This morning, when I returned from yoga class at around 10:30 am, my wonderful 23-year-old son was not home.

I wondered where he’d gone. His car was here.

Soon after I returned, he drifted through the front door, red-faced, red-chested, glistening with sweat, and breathing hard.

Now, this kid is in stupendous shape, but I know (from growing up on the East coast in places with dangerous summer heat, where it seemed every summer on a roasting, humid day, a seemingly healthy college student would drop dead in the middle of a run along a country road near our house) that this run might not have been the best idea in such conditions.

I could have said, “Geez, dude, what were you thinking going running in this heat? Are you crazy?”

Or I could have said, “wow. You took a run, eh? You look hot. And exhausted. Where’d you go?”

I said the latter thing. Because I know this hack and I use it all the time.

His response: “Yeah. I’m so tired. I ran _____ [explains the loop he took].”

And then he went into the backyard and turned the outdoor shower on himself. And then he sat there on the ground for a while, recovering. Not cooled down enough, he drove himself to the ocean and jumped in.

He took care of himself. My good boy.

My son’s goodness is not the point of this essay, however often I may refer to it.

The point I wish to make revolves around a simple strategy that has transformed all of my relationships:

to respond to what I encounter relationally not with judgment, but with observation and curiosity.

Not “What is wrong with you that you constantly leave your sh*t all over the house for others to pick up?” but “I notice there are quite a few things of yours in common areas. Was there something going on for you that made it hard to pick up after yourself?”

Not “Cut the attitude, mister - who do you think you are?” but “Looks like you’re mad about something. Or having a hard time. Are you? What’s up?”

Now, if you don’t have time for the curiosity part, that’s okay. Just the observation/acknowledgement is often enough.

“You look pretty blue right now.”

“I see you’re rushing to get out of the house on time.”

“You’re loving this movie - it’s not my speed exactly but look at how you’re cracking up!”

Imagine the moment between my noticing my soggy, flushed, pooped son straggling in the door and my saying things with my mouth as a fork in a road.

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One fork leads to him feeling defensive, judged, misunderstood, embarrassed, or ashamed. Which will not make him want to talk to me about much of anything, including whether he needs to be taken immediately to the ER to be treated for heatstroke.

The other fork leads to him feeling seen, respected, and trusted to do his thing, make mistakes, and learn from them. It leads to him feeling witnessed and cared for.

Witnessing. That’s a potent word for what I’m trying to describe.

Witnessing is not watching, or fixing, or cogitating about trying to fix or change.

It is simply being present with another in this exact moment, without judgment or attempts to control or attachment to any particular outcome.

It is allowing what we observe to mingle with our own essence/presence/ideas/soma, and allowing our response to bubble up out of the wonder and awe that is being alive and in loving relationship.

This little communication hack I’m describing allows us to walk that talk of being a witness - where time allows, a curious one - even when our default might be to take that other fork.

The rush of Being Right, of Fixing, of Correcting, of Blasting our Superior Knowledge out into the field between us and another is only temporarily satisfying. What comes with this step back into observation/curiosity, and our response from that place, is much more abiding and sweet.

And it is generally received in a way that only makes it all sweeter.

Maybe you’ll try this for yourself and let me know how it goes.

I have had the pleasure of learning from her in a workshop and went to see her speak and read at Godmothers Bookstore in Summerland this past Sunday, with the equally delightful Jennifer Freed moderating. Heidi exhorted the group attending to engage in poetry practice.

Thus inspired, I scribbled the seeds of the poem here in my journal this morning in lieu of my habitual cataloguing of the events of yesterday. I was afraid, in the moment of creative incipience, of stuckness and blocked-ness, but as soon as I began I felt the tug of the whole world pulling me along, spilling words across the page. O joy!

So. Here is what came forth, inspired by tiny drops of blood - from an overscratched rash on my arm -that I discovered on the page I was settling in to write upon. May it inspire you to your own poetry practice.

this bumpy
inscrutable rash
has inhabited my
right forearm for

weeks, months.
I thought at first
it was poison oak -
how bizarre, to suddenly be

allergic, fifty-six years in,
never had it before, and the itch,
holy hell! - like a hair’s-breadth
fire needle, poking around between the

cells of my epidermis (it’s that small),
a trickster, a taunting:
Go ahead. Try not to scratch. Try
not to thoroughly flay

the waterproof bag you love to
complain about, its new
weird lizard-texture, the hairs
growing darker and longer on one arm

than the other. I didn’t even try
not to scratch it, because, let’s be real,
there are few sensations so delicious as
scratching an itch; the deeper the itch,

the more satisfying the scratch: am I right?
So I scratched, and it morphed and it spread, wept a bit,
thickened concerningly, and for a few days I was certain
I would soon be top-to-bottom, transformed into a

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desert toad, to then succumb: a fatal rash. It didn’t kill me, at least
not yet, and it now has taken up what seems to be permanent residence
on my right forearm, where it was born as a little blister
one summer afternoon. Cortisone cream,

calamine, smelling like the chicken pox I suffered through at six.
Anyhow, this poem is
about itching and rashes, and there has to be
a metaphor here somewhere, or this is just one-dimensional

rhapsodizing about an itch, are you kidding me?
(I remember a dear friend’s advice when I
complained about money worries: “You need to get
better problems.”) It could be: What itches are you scratching too much?

Or: what itch do you need to scratch more? Ah, here’s another itch,
waking from its cortisone-cream-induced slumber: on my left breast, a pinpoint
of red, surrounded by a corona, pale and swollen. Here’s the story:
I was sitting en flagrante on a rock by a spring-fed pool

beneath a corona of sycamores and oaks, my feet in the water.
We were having a difficult conversation. I was crying. There was a
longing I was, once again, having to face, and let go of,
and there was silence -

not the stony, angry kind, where everyone feels unheard, but of
loving resignation, of grief, and loss, and the impossibility of needing something
another cannot give, and knowing the needing matters too much
to let go of. And then, what? And how? and when? In the thick of this,

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a sharp, sharp shock
on my left breast, near the nipple.
I only caught a glimpse
of the tiny, shiny cylindrical bug-body,

its black and yellow stripes, before
whisking it away, scraping out
what must have been a stinger, leaving this red hole,
this growing welt. It’s two days later and that fucker itches

as much as my arm. Same needle-like
almost-pain. Just before the sting, we had waded, together,
he and I, in that chill water, in that little glade.
We’d chased tadpoles, observing

which had begun to sprout back legs and which had not,
delighted in the zoom-zoom of dragonflies: giant red ones,
the tiny blues. The questions unanswered. The itch
of knowing unscratched.

You don’t know yet that your ancestors watch over you.
That this is not an abstraction, or a metaphor.

You don’t know yet that the entire known universe is knit
into the unknown one. That the latter pulls at the former, stretching it out.

You don’t know what a passionfruit is, much less
what one tastes like, how it feels to crunch snot-colored seeds

between your teeth, the golden gunk in which they sit
confusing your mouth, the burst seeds so tart, the slime so sweet,

scraped from the bitter rind, white inside, purply wrinkly outside,
which, until you cut it in half, will be the most testicular fruit

you have ever seen, a testicular fruit that springs from
the weirdest flower you’ve ever seen, like what a flower would look like

if space alien children were asked to draw a flower. You won’t see
a passionflower until you’re in your thirties. You will pass by

a passionflower vine many times before it occurs to you to look at it,
to ask the lover walking beside you, “What in the name of all that is holy…is THAT?”

You don’t know yet that you will spend
a decade and a half working as a thing you will call a social-emotional learning specialist,

teaching hundreds, thousands of people every year: hey, if you feel Big
Emotions, here is how you can Manage Them! So they don’t Get In The Way!

So you don’t Do Things You Regret! Yes, this will be a good thing, not a bad one,
but then later, much later, in midlife -

can you imagine yourself? in midlife? - you will have come to believe that it’s okay to Feel, but not too much, and not while you are trying to Do Anything. You will tell

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your partner when he is in his feels, “I’m like Dr. Spock. You have to explain this to me,” and you will realize that this is a lie you have told yourself, that you

have LOTS of feelings, big ones, and you’ve managed them
right down to the nubs. They’re shy and scared, hiding, and you will realize

that the whole point of this earthly time-traverse is to Feel, and that
the cost of avoiding Doing Things You Regret is a numb bearing-down that

has you walking past the passionflowers and their testicular fruits, not-seeing,
not-tasting, and you will have to perform excavations, you will have to slap yourself

out of auto-pilot a hundred, a thousand times per day, you will have to launch yourself
repeatedly into the abyss of such fear-inducing activities as

making eye contact, as remembering you will die, as stopping to hug when
you have to Be Somewhere, risking the heart rising to the surface like a whale

about to breach, then breaching, and you will be seized
with the kind of pleasure that

borders on pain, again & again, and every self you have ever been
will come radiantly to life.

They are deep in the field of their feels.

Might be rage. Might be grief. Frustration. Resentment. Longing.

They have come to you. How lovely.

