What delights him and makes him giggle?

What new thing is he practicing right now, and what is that like for you to witness?

What does he hate to do?

What is curious about?

How is he with transitions?

How are you with this transition? No really, how are you?

What foods is he eating? What foods are you sharing?

What is one thing you’re already missing?

How does the passage of time feel?

What are you grieving now, from the before baby times?

What surprises you about him? What delights you?

What surprises you about parenthood? What doesn’t?

How can you feel yourself changing in this season?

You’re doing a great job.

Many, many loops are open.

I used to be better at keeping in touch with people. That’s what I often tell myself, and it’s true.

But here’s what’s truer: The expectancy of following up in communication used to inspire a kind of anxiety in me. And that anxiety, though I wouldn’t have recognized it at the time, often led to patterns of inauthentic socializing and over-giving in relationships. I called back even when I didn’t have the energy. I made the plan and showed up even when I wasn’t feeling it. I reached out and scheduled things with friends who rarely if ever reached out and scheduled things with me. I’ve always loved and needed my solo time, but I tended to fill up my extra pockets with other people and outside fun to the point of exhaustion.

I love my people, and that love and desire to stay connected led to me abandoning myself in subtle, almost imperceptible ways.

I couldn’t leave the loop open, for fear of losing connection. I couldn’t hold the lack of clarity, the airy nature of maybe-future-plans, so I initiated more than I had the true capacity to. I couldn’t have put all these pieces together in my teens and twenties when I was out partying till late, living for the moment and living abroad, but it’s immensely clear now.

Which brings me to today, and the un-returned phone calls that my authentic new-mothering capacity has no energy or desire to return even while I genuinely want to stay connected

.

Part of moving through transition, the space between what was and what will be, is getting comfortable (with the discomfort of) holding open loops. With unknowns. With cloudiness and unclear directions. With changing capacity and the natural shifts that occur in relationship as a result. Some bonds will be able to withstand the middle place. Some will not. I’ve experienced enough of life’s gristle by now to hold that truth with a looser grip and take the unknowns less personally.

And, I can also express my love in truer ways now. A text message. A voice note. A youtube video. A series of just-right-for-them memes. Shorter snippets, perhaps, with more time in between. Just for now. Until next time.

Until the clouds start to move, my feet begin to find the earth and I can look at a calendar without my vision blurring and my brain fogging up.

That time will always come again. The work is to trust that it will.

Stay connected to my work

I have parts of me that want to know why? Why now and why so intense. I don’t know this animal well, and my system wants to know the source of this soggy visitor. But ultimately the cause-whether it’s postpartum adjustment, the many months of never getting the correct amount of sleep, the intense confluence of astrology in my sun sign of cancer this last month or the felt accumulation of living in an ever more increasingly violent and fragile world-doesn’t really matter.

What matters is the acknowledgement of the feeling. If I can feel the thing fully, let it move through me, sit with it long enough to hear what it might be trying to tell me, I can remember that this too will stay as long as it needs to until it’s ready to change.

Last weekend we went to a family friend’s lake house. Packed the many onesies and snacks and diapers into too many bags and settled into a long train ride. Arriving felt like an exhale that led to a three hour nap and the ability to rest that isn’t available within the constraints of regular life where there are rarely more than two adults present (deep sigh as I think about how much more supported parenting could feel in a collectivistic culture).

And then, the lake.

Have you ever swam nude solo at night and find yourself talking to your most vulnerable parts out loud? I highly recommend.

Out there in the water, body completely submerged, I thought of the old image of the iceberg as metaphor for how much of human reality and experience is below the surface.

Submerging in this way made my vulnerable parts feel held and, somehow, okay. The heaviness, the grief, the exhaustion. All held by something greater than me. All safe below the cover of water, my head alone lit by the light of the moon.

So often in the mental health sphere, there is an emphasis on putting language to what is. On categorizing, naming, understanding. There’s nothing innately wrong with this, but it can only take us so far. At some point both before and beyond language exists the body and all the experiences it holds. Some of this material has language and some does not. Some has sensation only, or color, or just a general felt sense that carries more shadow than light.

I am forever practicing being okay with not knowing. Practicing being with myself, and with the flow of life and relationship in a way that allows what is true to come to the surface without rushing to understand, name or express it before it’s ready. To be with what is without needing to fully understand or put language to it. In this state, I can know that the places beneath the tip of the iceberg are ultimately okay, as long as I acknowledge that they are.

Maybe you submerge in water, maybe in air, maybe in the warm glow of a dear friend or lover.

Whatever it is, may you submerge in something bigger than you this week~may your body settle in.

Follow my somatic therapy work

I close the door or move to the next room.

And then I scan the internal and external to do list, trying to decide what makes sense to focus on for this next unknown amount of time where my presence and care isn’t required.

There are dishes to do. Leftover progress notes to write. A painting stencil to order. A baby music class to research. Website edits to make. Maybe I’ll do nothing at all and take a nap with him. Give my brain and body a reprieve and tell the capitalist monsters that tell me I-can’t-stop-won’t-stop in my brain to quiet down just for now.

And then my stomach growls, reminding me to eat.

Start with the basics and then work up.

I fill a bowl with yogurt, berries, honey, almonds and stuff a handful of dates in my mouth.

Decide that since the earlier attempt to nap with him resulted in a wake up only 10 minutes later, this nap should be spent completing a computer task.

I open the computer, and stare. Wondering what to do. Flooded with options and unable to decide.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote myself a note this week, a list, entitled:

Things to prioritize (fight for as in fighting for my sanity).

An attempt to make the un-tetherable more earthly and grounded.

It includes things like exercise. Time outside. creative time. removing the temptation to scroll on my phone. It also includes what needs to happen in order to make these things possible-childcare, using the calendar.

All logical moves.

I look at the list and stare too. Many days, the attempt to organize caring for myself also feels insurmountable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The baby wakes up, sometimes with a coo and sometimes with a cry. Needing me.

