I’m having a vivid memory of this time I visited Los Angeles for the first time since I had moved to Oregon. This was in 2018 and I was staying in an apartment, small but light filled and covered wall to wall in books and art. It was the first time in a long time I had been properly alone and on my own.

I wore jewel tones. I let my skin be kissed by the sun. Everything felt possible. It was on this trip this I discovered and listened to ‘Causers of This’ by Toro y Moi for the first time. That album is now one I associate with me remembering in my body what it felt like to feel vibrant and unguarded. I felt myself come back to my aliveness after surviving many dull and dreary winters (and years) in Oregon. I remember daydreaming about moving back to Los Angeles, having a place of my own. I fantasized that the Airbnb that I was staying in was mine.

About 8 or so years later, I write this while listening to ‘Causers of This’ on my record player in an apartment that is less than a mile from that apartment rental. This apartment has been the home of a few others—a dog, a husband, a partner—and now it is mine.

I look out my window to blue skies and the movement of leaves inspired by the wind. I glance back again and see guava ripening on the tree outside. I’m surrounded by green and plants and light. I feel deeply called to heed the plans of my body, to make good on the promises of pleasure and protection it’s asking for. I feel connected to the gardens that i am tending in myself, and I’m patient for the fruits and blooms they will bring.

Mercury retrograde has me very reflective on everything that has changed in my life over the last year, the last two years, the last decade. I feel compelled to take stock of all the versions of myself that have died, been shrugged off, been rebirthed. There is still so much i don’t have that i really long for—a free Palestine, a home with land that I own, the destruction of racist, capitalist systems, reparations, land back—but what I do have, I feel so awake to, so grateful for.

I recently dyed my hair platinum blonde, a change that feels startling to me each time I look in the mirror. It took me some time to really enjoy it. I kept thinking that it was too much for me to be so striking in this way (a blonde buzzcut is a statement). I got into a habit of shrinking myself down to digestible proportions for the betterment of a relationship that sought to disappear me, and this reflex to become smaller won’t be leaving my bones for some time. Allowing myself to take up space again—not just out in the world but within my own body—is a practice I’m cultivating to enact revenge on the voices that wished to shrink me to embolden their fragile egos.

A phrase that came to me many years ago when I was having a hard time (another rebirth, perhaps) was “Love yourself deeply. It is the greatest revenge.” I invoke the practice of taking up space as an embodiment of that incantation. I also invoke it as a curse on what (and who) has tried to destroy me.

Singlehood has given me more space, made my life simpler. Simple doesn’t mean easy. With all of this space, my grief and anxieties have more of my undivided attention. I’m prone to loneliness, to feeling like I cannot trust my desires or the self that has them. More space means more time to drift toward the dark corners of my mind—regret, rumination, insecurity. Being alone, I’ve had to practice discipline with how deep I go. I’ve had to practice noticing when I’m drifting too far from myself, then speaking up when I need a life raft to pull me back in. And even still, I luxuriate in this space because I know it is not always so freely given. I also know that it has been hard fought.

I’m the sum of all the people and beings that have poured goodness and life into me, myself included. I know how to live my life, but aliveness—being deliberate with my own softness—is new in my body. But not the sensation. The sensation of aliveness is one I have felt a million times in my life, in the tiniest of moments that I was moving too quickly to recognize them. Now, I know how to slow down, capture them, savor them.

If I could give advice to the me I was two years ago, I would tell them to pay attention to the whispers of their body before they become screams. I would tell them the shame they carry is truly unnecessary—as in, there are some people for whom they should feel shame; should carry it like a backpack that bows their spines, makes them prostrate in remorse. And they (my younger self) is not one of those people.

I would tell my younger self that the insurmountable heartbreak you’re avoiding is way less pungent than the repercussions of abuse you’re being consistently exposed to and that your body is remembering. I would tell them that even if something feels good that doesn’t mean it is not also a poison.

And I would tell them that the reason your softness seems like a threat is because it is a weapon against willful hardness. I would say, “Your softness is a gift, not for softness’s sake, but as a liberatory praxis to counteract a world that makes things so unfeelable.” I would say, “Don’t forget how good you can feel when you are fully at home to yourself. This is the only home that matters.”

To this current version of myself, I say, “Welcome home.”

The title of this one is based on a lyric from Tool’s Lateralus, a song that has been getting (and putting) me through it lately. I’ve heard this song numerous times and always thought he was singing “Reaching out for the random or / what heaven will bewilder me.” I just discovered that the actual lyric is “Reaching out for the random or / whatever will bewilder me.” The original lyric is beautiful, but I do like the idea that maybe there are many different heavens, and if you’re lucky, you might randomly come across one of them, and it will put you in a state of awe.

Heaven, as a place, is hard for me to imagine—the idea of some eternal home that exists for us to experience permanent refuge and solace, a place to feel abundant and harmonious and sovereign. I’ve always held a lot of cynicism for a place like that. Even as I child, I had a hard time wrapping myself around the concept of an existence without any oppression or terror or trauma. To my little mind, it just didn’t feel possible. I grapple with that impossibility and cynicism especially now, though I’m trying to stay connected to visions of collective and individual freedom as a way of calling in futures that don’t exist yet, but are waiting in the wings.1

So, heaven as a place feels outlandish. Heaven as an embodied feeling, one that we can conjure up and tap into again and again through our bodies and with other bodies, is way more feasible.