Or maybe you just happened to be in the place where they finally, at last, could no longer hold it together.

If you are the brave sort of person who can hold space for such a thing—if you don’t scurry away with an excuse about having to be somewhere, so sorry—you watch them fall apart.

If they are speaking (sobbing, screeching) words, you might be trying to make sense of them.

You may be formulating your own judgments about the source of their upsets—poking around for the end of the thread of a solution to the dilemma they are caught in.

You may be problem-solving in your head, preparing to offer advice about what they should Do.

You may be mentally taking sides, joining your beloved in their rage or frustration at whatever person or force has oppressed them, hurt them, knocked them sideways.

You may be sucked so hard into their grief that you forget to breathe.

You want to Help. Of course you do! You are a good and kind person.

How can you Help?

First, let go of the taking sides and the problem solving. Let go of the content of the beloved’s problems right out the gate.

Focus on your own body and breath. Ground yourself: feel the weight of your body on the surfaces on which it is resting. Feel your big beautiful heart beating. (I like to imagine my breath moving in and out of the center of my chest, coming in and flowing out in all directions.)

Remind yourself that big feelings aren’t dangerous in and of themselves. It’s what we do when we don’t get to feel them in the presence of a compassionate other that is dangerous. This space-holding you are doing is in service of the collective good.

Let them let it rip.

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You can do this silently or you can say back to them what you’re hearing:

“I hear you saying you’d like to murder your ex with your bare hands.” “Right now you don’t want to be alive anymore, I hear you.” “You’re telling me your boss is trying to force you out.” “Wow, that’s so shitty that your young adult child seems set on destroying himself with drugs.”

…or reflecting back what you think they are feeling.

“You seem suuuuuper angry.” “Whoa, big tears, yeah!”

Sense into whether the mouth-words are helpful. You’ll be able to tell. If they aren’t, simply be quiet and present. Watch the waves of feeling rise and fall. Know they come and go. You are helping your beloved to duck-dive through them rather than getting knocked down and churned like those kids I watched playing in the shortest surf break I’ve ever seen. (From where I stood on the beach, the waves were invisible until the last moment, and then suddenly they were way overhead just as they hit the shore, and BLAM!, slammed directly onto the sand.)

Primary here is to not try to stop the waves. Duck-dive with them.

You may feel some shade of your beloved’s feelings yourself. Feelings are contagious. Notice.

Longing to touch your beloved as they move through this?

That’s a great instinct.

Use care here.

There is a kind of touch meant to stop emotions from moving.

And there is a kind that levels up your presence as a source of kind, non-judgmental support.

In my view, it’s all in the intention. So: set your intention.

Touch not to soothe or to fix.

Touch to send the message: you are not alone in this.

Do you feel the difference?

Anima was founded over a decade ago by Lisa Citore, a brilliant and boundary-pushing author, “divine femininity initiator, creative sparker, ceremonialist, and guide.” Under her leadership, this group has produced two or three shows per year for over a decade.

I’ve been part of Anima since the beginning. For over ten years, it has given me space to create, community with whom to collaborate, and the massive gift of a performance venue the group fills with witnesses for every production.

We are putting on our latest show this Thursday and Friday, May 14th and 15th, at Center Stage Theater. (You can get tickets here if you’re around and this ‘stack piques your interest. Get them ahead, because it often sells out.)

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About Anima

Carl Jung used this Latin word to describe the female or feminine aspect of the male psyche. In our context—the context of this witchy group of female-identifying creatives—it is loosely defined as the feminine principle that is present everywhere.

The Mother, the Maiden, the Wise Woman, Mother Earth.

You know, the generative principle that a lot of folks kind of wish could rise up and create a different sort of balance in the world than the destructive, patriarchal one that currently is breaking hearts, souls, and bodies on the daily.

It features women who create performance pieces that are ritual explorations of transformations in their own lives. Who are rising up, through creative expression, to represent this feminine power.

In creating and performing them, they—and hopefully, through holding and vibrating and inhaling and multi-sensorily sensing what is being presented—at least some of those witnessing—experience a transformation.

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My piece, “Moved,” is a solo movement study of restriction and freedom.

Other artists are examining the damage done along their matriarchal or patriarchal lines and its healing; the impact of infidelity; the ways we get hooked like fish on a line on stories and emotional states that do not serve us; the dance of female self-worth with soliciting sexualized male attention; and much more.

Some of the artist contributors have decades of experience making performance work. Others are new to this craft. The collective, which is led this round by director Teagan Rose, works collaboratively, supporting each other in their creative process, lifting each other up through uncertainty and self-doubt, and stepping in as ensemble members in each other’s pieces.

Although the technical aspects are spot on (thanks to pro lighting and tech courtesy of Center Stage, the awesomest little black box theater in our parts) and the production feels professional, the point here is not so much to offer something slick and shiny.

This thing is about soul opening. Baring vulnerable truths to be witnessed.

I choose that word, witnessed, on purpose. You don’t come to Anima just to watch. And you’ll get more out of it if you don’t come there to critique.

You get the download when you come as a witness: openhearted, ready to be present to the impact of what you are witnessing. To let it transform you.

This is not a show for children. It addresses sensitive and potentially triggering topics.

If you are open to what such topics can bring up, I hope to see you there.

You are holding court, monologuing about a current topic involving a website where husbands posted videos of themselves s*xually assaulting their drugged wives.

As you rail and rant, someone else speaks up, requesting clearly and calmly that you stop.

It’s triggering to them.

You stop, mid-sentence. You stammer.

They stand up to leave the room.

“Wait. I’m not going to talk about it anymore…” you say.

They go.

You’re left with your mouth hanging open and your mind racing.

They take some time. Another kind human at the gathering goes and checks on them.

The group hears them laughing and chatting in the next room.

It blows over. The subject is changed.

The gathering is not ruined.

And you are left with…feelings.

You feel your mind going to self-defense and justifications.

You figured everyone has heard about this. It was big news a couple of weeks ago.

What, are you living under a rock? your mind says.

Your mind says things like buck up, buttercup.

Your mind corrects itself.

You know that person has every right to say what they said. To make the request they made. To take space. To protect their peace. Good for them!

Nothing is wrong here.

And yet…oh my goodness, you are having feelings!

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You have been practicing noticing difficult feelings and tolerating them instead of reacting to and avoiding them.

As a therapist, you guide clients to do this. You believe this practice is key to better relationships. To being whole, to acknowledging and embracing your shadow stuff, to letting yourself fail forward into growth.

So much of your choicemaking—both micro (what to say next in a conversation) and macro (what career path to take, what commitments to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to, whether to speak up or otherwise take a risk in relationship or swallow that urge)—has been predicated upon avoiding these kinds of feelings.

There is a kind of relational perfectionism you are trying to turn away from here.

The kind where your absolute #1 top priority is to please and to be liked.

In this frame, hurting, annoying, or letting down another person equals disaster and must be avoided at all costs.

Of course, this means swallowing Your Truth, which (you have reasoned, not exactly consciously) can’t ever possibly be more important than preserving relational harmony.

You have noticed how even the flash of a displeased expression on the face of another causes a panicky trembling along the whole front of your body.

It doesn’t even have to be in response to something you said.

It could just be someone with whom you are sharing a space.

What did I do? your mind screeches as soon as you see it. It must be something I did.

This feeling is like nails dragged across a blackboard.

It makes your mind scream “ABORT! ABORT” and flip to full how-can-I-make-sure-this-person-is-not-displeased-with-me? mode. Must. Fix. Soothe. Solve. Now!!!

At this gathering where someone was triggered by a topic you were expounding upon, the feelings you are feeling light up your body like a shot of freeways at night, from high up in the sky.

Your arms tingle. Your face burns, hot. Your stomach turns, tightens.

You certainly cannot, in this state, make a reasoned response that comes from your deepest knowing. You are in full lizard brain. You are in fight/flight.

What is it? Shame? Yes. Probably.

So you do what you have learned is the way out of fight/flight:

You breathe into it.

You breathe space around it. You relax your body around it. You are quiet and let yourself feel the uncomfortable feeling. You choose not to call it bad or wrong, but to focus entirely on the body sensations you are experiencing. You choose to let the thoughts come and go like the screechy flying monkeys they are.

You know you will have higher-quality thoughts after you calm the heck down. Best not to attach to any of these panicky ones.

You let it be. You choose, probably ten times in that first few minutes after the thing happens, to not justify, defend, fawn, or apologize.

As you all leave the gathering, you hug the person who was harmed by your words.

You stop yourself (for the twenty-sixth time) from apologizing into her ear. You consciously let your defended body relax and feel the love that has not been ruined by the words you have spoken.

You go to the beach. It’s low tide. You walk.

You giggle at toddlers toddling up the sand toward their siblings. You scritch the heads of dogs that come up to say hello. You flip a big shovel over next to a hole that contains a happy little boy who used it to dig that hole.