I lick the last spoonful of yogurt. tell myself I’ll return to one of the tabs later. Finish the website edit. Write the progress note. Scribble onto a piece of paper.

Later will come, and later will go.

Mothering is now.

And I think, as I’m sure we all do about our bodies from time to time, “was this always here?” I don’t remember what it felt like to not have chin hairs, gray hairs, eye crinkles and slightly purple stretch marks that smile up as I gaze down at my belly. and I’m also sure at one point I did not. I don’t remember how it felt to not know heartbreak, love, grief and the deep satisfaction of rolling around on the floor of a dance studio. And yet at one point I did not.

Existing as I do now in baby time, the time before conscious memory, I wonder at how much he doesn’t know, how sensitive his system is, how sharp his senses. I also wonder at how much he already does know, in body as well as soul. Sometimes he stares into my eyes in a way that makes me positive he’s traveled lifetimes to be here, and sometimes he flops to the side or drools or plays with a plastic bag in a way that only a new arrival to earth would. He is both old and new, wise and naive, knowing and unknowing.

Maybe we all are.

Subscribe now

Maybe I’m not tracking the length of my chin hairs at all. Maybe each stroke is simply an acknowledgement of my body and self at this particular moment in time. Yes, you are here and yes, you have not always been. Time is moving quickly, but you are still here in this body, right now.

Remember this moment, It will be gone so quickly, the stroke says.

Record those gurgles.

Photograph the light as it dances with the flowers.

Call the friend you’ve been thinking about.

Save the voice note.

The felt experience of this life matters more to the body than the tracking of time on a clock or calendar. It doesn’t have to make logical sense. It just has to be recognized and validated as real.

Practice embodiment with me.

The depth is my mother grief. I carry it from losing my mother 8 years ago to metastatic breast cancer. From becoming a mother without my mother here in her physical body to mother me through it. The little girl I see in my therapy session, eyes closed, is the part of me that holds this grief.

It sounds silly to think of now, but I really thought I had reached the depth of this particular grief. Not the end of it, but the bottom of it. Sat on the bottom of the well and scraped my hands along the solid rock underneath, dirt collecting in my fingernails. Her death day felt so different two years ago-so much lighter and moveable. A turning point into a new chapter. Light opening up. Spacious.

And then with pregnancy and now motherhood, the bottom has disappeared once again. Another turning point, but this time downward and out instead of upwards.

I am more solid than I was eight years ago, more grounded, more me. It doesn’t feel the same-not earth shattering or shocking to my system anymore, but it also doesn’t better (whatever better means).

I am here without her, still.

Still, I yearn to ask her what she remembers from carrying, birthing and mothering me in these early days before we had conscious memory together.

Still, I so badly want to feel her hand on my back, see her face witness my exhaustion and love and her arms hold my little one.

Still and again, I am shaken, shook, sad.

It feels good to name. I didn’t realize until now that I had unconsciously tried to put a cap on this part of myself, as in “you’ve had your time, it’s time to move on”. But she, and any part that holds tenderness and sadness, really needs more time from me, not less. The resilience I’ve built shouldn’t need to quiet her voice. The comfort I’ve built in witnessing my own pain doesn’t have an end date. There is always more time. And parts can always co-exist comfortably when we let them.

People often comment that I am a good mother. I know it’s true. I love being a mom so much, and even though it’s hard it also feels natural.

I also know that this confidence comes more from my attachment to her than my years of childcare experience. She wanted me and tended to me and loved me and really knew me. And that nurturing lives in my body, trust my instincts and build in the rhythms that will create a similar bond between my baby and me.

She is not here in body. And, her embodied mothering is in me.

What an absolute gift.

Stay connected with my work.

Not just in my baby-the emphatic grunts, the repetitive pumps of his plump fists as if they were squeezed around drum sticks, the sucking of his little gums and brand new teeth (!) around his fingers or mine, the screams in delight at having a voice or in abject frustration that he can’t sit up by himself yet.

But also in myself. I mirror his sounds, and feel the satisfaction grow in me at simply expressing the feeling without needing to explain it (a particular skill that many have forgotten in this hyper-verbal culture in which words too often cover up rather than express feelings). The satisfaction of expressing myself through sound is not new to me, but the bigness of this particular identity shift and transition makes words feel mostly inadequate. Sounds feel more correct.

A friend asks me how I am, and I often grunt, moan or wave my hands before saying anything. “I don’t have the language right now”.

Gah. OOof. Humph. Uuughhh. Bzzzz.

Try it. Just make a sound. Don’t think about it. See how it feels. Let it move through you. Let it change-does it want to get louder or quieter? Lower or higher? Longer or shorter? Does it want to whisper or shout?

And how does your body respond to your own voice? Does your heart open and lift? Beat faster or slower? Do your shoulders close in on themselves? Does it make you feel inexplicably nervous? Satisfied? Ferocious? Perhaps imagine being younger than you are-a baby or child or teenager and let that give you permission that your current state makes it hard to access.

All of that is information. And with another being who is tapped into your unique level of weird (in the best way), the sound is enough. The sound, the body, expresses what words cannot.

Even when my baby first learns to speak, language will still be too inadequate to accurately capture the depth of his joy, sorrow and fear. He will laugh and cry and probably (hopefully) go on making his dinosaur screeching sounds for years to come. And I’ll be making them right alongside him.

Sound alone is not always enough. Movement is not always enough. And, in the midst of BIG change I find that these expressions capture the essence of the thing more accurately than words.

They help us feel ourselves. And see each other. Perhaps more accurately than before.

The sound of your authentic experience is enough.

(Yes, I realize the irony of taking the time to find the right words to write a whole piece about non-verbal communication. If my body wasn’t so deeply resistant to being filmed on video right now I might just send a video of me making sounds but it is and so here we are.)

I have been writing this on the floor while I watch my baby in tummy time drool happily and attempt to roll. He is screeching now to be moved.

And so he will be.

