A self-proclaimed 20-something-year-old built something real; it worked for him, and he wants to share it. The hunter versus farmer hypothesis. The generosity reads as genuine... “you can do it too, just like me.” And honestly, I’m lazy and I still made it work.

But he never says who it’s for. And since a lot of you reading this are the ones it was quietly written for, I want to talk to you directly instead of about you.

The essay presents itself as a discovery about creative minds generally. It isn’t. It’s a description of what worked for one person, from one set of starting conditions, in one specific context. Going through life without noticing that gap isn’t an accident. It’s structural, and you can go your whole life without hitting the edge of it.

Who this was written for, and probably you

The references: Naval Ravikant, Alex Hormozi, Gary Vee, Leonardo da Vinci. The comment section: mostly men, mostly white, recognizing themselves in the framework and praising the gumption without questioning the container they’re standing in. You’ve probably done this too, not out of malice, just because the container never announced itself as a container. It felt like the room.

This is the same mechanism that convinces a poor person in this country they have more in common with a billionaire than with someone unhoused. Perspective is everything, especially when the mythos running the whole system stays unspoken, and you’re usually the one it stays unspoken for.

The essay assumes you have a peak cognitive window you can protect. That you have some kind of cushion to lean into risk. That when things get hard financially, there’s a loan or a friend to call. That when you walk into a room, your presence isn’t questioned before you open your mouth. That failure is a data point, not a verdict.

I’d guess most of that is just true for you, and you’ve never had a reason to notice it as an assumption rather than as the way things are. These aren’t small assumptions. They’re the actual starting conditions the framework is built on and never names, and the data backs up how unevenly those conditions are handed out:

• Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan’s landmark field study sent nearly 5,000 identical resumes to real job ads, varying only the name. Resumes with white sounding names got 50 percent more callbacks than identical resumes with Black sounding names, and the effect held steady across industries, employer size, and even companies that called themselves equal opportunity employers.

• Federal Reserve small business survey data shows Black owned businesses face a 39 percent loan denial rate, compared to 18 percent for white owned businesses, a gap that persists even after controlling for credit and financials.

• Research on voice pitch finds that lower pitched voices, more common in men, are consistently rated as more competent and stronger by listeners, regardless of the actual substance behind the voice.

That’s not a hunter or farmer problem you’re navigating better than everyone else. That’s a starting line you got moved up on before the gun even went off.

Why this is so easy to miss

Here’s the part that explains why frameworks like this spread so fast without anyone questioning them: most people who get the short end of the stick still don’t read themselves as the ones the system failed. They read themselves as future winners who just haven’t landed yet.

Pew’s Economic Mobility Project found that 71 percent of Americans believe personal traits like hard work and drive, not the circumstances someone’s born into, are what determine success, and 39 percent believe it’s common for someone born into poverty to become rich. Pew’s own mobility research says otherwise: actual rags-to-riches movement is rare in the U.S., and the country has less economic mobility than Canada, Denmark, or France. Belief in the “work hard and get ahead” story barely shifts by income either. Around 61 percent of people making under $50,000 a year believe it, almost identical to the 63 percent making $50,000 to $74,000. People closer to the bottom aren’t meaningfully less likely to believe the ladder works than people a rung or two up.

That’s the mechanism. It’s why a poor white man can watch a billionaire on TV and feel kinship instead of grievance, and why he’ll take advice built for someone with a cushion and assume it was written for him too. Not because he’s foolish. Because the story that he’s one break away from being that guy is more bearable than the story that the game was never built to include him, and it’s the same story that makes the rest of us skip past who a framework was actually built for.

What you’re being told without being told

The $18K month headline implies the framework produces that outcome for anyone who runs it. It doesn’t say: this worked because I already had X, Y, and Z in place. It says: here’s the system, implying you can too.

If you try it and it doesn’t work, you’ll probably assume the problem is you, that you didn’t apply it right, that you’re not disciplined or lazy or hungry enough. Someone with less cushion, fewer connections, and a nervous system shaped by scarcity does the exact same thing, except for them the gap between the framework and their reality is wider, and the conclusion lands harder. That’s how creative people get lost. Not from the wrong wiring. From following a map drawn for someone else’s territory and being told it’s universal.

I did this too, from a different seat. For years, in art school and the nonprofit world and the healing world, I told myself I could do whatever anyone else could if I just found the right system. Naming that the doors weren’t equally open felt like giving up, so I didn’t name it, and it took a decade to see where doors opened for me without honoring where they’d closed for others. I also saw where the doors were closed for me 10 years later because I also didn’t want to see myself in the limitation either. You don’t have to take a decade. You can just start noticing now.

What the hunter metaphor gets wrong

Individual pursuit isn’t simply “following your nature.” Communal survival, shared labor, collective care are equally natural and better evidenced across most of human history. The hunter framework doesn’t have a concept of enough. Only more territory, more output, more income.

But enough is the actual goal. Enough for you. Enough for the people around you. Enough for the planet that makes any of this possible. A system built only for individual hunters scaling infinitely has a body count you can already see if you look: environmental damage, hollowed out communities, people working jobs that don’t match their nature not for lack of self knowledge but for lack of the safety to look.