“Thank you!” he says. He understands that you have remediated a hazard in his vicinity. (You are always looking for hazards to remediate, like the one where a person steps on a shovel and it rears up and hits them. You believe this makes you a Good Person.)

Over the course of the day, the feelings shift and change, making way for other feelings.

They come up like wavelets at the beach, rattling the rocks, depositing bits of colorful seaweed, pulling back. And in the end, you feel…cleansed.

You get that for some folks, recovering people pleasers like you, this is a small but vitally important task: sitting with feelings that are hard to feel.

If you can’t do that, you’ll never get past the people-pleasing impulse and to a truer version of your singularly unique self and its expression in the world.

Shame is probably the hardest. Shame can feel like being set on fire.

And the things people will do to avoid that feeling…well…

you wonder whether that is at the root of so much of the horrible shit that is happening in the world right now.

If one can recognize one’s own wrongdoing and sit with the way it feels to know one has done harm…

Sit with it until it washes through, until we are out of reactivity and defensiveness…

at the level of individuals like you, of groups, of communities, of cultures…

What else then might be possible?

I love to give my therapy clients a general introduction to something called polyvagal theory1 to help them understand the probable “why” behind anxiety, depression, out-of-control emotions, or the ways past traumas continue to hamper their ability to live the lives they want to live. In my experience, PVT helps people normalize and accept dysfunctional behaviors and emotional states that they haven’t been able to shift.

Since I started working in this way with clients, I’ve understood that it is a theory (not a set of facts)—a model or framework that reflects human experience and biology enough to be clinically useful.

I know how I felt when I learned this framework, applied it to my own pathologies, and began to use it for my own healing: relieved, inspired, resonant.

I see the same kind of relief come up for clients as they come to comprehend that their bodies’ unconscious safety mechanisms—not a fatal flaw in their psychological operating systems—may underpin their psychological (and, sometimes, physical) suffering.

This model validates clients’ experiences and gives them hope around improving how they function and feel. I LURVE it.

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And…PVT is in a moment of widespread debunking.

Debunkers include highly respected scientific researchers (39 of them contributed to the linked scholarly article), therapists, coaches, and interested laypeople.

Some of these folks are getting their intel from scholarly sources (although not enough of them are getting it from the theory’s creator, neuroscientist Stephen Porges, who published this rebuttal). Others are debunking based on information they’ve received via (fundamentally) a game of ‘telephone’ on social media.2

Of course, debunking is an important part of building knowledge.

Here are but a few previously accepted theories that were, thankfully, debunked:

• The geocentric universe: of COURSE the Earth is at the center of everything! (Not.)

• The miasma theory of disease: that we get sick because of bad air or foul smells.

• Phrenology: claims that personality traits could be read from bumps on the skull.

• Eugenics: eeeew.

• The ‘four humors’: it was once believed that health required a proper balancing of the four ‘humours’ (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile).

• A lot of what Freud told the world to believe: for example, that human pathopsychology rests solely on the thwarting of aggressive or sexual drives.

• Martian canals: The belief that straight lines visible in telescopic views of Mars were canals built by intelligent Martians.

And yet. Can we agree that sometimes our reasons for debunking something…

are not exactly pure wishes to bring down the bad guys and foment good?

Wanna get clicks and likes? Get on the debunkitty-bus!

“Thought it was CARBS that packed on those postmenopausal pounds? Think again! Scroll to find out about ONE SIMPLE TRICK that…”

“They told you to lift heavy weights to build muscle! But would you believe that this has been TOTALLY DISPROVEN? Click here to get to your best beach body EVER by June…”

Wanna feel like you’re one of the in-the-know peeps who can look down on others in judgment?

Debunking a respected notion or theory can do this for you, and more!...

Do you, like me, detect a delight, an almost-schadenfreude, that arises when a sacred cow is tipped, or (glee!) when we are the one to tip it?

Do you, like me, want others to know you have this special knowledge that something lots of people believe…is not true? Because this would make me…Very Important?

I have felt the aforementioned glee before.

During my stint as an anti-vaxxer (technically, a vaccination-debunker) back in the early ‘00s, I felt it.

Those poor souls, they just don’t know. If only they had better information. I’ll get it out there as best I can. I’ll spread Truth. They’ll thank me.

(This stint ended abruptly for me after both my unvaccinated young children spent a month feverishly cough-barking and bazooka-barfing after catching whooping cough in a community with a lot of other unvaccinated children. We traveled by plane early on in their illness, before we knew they were sick. Thinking of how we could’ve infected vulnerable people on that trip still makes my guts twist with guilt.)

But while I maintained my anti-vaxxer position, which at the time was even less popular than it is now, and in which I truly believed, I won’t lie:

it felt really good to think I knew better.

We gravitate toward debunking and tipping sacred cows when things feel out of control.

When the complexity and dualities and legit flippin’ Zen koans of existence feel overwhelming.

It can feel easier, simpler, in those moments to tear something down than to lean into building something better from what’s already been created; to ask reasoned questions that may even increase the complexity of what we are investigating.

“Gotcha! NOT TRUE! Now I know!” can deliver a temporary blip of certainty.

Before I get on the debunkery bus, I wish to check in about whether this “MWAHAHAHA!” is what I’m actually after.

And I wish to refrain from unnecessarily adding my own debunkish bark to the current din and confusion.

My hope is that to not cloud the field with debunkery engaged in as a strategy to soothe myself, to feel right, to feel better-than.

I am inviting you to do the same.

This edgy variety show has singers and hoop dancing and a male striptease to Glen Campbell’s classic “Rhinestone Cowboy.” It has an elaborate skit involving deities negotiating something in an office conference room.

I’m there with friends to share a spicy poem entitled “How to Kiss”—a topic covered in this, my most popular post to date— and to take in the homegrown creative expression of other members of my community.

There is a storytelling contest focused on the theme of the evening: broken hearts.The prompt: one-minute stories about bad dates. Whomever’s share reveals the worst date will win $50.

Having already done my bit, I sit with my friends in the back of the dark nightclub and watch the first storyteller take the mic. Her tale ends very, very badly. It ends with rape.

This turn of events in the story is revealed suddenly, clunkily, bluntly. Within seconds of dropping this R-bomb, she wraps up and darts back into the audience to her seat.

My friends and I look at each other, shocked. At least one person gets up and leaves. A few people clap. And we are on to the next story.

Two more of the one-minute stories told that night involve rape or sexual assault. The winner of the $50—chosen based on the loudness of audience applause—is one of the tellers of stories that include this turn of events.

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I know the statistics about rape and sexual assault.

I’ve had both these things happen to me.

There is no part of me that wants us not to talk about these realities, to bring them into the light, to work toward change, toward a world where women don’t have to walk the world in fear.

I feel for those who shared stories about being violated. It’s so brave to share something like that in a room full of strangers. But that night, I felt the doors of my heart slam shut in response. I didn’t appreciate having a story like this thrown at me like an Amazon package out of the back of a van.

Our little group grabs a meal at a nearby eatery and mulls this over together.

“Perhaps there should have been a trigger warning?” one of us says.

“In my view, trigger warnings don’t cut it,” another opines. “They give people an option to stay or go, to watch or listen or to look away or shut their ears...but if I decide to blot out what comes after a trigger warning, to turn away, what might I miss out on that might be hard to hear…but that might actually be good for me? For the collective?”

How might a trigger warning mean my being deprived of an important glimpse into something raw and real? Of discomfort endured for the sake of deep, revelatory connection with the truth of someone else’s difficult experience? Of hearing something I don’t want to hear, but need to hear?

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Almost a month later I’m still stuck on this, wanting to write about it, putting off writing other things, not knowing what exact conclusions I want to come to, trying to write my way into something worth sharing.

Here’s the best I can do: to pose a question for consideration, to anyone who holds a trauma story that they might want to share with others.

When we speak of harm done to us, can we agree that the way we speak about it matters? Can we take care in its sharing, engaging the powers of storytelling and creativity endowed to us as big-brained two-leggeds?

Can we offer potent stories with the same care we’d use in offering a delicate, complicated, beautiful gift we’d never entrust to the package-hurlers of Amazon.com?

I like Emily Dickinson’s take:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

How we tell stories like this matters, both to ourselves and to those who are witnessing us.

Yes! Get up in front of an audience and tell your story. Or tell me in confidence, friend to friend. I want to hear it. I want to know you.

And if you really need to tell it however it falls out of you, if you can’t take care to tell your tale slant because it’s all you can do to not bleed out, that’s okay. We’ll still be there for you.

If you can, though, if this gaping wound has begun to knit over to become a scar, please take care with my heart…so I can let my guard down enough to care for yours.

Mainly to learn stuff, of course, but also so I could hear them doing things I had done in session, thus being able to mark the checkbox beside the to-do list item of “Find evidence that you are not a talentless, ignoramus hack.”

I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. But I did find The Radical Therapist, a project of Chris Hoff, PhD, LMFT, narrative therapist and founder of the California Family Institute in Orange County, California. I’ve been binge-listening to it since then. And I’ve gained a lot more than I expected.