May you use your voice for clarity this week. You’re not alone.

Stay connected with my work.

P.S. If you’re in Philly, the next Move Your Mess class is happening on 5/2. This is a delicious place to explore non-verbal expression. You can email me at rootingwildmovement@gmail.com to book your spot.

I’m not big on dream interpretation (because who the fuck knows), but the sensation does feel familiar. It is heartbreak, grief, and also unadulterated joy. It moves the way any feeling that isn’t given restrictions or peppered with shame does. It is timeless and also placeless. It moves through me and around me but is not entirely of me.

After my mom died 8 years ago, I made a practice of spending time at the alter I created in my small Chicago bedroom that regularly shook a bit when the railcar would pass by. The grief moved through me, sometimes in wails and sobs, sometimes in shakes, sometimes in writing, sometimes in laying on the ground and letting it simply drip out of me into a puddle, my body a wet and well worn washcloth.

Years later when I had moved to New Orleans, my best friend came to visit me and that same energy overtook me as we erupted in giggles while attempting to cartwheel in Metairie Cemetery. Laughter rolling up up up and out. Through me but not entirely of me. (I hope you have people you laugh uncontrollably with).

This is the sensation of falling into a feeling, of letting it scoop you up and move you until it stops in it’s own time and not before that. This is the sensation of working with the body rather than against it. This is the choice to not suppress your expression. In some cases, this is also the practice following your instincts and listening to what your body needs in this moment rather than what your bossy parts or the culture have decided it should do.

Learning how to fall into yourself takes practice. Learning how to listen to the body is multi-layered and slow. Like any relationship that lasts, it requires tending and consistency and compassion.

It is also quintessentially human. And that matters.

In a time when we have become so collectively suggestible that we believe chat gpt can promise to help us find a soulmate or that it can be a safe refuge to process deep emotional pain , the choice to live inside of and outwardly express our felt experience can feel daunting, impossible or inaccessible, particularly if we don’t have others to hold our hands and scream with us on the metaphorical rollercoaster ride.

That is by design. The corporations who created AI have no vested interest in anything but their own profit. The individualism and isolation that already defined US culture has created the perfect environment to profit off of people who already feel disconnected from themselves and each other.

Embodiment is an act of defiance because of how human it is. Because of how indescribable sensation can be. As valuable as putting language to felt experience is, we don’t need to have verbal language for the felt sense of being a person to be real-sometimes defiance looks like choosing to just be with what is (the grief, the heartbreak, the rolling joy) without trying to analyze, describe, categorize or define it.

Letting ourselves be as messy and undefined (read: human) as we are is some of the hardest and most important work.

May you feel into yourself this week. May that be enough.

Also. I’m a Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapist and Licensed Professional Counselor based in Philly. If you are a licensed therapist desiring a space to deepen your embodied awareness in service of your work with clients, my new Somatic Consultation Group begins March 24th. Join from anywhere, and read more here-I’d love to have you.

Last night it felt like my baby was needing to be nursed every hour. I have intentionally stopped tracking the timing of how often and long he eats and sleeps since I know he’s getting plenty of both, and every stretch of sleep I get feels ephemeral. Maybe it was five minutes or two hours. Or an hour that felt like 3. Or 30 minutes that felt like a second. Either way, he’s up and so am I. I usually close my eyes and keep the room dark while nursing, sometimes but not usually falling back asleep. Sometimes I reach for the wretched phone and get a little fix of social media scrolling. At least once in the night I eat a snack, often perplexed in the morning by a brown smear on my baby’s sleep sack in the morning until I remember it was in fact a chocolate kind bar. Somewhere between 70 and 90% of the time a friend on the phone asks me what I’m doing, the answer is breastfeeding.

The daytime is sweeter. I can stare into his impossibly big dark eyes that are starting to hold my gaze more each day, his hand tenderly wrapped around the two fingers that keep the boob in perfect position. I can kiss the top of his head and run my hands through his incredibly soft hair. I can catch a sweet smile forming around the nipple. It’s difficult to describe the deep gratification I feel when I see his healthy body grow ever larger each day, with ever more perfect chunks in his thighs and rolls around his neck. I did that! I think. My body did that. And so I must feed myself just as ravenously, often at the same time I’m feeding him, a bit of rice or oatmeal or yogurt sometimes landing in his hair or on his belly. He is unbothered, udderly (:)) focused on the milk he’s receiving,

He is 11 weeks old, and We are symbiotic. I know this will be a preciously short blip in the grand scheme of our life together. I also know that I will be the sole holder of conscious memory about this time. That I will tell him about the sweet way he would close his eyes while nursing, the dinosaur screeches he made when needing to get off, switch sides or go to sleep, the warmth and perfect fit of his body as he lay on my chest following a feed. He will hold the memory in his body, but he will not be able to speak of how this time felt for him or what he remembers.

When the feeding feels monotonous or tedious or when I reach for a distraction during one, i try to remember this. In this window of time before his conscious memories form, while he is body and instinct and nervous system only, I am the keeper of these memories. So I must be as present as possible so that something remains in this sleep deprived brain to share later. At some point, we’ll be able to talk about a shared experience. For now he has smiles and facial expressions and a myriad of sounds that I delight in repeating back to him. For now, this is life.'

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I feel distraught or powerless about the daily unfolding horrors and bemoan my lack of capacity to engage in protest and organizing, I remember that this too is world building. That the energy it takes to deeply care for a growing human that will deeply care for other humans is valuable, no matter how invisible and unglamorous it may be.

Each season, each transition, is purposeful. Even if the purpose is to give your body a break or to squeeze your capacity tightly so you learn to say no. May your life give you meaning. May it bring you closer to other life, not farther away. We need each other to affirm our own humanity, maybe more than ever before.

What title would you give this season of your life? And what/who is it bringing you closer to?

Something about that innocuous comment hit me~how little our experiences show on our bodies, how large the chasm can be between what is felt on the inside and what we see on the outside, how few details can be absorbed in a 5 minute interaction.