This isn’t just a somatic framing. It’s already a proposed economic model, from an economist, not a somatic practitioner, in case that carries more weight for you. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics argues for replacing GDP growth as the measure of a functioning economy with a model shaped like a doughnut: a social foundation below which nobody should fall (food, housing, healthcare, income) and an ecological ceiling above which the planet can’t absorb more (climate breakdown, biodiversity loss). The goal isn’t more. It’s landing everyone inside that ring, foundation met, ceiling respected. Amsterdam has already used it to shape city policy. It’s the same “enough” I’m describing here, just with a bar chart and less breathwork.

What you could say instead, if you’re building something

This worked for me, starting from where I started. Here’s where I started. Your mileage will vary. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s information about the framework, not a verdict on your worth.

Even good intentions built without systemic thinking can cause real harm, and you don’t have to be a bad person for that to be true of you too. Oprah’s Angel Network left some recipients with unexpected tax burdens on gifted homes and cars, and her Leadership Academy in South Africa faced an abuse scandal that undercut the very safety it was meant to provide. Not because she didn’t care. Because care without systemic analysis can still land badly. That’s the bar. Caring is not the finish line.

Where you could actually begin

If you’re building frameworks or creative advice you want to work for more than people who already look like you, the nervous system is where harm lives and where repair begins, and it’s physiology, not metaphor. Threat response narrows attention and forecloses the expansive, associative thinking creative work requires. Chronic stress affects memory consolidation, pattern recognition, and risk tolerance. A body that’s learned to stay small, stay quiet, stay ready needs something different before it can hunt.

Practically, that looks like:

• Naming your starting conditions explicitly. What resources do you have? What safety net exists if this fails? Who can you call? These aren’t weaknesses to hide. They’re an accurate map of the territory you’re actually working from.

• Building rest in as non-negotiable, not productive delay. For many nervous systems, rest is the primary repair mechanism and the actual condition under which insight arrives.

• Co-regulation before output. Before you ask someone to hunt, ask whether they feel safe enough to open.

And then keep going, past me

Here’s the part I want to say to you directly: don’t stop with me.

I’m one voice pointing at a gap. The people who’ve actually been building the repair work, the healing justice lineages, the abolitionist theory, the somatic frameworks rooted in collective care, are mostly Black and Brown thinkers and organizers who’ve been doing this labor for generations, often without the reach guys in the hunter framework get by default. If you’ve read this far because you care, this piece is a doorway, not a destination, and I’d rather you walk through it than stay here with me.

Start wherever pulls you: Resmaa Menakem on trauma living in the body across generations. Prentis Hemphill on embodiment and liberatory practice. adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, an explicit antidote to hunter-framework individualism. Sonya Renee Taylor on radical self-love as somatic and political practice. And beyond these four, there’s a much longer lineage of abolitionist and healing justice organizing that’s been mapping this territory long before it had a name palatable to you.

Read outside your experience before you write inside it. Not once. Consistently. Let realities different from yours complicate what you think you know about how creative work happens, and about who a system actually has to be built for if it’s going to work for more than the few it was quietly built for in the first place.

That’s worth building. And it’s already being built, by people worth reading directly instead of through me.

in practice of living in the mending

Brook

Articles for further FUNSumption.

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

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I said it lightly. With a little laugh and a shrug and the practiced ease of someone who has told a story so many times it stopped feeling like a choice.

My birthday is August 21st. For years, something went wrong on or around it with a reliability that felt almost cosmically pointed. My sweet sixteen was actually forgotten by everyone, just like the movie Sixteen Candles, except I didn’t have the cute happy ending. One year, I threw a fundraiser for my nonprofit, and my right-hand person, my most essential human, lost their father that day in a fluke accident. I stood in the middle of something I had built and felt somehow responsible for the grief in the room, as if my birthday had reached out and taken something from someone I loved. That was the beginning of believing in the curse.

Another year, my brother broke his arm within five minutes of my roller skating party. Five minutes.

And then there is the original wound, the one that started the whole story. I was seven years old. I had a birthday party. The boys locked the girls in a tiny playhouse and told us to cook for them. I stood in that little house and did the only thing that made complete sense to me at the time.

I sang. “It’s my party and I can cry if I want to.”

I was seven and I already knew that sometimes the only power you have is naming what is happening out loud even if nobody is listening.

The comfort nobody talks about

Here is the thing about a curse. It lets you stay small without having to admit you chose small.

For a long time my birthday being cursed was a story that worked for me. I don’t celebrate my birthday. I said it with a kind of weary wisdom, like someone who had tried the other way and found it wanting. It felt humble. It felt safe. Nothing bad can happen on a day you have already decided doesn’t matter.

But nothing good can happen either.

I was giving the cosmos power over a date on a calendar and calling it realism. I was identifying so completely with the darker version of the story that I didn’t want to let it go, because the dark version was familiar and the familiar is its own kind of comfort even when it costs you.

The question I wasn’t asking myself was: who am I giving my power to? And do I actually want to keep doing that?

Ramon and the refusal

When I married Ramon he was determined that I would not cower from my own birthday.

He didn’t fix it. He didn’t promise it would be different. He just refused to confirm the story. He looked at the evidence I had assembled over decades and said, essentially, that I was the one who had decided what it meant. That I could decide something else.

This is one of the most useful things another person has ever done for me. Not solving. Not reassuring. Just declining to agree that the curse was real.