I’ve experienced multiple heavens recently, and it feels good to remember that I can feel other things. These heavens have given me a break from being in the thick of it, even if it’s only been for a few moments. They’ve helped me tap into the joy and resilience of my body. They’ve inspired me to keep showing up to what is hard, to be patient with what is still unfolding, and to stay hopeful. Mariame Kaba says that hope is a discipline.2 I think all things that are good, anything that remind us of beauty, pleasure, belonging, and our collective power, requires discipline, requires embodied practice.

If we don’t familiarize the felt-experience of heaven3 in our bodies, how will we know what to look out for when we finally arrive there? We memorize it through sensation. And how do we do that? Through dedicated and protected practice that has us dip into those realms, practices that bring in pockets of heaven in our worlds and in others’. Or, when we randomly stumble upon a heaven, we learn how to pause, be with it, and let the experience nourish our bodies.

Here are some heavens I’ve stumbled across.

Heaven #212: A tiny disco ball

I went to Idyllwild with some dear friends a couple of months ago. Idyllwild is this idyllic mountain town east of Los Angeles, 6000 feet above sea level. Imagine sweeping oak forests and rock formations jutting up unapologetically from the ground. Imagine manzanitas magically proliferating against a vast backdrop of sky and jagged cliff edges. Imagine thin, dry air that smells like ancient ponderosas and sun-warmed earth, and an ambience of quiet so obvious that being away from the constant racket of the city is like an unsettling noise of its own.

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Note: I posted a short version of this piece on my other newsletter this morning. This is the full version. Also, a content warning for suicidal ideation.

It’s my 38th birthday, and I’m feeling immense gratitude for my body. For all that it’s done for me. For the ways it’s protected me. For its ability to heal itself into more alive versions of its/my self. I’ve experienced about 13,870 days in this body. 13,870 days of learning, loving, healing, becoming, and undoing inside of it. It’s hard for my brain to make sense of that number. That’s more days than I could ever conceive of seeing. And yet, here I am, in this body.

How many of those days did I spend outside of my body, I wonder? Enough that it could accumulate in years? Decades? How many times within those days have I disregarded my body’s needs or boundaries? Or had my needs or boundaries disregarded by another?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I can at least measure the effects of those trespassings by feeling for the way my shoulders frequently try to touch my ears, or how my jaw never stops trying to clench, or how my heart can harden itself in an instant. I don’t judge these tendencies. I know that the shapes my body is trying to contract itself into are shapes of perceived safety and protection.

So, I feel grateful that I’ve learned how to soften. That feeling myself now feels safer than staying numbed. I’m grateful that the shape of my once hardened heart didn’t get stuck that way. That all the times I spent not feeling didn’t become such a ritual that I forgot how to feel at all.

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Note: I posted snippets of this piece on my other newsletter last week. This is the full version.

I've been in a season of grief for the last two years. It began as my marriage was ending.

I don't know that I'll ever talk about my experience of divorce publicly, but I can at least share that the grief that comes with it is a strange, full-body experience that is constantly morphing into other shapes. Sometimes it's shapes of grief I know. More often, they're shapes I've never met before. The ones I don't know are the ones that have broken me apart at my edges the most.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced grief like this. It’s deeper than sadness. It is a mourning from the bones, an ache down to the marrow, in a body that has never known a life where it’s not acting out the warmth and familiarity of nearly twenty years of closeness. It is the shock of severing myself from a home base that no longer nourishes me, the relief of being free of it, and the confusion in the part of me that habitually aches for it.

This grief feels similar in sensation to the yearning I sometimes have for my childhood home—this bodily craving to be back to what felt (at times) safe, familiar, mundane. I very rarely have desires to go back to that home, but when I do, the part of me that doesn’t know or understand why I’m gone longs to be back. And the home as I knew it no longer exists; my mind knows this. But the sensory memories I have of it are strong enough to trick me into believing that it’s a place that I want to (or can) go back to.

What do you do with grief like that? I can take the sadness. My body understands what it means to mourn. But it doesn’t know how to be with a sensation of longing for something that it actually does not (and cannot) want.

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(It’s a little silly, but I had this song in my head while I was writing this.)

How many things do you think your body has made contact with today? Take a moment and go through the archive of your day—where you were, how you moved, what you did and interacted with.

How many of the things you touched did you actually feel?

I recently blew my own mind with this question. When I thought about the sheer number of things I touch in a day that I don’t actually feel, it made me curious about how often I go without feeling the connection I make with the world on a daily basis.

Like, right now. I’m sitting on my couch, typing on my computer. As I type, I have no awareness of where my feet are or my back is or the sensation of the keys at the tip of my fingers. I don’t have any connection to my body beyond the movement of my hands and a feeling behind my eyes. When I check in, touch isn’t the only sensation I’m not aware of. I’m not aware of any of my other senses either, though I have a vague awareness of music playing from my speaker. But my other senses have disappeared or dulled.

