"Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar"

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

—Jeff Foster

Tools to Compliment our Work Together - While Remote and Online

Below are some items to consider having on hand to support your virtual somatic practice in days when in person sessions aren’t an option.

We often reach for props to aid an intervention that supports you to ground, be in relational space, move your energy and release what’s held in the body. (This is in addition to ensuring you have a private space to express and explore what arises!)

While gathering the below are optional, I’d encourage you to get creative with what you already have, can make, or repurpose. Links are not necessarily an endorsement, please see if there are local alternatives.

  • Art supplies like a blank pad of paper, markers, colored pencils or pens

  • Medium density foam roller or similar

  • Thick yoga mat, although a thin one will do, but better to double up or but a blanket over for more support

  • Pinky ball or tennis ball

  • Foam bat

  • A clean towel and pillow

  • Essential Oils are a powerful tool for moving energy. I like to have an array nearby like lemon, frankincense, lavender and my go-to brand is Vibrant Blue Oils for their body, brain, and emotional balance blends.

Post-session:

It's Alright to Hold - A COVID Entry

Everyone processes information at different speeds and in countless ways. Some of us jump to social media and others need to hold, to wait a minute, to let what needs to land in our bones, our cells, these rhythmic bodies, move its way through so that we can hear what wants to be spoken.

However you are showing up right now is perfect and all images of wrongness or judgement we might place upon ourselves are being shed.

Our work is to guide ourselves back to our bodies. The way of listening. To recognize that this level of fear and survival has always been here hovering just below the mask of “I got this”.

If you’re feeling like you have to say the right thing or show up in a particular way, you don’t.

Any sense of competition--or a clamoring to be seen so we don't get left behind--is here to be detoxed from our individual and collective nervous system if we get curious enough to let it.

All of us are needed. You won't get left behind.

Spontaneous Fires and Sacred Water

"Our immune systems, and only our immune systems, prevent us from becoming everyone else all at once. We are who we are only because we defend ourselves every moment of every day. And who we are is everything. We are pieces of others. Portraits painted somewhere between our brains and thymuses. We are the dirt we've eaten and the songs we've song. We are the light of stars and darknesses old beyond imagining. We are at once spontaneous fires and scared water. We are faith and forgiveness. We are our own deaths and we are the eternal thought of others."

- Gerald Callahan in "Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion"

 

Let The Waves Wash Over

The exhaustion is hitting differently today. Like, dripping down these old ancestral bones, exhausted. We've been holding ourselves up. Holding one another. For so many years. For so many lives. The waves of brokenhearted grief washing over, and then over again. All in the name of inexhaustible love for this life.

What I do want to say right now is thank you, from the depths of me, for calling and texting and holding space while I (and so many of us) crawl out from the darkness to regain some capacity for exhale. I don't feel alone and I pray you don't either.

(Written in the week following the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting)

The Trees That Ache

I missed the train to work this morning because I was caught in the middle of the road. Feet planted and shaking.

Four men were executing trees just feet from my bedroom window--first by hanging white rope around them and then by puncturing and slashing with chainsaws.

I begged them to tell me why they had to do it--had to clear cut the tree people that I have ever so tenderly been courting as friends and mentors over the past two years. The ones who shield the glare of the streetlights and allow the sweet moonlight to pour through. That rustle with the wind and rain. That exhale as I do.

With tears streaming down my face, I pleaded: stop, please stop. Giving way to the heartbreak of their fallen cries.

All a man could say over the deafening sound of machinery was, "They are all coming down."

I sit in the tension of cultural reckoning, not blaming these men for their task. Perhaps my presence offered only an annoyed moment of pause. But to the frozenness that has shielded us from feeling the loss we have capacity for--let it melt, let THAT all come down.