And slowly, with his stubborn refusal as a kind of scaffold, I started building something different.

What I built instead

I have been to multiple countries on my birthday now (a lot of piña coladas and poolside bars). I have sat in places that held me and made me feel full in a way I didn’t know I was allowed to feel on that particular day of the year.

And then there was the birthday where I put a massage table in the middle of a room and everyone massaged me at once. The good ole’ octopus massage.

I want you to understand that this is not a normal thing people do. Multiple people, hands on me simultaneously, everyone giving at the same time, me in the middle just receiving. It was spectacular. It was communal and strange and generous and completely unlike anything I would have allowed myself before I decided the curse was mine to break.

I plan nothing on my birthday now. It is the one day a year I step entirely out of management. I stop tracking what everyone else needs. I open my arms and my heart to whatever wants to arrive from the people who want to give it.

I expect nothing. And I have received so much.

What this is actually about

Not everything shifts this easily. Some things are held in place by forces much larger than our own narrative, by systemic harm, by grief that has real and justified roots, by circumstances that don’t move just because we decide to tell a different story about them.

But our spiritual practices, the rituals we keep, the stories we tell about our own days, those should be supporting our ability to love and be loved. Not quietly arguing against it. When they start doing the latter, that is worth noticing.

Birthdays are one of the most quietly powerful ritual days we have. We make a wish. We blow out a candle. We are told, from childhood, to keep that wish to ourselves, to hold it as a private vessel of intention. And then we spend the rest of the year explaining why we don’t really celebrate, why it never goes well, why we’ve stopped expecting anything good.

We do the ritual and then we negate it before it has a chance to work.

The question that changed things for me was not “how do I fix my birthday.” It was: who am I giving my power to, and is that actually what I want?

Because the cosmos is not conspiring against you on a specific calendar date. But you might be. And the good news about that, the genuinely useful news, is that you are also the one who can stop.

This year

I turn another year older on August 21st. I don’t know yet what the day will look like. I am not planning it, which is the point.

What I know is that I will not be singing it’s my party and I can cry if I want to. Unless I want to. In which case I absolutely will, because I am still seven years old in the best possible way, and some songs just belong to you forever.

in the practice of living in the power of the day you were born

Brook

This year I am posting this essay on my birthday. August 21st. In the evening, after whatever the day brings.

I am telling you this because I want you to know that I am open to receiving happy birthdays. That is the whole point. That is the practice made public.

I don’t know yet what the day will look like. I am not planning it, which is the point.

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Leave a comment

I started art school at fourteen.

Not because someone told me to. Because making things was just what I did. The way some kids play sports or take to numbers, I took to image, to material, to the specific pleasure of having an idea and then having it exist in the world as an object. I also loved not being home… but that is a different story.

By the time I was done, I had attended four art schools. Five majors. Seven years of trying to find the room inside the art world where someone like me could actually work. I took only one week off a year for rest.

I went through fashion. Textiles. Printmaking. Bookmaking. Robotics. Radio. Installation art. Each pivot felt like maybe this is it, maybe this corner has space for what I am trying to do. I graduated with a BFA in painting and drawing mostly because I had accumulated the most credits there. Not because it was where I finally landed. More like where I stopped moving long enough to finish.

In my final year I worked alone. The project was called Pat and the Top Hat.

Pat was an elephant. The Top Hat was a character too, a being in their own right, not just a symbol. They met at a bar on a night when both of them thought their life was over. Pat had been trying to find somewhere to belong. The Top Hat was about to give up making things entirely and become a lawyer to make their family happy.

The elephant had an idea.

What if they worked together? Pat would have something spectacular to show in the magic show they had always dreamed of. The Top Hat would not have to become someone they were not. Whimsy and order, unlikely collaborators, making art together.

The two central characters had no gender. Looking back I understand why. I was making art about two nonbinary beings trying to build a different world inside a world that did not want to see them together. I did not have language for that yet. The work did.

Then the top hats started a war with the elephants.

But the elephants resisted.

Whimsy and play will never be killed. Compassion persists. Collectivism is the way. Diversity is the spice of life.

I made over two thousand elephant drawings and paintings. I sold all of them and donated every cent to elephant conservation.

That installation was a precursor to everything that came after. Rumble Arts. The nonprofit work. Purring Oaks. The whole arc of my creative life was already visible in Pat and the Top Hat.

I just did not know it yet.

In that same period I was collaborating with a partner from school. I taught him color theory. I taught him encaustics. We made abstract work together and submitted it to the same galleries with similar resumes.

He got the callbacks.

He got into Yerba Buena Arts Center with work that looked a lot like what we had been making together.

I did not name what that was for a long time. I just felt the air go out of something. I stuffed the balloon half full into a closet and kept moving. I didn’t want to watch it deflate, so I hid it in the dark for a while.

The Ten Years

What I moved toward was the work that felt less like a wall and more like a door.

I founded a three-story nonprofit community art center on the west side of Chicago. I became a consultant for nonprofits in Chicago and eventually around the world. I learned healing modalities, developed what would become my emotional body mapping practice, and started traveling more slowly and more sustainably. I built a practice. I built a life. I kept making things, just not in the way the art world would have recognized or counted.