This disappearing and dulling of the senses is what happens when we’re on autopilot and for me, the experience of this mimics the sensation of dissociation I feel when I’m activated or having a hard mental health day—a feeling of not having a body, of not being fully present in the world around me. This (dissociation) is a useful protective mechanism, one that has kept me safe during unsafe moments in my life. I never wish to badmouth dissociation, or even going on autopilot. Both are something we must do to get things done and survive. But if we’re always practicing something, I’m interested in interrogating the practices that we do from impulse or habit, and exploring different ways of being in my body that counter those reflexes.

That exploration is what helps me gain a greater capacity to have different embodied experiences and gives me access to more choice in how I want to be and feel.

And I want to feel more, not less.

It’s not often we get to consciously experience a felt-sense of disembodiment. Usually, we’re moving way too fast to even know that we have a body, let alone to discern when we’ve dropped out of contact with ourselves. But that question that blew my mind—how many of the things I touched today did I actually feel?—brings that awareness (or lack of) front and center. That question is a teacher that guides me into curiosity, into the How of my disconnect, even when it’s benign. It tells me, “When I am on autopilot, like typing on my computer or driving in my car, I lose contact with myself. I become a head on a stick.”

Perhaps you’re experiencing something similar right now. As you’re reading this, which parts of your body do you feel, and which parts do you not? Which of your senses are activated, and which ones are completely offline?

When I ask these questions to myself, I ask them from a place of curiosity, to glean information to help me know where I go when I’m not in my body and to come back to myself. It’s also useful for me to make the times when I’m on my computer or driving my car a space for me to practice more embodiment. Like, now that I know what disembodiment feels like while I do this thing, what does it feel like to do it with a little more feeling?

This is something I’ve been exploring while teaching my sensual-somatic course, Sensual Being. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been practicing getting a felt-sense of what being disconnected from our senses feels like so that we can come back into awareness of ourselves.

We can use how we disconnect as a tool that helps us reconnect.

Here’s how.

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The following is an excerpt from the original manuscript of my book, Sensual Self, edited and adapted for this space. I haven’t revisited this version since 2021 and it’s wild to see how different this version is from the one that was published. What I notice immediately is how depthful this version is. I had so much to say (the original manuscript was over 11,000 words) but there wasn’t enough room to include it in the final edition.

I share this here for two reasons: to return to a piece of work (my manuscript) that I deeply cherish that captures the philosophy of sensuality for me, and to celebrate the ways I’ll be exploring this depth in real time with my new offering, starting next week.

. . .

The first time I ever heard the word sensual, it was sloppily associated with sex.

And not just sex as an act, but a particular form of sexiness that it’s suggested a feminine person should perform for the gaze of someone else—the swishing of hips, a look of lust, a dress with a thigh-length slit that’s worn to excite someone else. That personification of sensuality, combined with the other fear-mongering messages I received about my own body and pleasure, created a harmful narrative in my mind that sensuality was not only bad, it also didn’t belong to me. It belonged to the gazes and experiences of the people watching me perform it. And, even more confusing, I was supposed to act this way and perfect it as part of my “femaleness.”

As I grew older, the message became: Your body is a site of temptation to yourself and others; pleasure is a pathway to sin; desire is a voice you should never trust; and you are only good if you can abstain from these wicked temptations. Through these messages, my sensuality became weaponized. No longer was the exploration of and taking up space with my body sensual, I was being “fast.” If I yielded to any nudges my body gave me to pause and feel good, I was self-centered or lazy.

My body became a place of fear and shame, and pleasure as a whole was vilified and demonized.

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I began this Substack because I wanted a place where I could explore my thoughts and experiences when it comes the body and all the pleasure, wisdom, and healing potential it holds, using myself as a kind of case study. One of the first things I imagined in creating this space was doing regular “moments of sensuality” check-ins, writings where I’d outline things that delighted my senses throughout the month—not just as an anchor for this platform but an anchor for me as I navigate through a world that can be deeply unpleasurable at times.

Imagine my surprise when I realized it’s been over a year since I’ve written one of these.

I could blame it on busyness or burnout but I believe the real culprit to be despair. The last time I wrote down my moments of sensuality was last February, right at the beginning of what would be my divorce that was also occurring alongside so many heartbreaks and tragedies—personally and collectively. Despair has been a constant cloud above (and in) my head since then. When crisis occurs, despair is the first place I go, which begets disconnection from myself, my body, and the world around me. So, it makes sense that this practice hasn’t been picked up since last year.

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In my work, I talk a lot about the importance of feeling what you don't want or know how to feel.

We don’t want to feel certain emotions because the sensations they bring up are often so strong and too uncomfortable to be with. So we avoid them, contain them. We deny ourselves from feeling those sticky emotions, tucking them somewhere inside us, and try to forget about them.

But something I’ve learned—both through professional experience and personal tribulation—is that our bodies don’t forget. What we don’t feel gets trapped in our tissues and ultimately finds a way to unconsciously express itself. It can be as benign as grinding our teeth at night or having perpetually tense shoulders. Other times it comes out through snapping at our loved ones or internalizing the emotion so deep inside of us that it becomes a character trait—like, “I’m just not a feelings-person. I don’t feel.”

(A note: we all feel. How and to what capacity is a question I’m always inviting us to be in. But we all feel and we can build our capacity to feel more with practice—which I think is really good news.)