Not only have I learned much more about narrative therapy than the tidbits I received in my graduate education; I’ve felt non-therapist parts of myself click into alignment. I’ve begun to shine sparkle-twinkles of light into a blind spot not only in my work as a therapist, but in my way of being in and seeing the world.

I wanted to share about this here in case you feel the same resonance and some sparkle-twinkles of your own.

Narrative therapy was co-founded by Michael White and David Epston in the 1980s.

The idea behind it is that the stories we choose to tell and how we tell them dictates how we live our lives and how we see and relate to ourselves and others.

That in working with these stories—exploring, developing, and dialoguing with them—we can fundamentally re-author our lives.

Our cultures and histories, the oppressions inherent in those cultures and histories, and our “master narratives” (deeply held beliefs we have internalized) all come into play.

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A skillful narrative therapist walks clients through recognizing the impacts of all of these elements, placing their problems in political, social, cultural, and personal contexts, freeing them up to question the shoulds and musts that shape their stories and contribute to their problems. They provide a safe, encouraging space where clients can build new stories that align with what matters most to them.

Of course, a full explication of narrative therapy theory and practice is outside the scope of a little Substack written by someone who is just beginning to learn about it.

But I’ve already learned about one really revelatory narrative therapy concept, or really just started to learn about it.

It’s the concept of the unstory.

An unstory removes factors of lived experience and context. It tries to place clean, sharp lines of identity and labels over the chaotic mess of what it really is to be alive.

It’s: “I have anxiety.” “I have depression.” “I need more self-esteem.” “I’m not living as my best self.” “I have trauma.”

It’s an abstract boiling-down of the nuances of a person’s perfectly unique, individual, messy, emotionally laden, relational (to self, other people, culture, world, the political) to a little catchphrase.

Those catchphrases are meant to tell a story, to reflect a larger reality, and for sure they do contain this larger story or reality. And what they end up doing is taking away our freedom to (as Whitman said, in one of my favorite quotes EVAH) “contain multitudes,” and to convey the full breadth and depth of those multitudes—confusing, contradictory, laden with feeling—to others.

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An unstory is a kind of diagnostic self-definition—whether from the DSM-5 or the ICD-11 or any of those other voluminous volumes that make excellent flower presses or door stops, or from pop culture, or any other force that seeks to homogenize, dilute, and reduce human lived experience so that it fits neatly into a category or falls cleanly into a framework.

Can we agree, friends, that the forces driving us to unstory ourselves are intense right now? How powerful is the push right now to identify ourselves through labels and soundbites, in a misguided effort to feel as though we are a part of something, as though we belong and are understood?

Opposite this is a clear longing for story. You see it in the collective fascination with film and television. You see it in the thirst we have for dramatic tales showing up in the news or on our social media feeds. For gossip. Oh, sweet gossip! Bring on the tea!

One of the aims of narrative therapy is to move clients away from unstories and into actual stories.

Registered psychologist and Calgary Narrative Collective co-director Sanni Paljakka defines a story as follows (So You Want to Do Narrative Therapy?, page 9):

A story is a narrative that has:

• a unique setting,

• memorable characters,

• a plotline in which grave and substantial matters of everyday living are at stake to all involved,

• a political and cultural context,

• and a protagonist who is puzzling over it all in a unique voice and full of feelings and sensations, thoughts and actions.

I became a group facilitator and then a therapist because I wanted to act as a healing force in the world. I’ve learned a lot about how to do that. But much of it, at least the way it was translated in me, has been (I now see) about reducing stories…to unstories.

At the same time, I’ve found myself in sessions just hungering, thirsting to hear people’s highly personal accounts of real, true stories about their lived experiences.

In some therapeutic models, this is called content, and we are discouraged from focusing on it too much. We’re supposed to work with process. With the present moment, in the therapy room.

Yes! Of course. Somatic psychotherapy, which I practice, is all about that. Your experience has been what it has been, and right now, what’s happening in your body? Let’s be with that. Let’s see what happens when we be with that.

And yet. These stories. The stories people tell!

I can’t get enough.

I’d dive into storytime with people, feeling guilty, like I wasn’t therapist-ing properly, despite the fact that telling these stories, being gently and enthusiastically witnessed, asked good questions, supported in seeing a different way into and through and around these stories, seemed to be…really and truly helpful for these folks.

I’m a fan of storytelling as a performance art.

Lots of good storytelling events going on. Two of my favorite women (Elaine Gale, Jenna Tico) run storytelling events and teach this art to many lucky folks.1 People taking the mic and sharing what happened, and what happened after that, and then what, and how it felt, and what it made them think, and what it made them question, and what it meant to them, and how it changed them.

I love that shit.

I wish I could be a storyteller. And I haven’t really been able to figure out how to turn my life experiences into stories worth telling at the microphone, or as short stories, or as novels. I’ve tried. Now I see where I’ve been hitting a wall.

I’ve been unstorying the absolute shit out of my own stories for a very long time.

My mind automatically trying to reduce, make orderly, categorize, hoover out the mess and the context. Something socialized into me that problems are not to be savored, stayed in, turned over, experienced fully, but solved as quickly as goddam possible, using state-of-the-art life hacks, or whatever. Ignoring the influence of anything outside a teensy little individual self.

Nope!

Now, well into middle age, maybe I can finally figure out how to tell a good story.

And I get to practice at work. How cool. Narrative and somatic approaches feel like great bookends. Be here now in the body. Oscillate over to story. Come back to the body. Very nice.

When someone comes to me and says “I have ADHD,” “I’m autistic,” “I’m transgender,” “I hate myself,” “I have PDA and RSD,”2 I will remember that these represent only the beginnings of the edges of the stories of what it is like for that person to be themself. There is so much to discover! What happened to them? What was it like? And then what happened? And what did that mean for you?

This is an invitation to you, dear reader, to notice: what unstories are you telling about yourself?

What would it mean for you to stop telling them, and start telling the real story about what it is, has been to be the one and only you?

I hope these writings bring you joy, insight, self-awareness, other-awareness, or other elements that feel supportive.1

A certain sentence has emerged from my mouth so many times in my work as a therapist over the past few weeks that I have decided to share it here.

That sentence is: “We don’t fix feelings in this family.”

The more I say it, the more it infuses me with life force. I feel it as a root system inside my body. I infer from this that it’s probably a good thing to be saying, a mantra of sorts, possibly worth sharing more broadly.

Usually, in my work with clients, this is said in a context where it makes sense without much explanation.

Here, though, where I’m dispensing it as general relationship advice, I might say it like this:

I’m going to invite you to start saying something to yourself that might feel strange or foreign. You can say it to yourself when someone in your family is having a difficult feeling: sadness, grief, rage, frustration. When you feel lots of love for them, and their difficult feelings are maybe causing you to have difficult feelings.

Their feelings may even be because of you, something you are doing or saying or not doing or saying.

Notice how you feel compelled, driven even, to do something, anything at all, to change their difficult feelings into pleasurable ones. To fix their feelings.

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What happens when you do that? Think back.

There are all kinds of possibilities, but here are a few I’ve seen play out, both in my own relational life and those of the folks I am privileged to sit with as a therapist:

• You go to people-pleasing instead of your own integrity in order to make someone else feel better. Everyone feels better temporarily, but underlying issues don’t get addressed.

• The person whose feelings you are trying to fix gets pissed off at or rejects your attempts to help.

• The person whose feelings you are trying to fix forces themselves to pretend to feel better so you’ll quit trying to fix them.

• The person whose feelings you are trying to fix stuffs their feelings down because they can’t tolerate someone else being upset by their feelings.

• The person whose feelings you are trying to fix feels invalidated and the distance between you grows.

How would it be to say to yourself, instead of leaping to fix: “We don’t fix feelings in this family”?

Here’s the thing: feelings don’t want to be fixed.

They want to be felt.

And they most want to be felt in the company of a loving other.

Our efforts to fix feelings rob others of that healing, fortifying experience.

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When we try to make someone else Feel Better, the feelings that want and need expression don’t just magically evaporate or transform.

They tend to go underground, go unfelt and unexpressed, or come out sideways, destructively.

The loneliness of this is at the root of complex trauma: unbearable feelings experienced alone.

People not being willing to let others have their true, real feelings, without trying to fix or change them, is a root cause of many of the relational challenges I see as a therapist.

As we try to fix others’ feelings, we tie ourselves in relational knots.

Untying them is as simple as stepping back rather than trying to fix.

(Simple, not easy.)

Stepping back not too far. Far enough that we can witness another’s feelings, validate them, be present for them.

We can ask for the feelings to be expressed in a way that is not threatening. That may be a grantable request; it may not. But we can ask. And then we can choose to stay connected to the feeling person while they work their way through it, or to lovingly step away.

In my experience, when feelings are met with acceptance rather than pushback or fixing, they naturally express themselves in much more tender ways. When there is a conflagration, it flares and burns itself out quickly.