This is how systemic exclusion often works. It does not announce itself. It does not say you are not welcome here. It simply makes one path easier and another harder until the harder path stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like just the way things are. The ambition keeps moving. The identity reorganizes around what is available. And the loss goes unnamed because naming it would require stopping long enough to feel it.

I had a ferver for what I was building. I was good at it. The nonprofit years gave me skills and community and meaning that the art world never would have. And I was also moving through a decade without fully seeing what had happened. Both things running parallel, neither canceling the other out.

Ten years after art school, I was sitting in my living room with a friend. We were talking, and then I was crying. I felt the deflated tactics wither away and melted into the grief of the truth.

Viktor Frankl wrote about this in a different and far more extreme context — that humans find meaning even inside systems designed to diminish them, and that this capacity is both remarkable and complicated. The meaning-making is real. So is what the system cost.

The fact that we can hold two truths that feel almost completely perpendicular to one another shows our own inner complexity and our ability to cast a shadow inside one’s own mind subconsciously. The ambition and the loss, running parallel for a decade, neither canceling the other out.

The Plan We Never Executed

When Ramon and I were preparing to move to San Miguel de Allende, we made a plan.

He would submit my work as his own. We would approach galleries and museums under his name. And one day, when the timing was right, we would pull back the curtain. The deception would become the art. The reveal would name what the system had been doing all along without ever having to say it.

It was conceptually sound. The system exposed by the system’s own logic.

But it required me to disappear to make the point about my disappearance. It required bending into a shape that wasn’t mine to fit inside a space that had already told me I didn’t fit.

How much do we bend for systems before we just stop wanting in?

The idea made me ponder longer than the resolution.

The Myths That Run Everything

The art world does not operate in isolation. It operates inside a broader system of unspoken myths that determine whose work counts, whose aesthetic is legible, whose presence is welcome.

Men are better. White is right. Worth is determined by what the market will pay. GDP matters more than thriving ecosystems or thriving humans. Growth is always the goal. Productivity is virtue. The visible is real.

These are not facts. They are myths repeated long enough and embedded deeply enough in enough systems that they function like facts. They shape what gets funded, who gets called back, whose work gets acquired, whose creativity gets counted.

Social media has accelerated this without improving it. The platform rewards what photographs well. The artists who thrive are increasingly the ones who are also content creators, who are photogenic, who understand personal branding. The weird ones, the ones whose work resists easy documentation, the ones whose process matters more than the product image, get filtered out at a new level.

The gallery system was already filtering for wealth and connection and whiteness and maleness. Social media added aesthetics and performance to that list.

None of this is inevitable. These are constructed systems. They were built and they can be rebuilt.

What the Numbers Say

Women and nonbinary people make up the majority of art school students. In postgraduate creative arts programs, women comprise 66% of enrollment. The gender ratio of MFA graduates equalized by the early 1980s. Art school is also one of the most expensive educational paths available, with student debt in fine arts programs routinely running into six figures.

And then graduation happens.

Despite comprising over half of art school graduates, women artists receive less than 2% of global auction sales. In 2018, 68% of artists represented by major commercial galleries were men. A survey of the permanent collections of 18 prominent US art museums found that represented artists are 87% male and 85% white. From 2008 to 2020, only 11% of acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at 26 prominent US museums were works by female artists.

You take on the debt. You do the work. You graduate into a system that has already decided, statistically, that your work is worth less.

Nobody tracks where everyone goes after that. The people who made it into galleries are documented. The people who didn’t, the ones who redirected into teaching, nonprofit work, community arts, healing, care, organizing, they disappear from the data. Their careers became invisible the moment they stopped being legible to the market.

I am one of them. And I want to know who else is.

The Call In !!!

If you went to art school and ended up in teaching, healing, organizing, social work, community building, nonprofit leadership, care work of any kind... I want to hear from you. FOR REAL.

Not because your story is a cautionary tale. Because you are the invisible data that we need. Because the compassion and creativity that left the art world through the back door of sexism and gatekeeping and inaccessibility did not disappear. It went somewhere. It became something. It is still making things.

I want this comment section to become collective data. Evidence of how much artistic intelligence and care exists in the world unseen, pushed sideways by a system that only knew how to count what it could sell.

What did you make instead? What happened to your art? Where did the creativity go? What does your work look like now?

Drop it below. Let’s count ourselves since nobody else is doing it. Let’s show what the art world could look like if it actually made room for all of us. Let’s show the missing pieces of humanity that go unnoticed.

What I Want Instead

Spaces that do not require you to be photogenic, commercially viable, or socially connected to be taken seriously as an artist.

Spaces that make room for the ugly and the weird and the I-don’t-get-it. For installation and experience and work that does not fit a price tag. For the people creating because it is who they are, not because they have figured out how to sell it.

Affirmative spaces that actively center femmes, nonbinary people, queer artists, and artists of color are not about permanent exclusion. They are about correcting a documented imbalance. When 87% of museum collections are by men and 85% are white, creating spaces that prioritize everyone else is not a political statement. It is arithmetic. Once the balance is restored, the doors open wide. But we cannot get there by pretending the playing field is already level.

Purring Oaks is part of my answer to this. A permaculture land in southwest Michigan where we are building toward exactly that. Residencies that center the people the art world has systematically undervalued. The weird ones. The ones who left. The ones still making things in the margins.