Bypassing our feelings doesn’t just happen with hard emotions like anger or grief. In my work with clients, I’ve had people tell me that they don’t know how to feel good, that experiencing the full spectrum of their pleasure somehow evades them, and they don’t know why. My hunch is that the same mechanism that’s used to shut themselves off from hard emotions is the same one that comes online with the good ones. Maybe we can tell the difference between “good” and “bad” emotions, but our bodies can’t do that same kind of cherry-picking.

How we feel one thing is how we feel everything.1

I think our avoidance of feeling certain things boils down to trust. We don’t trust ourselves to feel because we’re worried we’ll stay in the emotion and never come out of it. We calcify ourselves from emotions that feel unsafe or unfeasible as a way of protecting ourselves and the people around us. We use our brains to rationalize the emotion, rather than allowing the feeling to be acknowledged through and with the body.

This sentiment came up a lot during my recent workshop, where I was guiding people into feeling and expressing their anger. Someone spoke up and said that they were afraid that if they felt their anger that they would get destructive, so they didn’t allow themselves to feel it. I get this is a real fear2, but choosing to preemptively not feel our emotions because we fear that we’ll become possessed by them robs us of the opportunity to show ourselves that we can be with our emotions responsibly, that we can demonstrate self-control alongside necessary expression.

We can’t long to feel fully alive while simultaneously culling the aliveness of some of our emotions. We need to feel ourselves. We need to learn how to be with what is hard and show ourselves it’s possible to not get lost in it. We need to get comfortable with feeling discomfort around our emotions3.

But how do you actually do that? How do you feel what you don't want to feel?​

Here's a quick somatic practice to help you do that.

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This month, I started a 10-week in-person intensive that’s meant to help me recover my creativity from the grips of capitalism.

Each week, me and seven other artists of multiple disciplines gather to discuss our creative archetypes, dreams, and visions. We do exercises and create visual presentations to help detangle the parts of us that want to make and be our art from the parts that second-guess, neglect, or deny our talent. We’re trying to locate the truest form of artist that’s buried underneath our tendency to self-edit and the pressures to market ourselves for successful monetization.

The course is kicking my ass.

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As I move through a lot of change in my personal life, I've been feeling this automatic urge come up in my body to be fast. To rush, to not sit still, to be anywhere but here. This urge feels primal, protective, like the only way out of these awful times is by moving quickly so I can hurry out of this period of uncertainty.

Moving fast during hard times feels comfortable, safe. I do it reflexively. It’s what I’ve always known. And it’s detrimental to my body.

When I move fast, I can't hear myself. When I move fast, I have a hard time deciphering my emotions or connecting deeply with others. Moving fast feeds my dissociation. It disconnects me from the voice of my body. It disorients me from gratitude, pleasure, and my own sense of belonging.

So, I've been asking: What if you slowed down?​ A lot of thoughts flood my brain when I sit with that question:

If I slow down, how will it all get done? There’s so much to do and worry about. I’ve got to keep moving. If I stop moving, I’ll need to face my grief, my anxiety, my rage, my fear. And if I feel that, I might never move again. I can’t slow down. I need to keep moving.

But when I tune into that question—What if you slowed down?—with my body, I feel a curiosity, a yearning. Of course I feel nervous about what I might find in the slowing down, in sitting with the qualities of my emotions that I’ve been running from. But I also know that being slow will offer me a medicine I really need right now, even if it feels counterintuitive.

When I am slow, I notice that I’m better able to tune into my body and emotional landscapes; I can hear how I’m actually feeling, what I’m actually needing. When I connect to how I’m feeling, I can tend to what hurts, what I’m afraid of, what I’m longing for—all the things I’m trying to avoid by moving so fast.
​
This is deep, hard, and rewarding work.

As we collectively move through upheaval, despair, uncertainty, and the violence of erasure, I think we all need this medicine right now. Unfortunately, we’re not going to find it in dominant culture.​ So we need to make time for ourselves.

We need to be curious about our reflexive quickness in response to stress, sadness, stuckness. We need to slow our pace so that we can hear our needs, feel our feelings, and detangle all that we're holding.

This is the intention of my life as a whole—to move at a pace where I can still feel my body.​

I know I said earlier that I feel safest when I move fast, but that’s only because it feels familiar. When I really allow myself to be in it, I feel safer when I’m slow. So yes, maybe it’s true that if you slow down, you’ll have to contend with everything you’ve been rushing away from; you’ll have to find and feel yourself.

But in a world that wants us fearful and dissociated, feeling ourselves is not only a good thing. It’s revolutionary.

. . .

If you're also in need of some slow medicine, join me and Fariha Róisín this Saturday as we create a space for you + others to slow down, inquire within, and be with everything your body is holding.
​
We'll use writing prompts to open us up emotionally and body-based practices to deepen what's coming up through movement and breath.
​
​Click here to join us for Tuning Into the Wisdom of Your Body​
​
In these fast and hard times, let's be slow + soft together.

After publicly announcing the end of my marriage last week, someone asked me how I was able to come to such a hard decision.