To be with another’s tough feelings without fixing, we must practice staying with our own experience when someone else is in struggle.

We must explore how we might hang close and witness—maybe even ask some meaningful questions to help the person move along and through—and how we can know when we need to step back.

How to manage ourselves directly instead of by proxy, aka by knocking the other person out of their struggle…which may be a meaningful and important struggle for them to stay in and work through.

How to tolerate knowing that something we have done, or have been, is upsetting to someone else, and to choose integrity over people-pleasing.

If we do this more, and if we lift this expectation that Happy/Joyful/Hopeful/Awesome/Confident and their ilk are the only right ways to feel, perhaps people won’t feel the need to medicate their feelings quite so much.

Does this resonate?

Say it with me: We don’t fix feelings in this family.

How does this sit with you?

Does it feel challenging? New? Ridiculous? Crazy?

The invitation stands.

Try it on and let me know how it goes.

You have arranged to have a truthful
conversation, to finally say the things

you really mean, to open the portal of your heart and
spill it, at last, finally. You have ruminated

long enough, rehearsed what to say
a thousand and fifty-one times, and you know

you’re not exactly ready, not in the conventional way we think
of readiness: the perfect, pearlescent word-stream

emerging as a trickle, then a luminous wave, so compelling
and iridescent as to topple the hearer directly into

the world you inhabit, the world that often feels so lonely
that the echoes have echoes.

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2.

But you are ready
in some embryonic way,

the way fused chromosomes are ready
to transform in the next way and the next and the next again,

in complete darkness, the heart of the mother
thrumming above, her guts churning

below, until this pin-prick
of a life is a fully formed creature

full of organs and blood,
pumping and sparking, teeth embedded in its gums,

squirming against the wet walls of a womb, ready
to emerge, squalling, into the dangerous world.

You will name your longing.
You will accept the consequences.

3.

On your way to this cataclysmic event,
to this conversation to end all conversations,

you are a shower of sparks.
You are a radiant leviathan

surfacing, rising through bioluminescent waters.
This is fear plus reverence, reverence for

the truth you hold, that soon, so soon, will be
available for an important other to consume, into which they may

glide, light as air. That is the invitation. And
you know full well: they might not

like what you have to say. They might only
nibble at or devour the fear and leave the reverence on their plate

like so much green Jell-o with the pineapple
and Cool Whip that moms of a certain age

make every holiday because they think the kids
will miss it if it doesn’t show up on the table.

3.

You did it. Yes, queen! Yes, king! Yes, two-spirit royal!
Either you were met, or you

weren’t. Doesn’t matter. You opened your mouth and started
speaking. It was a sermon. It was not about God, but maybe

it kind of was about God, because God is in you, and formed
your truth in just such a way that you owned

your complicated stories and your big big feelings
and you showed them where

your magic was touched by theirs, touches by turn rapturous
and terrible. You did it, and then

stuff happened, and the what of that stuff is all but consumed,
overtaken by the way the whole universe sang into your bones while

you became what you are, inhabited this moment completely, and
said it, just said it, and by doing so

were blessed, and offered this truth-blessing to another.

The discord that can arise between family members once everyone hits adulthood can upend even the steadiest of us. Years upon years of difficult relational experiences can pile up. If it’s hard now, it was probably hard for a long time before now.

The tendrils that connect us to our earliest experiences, where we were (hopefully) held, nurtured, and guided—possibly, probably, imperfectly—by our parents or guardians…well, they are easy to tug at.

And where those tendrils hook into the juicy meat of our tenderest selves, slights from those same people, people who changed our diapers and screeched with delight at our first steps, can pull at us so deep that it feels like evisceration.

From those folks, micro aggressions can feel downright macro, and outright aggressions, slights, manipulations, or lack of acceptance of our identities intolerable.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

In recent years, going “no contact” or “very low contact” or “no contact” with family in response to this kind of strife has become much more common and socially acceptable.

A New Yorker article on this topic cites a figure of 27 percent of adults surveyed having become estranged from a relative all the way back in 2019. I’m guessing the numbers are significantly higher by now.

As someone who tends toward an avoidant attachment style, I am familiar with the strategy of walking away and cutting ties when a relationship feels thorny.

I’ll admit that I’ve listened to friends talking about some ugliness in an important relationship and thought, “well, geez. Forget about that person. Walk away. What’s the downside?”

Watching the unfolding story of a steep rise in family estrangement, though, I feel a bad feeling in my tummy.

This is not because cutting ties isn’t the best, healthiest solution in some cases. Where there is abuse, frank maltreatment, and so on, well of course you save yourself and the people you care about.

And. But. I wonder how often these cutoffs are about challenges that don’t quite reach this bar. I personally know of a few that definitely are not.

To me, this trend seems to reflect and amplify another trend: fragility.

(The link above is to a chapter on fragility and its causes by one of my favorite authors/thinkers, Jonathan Haidt.)

Refusal to lean into that which challenges us—especially that which challenges us almost to the edge of what we can endure—doesn’t strengthen us. It makes us more fragile.

Choosing cutoff rather than seeing a tough relationship as an opportunity to further define ourselves, show up as the best possible version of ourselves, and rise to the occasion of standing by and with ourselves even in relationship with someone with whom we disagree, or who we feel offended by, et cetera…

…makes us more fragile.

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The more fragile we become—the more we protect ourselves against and cut ourselves off from what scares or upsets us—the more likely we are to suffer from depression and anxiety.

Therapists know this. We are trained to help people face and endure what scares, angers, and irritates them. To build their tolerance for discomfort and distress. To marshal increasingly solid internal and relational resources so they can live their lives without avoiding much of anything.

They might still feel unpleasant feelings (anxiety, frustration, hurt, rage) when encountering what they have been avoiding. But they will have the strength, self-knowledge, and courage to tolerate those feelings.

Sure, it feels better to nix something from your life when it’s hurting you.

Such a relief! No more holiday drama! No more homophobic comments! No more Trump-y expostulations! Freedom!

Um, also, it feels better to a person with social anxiety to not be in social situations. It feels better to a person who is depressed to stay in bed all day.

These are short-term fixes. We call ‘em “safety behaviors” in therapeutic lingo.

When people engage in those behaviors, they don’t get better.

When they choose to step toward or into the discomforts they are resisting, they do.

Sometimes they need therapeutic support to do this. That’s okay.

If we believe that our well-being is contingent upon not being around “toxic people,” we increase our fragility.

By the way: I dislike that term “toxic person.” It’s reductionist and dehumanizing. A person in pain, lashing out? Probably. A misguided, ignorant person who’s getting their information from Fox News? Possibly. A scared person reacting from a need for self-protection? Maybe.

We can learn to navigate difficult relationships. It’s hard, but in doing so, we grow. We become better. We can learn how much to let “toxic people” in to minimize the harm we experience in those relationships. We can learn to use assertive communication skills to show up strong and clear even when those assholes are trying to tear us down.

This is an important way we learn boundary making and the tough skill of holding a boundary when it is threatened.

We become stronger.

Staying connected to family members who do not share our beliefs doesn’t hurt us. Even if we feel hurt by those beliefs, sticking around at least in some small way means we aren’t bubbling ourselves off with only people who think and believe as we do.

People siloing themselves only with people who think and believe as they do is a big reason why humanity is facing the problems it currently faces.

Also, beliefs aren’t everything. There are other reasons to be connected.

Have you read Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell?

It’s all about how people who face disasters like earthquakes and massive fires and tropical storms show up for each other in heroic and loving ways, regardless of belief or socioeconomic class or any of the other things that tend to divide human beings when things are more steady and peaceful.

If we can’t do this in our families, I fear for our ability to show up for each other when it really matters.

In my humble opinion, right now, in these times…

It really matters.

are impacted by seasonal affective disorder.
I know this is a real thing,

that depression is real, that a lot
of the whole fucking DSM-V is real.

those diagnostic categories, as much
as they fail to capture the mythic proportions,

the archetypal thrum of the despair that can
come wi…

Read more

As in, toxic positivity.

As in:

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I believe in positivity. I really do. But not the toxic kind.

Not the kind that sets up a binary between positive and negative.

Not the kind that shoves any part of human experience into the shadows, or attempts to bludgeon adversity out of awareness or reassure me that Everything Is Going To Be All Right (let’s face it, maybe it won’t) or that My Dreams Will Come True If I Just Envision Them Properly (that’s a setup if I ever heard one).

I believe in the kind of positivity that celebrates the beauty of everything that is.

Pleasure. Pain. Good. Evil. Challenge. Debility. Aging. Birth. Death. Loss. Decay. Creation. Failure. Success. Destruction. Joy. Anger. Fear. Grief. Depression.

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IMHO, if it exists, there is something to celebrate about it—something awesome, amazing, compelling, fascinating—and I want to figure out what that something is.

When I talk about staying positive, that’s what I’m talking about.1

I don’t always succeed in finding gratitude or being fascinated or awestruck or otherwise celebrating things that just feel like pure shit at the outset. But that’s my intention.