Since we last worked together, I’ve lived what feels like several lifetimes, and I’m sure she has too. I’ve lived in another country and traveled in numerous others. I’ve made home and community in two other American cities. I’ve held my mother while she took her last breath. I’ve gotten married. I’ve lived-and now I am sustaining life for ten week old baby of my own.

We rarely get (and even rarely take) the opportunity to look closely enough at each other to take in the changes that time and experience mark us with. She could not see the deepening crinkles at the corners of my eyes, the ever growing collection of gray hair at my crown, the purple stretch marks that tell the story of skin that held life inside of it.

Often in the middle place of whatever transition I find myself in, people from the past show up, almost as if to remind me how much I’ve changed. Today, that was welcome, because early mothering has forced my presence in a way that makes it feel impossible to plan for the future and certainly doesn’t leave much space for reminiscing about the past. It is both mundane and miraculous, relaxing and exhausting.

That complexity is what the middle place contains: Absolute awe at a newly eager smile from my baby while he happily stares at the ceiling. Blood boiling rage at the US health care system that probably gets directed at my sweet husband. Abject exhaustion that makes it feel absolutely impossible to do anything but collapse (sometimes people ask me how I do this thing with so little sleep-It is incredible what the body can adjust to). A blessed hour like this one to finally write something-anything-that I’ve been sifting through. Another one fueled by the particular stamina that listening to and attempting to respond to a crying baby requires.

I am meeting myself yet again here in this space between who I was and who I am becoming, with more wonder and curiosity and respect than I have in the past. As the role of mother starts to settle more deeply into my skin, I feel immense gratitude for this body that carried me while it carried and grew and birthed another human.

I know I don’t really look 22 anymore, and I actually don’t want to.

I shared ideas and offerings with the world almost as soon as they entered my body. I made huge life decisions on instinct alone. I did not know how to hold things inside of me, to let them marinate, to be with the discomfort of not exactly knowing, so I performed full confidence in the hope that if I shared it with others that would somehow make it more real and true than it felt to me at the time.

More than anything else, pregnancy is teaching me the wisdom of waiting, of letting life take it’s time, and of the intelligence of the slow reveal.

How does this happen? How does one who never could wait before learn to settle into and even be comforted by the pure act of slow growth and waiting for life to be ready?

Gestation, I am learning, is highly intelligent. These nine months are absolutely crucial.

Baby needs all this time to grow enough to survive outside my womb. I need all of this time to both be with the unfolding and prepare for meeting this most awesome responsibility of mothering human life.

To prepare is multi layered and many stepped.

There is physical preparation.

For years before getting pregnant, I prepared my body to hold new life. I focused on nutrition so my womb could become a vital home. I learned a lot about birth. I stopped drinking alcohol. I took rest more seriously than ever. All of that laid the foundation for the physical preparation to give birth and receive new life~painting walls, buying diapers, practicing breath, shoring up my community, continuing to be as responsive as possible to the needs for hunger and rest and movement that my body crave.

There is emotional preparation.

New layers of grief reveal themselves as I reckon with the heartbreak of mothering without the mother who birthed me here in physical form. I say a slow goodbye to the freedom and selfishness that the years of maidenhood afforded me. I relish the years that my partner have had together, just the two of us, knowing that the ease and closeness we have with each other has laid a strong foundation and that parenthood will inevitably require us to shift and change inside of it. I watch the rise of fascism, environmental destruction and genocide in the U.S. and around the world and allow myself to be with the heartbreak and natural fears that arise when so much is unknown about what systems will still be in place as this baby grows.

There is spiritual preparation.

I connect with my ancestors, spiritual support and baby as they flip throughout my womb. I discover and embody my values and boundaries on a deeper level. I ask for and receive help (yes, this is too is spiritual work).

__________________________________________________________________________

I look back and marvel at how untrusting of gestation I have been in the past.

In the first iteration of my business when I was guiding people through embodied grief processes, there was a current of stress and fear running through me that is not present now.

The stress was partly financial-we cannot dedicate ourselves creatively or spiritually while we are also struggling to meet basic needs.

The fear was an internal crisis of confidence. Can I make this work? How do I make this work? Even as I held space and witnessed powerful transformation in the people I worked with individually, I continually felt the need to push out new classes, retreats, and groups to get the external validation that I couldn’t give myself.

I didn’t hold my ideas for long before sharing because to hold and actually allow new life to gestate until it’s ready is uncomfortable, incredibly slow and kind of boring.

Ideal gestation is largely boring. There is very little drama. Life grows inside while I eat my morning eggs and toast and I don’t have to do a thing about it.

Expecting myself to do (what I understand to be now) an absolutely unnatural process of quickly turning out new ideas and expecting them to land with others when they had not fully landed in me creates stress, and yes, drama. Drama distracts us.

For lots of good reasons (Trauma, capitalism, individualism, social media fueled distraction etc), many approach gestation and birth and mothering with a nervous system that cannot hold itself and without the support of calm bodies to hold them. Stress and drama are natural outputs of an internal struggle to land, be still and fully feel.

What might have been different in my relationships, in that that business and in my life had I trusted the wisdom of gestation then, I’ll never know. All I can do I can love that version of me and know that she was doing her best.

The maiden is becoming a mother.

__________________________________________________________________________

Six months ago you were just a seed. Now you are practicing kicks and twirls and breath. I sit on the rocker where I will be nursing you in a few short months, hand on protruding belly, and feel you pulsing inside of me. I gaze out the window as the sun breaks between the clouds and greet you good morning. Hip flexors and back twinge slightly with the continual stretching of this uterus and the renegotiation of weight. Tummy garbling from morning hunger, I go downstairs to satisfy it. What a miracle we are, baby. Let’s begin the day.

___________________________________________________________________________

Whatever/whomever you are gestating right now, however long it takes to reveal itself, may your process be sweet, slow, kind of boring and deeply gratifying,

“Let that shit go!”