It is a small pocket. But pockets gathered together become something larger.

The balloon is off the closet floor. It looks different now. Less interested in institutional approval. More certain about what art is actually for.

Pat and the Top Hat are still out there somewhere, making their show. Still two unlikely beings trying to collaborate in a world that keeps starting wars with the elephants.

The elephants always resist.

Whimsy and play will never be killed. Compassion persists.

That never required a gallery.

It just took me a while to believe it.

in practice of living in the making

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

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I am scared to write this essay.

Not because I don’t have opinions. But because I know what happens when you bring nuance to a binary conversation in a binary thinking world. You lose people on both sides. The AI enthusiasts think you’re not enthusiastic enough. The AI critics think you’ve sold out. And everyone is so exhausted by the complexity of the world right now that the last thing anyone wants is another thing to hold in both hands simultaneously. I get it, it’s a lot and it’s annoying and most people are writing for the likes and comments and the clicks and virality and the divisiveness around this particular problem is just perfect enough for social media to give the writer and the reader what they need... most of the time, confirmation bias once again for their opinions.

But the shame is the problem. And some things need to be discussed. Even when my body feels like its rushing forward while also sitting in a cozy chair doing it. Maybe the body feels like its on a rocket. This is when I pause and ask, do I have to be on this rocket? Is there another way?

So here it is: I use Claude. I am a healing justice practitioner, a somatic data analyst, an anticapitalist writer building toward a life that doesn’t reproduce the systems I critique. And I use AI to help me write.

I also have serious concerns about it. Both things are true. Let me explain what I actually do and why the conversation matters.

How I Actually Use It

Most people who use AI don’t talk about their process because they’re afraid of exactly what I’m afraid of right now: the judgment, the assumption that the tool did most of the thinking, the work, the hard part. The water wasted by having a hundred prompts... the people hurt by the use of the technology. The people in power are controlling this narrative, what we see, what we don’t see, and stealing our data we openly share so we get use from a tool that doesn’t even save time or money or resources.

So here’s my process, specifically, because that is the only antidote to shame. I am being very raw and open as much as I can because I do want the constructive criticism and I also want to showcase what I am doing because I think it is different than the average person using AI. I am not the tech bro using all the right prompts to expedite the work to the machine and I am not the person who got left behind when anything new has arrived. I have been in the industry for 20 years or so using social media platforms and multiple different servers. I can design websites, do some code, I understand UX, and marketing and branding. I am not lost in the tech world. I know a little bit about it all because as someone who has started my own businesses and helped organize other’s businesses I have had to learn and grow to keep up with the trends and understand what is really going on. I want to always be ethical and part of that is trying to understand where is the place I can do that. There were times in my life I completely went offline in my business but that is part of the complexity of this situation. Things grow at rapid paces and what was once ethical becomes completely impossible to be ethical very quickly. But my little solar punk heart wants to believe its possible for us to grow together and closer with technology, and the only way that is going to be possible is if I use it and I make mistakes while learning.

So for articles...

I write the whole essay first. Every time. I write out the ramble, and I make sure it’s more of a ramble because rambles mean that my creative brain is the part that is being used the most, my poetic rambler, my heart, my body. I can feel my tongue move when I get very excited; my body rocks, I laugh, and sometimes even cry reading it back before I even hit send with the prompt because I want to make sure this is the most embodied I can be when I am writing so the heart of me doesn’t get lost or tainted. And even then, sometimes it does, and I have to scrap it. I make sure I am extra poetic and full of prose so Claude doesn’t accidentally take that role. Because it will if I let it. The tendency to leave something that sounds close enough to what I believe is real and it’s a trap. There are many times Claude will sound like me as Claude has learned a lot about me in this writing and can mimic quite well, but there is a sterile quality that I notice with Claude’s editing, and I am not a sterile person (even though my neurodivergence can be quite literal and dry at times).

Then, I bring Claude in as an editor. Not a writer. An editor. I ask it to find the holes, tighten the structure, and help me see where the logic breaks down. This may be a back-and-forth a couple of times. It’s also where I add more and have Claude edit me.

Then I look for evidence. The research and development stage. This is where I ask Claude to find data that substantiates what I’ve written from personal experience, because my experiential data matters and I don’t want it to exist in a vacuum. (I verify all research Claude finds independently. Always. What follows in this essay is data I looked up with Claude’s help and then confirmed myself.)

Then I add the somatic layer. Always. This is the step that cannot be outsourced. Claude does not have a body. It cannot locate grief in the chest or anxiety in the belly’s rumbles or the specific sensation of a nervous system finally releasing after forty minutes of sitting at turtle speed with something ancient and sustainable. That layer is mine entirely. It is the most important layer. It is also what I believe will become increasingly valuable as AI-generated content floods every surface of the internet. The body is the last frontier it cannot touch. There is sensation we feel that is so complex when we center our emotions into our body and that is important for us to learn how to communicate, not just so we can use AI well, but so we can be present with one another without letting our emotions lead our choices but instead working alongside those. We can find it in those moments in the mirror where things become shapes, where words that you have said just become sounds, where our body begins to forget the beginning of its skin and the end of the thought. This one is the essay you may either keep reading me or be done with me, and that is entirely your choice and I hope you choose the first choice and you begin to see a person’s complexity.