Usually, I get there. I get to where I can celebrate the hard, yucky stuff as much as the sweet, pleasurable, easy stuff.

How about you?

What magic can you find in the shit pile today?2

“Did it even really happen?” she asked, her eyes wild. “And why don’t we leave time for people to just…pause after something big happens to them?”

Think back to an important happening in your life.

Your wedding, perhaps. Or the first time you had sex. Or the ending of a job, or the death of a loved one, or having an experience or a witnessing of something shocking or horrifying.

Now. Think back about what happened after.

Did you plunge back into the everyday?

Or did you take a pause?

I’m asking because I’m just figuring out at ** years old that we need time and slowing-down when something big happens to us.

Time and space are required for us to absorb the past into the present rather than having it rattle around inside us as floating blobs of unintegrated wisdom.

Our culture tells us to KEEP GOING, to GET BACK TO NORMAL, to soothe ourselves with distractions.

I’ve really fucking internalized this impulse.

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I tore my left Achilles tendon a week ago, and let me tell you, if I could, I’d GET BACK TO NORMAL at the speed of a bullet train.

But I can’t, because I’m on crutches and in a lot of pain. You could say I’m on a mandated pause.

I hardly know what a pause like this is supposed to look like, or how it is supposed to feel, or what one is supposed to do during this pause. I just know it is necessary.

How do you pause when something meaningful happens in your life?

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What does it look like for you? Do you make art, talk with others, just sit and be?

(Distracting with shows, scrolling, or other Normal Pastimes do not count as a pause.)

The pause is a thing unto itself, not a gap between Important Things.

It is something to do.

In the world as it is now, most of us have to be intentional about taking it.

Everything was going great. There was dancing, flirtation, the casting of glances across crowded rooms, sojourns out into the night where hands were looped around waists at just the right spots. The deep excitement of something good, sparkling in the night air, held just out of reach…until that magical moment where it was time for the kissing to begin.

And then…oh, no.

There were stiff lips. There was a thrusting tongue. There was a sucking and a pulling and God knows what else and the desire was there, the connection was there, but the technique…well…it was all wrong.

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Everyone did their level best, really they did. But it was a missed opportunity, you know? A missed opportunity for the kind of intimate experience that resonates and reverberates right into the deepest hollows and densities of the body.

This was an awkwardness that could not be named in the moment, because ouch, how can a person say to another person who wants to kiss them that their efforts are falling short? So there was a tolerance, an inward giggle, a patience that in itself has merit, a patience with the weird importance of this kind of communion and how hard and awkward it can be, and how beautiful it is that we show up for it anyhow.

In the end, will the kissee return to the kisser for more of the same? Yes, she probably will. Will things improve? Most likely they will, somehow, some way. Or maybe they won’t, and she will like him plenty, but she will tire of the gnashing and the pulling and poking, and she will move on, and he probably won’t know why.

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This conversation got me thinking.

Because kissing is really important.

It is an entryway into the sublime: putting mouths together, the mouths that breathe air, the mouths that form words and cry and sing and taste ice cream and suckle at a mother’s breast, working the stuff of two souls in the place those mouths meet.

“There should be a class for guys,” I told her. “A class about kissing.”

We have sex ed. We teach kids how to roll on a condom, how to remove it without spilling the seed. We teach them about all the other hilarious methods for blocking the conception of new human beings: implants, IUDs, diaphragms, and so on and so forth.

But we don’t teach them about kissing, do we? No, we do not.

Great news!

This happens to be a space of modest expertise for me.

I am a really good kisser. People have said so. And I just KNOW it’s true.

For me, kissing has always felt like the kind of dance where people are moving as one thing, where there is no effort, no leader and no follower, just an energy awakened as sensitive pairs of lips meet and melt together.

Kissing happens to be one of my very favorite pastimes.

I would like to help the young men to show up as kissing masters.

For their benefit, of course…but also for the benefit of all the people they will someday kiss.

So, without further ado, here it is: Kissing 101.

This is written with young men in mind, but my hope is that interested others may benefit, whether they are kissing a new person or someone they have kissed a million times already.

Part I: preparation

Once you have identified that you would like to kiss someone, and you are reasonably certain they would welcome this contact, make your mouth very, very soft.

Imagine it as super-smooth melted chocolate. Imagine it as a cool sweet sip of smoothie, blended so smooth that no intact chunk of sweet fruit remains.

Just focus on that for a while: softening your mouth, your lips, your tongue, the insides of your cheeks.

Imagine your lips are big and velvety soft like the flanks of baby bunny rabbits. Imagine they can breathe on their own.

Keep enjoying your person’s company as you do this.

(Human attention can rest in many places at once. If you can watch a movie while scrolling Instagram or do homework while listening to music, you can actively soften and enliven your own mouth while carrying on a conversation.)

Part II: contact

It’s time to go in! This is an exciting moment.

Don’t tense up, friend.

Let your relaxed, soft lips touch the lips of your kissee. Go slow; don’t startle them! Just go in and be there for a moment.

Breathe in very deeply through your nose. (Did you know that some experts believe that kissing evolved as a way to smell the face of a prospective mate?)

If you’re here, and you take a big whiff of the face of the person you are kissing, you’re more than likely going to love the smell you smell. If you don’t, it might be time to call this one and find someone else to kiss.

(I’m sorry that movies and TV and all those media depict kissing as having a devouring, attacking vibe that leads straight to a scene that may or may not be suitable for family viewing. Honestly, I have no idea why so many shows have people kissing for three seconds and tearing their clothes off at lightning speed. Does anyone actually do that?)

For now, let your lips just rest against your kissee’s lips and breathe their scent in. Feel those lips as much as you have felt anything touching your body.

Soon enough, your lips will want to start to move. They will move against the other person’s lips, and the other person’s lips will follow along. And you’re off to the races!

Part III: the unfolding

Maybe it’s surprising to find that your mouth kind of knows what to do if you start with it soft and give your attention completely over to the place where it is meeting another mouth.

Stay with it. Follow it. Don’t forget to breathe.

Your tongue might notice it wants to get involved. Do not let it become poky and pointy and demanding! Go in with the same sensitivity with which you have endowed your lips.

And if your tongue encounters anything grippy or clenchy in its foray past the lips of your kissee…for the love of God, please take the hint and put it away until the time is right.

A good kiss is an invitation into a dance. Let it start slow so you can both drop in all the way.

Have you ever seen two highly adept tango dancers or West Coast swing dancers do their thing? Or people doing contact improvisation?

They find the point of contact and they focus on that and everything else comes from there. As long as that point stays alive, they can get creative and expressive and fancy without ruining the dance or messing up their partner’s mojo.

If they lose the point of contact, or there is jarring or disconnection, they slow down and give themselves completely to finding it again.

Then, they continue to dance.

Do that.

With your mouth.

That’s right!

What’s next?

Kissing in this way is an end unto itself.

Maybe more will happen. Maybe it won’t.

With kissing may come an unfurling inside. Arousal, sure, the parts of the body responsible for reproduction dilating their little blood vessels and all that. Hardnesses and wetnesses will likely occur.

But more is possible. If you don’t force or push or gnash or thrust, if you allow the dance to become itself with patient and loving attention, your whole body may light up like a densely string-lighted Christmas tree. Like phosphorescence in nighttime waves.

Stay with that when it comes. Trust it. Keep following it.

And…kissing in accordance with these guidelines, I believe, sets one up to be a superior lover.

That’s a topic for another post.

I am learning at the tender age of 55 that we have to write what is ours to write, what the ethers channel into and through us. And what I keep receiving has to do with interior experiences…about shifting patterns of thought and behavior in small but important ways.

In this time of mayhem, genocide, fear, and disaster, I sometimes feel compelled to talk about bigger issues. There are TONS of wonderful writers already talking about those things, and for that I am glad. This here’s a navel-gazey, microcosmic space and I am trying to just let that be what it is.

If you’re reading, my hope is that this is a space you like or want or need in some way. Thank you for being here.

It’s Saturday afternoon, tilting into early evening.

I just returned home from a rehearsal with several of the women with whom I collaborate to build ritual theater offerings.

This collective, Anima: Theater of the Feminine Underground, is somewhere around ten years old, and I’ve had the privilege of working and playing with some remarkable and visionary woman artists for most of the two or three shows Anima puts on each year at Santa Barbara’s Center Stage Theater.

Today’s rehearsal was what we’re calling a “tuning rehearsal,” where director Teagan Rose, stage manager Aurora Rose Wesman (not related), and Anima founder Lisa Citore gather with some of the artists to begin to share, shape, and dream around individual pieces being created for the show.

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A performer who is sharing with the group wants to play us the song she plans to use for her piece.

We’ve already heard an overview of her vision, which we’re all excited about. She shares that this song brings up big emotion for her, then hits play. The room goes quiet but for the music piping up out of her digital device.

I notice my inner Judge waiting in the wings of my mind.

Oh honey, I see you.
Whatcha doing?
I don’t need you right now.
No one does.