“Release it!”

“I’ve got so much to let go of.”

We receive so much weird messaging about letting go.

On the one hand, we just need to let it go-pain, sadness, grief, expectations-you name it-let it go.

On the other hand, anyone who has actually engaged in the tending that requires to heal wounds and have them take up less space knows that letting go is work. It’s not like letting go of a piece of pottery and hearing it smash, once and for all becoming fodder for art or plants.

Largely because of internet influencers who make videos about “somatic shaking once a day to change your life”, many people have come to conflate somatic work with letting go. With quick fix exercises and big emotional releases. This is both over-simplified and potentially dangerous.

Somatic work is nervous system work. Each person’s nervous system is unique, requiring a different amount of closeness, speed, light, talking, silence movement, and touch in order to come into a sense of integration. Each life experience, heartbreak, t(T)rauma and relationship shapes each body differently. There is no one thing that works for every body.

More than simply letting go, somatic work is about integration. It’s about coming into relationship with the fullness of who we are.

And integration requires both letting go and holding on. Both/and.

Letting go of what and who no longer is resonant, holding on to what and who is. Holding on to ourselves.

Perhaps I am so averse to the simplistic language around letting go because I am so exquisite at holding on.

I keep yearbooks from elementary school. I have boxes and boxes of photographs. Old letters and stacks of journals. The makings of my emotional world and the people that shaped it are precious to me, and I am deeply sentimental by nature. It has taken me years to know the difference between holding on and remembering, or to learn that remembering does not have to equal maintaining the same connection.

Things fall away easily when they have served their purpose. And as much as we can be curious and exploratory with our patterns of holding, we don’t really get to choose when or how they will.

I wrote early this year on Instagram about the particular uneasiness of not feeling sad on my mom’s death day. I had clung tightly to her, to my grief and to the cord between us for 7 years, the cord becoming looser and looser with each passing day. My investigation of the embodiment of grief compelled me and transformed me and forever changed me, until one day that particular cycle of change had completed. And on that day, tears that were usually right on the surface ready to release simply weren’t there. I of course missed and miss her, but I am not holding on anymore. The holding tight had served its purpose. The letting go was weightless.

If you’re having trouble letting something go-a person, a situation, a memory-it may not have been held long enough.

Have you held it closely? Have you let yourself feel all of it? Have you released the pressure and expectation to let go? Have you allowed yourself any expression that comes when you do feel it?

Most of us want to let things go before the thing is ready to leave, before we’ve felt and integrated what we need to.

So much of traversing the middle place between what was and what what will be is fighting the need to feel or fighting our own desires to hold on.

And I just want to say, hold on.

And then, when there’s softness, spaciousness and ease, the thing will release.

You will have let go. Just like that.

_____________________________________________________________________

P.S. if you’re in Philly and would like individual support in this arena, my practice Rooting Wild Movement is accepting new clients both virtually and in person. Check it out.

Hello!

I haven’t written for awhile. I was waiting for the inspiration to write, for the thoughts that pulse through my dream space to sound palatable (or at least sensical) in the daylight. I was getting my new private practice established, getting overwhelmed by balancing the particularities of being a therapist in all the ways and contexts I do it with the practice of living in this deeply beautiful capitalistic patriarchal garbage dump.

As Julia Cameron reminds us, creativity should not be limited to the random spurts of energy that occasionally have us reaching for a pen or paintbrush. Creativity, like anything else that keeps us well, is a practice.

I could write about the deeply unsettling uncertainty following the election that so many of us are holding close or trying our damndest to ignore. I could talk about mindfulness and the somatic awareness that keeps us human.

But what I really want to write about is the dry sauna at the Y.

And the small miracle of going to bed by 10 pm multiple weeks in a row.

And remembering to pack snacks so I don’t get hangry.

I have begun to think of self care as the anchors that keep me vital. Anchors that the ship of my body needs to keep me here (right here right now).

In some ways, this is just the continued revelation of taking my own medicine. I often guide my clients in the meditation that begins our sessions to bring as much of themselves to the front as possible. And, I cannot hold all of those parts skillfully if I am not all the way here too.

So often we think of self care as luxurious, timely and geared for self-improvement.

I don’t know about you, but none of those things are very motivating for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love a bubble bath as much as the next babe, but I am far more motivated these days by the idea of sustaining than improving.

As in, I want to do my job and do it well for a long long time.

I want to be able to move my body with relative freedom and ease for a long long time.

I want to be able to be present and engaged in my marriage for a long long time.

I want to continue to build nourishing friendships and community for a long long time.

Knowing that there is so much outside of my control-illness, loss etc- that may befall me at any time, connecting to my anchors on a regular basis keeping me here. They are not complicated. I don’t have to overthink them. And I do them almost every day in some form.

So, here are my personal anchors, in no particular orders.

1. Going to bed by 10:30 at the latest every weekday night

2. Starting work at 10 am (yes, there is of course privilege allowing me to change my schedule in this way)

3. Pulling coconut oil in the morning.

4. Moving in some way every day-swimming, weight lifting, dancing, yoga, walking.

5. The aforementioned sauna at the Y is LIFE GIVING.

6. Eating within an hour of waking up.

7. Packing snacks so I don’t get hungry.

8. Laying on the floor and moving intuitively to close down the day.

   A future version of me will add turning off my phone before 9, but that would not be truthful now and we are practicing here and now.

   What is anchoring you, right here and now?

For whatever reason, it’s this image that motivates me to weight lift. When I learned about bone health, and the effects of strength training on long term bone health, I was hooked. My future aged self motivates me more than any amount I lift or the amount of reps I do. The practices I build are just that-a practice. A structure that organizes my brain and heart and energy.

I got my Master’s degree in Dance/Movement therapy and counseling in 2019, so lets say It’s taken me 5 years to make the explicit connection between embodiment as a practice of and lens for emotional healing and the practice of taking care of the physical body as a tenant of emotional healing.