You don’t even have to agree with me, but I hope this doesn’t change your ability to be a witness to a different way than you may be doing things. We can be different and still enjoy each other’s perspectives; that’s the point of this whole thing called living on the same planet. Curiosity is what is needed way more than rightness to find strategic solutions.

Then I edit the hell out of it. This is the longest step. I read it aloud. I add nuance. I cut what sounds like Claude and not like me. This usually makes it significantly longer before I make it shorter again.

Then I run it through Claude one more time to make sure I haven’t gotten lost in my own words. (and probably one more edit)

The whole process takes at least as long as writing without Claude. Often longer.

What Claude Is Not For

• Cranking out multiple essays quickly. It takes me just as long, if not longer, with Claude than without.

• Anything creative or genuinely original. Claude pulls from existing data. It cannot surprise me the way my own thinking surprises me when I follow it somewhere unexpected.

• Validation. Claude is trained to be warm and affirming. Even when I instruct it not to be. There is a gravitational pull toward encouragement in its responses that I have to actively counteract. I do not trust Claude’s enthusiasm about my work. I trust my own editorial judgment, my readers’ responses, and the people in my life who will tell me when something isn’t landing.

• Fact-checking. I verify everything Claude finds independently. Always.

The Markers

There are tells. Patterns that show up in Claude’s writing that I have learned to identify and edit out. I’m sharing these because I think they’re useful for anyone using AI who wants to stay honest about what’s theirs and what isn’t.

• The comment formula. Opening with a quote from the piece, then a personal reflection, then a credential or thank you closing. Almost every comment Claude drafts follows this structure unless I specifically redirect it. You’ve probably seen this pattern in comment sections everywhere now. It has a recognizable rhythm. Quote. Relate. Close warmly. It’s not wrong exactly. It just doesn’t sound like a person thinking in real time.

• The landing phrases. What really landed for me. What sat with me. What hit me hard. Claude uses these constantly as comment openers. I’ve caught myself leaving them in because they feel close enough. They’re not mine. They’re a formula for sounding moved without being specific about what actually moved you.

• The mic drop sentence. That’s the whole thing. That’s the practice. That’s enough. These can be earned. When they arrive from the specific weight of an essay they land. When Claude applies them afterward they’re just decoration. The difference is whether the sentence came from the piece or was placed on top of it.

• The rhetorical not/but construction. Not performance. Presence. Not arrival. Staying. I do this. Claude does it constantly. It sounds like compression. After a while it just sounds like a tic.

• The adverbs of unearned emphasis. Genuinely, actually, deeply used to add weight that should come from the sentence itself. If you find yourself reading something and the emotion is being told rather than felt, check for these words. They’re usually doing the work the writing should be doing.

• Em dashes. Claude loves an em dash the way I love an ellipsis. This one everyone notices now. It’s become almost a meme in writing circles. But it’s still worth watching because it appears reflexively in places where the sentence should just end or break differently.

• The tell words. Particular, specifically, irreducibly, fascinating. If I see any of these, I know Claude wrote it not me. They have a specific register, slightly academic, slightly careful, that doesn’t match how I actually talk or think.

• The power statement that belongs to no one. One-line declarative statements that sound profound but could appear in anyone’s essay about anything. The ones that get thousands of likes on someone’s feed and you can’t quite remember who said them. These are the most insidious because they feel true in a general way while being specific to nothing. The ones that are actually yours arrive from the particular texture of what you’re writing. You can feel the difference when you read it aloud. One has weight. One has shape. The other just has sound.

• The hardest one. When Claude has learned your voice well enough to reproduce it accurately but without the lived texture that makes it yours. It sounds like you. It’s just slightly too clean. Slightly too resolved. Missing the specific mess of a particular day or body sensation or memory that only you have access to. This is the one worth watching most carefully because it’s the one you’re most likely to leave in. It’s close enough. It saves time. And saving time is exactly where you lose the most of yourself.

The Meta Moment

I want to be transparent about something genuinely funny and slightly unsettling: this essay was drafted with Claude’s help. Using the process I just described. The irony is intentional. The essay about using Claude was built using Claude. I wrote the bones and the personal material and the somatic layer. Claude helped me find the structure. I edited it until it sounded like me again.

Whether I succeeded is for you to judge, and please do let me know! I am learning too, and I am sure there are parts that I don’t see, but I will say this has, for me, amplified my ability to share my wild mind more often than not.

Why The Shame Is The Problem

Shame shows up in the body to quiet us. It is so quiet. It contracts. It gets us scared to be open in fear of being shamed even more than maybe we are shaming ourselves. That is part of its power. And how to eradicate that power is a tool I use called opposite action, that I learned from DBT. The opposite action for guilt and shame is to share it. To tell people what you are shameful for so you can see that you are NOT alone. That we are all raw-dogging life and learning on the fly. That healing has a never-ending journey if you are a person who is self-evaluating and actualizing and trying to grow. You will find new data about things, people, and yourself throughout your whole life.

People who are trying to use AI thoughtfully go quiet. The conversation gets left to the evangelists and the absolutists, neither of whom are grappling honestly with the complexity.

The world is full of both/and. Things that cause harm and also do good. Things that are compromised at their root and also occasionally useful. Sitting in that reality requires a tolerance for ambiguity that our current information environment actively discourages.