This Judge is all about ensuring that I Matter.

She wants to assert her value by Having An Opinion.

Now she is chucking Opinion fragments at me hard and fast.

Even if they weren’t fragments, they wouldn’t qualify as quality Opinions or well-thought-out Opinions. They aren’t helpful or necessary or intelligent.

She feels…desperate.

I hate you, honestly, I want to tell her. You pathetic people-pleasing bitch. I’m so sick of your bullshit. You’re always coming in here, cramming your hard ass between me and actually having an Experience/actually absorbing, witnessing, and honoring someone else’s Experience. Can you please, please step the fuck off?

But I don’t, because all the wise people I’ve consulted about her have told me that she needs love.

That if I fight her, she’ll always win.

I’m doing my best to be kind, believing that this is the way I can make space for this other beautiful human’s beautiful offering to resonate, to ring into my soma.

To bear witness without that persnickety Judge mucking about in here with her scuffed old boots and dusty set of encyclopedias.

Without her inserting her rangy, cock-blocking form between me and beauty and truth and intimacy and everything else worth having.

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So…I’ve been practicing meditation.

My therapist told me I HAVE to, because my mind is an unruly beast and will make me miserable with future-thinking and perseverating about Making Sure I Matter, for every waking goddamn moment…unless I work the muscle of simply sitting with it and observing it. Every. Day.

Boy, have I fought this, because BOOOO-RING! But I’m convinced. I’m back to meditating every day.

I developed a strategy:

1. I let the thoughts come in: a swarm of flippity-flapping thought-bats.

2. I turn the thought-bats into clouds. They are thick and puffy and white.

3. I let the clouds float upward until they form a corona of thick puffy whiteness in a broad blue sky.

4. I sit under the clouds and for a few precious moments, everything is quiet. I touch presence.

5. …until the next swarm of bats swoops in.

Just touching that space is enough, though. It feels like progress.

So that’s what I did today while my Anima artist sister played her song.

I closed my eyes and went to work.

And then, in the space beneath the thought-clouds, in which the Judge perhaps was floating, not in an unpleasant way, I touched into magic.

For a few precious moments I could let go and be WITH the artist. I felt myself lock in like those creatures in Avatar who slap their head-cords together to mind-meld.

I felt myself connect with her imagination.

Tears sprang to my eyes. My heart grew inside my body. My skin tingled in the yummiest way.

And a little later, when it was time to give feedback (which is part of the Tuning Rehearsal process), it didn’t come from ol’ Judge Judy, who I guess was still up in the clouds, maybe having a much-deserved nap.

It came from a wise, creative, artist part of me.

Is it really this simple, and is it really this hard, to just learn to BE HERE in the hurricane of the miraculous that is this life?

Maybe not for all of us. If it isn’t for you, well gosh, that’s super great.

This Capricorn Sun Enneagram 6 is trying her best to get where you are.

You find one of the hens on her back at the bottom of the cage. She’s flailing around, not with much energy. She might have been there for a while. 

You summon your 22-year-old son, who is nearby reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, the one that describes a way toward cultural sanity in the modern age through Indigenous ways of thinking and doing, and sipping his morning coffee, here on his last morning at home before he heads back to Berkeley for his last year as a biology major, where he will take a class on spider biology and live in a duplex with clever and hilarious biology-major friends, a surfeit of whom seem to be named Jack. 

You are afraid to touch the bird. You aren’t sure why. Your son is not.

He bundles her up in both hands, placing her gently, right side up, into the tray of sand they use to bathe. In the sand, they scuffle and swoosh about, edging sand between their fluffed-out feathers, stand, shake off the excess.

They do this because it feels good. Their pleasure communicates itself into anyone who gets to witness. 

She tilts sideways, her legs collapsing immediately beneath her in unexpected directions. She scratches around, sand flying hither and thither. She seems unable to right herself or lift her body up. Her feathers are poking every which way. She is a mess. 

You both quickly recognize that she should be relieved of her suffering: a responsibility that rests upon the two of you, all-seeing as you are in comparison to this slight little conglomeration of nerves and muscles and organs and feathers with its tiny little brain. 

He hasn’t done this before, but he calmly and seriously sets to work. He finds his sharp knife, the one he takes backpacking and camping. He brings a soft black kitchen towel and sets out a metal washtub. Meanwhile, you feed the poor girl some dried worms, which she at first ignores and then gobbles greedily (that is the only way quail gobble dried worms).

You stroke her neck and back, which seems to calm her.

You tell her it will be quick and then she will be free from her broken body. 

He picks her up and lays her in the towel, which you are holding in both open hands. Together you wrap her, not too tight. 

“Hold her upside down,” he tells you. “She’ll relax.”

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You do, and she does.

You kneel at one side of the tub and suspend her. She gazes back and down. You close your eyes, and you feel him quickly and neatly sever her head, and her body jerks and trembles hard in your hands.

You open your eyes. You look down at the bright red blood, the bird’s head. You and your son look at each other. 

You hold the bird until its body stops jerking and twitching. He stays crouched there with you, witnessing.

This is a new kind of intimacy between you, who have had many other kinds of intimacy, starting with the bloody moment of his birth such a very long time ago, or was it yesterday?

“Her body got so much heavier,” you tell your son. He holds her and agrees.

He understands this moment. He feels the whole arc of things: birth, life, death. He held this bird only days after it hatched.

He is young, vibrant and beautiful, full of possibility, excitement, curiosity, hope and joy, and you are careening through middle age, full of equanimity, grief, letting-go and acceptance. And somehow, shepherding this bird through the gate into the next world together has helped you both feel all of it. 

It is a sacred moment. 

Your son reports a little later, after taking some time to examine her body, that her wing is broken or dislocated. Together, you surmise it was that rough quail rooster bouncing her too hard. He does that: he grabs the hens by the feathers, jumps on their backs, has his way with them, many times each day, crowing his screechy little triumphant crows. What a bully. And then the joint that was broken or dislocated became infected. Poor girl was probably delirious. 

The Internet says humans should probably not eat an animal with an open wound or infection, so you cook her up for the cat, who gratefully partakes. The entrails go up on the hill for the vultures to eat.  

For the rest of the day you can feel the bird’s trembling body in your cupped hands. 

The next day, your son’s friend comes to pick him up to drive up to Berkeley. All the things he needs fit into her small SUV with her belongings. It is a great feat of efficient packing and loading. They drink smoothies and you pack them a delicious lunch. 

On the driveway, you say goodbye. You don’t want to feel your heart pierced and smashed by his leaving, but you make yourself be all the way there when you say goodbye. You look up into his eyes, which are the color of a Caribbean sea when the sun is setting: blues and greens blended together. His eyes are warm and soft and full of love.

You smile up at him and put your hand on the center of his warm strong broad chest and tell him you will miss him terribly. He holds you. You feel held in a way you hope everyone gets to feel. 

You don’t stand there and watch them drive away. You go inside and start washing the dishes. You can see just the rear left bumper of the car out of the kitchen window; you hear them laughing and screeching with glee that their next adventure is unfolding. They have so much to look forward to. You are so very grateful and glad for all of it. 

You keep on washing dishes, except when you can’t because you are crying so hard you have to put both hands on the sink’s edge and close your eyes. You see, through your tears, that rear left bumper edge out of view, and they’re gone.

The sobs leap up through your body and push themselves out of your mouth.

This is grief. This is praise.

You putter around in the quiet house for a while, put in a load of wash, sobbing and stopping and sobbing some more. You get dive-bombed by a couple of hummingbirds in the backyard: they know something’s up.

You drive yourself to the beach. You listen to a story on NPR about a Palestinian boy of 17 who died in police custody in Gaza. A good boy like your good boy. 

It’s August in Santa Barbara, at the tail end of a wicked heat wave. You walk a sweaty lap around the graveyard, noticing how many of the older stones are for babies and very young children. One just says “BABY” and a last name, with birth and death dates both listed: the same day. 

Back at the beach, you walk into the choppy waves, bob around, walk back out and sit on your blanket to read. And it starts to rain. In Santa Barbara. In August.

This doesn’t happen.

Beachgoers start to flock to their cars. You give it a few minutes, then go too, walking up the footpath to Channel Drive, where you parked. Droplets of rain sit primly on the bougainvillea flowers.

The hot pavement is wet with cool rain. 

It smells like rebirth. 

The posted photo had me within a nanosecond.

Oh, God, she was the prettiest kitty ever to walk God’s green earth.

My partner did not want a cat.

We got the cat.

She was shy, almost pathologically so, and skittish and weird and tiny. She didn’t seem too interested in human company. Or cat company. Or any company at all. She didn’t understand how to sit on a lap, or generally how to cat in the ways one would expect a cat to cat.

She came to us with a vial of kitty Prozac, which we never gave her, but that should have tipped us off that this would not be one of those ride-on-your-shoulder cats, or one of those cuddle-up-in-bed cats.

She was on guard. She seemed a little…traumatized.