Despite my initial reaction to this question, they weren't surreptitiously trying to get me to divulge the intimate details of my breakup. It was in earnest. They were asking because they were contemplating the end of their own long-term relationship and wanted me to share my experience.

The answer to that question ("How do you make a hard decision?"), especially when it comes to matters of the heart, is long, complicated, and very personal. But here's my simplest answer:

I used my body.

I listened for the No in my body and how and when it showed up. I tuned into the parts of me that lacked aliveness and asked what it needed. I allowed myself to regularly be in a felt-sense of my desires (i.e., what + how I want to feel) and contrasted them with the life I was living at the time, and when there were incongruencies, I got curious about them.

I moved really slowly. I let all that was arising live with me for days, weeks, months, years. And I observed. I observed sensation.

There were times when my mind tried to talk me into other feelings, especially when what I was coming up was grief or fear or sadness about what it all might mean.

But I always knew to come back to my body.

Our bodies are wise about what doesn’t feel good. They're wise about what they need in order to feel safe, free, and fully expressed. Our bodies intuitively know which rooms and conversations and embraces it wants to be in. It knows how to signal when something doesn’t feel right even if it feels comfortable, and it's doing this even as we ignore, neglect, or second-guess those signals.

So, to make a hard decision: Tune into the wisdom of your body. Listen to sensation, nudges, urges, desire.

Obviously, this is much easier to say than it is to do. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of slowing down, but especially a lot of repair for all the times when we didn't listen. It’s also a deeply personal practice, as all of us have different relationships, histories, languages, and desires with our bodies.

This is why body-based practices are so helpful. They can support us in tuning into the wisdom of the body (not just the mind!) to help us discern on a felt-sense what we really need, want, desire, and wish to let go of.

Often, we need to get out of our heads to find those answers.

Once we get it, it won't necessarily make the hard decision less hard (unless it does), but at least we won't be abandoning ourselves while we make it.

. . .

If you're grappling with a hard decision of any kind right now, here are some body-based questions I’ll leave you with:

• Do you know what an enthusiastic Yes feels like in your body?

• Can you feel into the parts of your life (or self) that are lacking aliveness?

• If your body were an oracle, what wisdom would it be trying to give you? How?

When I close my eyes, I see the spindly tendrils of chickweed with their tiny white flowers and green oval leaves and roots so fine they have the thickness of sewing thread, but they’re deceptively strong. They reach down into dark earth further than you’d expect, nestling deeply into the soil, quietly proliferating. When I pull on the stems, attempting to uproot chickweed from their home amongst phacilia and poppy and yarrow and clarkia, the roots defiantly resist my tugging. Often, the stem will snap and I’m left to surrender the fight and leave the root where it is. Let life be life.

I’m being taught a lot about gardening from a partner with hands that are both strong and gentle, a mix of meticulous and patient in their care. We started a garden together, which feels like a continuation of the garden we’re tending in each other. As we find the rhythm of the sun and shade on our seedlings, we also tune into the unique cadence of each other—how we want to be loved, how we want to be connected, how we want to stay individuated.

When I feel their hands on my body, memories of their hands pruning roses or their fingers delicately massaging gurdled roots spring to mind and conjure all kinds of sensations in my body: the warmth of want, the soft wave of pleasure. I get touched by them and remember I am a body but also that I’m not unlike the plants they/we are taking care of. I too need a slow hand and ample space to stretch myself upward and outward, to reach high for the sun. I too really want to live.

This post + playlist continues below. If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s playlist and other writings from the archives, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here. You can also subscribe for free to receive snippets like this one.

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(Here’s a song I listened to while writing this.)

Yesterday, I was having trouble locating my body.

Living through a natural disaster will do that to you. Living through outraging and deeply unsettling times will do that to you.

It wasn't until someone earnestly asked me "How *are* you?" that the dissociation spell was broken. That question prompted me to take a deep breath (my first that day), feel into my body, and honestly answer that question. (Being in a safe space to be able to tune into myself also helped.)

I was flooded with feeling. Many emotions came to the surface—worries, fears, sadnesses. And even though it wasn't pleasant, even though it was all very uncomfortable to sit with it, there I was:

Back in my body.
(It had been a while.)

I've learned that it can be just as simple as that: a thoughtfully posed question asked right when you need it can get you back into connection and presence, back into feeling. Maybe not feeling great, but feeling nonetheless.

So, I'd like to ask you—earnestly, gently, with love:

How are you?

Here's a quick somatic practice for you: Take a deep breath and breathe that question into your body. Breathe it into your belly, your feet, your back. Notice what comes up.

Take 30-60 seconds to sit with what's arising—emotions, thoughts, sensations, all of it. See if you can be a witness to it without getting sucked into the current. Write it down if you'd like. And if nothing's coming up, that's okay. Nothing is also a sensation.

Then, once you're ready to move on, especially if what's coming up is intense or not something you have the capacity to feel at the moment, take another deep breath and feel a little less. Notice how you did that and notice where all that feeling went, where your breath went.

(Not sure how to activate feeling less? The best and quickest way I've found is to begin scrolling through social media.)

I share this little practice to offer a way I've been allowing myself to be in better relationship with dissociation during these wild times, to sort of microdose being in my body. I also share it to highlight how simple it can be (and how okay it is) to go in and out of feeling.