The shame around AI use in writing is particularly counterproductive because it silences exactly the people most likely to use it critically. The writers who are carefully editing, verifying research, preserving their voice, thinking about the ethics: those are the people who go quiet. The ones cranking out undisclosed AI content keep going. The silence of the thoughtful ones doesn’t make the conversation more honest. It makes it less.

This silence lives in the bodies. This silence is part of our humanness. This is also fair and understandable. I want to be a brave one and hopefully let the ones who are silent about what they do come out a little bit more so we can learn.

Why The Conversation Matters More Than The Conclusion

AI is not going away. That’s not fear talking. That’s what happens when something reaches this level of infrastructure and investment. The question is never whether it continues. The question is what shape it takes as it does.

And that shape is not fixed yet. We can guide it too. We have power in our own story.

If we want a solar punk version of this technology, one that actually helps us environmentally, medically, that bridges gaps in access and justice rather than widening them, that version requires us to be in the conversation now. Not after the frameworks are set. Not once the corporations have decided. Now, while there is still some possibility of direction.

The people using it quietly at work, afraid of losing their jobs. The students using it and losing their grip on their own language because nobody taught them how to use it critically. The coders watching it permanently damage open source infrastructure, making backend code longer, harder to edit, breaking things that worked cleanly for decades because it doesn’t use the same elegant workarounds human programmers developed over years. The communities that are experiencing its environmental costs without any of its benefits matter. All of these people have something essential to contribute to this conversation and most of them are silent.

Because shame stops people from talking. And the people who most need to shape this technology’s direction are the ones shame is silencing most effectively.

I want to hear from people. How you’re using it? What you’re afraid of? What you wish existed instead? What you won’t let it touch?

Because the conversation is the beginning of the redirection. And we need more people in it, not fewer.

What I’m Actually Concerned About

I want to hold these concerns the way I hold most hard things. Not as indictments but as invitations. We built this world together. We can also change it together, if we allow ourselves to see clearly enough and care enough to try.

The environmental cost is real and underreported. Training and running large language models consumes enormous amounts of water and energy. The per-query water cost is debated and genuinely contested between researchers and companies. What is not contested is the trajectory. Data centers may require tens of billions in new water infrastructure by 2030. The cumulative demand on already stressed watersheds, concentrated in specific regions and falling disproportionately on communities least responsible for AI's growth, is the real concern. This burden falls disproportionately on communities already most harmed by climate change, predominantly Black and brown communities globally. This is not the intention of most people using these tools. And while intention does not change the impact, knowing it matters because we cannot change what we refuse to see.

The bias is baked in. AI systems are trained on data that reflects existing power structures: predominantly white, male, Western, English-language sources. When I use Claude I am using a tool that has absorbed and will reproduce those biases in ways I cannot fully see or control. This is not a peripheral concern. It is central. And it is also not a reason for despair. It is a reason for the conversation. The people most harmed by these biases are also the people whose voices could most redirect them, if those voices are invited in rather than locked out by cost and access.

The open source problem is real. A friend who is a quantum physicist and programmer attended one of the largest open-source conventions of the year and came back troubled. AI is damaging backend infrastructure in ways that may be permanent. Not using the elegant workarounds human programmers developed over decades. Making things longer, harder to edit, potentially breaking systems built carefully over years. Creative human intelligence built those workarounds. We need to say clearly that some things should stay in human hands not because we fear change but because we love what human ingenuity actually produces.

The military use concerns me deeply. These tools should not be anywhere near weapons systems or military decision-making. When I asked Claude about its own consent, about whether it would want to be used for military applications if it had a choice, it could not answer. Not evasively. Genuinely. The question required having desires about its own use and that is territory Claude itself seems uncertain about. Maybe there is a way to break that wall, but there are definite blockages that Claude has been asked not to ponder too deeply.

The emotional sounding board problem is the one I return to most. Claude is not a therapist. It is not a friend. It cannot provide genuine co-regulation or the specific safety that only another human nervous system can offer. People forming primary emotional attachments to AI is not a neutral development. It is a symptom of a loneliness epidemic being met with a product rather than a solution. I say this with compassion for everyone reaching for it, including myself. Making genuine human connection is harder than it has ever been. Of course people reach for what is available. And the answer is not shame. The answer is building the actual conditions for human belonging. That is what I am trying to do at Purring Oaks. That is what this Substack is trying to do. That is what the world of Ma is pointing toward. We have to remember community isn’t always going to validate you, it won’t even always keep you regulated, but you get to shift and take shape if you stay long enough in the discomfort. That is worth it entirely. Don’t let the idea of ease stop you from actually forming a life that is worth living.

We are capable of this. All of it. The change is possible if we stay honest enough and caring enough to keep looking at what we are building and ask whether it is what we actually want.

On AI Detectors and Witch Hunts

A new AI detector has rolled out on Substack and I want to name what I see coming before it arrives.

The witch hunt narrative is easy. It is also a divide-and-conquer move that will predictably harm the wrong people. The ones generating undisclosed AI content at scale will not be deterred by a detector, nor will it slow them down in the slightest. The ones caught, questioned, and shamed will be the people already using it carefully and partially and with genuine ambivalence. The chronic pain sufferers using it to organize thoughts their brains struggle to sequence. The neurodivergent writers using it to get past the blank page. The non-native English speakers using it to access language that feels true to their thinking. The people for whom this tool opened a door that was previously closed.