She did, however, after a time, want to be in the room with the humans. She spent many an hour sitting on my journals and astrology notes (between 2013-2019) and therapist school notes (2021-2023). Sometimes she’d sleep on the end of someone’s bed. But cuddling? Allowing a human to pick her up and hold her? Not a chance.

Her very favorite thing turned out to be a firm spanking where her tail met her back. The harder the better. She’d dance her little back feet back and forth and rear her rear ever higher and go MEOW MEOW MEOW. An occasional tail yank hard enough to lift her back feet off the floor? Yes, please!

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When the spanker was done, giving a final extra-firm smack that sent her skittering, she’d take a few steps away…and circle back, begging for more.

During the pandemic, our friend Elaine Gale and her extremely handsome and charming border collie Lucky Blue were part of our isolation pod (IsoPodTM).

They spent lots of time here. And Lucky fell hard.

For us, sure. But mostly for Bella.

When he was around Bella he’d forget to eat or drink or sniffle things or even get pets from humans who were dying to pet him. He would just sit at a respectable distance, gazing at her, tingling right out to the tips of the hairs at the end of his adorable ears, which are the perfect halfway point between pointy and floppy.

(Watching him trot after her down the hallway, the way his ear tips bounce…it’s brutal.)

Bella tolerated him. She’d occasionally give a little yowl and swipe at him lackadaisically with one paw if he got too close or she grew tired of his omnipresence in her personal space. But he was relentless, so she adjusted.

He’d spend hours just watching her sleep. He’d follow her (at a polite distance of at least one-and-a-half-Lucky-lengths) if she went anywhere, and if he was met by a door he couldn’t follow her through, he’d lie down and wait patiently for her to reappear.

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Now Bella is getting senile and walks around the house meyyyyowwwwwing very loudly. She is deaf. She keeps getting urinary tract infections. She might have a thyroid issue. She weighs all of six pounds, about half of what a normal cat weighs. She pees and poops in the wrong places.

She still loves to be spanked, but we’re gentler now, as she is old and frail.

It’s been really sweet, too, in that one day about a year ago, she finally, finally, finally spontaneously climbed into my lap.

And now there’s no place she’d rather be. As soon as I sit down or lie down, she climbs on top of me and starts purring like gangbusters.

We’re making up for lost time. We don’t know how much longer she’ll be around.

Lucky Blue and his mom Elaine moved away: first to LA, then to Tucson. Lucky has had to live without Bella for months at a time. But now, right this minute, as I write this, they are visiting.1

Lucky Blue didn’t skip a beat.

He’s older now, too. Eleven—77 in dog years. He’s blind in one eye, but other than that, he is a hale and hearty gent for his advanced age. Everyone goes wild for this dog. He is the best dog I’ve ever known.

We are in our second day of our time together at our house, and he is right this very minute lying on the floor next to me, waiting for Bella to come back through the cat door, which he saw her climb through about a half hour ago.

This is his own sort of meditation: come close to the object of longing, but remember always that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, and that if she actually let him come all the way up to her, what would happen then? What would he even do if he captured this, the object of his great, great longing?

No. It’s enough for him to sit with the wanting. He is enjoying the wanting, the unreachable, the unattainable.

And although she gets annoyed by all this attention from time to time, the way she receives it, for the most part, is giving of course you are admiring me. Of course you see my greatness and my eternal beauty. You may bask. Just stay out of my way, please.

Meanwhile: he is meditating. He is praying. Oh, great deity Bella. Let me gaze upon you with my one good eye.

You can see his heart filling with something beyond joy.

You can feel him vibrating.

It’s not about getting the thing he wants.

It’s about beholding a wondrous thing and savoring the beholding.

We could all learn a thing or two from Bella and Lucky Blue.

For four three-day weekends, a crew of 10 therapists and practitioners deep-dived together into a psychotherapeutic framework founded in the belief that healing mental and emotional suffering or shifting dysfunctional patterns of living should probably involve more than talking from the mouth-holes on the front of our heads. 

I told someone in my life that I was re-doing this training, assisting with this & that (I’m super good at writing up giant flip chart pages!).

They asked me, “What is somatic psychotherapy?” 

I don’t think I did a good job explaining it.

And…I forgive myself for stammering and stuttering and probably saying something misleading that either confused the person or made them uninterested in learning more about it.

Like, if you’re a parent, go ahead and summarize parenting in two minutes or less. Share about a great passion in that same amount of time. About your favorite person. It’s hard. There is a strong desire to do justice to complexity, to not reduce richness to an elevator speech or sound bite. 

Anyhow, this inquisitive person could consult their ever-present hand-held glowing-screen thingamajig. AI gives a lovely and succinct description (yes, I checked it out for myself). Perhaps they did, and good for them. 

But that’s when I realized I needed to write out my own, in my own messy way.

Because I am a human person, and as a human person I believe that being messy is an important way we learn. 

Not in the check-off-that-I-know-the-definition-of-that way, but in a this-makes-sense-in-the-marrow-of-my-very-bones kind of way.

(I just read a great piece by Maalvika, an amazing Gen Z philosopher, about this distinction on Substack: “compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting”. Go check it out.)

Somatic psychotherapy holds that the body—every bit of it, from skin to viscera to bone to muscle to interstitial spaces—is its own kind of brain.

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It is infiltrated and influenced, limited and liberated by its past and present circumstances. 

It impacts the mind. It holds our emotions.

It is a large part of how we exist.

And most of us in modernized, Western culture do not even really know we are in a body until someone directs us to become aware of and attend to it.

Being led by a skilled practitioner in an exploration of how psychological and life issues arise in and affect the body—in concert with talking about the experience of doing so—opens doors that traditional talk therapy just doesn’t.

Here’s a piece I wrote a while ago that describes what a somatic psychotherapy session is like.

Somatic therapy vs. somatic psychotherapy

“Somatic” is an adjective that the Cambridge Dictionary defines as “relating to the body as opposed to the mind.” That’s a big bucket.

Somatic therapies are HAWT right now, and that is a GREAT thing.

A “somatic movement” class focuses not just on moving the body around but on being aware of and paying attention to body, breath, and emotions as you move. A somatic practitioner could be a bodyworker, a breath work teacher, a Reiki master, or someone trained in the same modalities that you might explore with a clinical psychotherapist: Somatic Experiencing, Authentic Movement, or Hakomi, for example.   

Somatic psychotherapy, however, adds a layer of verbal processing—yes, talking with the mouth-hole on the front of the head—to these other elements.

Clinical training equips us to:

• Build a client-therapist alliance where the client feels safe and held and appropriately challenged—usually, a task that precedes any deep somatic dive

• Integrate other kinds of therapy (creative arts therapies, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or Jungian depth psychology, for example)

• Prevent, recognize, or manage psychiatric emergencies, which can happen when people dive too deep too fast into somatic work

• Determine who is a good candidate for somatic work right out the gate…who could benefit, but needs some gentling in that direction, and how to gentle them thusly…and how to move back and forth between verbal processing and somatic work

What enables us to add this layer: a Master’s degree in clinical psychology plus 3000 or more supervised hours practicing therapy with people. A person with a terminal license to practice psychotherapy1 has passed a 3-hour Law and Ethics exam and a 6-hour clinical exam.

And finally: we are bound by ethical and legal guidelines that can feel a little strangle-y to us, but that ultimately are there to protect YOU, the person seeking help and/or healing.  

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No shade to all the awesome somatic practitioners out there who are deciding not to go the clinical route.

I know many I’d confidently refer to if people weren’t interested in the psychotherapy part. I’m not even endorsing one or the other, even though I’m on one of the teams and I like clients and I like to earn money and so on. 2

I am making this clear distinction because I think it’s important for people to be informed enough to make a good choice about where to put resources dedicated to their own well-being. And there does seem to be some confusion about all this.

I set out here to concoct my own concise description of somatic psychotherapy.

I don’t think I’ve done it.

But now I don’t really care about that.

It’s more fun to pull at its edges, give tantalizing glimpses into its whys and wherefores, and leave it to y’all to decide whether you wanna give it a try.

There’s no description that can substitute for direct experience.

Which is kind of the whole point of somatic psychotherapy. We have to live the healing/changing moment and be aware of it in order to actually heal or change. And it can’t just happen with words. It has to include the body.

At the training I attended, where I started this little essay, I saw a certain look on people’s faces after they experienced some of the work for themselves.

I saw it a bunch.

You know those videos where they put a first pair of glasses on a baby who can’t see very well?

And they fuss and cry as these uncomfortable things are strapped to their faces, but then they look around, and their squished-up mad sad faces melt open with pure joy and awe as they see, for the very first time, the clear outline of their mother’s face?

Like that.

Wonder and a touch of fear. I think the word is awe.

I am in a body. Awe.

It holds so fucking much! Sensations. Feelings. Movement. Imagery. Awe.

My body moves and it is still. But even when it’s still, so much is moving. Awe.

My mind can make a lot of meaning out of all this! Who knew what multitudes I contained?

Awe.