So many people show up to session with me dysregulated as hell. The world has fallen in on them. They don’t know who they are. They feel desperately lost and often alone. They are moving through major life transitions and grief, processing years and sometimes decades old trauma, coming into a new and often unfamiliar relationship to themselves and the ones around them. I know intimately how going through these processes inevitably make us feel like strangers to ourselves, at least some of the time.

Subscribe now

And also, I know that when I’m not taking care of myself in the most basic, foundational ways, every difficulty feels like the end of the world.

So at an opportune moment, I casually ask, “have you eaten today?”* And 9 x out of 10, they look up as if someone had told them the sky was blue again when it had been green. A look of dumbfounded awe or confusion, as if that question is totally unrelated to whatever it was that they were processing. Because it is. And yet, it isn’t.

More often than not, they shake their heads no, often with a sense of recognition and relief when I remind them that this is where healing begins. The physical body. The emotional processing that happens will not physiologically integrate on an empty stomach and a poor nights sleep (or several). *a note that none of my clients are suffering with eating disorders. My approach would be very different if they were*

Supporting the physical body is essential to supporting our transitions through the middle place. The body is the anchor to the earth, the thing that allows us to experience life. If we don’t take care of body, the foundation is shoddy and there is no solidity to build on.

I know this. We know this. Psychology 101-Maslow’s hierarchy of needs-basic needs have to be met first before any deeper processing or higher evolution can happen. So why did it take me so long to start talking explicitly about eating? About what the foundation of feeling physically satiated provides to a nervous system?

I don’t really know. Perhaps because our individual and collective relationship with food is sensitive and layered and complex. My own relationship with food and feeding and my body has gone through a journey that at this time is a largely pleasurable, loving one but at different times has been fraught and disordered and very unloving. Somehow it hasn’t phased me to continue to highlight how our bodies carry grief (something that many would really rather not focus on), but I have been quiet about food. And sleep. and exercise that isn’t rolling on the floor, but that challenges a physical body and makes it have to work differently and perhaps more functionally than before.

Hence, the weight lifting. And the bone building. And the kiss I’m sending to my future elder self with each squat and bead of sweat.

I’ve never felt this settled before. As a child I simultaneously dreamed of buying my childhood home and having 12 kids there with my childhood best friend AND living in an unspecified amount of other cities and countries. I always thought I would live elsewhere and then return home but when my mom died that desire turned off for what I thought would be forever. Suddenly I didn’t know who I was without her, and certainly couldn’t imagine living in a city so full of reminders of my her and of my childhood with her.

I am getting more comfortable and more playful with the part of myself that loves to proclaim. I proclaimed I would stay in New Orleans forever. I proclaimed that I wouldn’t get my counseling license because I didn’t need it to do my work. Both of those proclamations and many others have fizzled with time. I have learned that the proclaiming is in itself a sign that something feels unrested or unsettled inside, so there is more need to prove.

Something shifted in my relationship to home after Mardi Gras 2023. Not immediately, but that feels like a turning point. It had been at that point 6 years since my mom died. I scattered the majority of her ashes at the St. Anns procession and cried with the gusto of an exorcism at the waters edge.

Sometime after that, New Orleans began to feel less and less comfortable and returning to Philly became…obvious. My grief had processed and integrated into my system enough that it wasn’t running the show, and the return felt sweet. It’s hard to describe the safety that being home has given me, and gives all humans. I am rooted down, so I don’t have to rush. I can rebuild my business slowly. I can fumble at making new friends. I can feel the absence of the community that used to be at my back. And still, I am where I am supposed to be. That has never felt more clear.

Right now, thousands of people around the world cannot return home. Their homes in Palestine, the Congo, Haiti, Sudan and so many other places are unrecognizable and unsafe. Their relatives and friends have been tortured and killed. There is no option to return. The homes they have found in other places may be temporary, hostile or unsafe in other ways. The homes they have found or built may not feel like home at all.

It is devastating to the human psyche to not be able to return. Or to return and not know the place one is from, to not be known by the people around. That has happened as a result of gentrification all over Philly too. I hold such privilege in being able to return home.

People are resourceful and resilient and endlessly creative. We make art amidst heartbreak. Make jokes amidst violence. Make community amidst loss.

And, I want us to be able to linger at the grief portal longer without turning away. I want us to grow our capacity to witness absence and devastation without shutting down. I want us root down where we are and, if it applies, to grieve where we are not without needing to make it okay. I want us to trust ourselves to go to hard places and know we can journey back. That is why I do what I do.

Traversing the middle place is nervous system work.

I’m one of those people that has a lot to say and does powerful work that benefits the collective. Maybe you are too.

I’m also incredibly tired. With 8 hours of sleep and a daily hour nap a day, I still find myself yawning throughout most of the day. Whether it’s recovery from burnout, a hangover from gemini season, feeling collective rage and grief or some combination, my body is tired.

My mind, however, is active. It thinks about pieces I want to write, workshops I want to hold, places I want to travel. It jumps from topic to topic, encouraging a deep dive wikipedia search on Glennon Doyle, the history of Cuba, Erykah Badu. It tells me to google things I already know the answer to and check my email hundreds of times a day.

A tired body and a frenetic mind makes for a system with little direction or focus to create the meditations and business plans I want to.

So I do things to release my energy without trying to be productive.

I take walks by the river.

I paint.

I turn on music and dance.

I do yoga.

I don’t try to analyze the why behind my frenetic brain too deeply. I have been in the middle place long enough to feel okay settling into not knowing.

I take long breaths.

And sometimes, my brain gets seduced. By the courses that people I respect are selling. By the promise of more business success if I do a, b and c.

My body, however, is still whole heartedly rejecting any outside input into my process. I can physically feel my heart close up when scanning those gorgeously written sales emails.

