacity to stay embodied, aware, grounded, and focused, even as our legs are shaking? What’s your relationship to resilience, pleasure, and fortitude?
— Amy
* Just in case, I searched for youtube videos on the subject and found this silly one.
Thank you, Mark Fleming and Jay Craver!
Music: Grateful to Little Dog Big Ears for their Creative Commons licensed music She Sees Mice (intro and outro). Make sure to subscribe in iTunes or Sticher. And give us a 5-star review in iTunes, it helps us reach more beloved explorers.
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actively embracing loss
“Samhain heralds in a terrifying season when we are asked to embrace loss.”
I’m really into dharma talks and recordings of meditations lately. I have a commute now; plus, I’m spend so much time at a computer for the 9-5 job, I do less of the computer stuff I used to do for fun — like read a million articles and scroll through Facebook groups. I’m spending more time resting my eyes.
But often, I still want to engage my brain and relax and learn.
So I’ve been listening to more podcasts, and looking up more youtube recordings, too. This one I’m sharing with you is “Through the Veil,” a samhain meditation.
Samhain (pronounced saah-win) is the witch’s new year, a celebration of the end of the harvest and the calling in of the coldest part of the year. It’s a festival of the dead, and a celebration of all those things we don’t necessarily see or look at directly — the unconscious.
I used to have a shirt that said “this body will be a corpse” in really big letters … I wore it a few times, but I got too many stares. I already feel as though I stand out, I didn’t like the attention it drew.
This culture I’m in doesn’t embrace thoughts like that. I wasn’t taught to honor death, to invite loss, to embrace it, to hold it like a lover. But what if I had been?
The buddhist dharma talks I’ve been listening to lately have a similar tone: an ask to embrace the inevitability of loss. It can be a way to be more conscious both of our grasping for something that does not exist (like stability, and guarantees) and of being grateful for the things we do have, that we have not lost.
There are fires near my home in Oakland. A hundred thousand acres, last I heard, with hundreds of homes burned down, dozens of deaths. I woke up on Sunday night at 2am and asked Hunter, “Do you smell smoke?” I thought our house was on fire, or our neighbor’s house — but it was huge forest fires on dry land 60+ miles away. The smell was so strong — strong enough to wake many folks in the Bay Area. I’m shocked by the loss, devastated by the photos. Some moments in the last few days, that’s all I feel — completely full of loss.
So I try to be grateful for what I have, reaching out with compassion (and money) to support. I practice letting go — of this moment, of this feeling, of this argument. Because everything is temporary. Even this body I’m in right now, it’s temporary. It, too, will be a corpse.
Samhain is an invitation to consider the dead, the loss, and non-attachment. A time when the veil between worlds is thin, thinner, thinnest. We can feel the death part of the life and death cycle the closest.
But also consider this: in this loss comes unexpected beauty, gratitude, compassion, and blooming. Something continues beyond that loss — seasonally, it is winter. And she, too, has blessings to offer.
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Update: Wonder Body Connection Tour
The Wonder Body Connection Tour is all over the place, bringing the aliveness of the coloring book near and far. We’ve started describing it as “an embodiment guide disguised as a coloring book.”
I’m looking at this as a chance for me to explore what markers of community say “safe” to me, and which ones say “caution.” Can I test what assumptions are beneath those judgements? Can I adjust those that need changing. I feel untethered in a good way, with the veil between the “known” world and the “discoverable” one being worn thinner. I’m in a deep meditation on what it takes to make connection, to push the conversation to the places that get to the heart of the matter—whatever that may be.
Right now, Alex and I are in Asheville, NC and will be heading to Savannah this weekend, before making our way to Atlanta. You can keep up with all the latest adventures at bodytrustcircle/wonder-body/tour (we just redid it so it’s now very pretty!). It’s sure to be full of surprises.
We’d love to see you!
— Amy