We will always find ourselves vacillating between connection and disconnection, dissociation and embodiment, especially as we're living through destabilizing times. But I've found that learning how to do this dance with more awareness, even giving myself permission to mindfully disconnect from myself if I need to, has been really helpful.

It's helped me destigmatize dissociation and tune into how I do it. It's helped me practice tiny moments of embodiment at my own pace.

It's helped me feel less shame about sometimes needing a break from my body, remembering that if I can disconnect, I can always reconnect—and vice versa.

If it's been a minute since you've checked in with yourself, try this practice and let me know how it went for you.

Be gentle. Go slowly.

/

Some notes:

1. I recommend doing some light movements after this "How are you?" practice to help move some of that energy. Circle your neck. Stretch your arms above your head. Tap your feet.

2. My next workshop will teach you how to come back into your body after dissociating during sex. If you're interested, put your name on this list and get notified when registration opens.

There’s this scene in the film Midsommer that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

This woman finds herself at this idyllic, isolated commune of sorts and has just finished participating in a spirited dance ritual amongst the members. Her body heaves from continuously spinning and stepping to a thumping drum beat. Her cheeks are flushed and damp with sweat. Her breathing is deep and ragged. She’s disoriented from the hours spent doing this community dance that has her spellbound and dissociated from time. The ritualistic efforting of the dance has put her in her body so much that it’s like she’s having a psychedelic experience.

It’s from this place of elation and exhaustion (and some other places that I won’t elaborate on because I don’t want to spoil the film if you haven’t seen it) that something suddenly breaks inside of her and all that she’s been holding—grief, despair, fear, rage—unfurls out of her in a deluge of wails. She drops to her knees, gagging, sobbing, moaning, and as these guttural sounds come through her, a small group of those who danced alongside her also drop to their knees and begin to mirror back her anguish.

As she gasps and moans to the very bottom of her breath, they do the same. As she rocks and writhes, besotted, they undulate their bodies, tearing at their hair and clothes, externalizing her inner turmoil. The group syncs with this woman’s rhythmic expressions of grief to an extent so full that they themselves become it, allowing their own bodies and breaths to be used in service of this person having a deeper release. It’s a truly gorgeous scene.

When I first watched it, I kept thinking about the physical toll this scene must’ve taken on the actors. I imagined how grueling it must have been for them to channel these emotions with their bodies to such an extent for a film. I wondered how many takes it took to capture that scene and what it was like to be in the room watching it unfold. What they tapped into during that scene felt primal, personal, and ancestral, like they were channeling 5,000 years of collective sorrow.

I wondered, was anyone in the room unsettled by the actors’ commitment to this scene? Did the actors feel surprised that their bodies could open so wide and let all of this emotion spill out and fill the room? Was there a staticky charge in the air from this emotional cleansing that raised the fine hairs on the back of their necks, that spurred involuntary water in their eyes? And when it was over, did witnessing and participating in this collective purging leave them all feeling relief, like an eternally-held breath was finally exhaled? This is what I thought about as (and after) I watched this scene.

But what I felt, what came from my body, was this very urgent and surprisingly palpable longing for this experience for myself. I longed for it so completely that my mouth practically watered for it. So hungry was I to experience that violent expulsion of emotion, to not only be given the space to use my body to move my own torrid grief, but to have it be held and felt by trusted others around me. I’ve found myself thinking of this scene and longing for it again.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about time, about what it does to the body, to memory, to emotion. How time holds us all with an elusive hand, one we try to hold with our own but can never seem to grasp. How we simultaneously want more of it but have such trouble being with all the time we have now.

How much time does it take to forget someone? For trauma to disperse from our bodies? For resentment to forget our tongues? How much time will it take for us to trust the love we’re given after years of heartbreak? How many times will we witness genocide before we decide1 to cease it?

They say that time is the great equalizer, except that it really isn’t because we’re not all working with the same quantity or quality of time—even though the clocks that tick above us measure moments with the same mechanisms. How irritating that is, that some people have more time than we do and such don’t need to cherish it as much.

These days I try to live without such an oppressive awareness of time but before, I used to tirelessly try to mark it. I did this with my journals, mostly. When I was younger, I became obsessed with capturing every moment I could, down to the sensation. I would keep little notebooks with me just in case something important happened so that I could have a quick place to jot down words exchanged, feelings experienced, the color of the sky, the exact time of day.2 Eventually I realized that trying to commentate the lapsing of time was impossible, not just because it was difficult to do (my hands kept cramping trying to write at the speed of my thoughts and perceptions) but it was incredibly time-consuming, and I mean that literally. Trying to document my life in that way completely swallowed up my focus to the extent that I wasn’t able to be fully with and in the time I was trying so hard to qualify.

(This post + playlist continues below. If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s (and last month’s) playlist and other writings from the archives, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.)

