Creating Meaning When It Feels Impossible
There is a New Mystery Out There & It Wants Us to Find It
🌟🌟🌟 Tomorrow I will be leading a Leap Year Breathwork & just in case you may feel it is a distraction, let me get all psychic on you & tell you YOU NEED THIS to collect yourself & release, because WE NEED YOU. Sign up here 🌟🌟🌟
🌟🌟🌟 This is a free offering for you. I love to be accessible especially at this time but also remember that content creators are artists & need support to keep creating. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps enormously 🌟🌟🌟
Every morning, against my better judgment, I roll over in bed and check on Palestine. I watch and listen to the Gazan journalists letting us know that they are still alive. I look into their eyes and listen to the spaces between their words. I check Aljazeera and then I check the New York Times to counterbalance, just to be grumpy and hate America. I make myself look at the videos. You know. Not just scroll but LOOK. Through all of this I continue to stretch my nervous system. Many would say this is ill advised. I can feel the subway doors closing on my senses, my vision blurring. The desire to scroll away being so strong but I push through, open my eyes and heart wider. I take it all in and tell myself that this time and presence is worth something.
I am writing to you from my inner journey. It’s all I have. The more the violence, death and destruction of Gaza continues, the genocide of the Palestinians,the more clear my heart’s alliance is, and the less clear my brain functions. I find myself, for the first time in a very long time or perhaps ever, not waking up with excitement about the day, with seeing the light around the edges of my windows, hearing the birds. I wake up heavy, remembering dense dreams of moving constantly, of leaving things behind, of being lost, about not being able to get home.
Wait, let me go back for a second. I said my brain is less clear but that is not precisely true. It is more clear now than ever but this is the thing ~ it is speaking a whole new language. Maybe not new, maybe recovered. A language that is not based on my learned cultural assumptions. A language that is not memorized. A language that is informed by what I am seeing and feeling in the present moment. It might counters what I know, or at least what I thought I knew. It feels unclear because I am continually translating. It feels unclear because there are many people who do not understand or speak this language. It would make me feel crazy if I wasn’t absolutely sure it is a language I have been waiting for my whole life.
If I am totally honest with myself, my current response to the genocide in Palestine is, yes, one of heartbreak and an inability to hold the torrential grief in my body and mind, but somehow in the deluge there is also a feeling of {don’t judge me} excitement, the kind of excitement that I would imagine after a scientific discovery that would change human life forever, like how I felt when I was giving birth for the first time, like “how could this possibly be happening” “this is a miracle” “this is something I can’t think my way out of” “this is something I can’t stop”. And by “this” I am not (only) speaking of the brutal killing of the Palestinians, I am speaking of the lifting of this excruciating, weighted veil of what it means to be an American, what it means to live in the “modern” world, what progress means, what success means, where I thought the world was going to be since I was born in 1958, the America that believed each generation should “improve” on the past, would make more money, would somehow live a better life. That my life would be so much better than my first generation parents, than my immigrant grandparents who gave up their homeland for MORE.
Suddenly MORE has less meaning. Suddenly MORE is suspect. Suddenly MORE is a trick, is poison in the water, is mass hypnosis, and has never ever been real.
What I am excited about today is that we are actually seeing, feeling & realizing in pretty much real time, that we actually don’t need to do as “they” say.
Please excuse my incessant air quotes, I can’t help it, it is because none of this is true and yet we all recognize it, we all have it memorized literally and epigenetically in our bones. And now suddenly, miraculously the gate is open. The gate has always been open.
The question is how do we come together. What does that look like. For now, it is small magical steps in community that are treasures to be sure but we know it will take something bigger than that. I am excited about these possibilities but I am not going to lie, I have a catch in my throat. Like this is it. The conveniences, the illusion of the safety net, the narcoleptic pockets of dependence on the powerful, rocking us to sleep. The awareness that although we are working to dismantle the patriarchy, it will take leaders to make this work. It will take people willing to risk their daily sanity to organize. How do we take care of ourselves & also rise up.
It is confusing (for myself) to be seen as part (whether I like it or not) of the Wellness community. There are a lot of politics there that frankly I am exhausted by. However I do believe it is important to take care of your nervous system if you have the privilege to do so. I want you to take care of yourself, not to detach from the current reality but because we need you. We need you to be present. We need you to confront your fear of death. We need you to be able to live with less if you have the privilege to do so. All of this is incredibly helpful.
This morning I reached out to a few people who I think are doing good work & offered my services to help organize further. It’s kinda a crap shoot right, the idea that we can work together when everything is brand new? What is the plan? This is what I felt inspired to do this morning. Reach out. We are what we repeatedly do. We can create meaning for ourselves. We can do something new.
OTHER THINGS I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT:
~ If you haven’t listened to this do it now & then again & again & again & smile.
~ I felt really seen by this 💞💞💞
~ I know you all wanna know what I am watching. Doing my best to not zone out completely I am currently obsessed simultaneously with rewatching MANIAC on Netflix (2018 a comedy on big pharma, trauma, seances & computers that cry) & Station 11 on Max (just because & dreaming of how we organize the people when things fall apart)
~ It’s common knowledge I have a hard time paying attention to straight white men but I have been enjoying Daniel Mate on Instagram {Here is also his response on Brene Brown, super smart, articulate & actually kind}
~ Again, Leap Year Breathwork this Thursday (Tomorrow!!) February 29 7-9 pm ET 🤍 Give yourself room to process without thinking (much) grieve, cry, feel some release & let me love on you with subspace healing & an awesome soundtrack. Come sit with me. You will not regret it.
I am writing to you from my inner journey. It’s all I have. The more the violence, death and destruction of Gaza continues, the genocide of the Palestinians,the more clear my heart’s alliance is, and the less clear my brain functions.- this spoke to me 💜