In this time of chrysalis, I have no room to listen to anyone’s voice but my own, no matter how brilliant or intelligent or wise those voices are. This morning as I was stirring a pot of oatmeal, I heard this voice say “write”. On Sunday that same voice said “take a walk”, and I walked by the river listening to jazz and blowing bubbles, getting a deep and necessary cleanse from a powerful summer thunderstorm on my way back.

That voice is a body voice. It’s the intuition that comes in the quiet space in between.

I will always trust that voice more than anything my brain tells me.

My brain has no business directing my life. My brain will tell me to do whatever feels the safest and least bothersome and most direct. That is how it is designed.

Your brain has no business directing your life either.

Here’s what I mean.

My clients will often come into a session saying “I don’t know what I want to talk about” or start a long winded story about something that happened over the weekend. Nothing wrong with either of these responses, but both are driven by the mind.

And so I invite us to pause. To close our eyes and drop into the sensations underneath. The heaviness on the heart, the tightening of the throat, the tension in the head. And instead of trying to analyze or interpret this with the brain (always trying to close the loop of understanding), I invite them to get curious about what the sensation is asking them to do. Does it need to yell? Run? Shake? Are there words that need to be said? Are there sounds?

And in this process of slowing down, listening to body and responding to it, the truth of what is actually happening underneath the surface gets revealed. Body directs the show. And then when body has had a chance to express itself, we invite brain in to make meaning, to do the job it was assigned to do.

In effect, the frenetic nature of my brain is actually directing me to back to my body.

It is telling me to center my own expression. To make room to move, sound, wiggle. It is only possible to make meaning and complete tasks after body has directed the show.

I’m off to wiggle now.

How will you center your own expression today?

It’s not our business how or when, but at some point the swirling sand in our brains and bodies will begin to settle, will begin to know that it’s safe to build up where it is, one grain after another.

At this moment, maybe for the first time ever, I am more interested in staying where I am than leaving.

In my body, this feels revolutionary.

For as long as I can remember, the allure of newness, of experiencing other places and cultures and life beyond the place I was has been the driving force behind my decisions. Whether it was Lesotho or Chicago, there has always been a pulsing heartbeat that kept asking for more exploration and more expansion. I have been privileged and intentional enough to follow it, so even as I formed relationships where I was, I never felt fully settled. The logical reasons for moving (a 2 year Peace Corps contract, beginning graduate school etc etc) only explain so much. The brain is only part of any equation in a human life. The body is our first way of both the physical world and the spiritual realms that we cannot touch, and ultimately my body was simply not ready to settle.

Now, the readiness is here. My body is settling into what is, right now.

The transformation that began the day my mom died seven years ago actually has settled and integrated in a way that I did not think was possible. The loop has closed on that particular chapter, and so of course I return to the city I was born in at this precise moment in time. My grief had stirred the sand in me to such a degree that it would have been impossible to move back to Philly and feel this much at peace here until now.

So much of what we are told about living after loss, about moving through the portal between who we were before and what we become afterwards, is quite passive. We are told to wait. We are told it will get better with time. This makes people think that the eventual settling of their righteous unrest is something that can be measured on a clock.

Time is not linear. Or rather, linear time (chronos time) is only one way of measuring time. It is an inappropriate way to measure healing, wellness and integration. For that, we have Kairos time. Kairos time measures time by season, opportunity and rightness. Experiences of loss catapult us into particular seasons, in which the only appropriate measurement is how our bodies respond to life.

I wish that clocks ceased to exist after death. I wish that American culture understood (remembered) how to grieve, and how to hold space for the movement of grieving (read Martín Prechtel’s Grief and Praise for more on that). Alas, the immediacy of linear time in America is relentless, and it is easy for the structures that be to keep proliferating the lie of linear time governing grief because linear time governs just about everything else. It is also much more profitable to have people believe that all they need to do is wait to feel better. Keep working, producing and grinding and eventually grief just…changes?

I wish.

Or, actually, I don’t.

What I love about my work is holding people in a timeless way. Even as I hold the boundary of how much linear time we spend together, I get to witness bodies that are learning to respond more to their instincts than anything else, including the clock or the month on the calendar. Yes, healing takes as long as it takes, and it also takes intentionality.

The purposefulness of a body whose inner sand is swirling and aching to but unable to settle is one of the most beautiful things to witness.

Grief does not move if it doesn’t have the space to move.

In order to find rooting (which is not the same thing as “feeling better” or “moving on”), we have to let the wildness of loss move us for as long and as loud and as heavy as it needs to.

We have to grapple with who we are now and who we were.

We have to allow the loneliness, rage and sorrow to make a home in our bodies.

We also have to let ourselves feel love, awe and beauty just as fully.

Over and over again, we have to let our bodies guide us into the middle place, the place where multiple truths converge and our bodies can expand enough to hold them all without minimizing or running away.

And the process of doing that over and over again makes room to root.

As much as I have always answered the pulse to leave, I also think I knew in the deepest part of me that I would return.

________________________________________________________________________

If you would like to practice embodying some of this awareness, here are three wonderful offerings. I would love to guide you if it calls.

1. Standing with Grief, July 12: an online workshop hosted by the Embodied Education Institute of Chicago, specifically for therapists and other practitioners who want to get better at holding their client’s grief.

2. Move Your Mess, July 20th and every 3rd Saturday going forward: an in person embodied gathering hosted by Unity Yoga in Philly for adults who want a brave space to practice embodying and moving through the mess you carry.

3. I am now accepting new in-person clients in Philly and virtual clients everywhere else! You can read about working with me 1:1 or with your partner here.

I have learned and will relearn this lesson a million times through the course of my life.

I am learning it again right now. And inside of this lesson of “don’t do more than your body/brain can physically handle” is the parallel lesson of “when you start doing less you will feel more”. That feeling more includes grief, the shadow side of experiencing newness.

Early this month, my partner and I moved into our own space after 5 months of living in my mom’s house, the majority of our stuff stashed in storage. I took off from all my group facilitation to make room to nest. I didn’t consciously know that I was also making room to grieve.