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Lately, I’ve been feeling my age. Not in the physical sense. Luckily my bones aren’t loudly telling of their thirty-six years—though sometimes, on cold mornings, I can feel the quiet weight of them bragging. No, I’ve been feeling my age in an intellectual sense. I’ve been thinking about all the wisdom and memories I’ve accumulated, how they’re collecting in what feels like my brain through vivid rememberings and hard-fought lessons but they’re actually on my body, making my movements, directing my steps. An example of this on a simple level looks like me always washing my strawberries (even the organic ones) because of the one time I got food poisoning from a handful of dirty ones. On a deeper level, it’s having an inner knowing that I’m always changing so it’s not wise to make promises to others that a future iteration of myself won’t be able to keep.1

I’m feeling viscerally this month that I’ve lived a lot. I’ve seen multiple trajectories of my life fizzle and be re-routed toward something else (and I’m in the midst of the biggest and most serious fizzle/re-route at this exact moment). I’ve seen many parts of me, pieces that I swore I needed to keep alive to survive, die and become composted into new ways of being, and the grief of those things dying is as palpable as the relief of having new and different choices. I’ve had many moments this month so far where I’ve looked around and thought, “Whose life is this?” Where I’ve been isn’t where I’m going2 and there’s so much joy in that. There’s also a lot of fear.

I’m not a religious person.3 But if I was, I would lie prostrate at the altar of change. This is a deity I know well, one I feel like I was born to learn from, worship, be cracked open by. I’ve sacrificed myself over and over again for change’s blessings, to be seen in a favorable light by transformation’s pleasing eye. I’m devoted to change—my own and others—because in my experience, it’s there that we actually live. For me, being devoted to self-change is not about being a better version of myself. It’s about becoming more me. It’s about feeling more of my aliveness.

I forget that feeling my own aliveness isn’t just about the sweetness or sensuality of a moment. Sometimes, it’s about feeling fear or uncertainty, giving those feelings space to breathe and resonate in your body. There’s aliveness there, too. The wisdom I’m learning now is about being with those feelings (fear and uncertainty) and not letting them or their vivid memories overtake me; not letting them steer me away from becoming more me.

This month I’ll be trying to tap into my resiliency, vigor, and will to stay in my aliveness. A lot of questions have been answered these first five months of the year but I’m still living with certain questions that continue to stump me. Some of those questions I don’t necessarily need the answers to. And some of them are quite literally making me crazy with their answer: "Ev’Yan, you gotta live the question to find the answer.”4 But there is one question that I know the definitive answer to, one that I posed here:

“Whose life is this?”

The answer: Mine.

The playlist I made for you this month is a continuation of what I’ve been ruminating on regarding change, fear, and the body. On it, there’s songs from Jimi Hendrix, Earth, Wind & Fire, and BADBADNOTGOOD. If you’re a paid subscriber (you are a gem!) you’ll find the playlist below. I hope you enjoy it. :)

If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s (and last month’s) playlist and other writings from the archives, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.

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They say April showers bring May flowers. I’m curious about what seeds my tears have been watering this month, what new things are being cultivated in the darkness of this moment, what feels ready to bloom after so much stormy change.

I often go in and out of fearing change. When change is hard, it feels like I am losing myself, like I’m becoming less of what I know. Not being able to recognize myself or the shape my life is morphing into can be quite nerve-wracking. But this month, I’ve been able to access a different perspective—that change isn’t just about loss, it’s about becoming. Who will I become at the end of this season? How much more me will I be? Those questions don’t daunt me. I’m eager to find out what’s on the other side after the shifting has settled.

And god, how I want to be on the other side.

April has been a month of both quick processing time and very slow fulfillment.1 I have felt that paradox viscerally in my body. I’ve been rather restless this month, feeling like I’m waiting in line for the next phase of my life to begin. It’s been hard to be still. I haven’t been moving as slowly as I should be, haven’t been taking enough mindful breaths. I’ve been letting my anxiety dictate the pace of my actions and sometimes that pace has looked like me being completely immobile, in a total freeze response.

I’m noticing that when I’m feeling impatient, I’m not in my body. I’m projecting myself into the future. And I think that’s why the experience of waiting can feel so frustrating: it’s kind of painful—or at least that’s how it feels for me. My jaw clenches. My breathing becomes shallow. My eyes feel like they are almost bugging out of their sockets, looking ahead, anxiously anticipating forward movement. Having more of a somatic awareness about what impatience feels like in my body has given me some interesting information.2 It’s also made me want to change my response to impatience, to get more comfortable with waiting, with not-knowing.

As the month continues, I want to trust the seeds I’m watering. I want to trust the timing of my own blossoming. I want to slow down enough to feel myself and what is around me and when I do, I want to really enjoy the sensation of being connected and present.

This month’s playlist encapuslates what I’ve been thinking about lately about patience, self-transformation, and endings. On it, there’s songs from Kelela, Sade, Arrangement, and The Postal Service. If you’re a paid subscriber (so much love for you!) you’ll find the playlist below. If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s playlist and other sharings soon to come, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.

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I have spent this month (so far) pressing my cheek up against a great wall of moss; looking into the eyes of a past lover and remembering; smelling the sweet scent of jasmine and orange blossoms; making art that is for my eyes only; taking long, aimless walks to be with my thoughts, feeling weather on my skin; becoming hoarse from spirited shouts invoking a free Palestine; feeling the weight and labor involved in recalibrating my entire life and still somehow experiencing the hope and promise of spring.

There are a lot of things ending in my life currently. I am shrugging off iterations of myself like an old, worn coat. There has been a lot of pain in this process as I feel the loss of things, things that I used to really want, that previously felt so good to me, that were so good to me. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could go back to the way those wants felt to me before—the comfort and excitement of fiending for them, the hot hunger in my belly that propelled me to have them. I’ve been missing the certainty of those desires, that cosy feeling that I would always want and love and need those things.

I’ve talked so much about pleasure in my life but never about what happens when your pleasure changes, when you lose interest in wanting something that you’ve wanted for so long. Intuitively I know that the lack of wanting what I used to want is carving out space for new objects of my desire so that the cycle can begin again. I guess it’s been hard to remember who I am without all of the wanting that used to move me. At the moment, I’m having trouble knowing what to do with that grief, how to hold it alongside what is trying to bloom inside of me.

During this time, I’ve found myself trying to convince myself to want again what I no longer want. Even while experiencing a visceral ‘no’ in my body, I still try to find (even manufacture) the feeling that once said “I want you.” Because things would be so much easier if I were to stay with those old desires. Because I have erected altars to them, prepared rooms in my heart that kept them safe and warm. Because I’ve built my life around certain wants; they have made me who I am. Without them, I am unmoored.

Perhaps what I’m looking for in staying with a faded want is the familiarity and simplicity of who I was when I first discovered it and the ease of maintaining it. I know that trying to force-feed myself a want that is no longer tenable is a kind of violence I am enacting against myself. I know that it is a pointless, fruitless endeavor. I know that what I’m really trying to do is soothe the parts of me that are afraid to meet the person I might be without the familiar anchors of desire holding me down.

This month, amongst many other things, I’ll be trying to move on from coercing myself to want what no longer has life in them, what no longer brings life to me.

I made this playlist inspired by the sides of wanting and unwanting I’m currently occupying. On it, I put songs from Park Hye Jin, Broken Social Scene, Infinite Bisous, and Charlotte Day Wilson.

If you’re a paid subscriber (I appreciate you!) you’ll find the playlist below. If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s playlist and other sharings soon to come, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.

Sending you lots of love and big floral feelings.

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I’ve been thinking about death a lot. How can I not? There is death all around me: I am witnessing multiple active genocides. I’m immersed in the constant violence that is racism, transphobia, capitalism, and ableism. I’m living the bleakness that is burgeoning climate catastrophe—to name a few. As morbid as it is, I’ve been thinking about death not as a way to spiral into hopelessness and deep fear (though I have my moments). I’ve been using death and its constant, inevitable, heartbreaking presence as a way to focus in on love. There’s something about knowing that all of this is ephemeral that makes me want to love it—my body, my loves, the ground underneath my feet—even more fiercely.

Something my partner and I’ve been talking about a lot together is the idea of leaning into love, surrendering to its force, giving ourselves up to its rhythms wholly. I’ve spent a lot of years feeling, receiving, and giving love up to the point where it met my resentment, stubbornness, fear, and resistance. And while I still experienced love then, I didn’t reach its depths; I didn’t let its depths reach me.

Meditating on death has reminded me of my own impermanence and how maybe it would behoove me to stop withholding my ardor for people, for things, for myself. That if I’m always telling myself to live without regrets, I need to love without regrets too. This isn’t a novel idea. There are whole books and entire songs about the importance of loving to the fullest. I guess I’m finally realizing, in my big age, how to embody that as a practice.

For me, that starts with not policing what and how I love by putting arbitrary limits on myself. It’s giving myself permission to express love when I want to, to say it to my friends more, to show outward appreciation for things that move me. It’s giving myself permission to be moved by things. I’m allowing myself to be openly romantic which means that I’m allowing myself to tap into the cheesiness that often accompanies love. I’m seeing that “cheese” as a result of what happens when I let myself be softened by love. As a recovering cynic, I always thought that cheesy meant cheap. These days, I’m finding that being cheesy makes love more playful, less serious.

I’m letting love move me, taking me where it wants to go, and sometimes that means love is taking me toward heartbreak. Since I’ve been opening up myself to love more, I’ve been getting my heart broken more. I used to be so afraid of heartbreak. Admittedly, I still am. But I am trying to not let it choose my steps. I want to love for the sake of love and in doing so, I understand that love will eventually end in some way, be it in intensity or a particular iteration, just like I, eventually, will end. I may as well love and love and love and love to the fullest.

I end each phone call with my mom and sister by telling them I love them. (There was a time I didn’t do that.) I picked a mandarin from my tree and while I ate it, I thought about how maybe the fruit is an offering of love and nourishment to me, and it tasted different, sweeter, more present in me. I’ve been telling my partner I love them when I feel the sensation of it coalescing in my body, even if it’s repetitive, even if I said it many times before. And sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly blue and drab and my mind drifts to horrific things, I feel a sense of peace knowing that when I die, at least I know without a shadow of a doubt that I have loved and been loved.

This month’s playlist is a continuation on the meditations I’ve been doing on death and love. On it, there’s songs from Dolly Parton, Helado Negro, Animal Collective, and Tracy Chapman. If you’re a paid subscriber (thank you so much for being here!) you’ll find the playlist below. If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s playlist and other sharings soon to come, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.

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