As soon as I had the space and privacy my system needs, bone deep exhaustion took me down. As soon as there was safety to feel, deep wells of grief rose up and around my body. The feelings of deep depletion and tiredness that had been building for months culminated in evenings spent staring out the window and crying, in sleeping in far later than usual, in sadness that had no name and no direction.

The dominant culture might call it depression or “depressive symptoms”, but I know that most depression is unexpressed grief. In the space that emerged from finally taking my own medicine and moving my body in service of my grief, I felt the layers of grief that had built up over the past year that I had never slowed down enough to let take over completely. Even someone like me who has built a whole body of work around the medicine of listening to the body and trusting the darkness can still swallow the cultures belief that surrendering to grief will make it impossible to get up afterwards.

Moving through transition(s) often happens more quickly than our bodies can process. We start new jobs, leave old ones, move across the country, have babies-and we are told by culture to just be excited about the newness. We forget, as I forgot, to grieve what has been lost in the process.

It turns out, a body that has swallowed the story whole that productivity = my worth as a human (so, every body that has been born and raised under capitalism) needs more than a week or a few months to rest.

This body needs a full transformation of focus from the outside to the inside. And so, I am again (or maybe for the first time, fully) in the slow down portion of a transformation journey. I am in the chrysalis.

In this part of the middle place, everything that isn’t my own voice, even guidance that is designed to help me listen to my own voice, just feels like noise.

In the chrysalis, I am necessarily less available for input in the form of light and sound (I took a break from social media for May and I’m planning on extending it to June).

I know from experience that the darkness that fills this chrysalis time is fertile, even when I feel creatively barren and disconnected from myself.

This chrysalis period of turning inward, of saying no, of becoming unavailable to outside influence is, for me, the most uncomfortable part of the middle place.

Because it is reconnecting me with both my own power and responsibility. If I fully feel my own power, if I am responsible to and for myself first and foremost, then I am tasked with living in service to that life force.

From the middle place, everything sprouts.

This is nature.

We do not expect babies to digest solid food before they are able to.

We do not expect trees to grow without growing roots.

We do not expect wisdom to come without experience…

except, maybe we do.

Maybe in the rapture of it all, we have forgotten that we are nature too.

That growth and transformation doesn’t generally feel good, except in glimmers.

That awkward conversations and physical pain and rotting in bed scrolling and ugly crying and having absolutely no clue what to do next is…the whole thing.

We have made comfort and beauty good. We have made pain and sadness and lack of direction bad.

What if none of it was good or bad? What if your body wasn’t good or bad?

What if all of it was life? What if you knew that your body was earth? And you trusted that body to grow what it was meant to, in the exact way and time it was designed to take?

How much softer would you become in your journey through the middle?

Read more

No time like an hour before bedtime to start writing a thing that has been simmering all week and has not yet told me how it wants to be delivered.

I might as well just start.

the crux of it is this: i do not know, and that’s a good thing.

In the U.S. and similar cultures, we place great weight on knowing a thing with our brains. To use the field of psychology/therapy as an example, lots of importance is placed on gathering certificate after certificate, on learning the latest trendy modality, and on coming up with an answer or gathering a list of tips and tricks to try out. We are taught to be the “expert” and the “professional”. No one will say this overtly, but the implicit message is that people are paying us to know what to do.

The thing is, using my cerebral cortex to reach for the exact thing that will meet the person’s needs who I’m working with is not only impossible, but it completely takes me out of the moment, out of the relationship and out of my body, the very instrument that makes the work I do possible. It also positions me above them, as if I know something they don’t.

I do not.

I do not know how it feels to be inside of their bodies. I do not know what keeps them up at night (unless they tell me). I do not know what will soothe them, spark tears or nourish them.

What I am absolutely sure of is that the people I work with do know. Not in the thinking, gathering up information kind of way. But in the sensory oriented flesh/blood/bone dreamtime sensation oriented kind of way. They may not think (with their brains) that they do. They may have trauma that is blocking their current capacity to trust themselves. But they do know.

We are not meant to find out what we have known all along by ourselves. We are meant to have a hand to hold (or several, ideally) while we traverse through mud and dark caves.

Remembering how little I do know frees up the space to form genuine connections.

I get to be curious.

I get to watch my clients be curious.

I get to see the opening that happens when we sit in the place of not knowing and genuinely wondering together.

Not knowing is vulnerable, and it is also liberatory. It is putting down the mask of “expert” or ”knower” or “guru” that in so many spaces has long created the conditions for oppression and exploitation to become possible.

When I am sitting in my center, the not knowing ignites a certain fire in me. It feels playful and invigorating. Perhaps it’s my sagittarius moon.

When I allow myself to be distracted by someone else’s successes or the perceived superior brain knowledge that I am led to believe they possess, I feel paralyzed. It appears (again, by capitalism’s design) that the things I produce make me worthy, and I suddenly cannot produce a thing because I believe for a moment/day/week that I don’t know (with my brain) enough to produce. I believe that the thing I need to do is gather up facts and information and, importantly, demonstrate to others the facts and information that I have accumulated. I find myself perusing websites of certificates that seem interesting but spark no real joy or sense of aliveness in my body.

And then I widen my legs. unclench my jaw. Take a long slow breath. And I remember this: the thing that makes me a good guide for others (and for myself) is my ability to let the body show us what it needs to say without needing to know right away.

The thing that helps this ego driven freeze melt is curiosity.

Transparently, here is a short list of what I do not know, right now:

• I do not know the details of how my new business will operate or when we will launch.

• I do not know if it will be warm or chilly tomorrow (it is, after all, still march).

• I do not know what my day will look like tomorrow. There is thankfully some open space that I will do my best to be soft inside of.

• I do not know when our home in New Orleans will fully sell.

• I do not know exactly when my partner and I will be moving into our own space.

Instead of becoming paralyzed and worried about what I do not know, I am choosing this week to lean into curiosity.

Perhaps you’ll join me, and let me know what you notice along the way. I will certainly let you know.