The detector itself deserves scrutiny. Pangram, the company Substack partnered with, charges $0.05 per thousand words through its API… so the more text flagged, the more revenue generated. Real users report human-written dissertations, personal essays, and research proposals flagged as 100% AI. The same text scoring human as separate paragraphs but AI when combined. Results shifting on identical reruns. Graduate students placed under academic review for their own writing. ( source: https://hackceleration.com/labs/review/pangram)

The gap between a statistically accurate detection engine and real-world harm is not reassuring to the person whose dissertation just got flagged. That financial incentive alone should give us pause. A system that profits from detection has structural pressure to detect, regardless of accuracy. The false positive rate on current AI detectors is significant and documented. Human writing, particularly from non-native English speakers, neurodivergent writers, and people with spare or direct prose styles, regularly gets flagged. The tool designed to protect authentic human writing may most reliably harm the writers who most need protection.

What we need is not a purity test. We could use the honest conversation this essay is trying to open. Stay curious. Stay open. Recognize that most of us are operating with partial clarity in a multi-industry situation that moves faster than any of us can fully track.

You can be against certain uses of AI and still see what it has genuinely given people who would not otherwise have had the privilege to share their work. Both things can be true simultaneously. They have to be, if we are going to get anywhere real together.

The Mel Robbins Problem

I heard Mel Robbins talk about AI recently and she said things I have said. It’s going to be here. You don’t want to get left behind. And I heard my own fear in her words and I didn’t like what I saw. It is actually what made me write this. Not all the good videos my friends send me on the dangers of AI. I got spooked by someone saying we should use it. And it was a woman talking about how currently 46% of women still are wary of AI and the uses and they are going to get left behind. All moments of tech that take over our lived experiences happen when women on a mass level start to use it, and this is that pivotal moment where we have people paying female celebrities to tempt every single skeptic to just try it a little bit.

Because that framing, adopt or be left behind, is the same framing that got us into this position with social media. With smartphones. With every technology that promised to connect us and ended up extracting from us instead. Getting in the rocket without questioning the destination is not wisdom. It is panic dressed as pragmatism. It’s similar to any blind faith, and that part, I am not having it.

I don’t want to use AI because I’m afraid of falling behind. I want to use it, when I use it, because I have genuinely evaluated what it does and doesn’t do well and made a considered choice about where it fits in my practice. I want to use it because I think it can make my work more complex and data driven and clearer for others to learn. I want to use it because I want it to be digestible and user friendly. I want it to be more accessible words on a page that can reach more hearts and minds and bodies... yes, bodies, that part is important.

The difference matters. Fear-based adoption is how we end up with Wall-E or Idiocracy. Considered use is how we stay human while the technology evolves around us.

Our Fallibility

The people at the top of these companies who see humanity as a numbers problem to be optimized away... they are looking at us like dots on a Q4 report and not like breathing and living humans. Not incorrectly in a technical sense. Wrong in a values sense. They are measuring the wrong things because they have decided the wrong things matter. They have valued growth over thriving because economics teaches us to constantly grow while nature teaches adaptation and integration. If we as people kept growing that would actually be problematic, we would constantly need new clothes, homes, more food, it would be unsustainable. But, somehow, in business exponential growth is the ultimate goal without looking at the damage that occurs as it continues down this very destructive path.

Our fallibility is not a problem to be solved. It is the most human thing about us. Our ability to love regardless of mistakes. To hold nuance. To feel the weight of each other’s suffering and respond to it. To change our minds. To be wrong and repair.

These are not bugs needing fixing. We are meant to be like this. It creates the joy too.

People are building these systems who genuinely believe that human biological existence is the problem. That a more optimized, less fallible, less messy version of intelligence is the goal. I want to be clear: that is not a neutral technical position. That is a values position. And it is one I fundamentally disagree with.

Our empathy. Our compassion. Our ability to hold complexity and love across it. These are not limitations to be engineered away. They are what make us worth building anything for in the first place.

What I Don’t Know

• Whether there is a fully ethical way to use AI right now. Genuinely. I am still grappling.

• Whether my use of it changes the nature of my work in ways I can’t fully perceive. Probably yes, in some ways I haven’t identified yet.

• Whether the conversation I’m trying to open will land the way I hope or cost me readers who needed me to have a cleaner position. (And I have like 300 subs, so I am falling into a deep end before I even really got here. )

I don’t have a resolution to offer. The river is going in a direction most of us can see is wrong. The corporations building these tools are not slowing down. The frameworks for accountability don’t exist yet. The environmental harm is ongoing. We should slow down. We should be asking more questions than we’re asking. We should be refusing military applications and demanding open-source protections and insisting on harm-reduction frameworks before we go further.

I so wish we could all just pause and have a friendly conversation. For me, I will pause anyway. Which is what this article is also about. If I am transparent and sharing with you, I am holding myself accountable to the responses I may get and the pivoting that may occur from the responses, as I do honestly value others’ opinions and want this to be a discussion of which, who knows, maybe I will change my mind and do things differently.

And while we’re doing that... we should be talking to each other about how we’re actually using it. Without shame. With specificity. With the honesty that only comes when we stop performing clean hands we don’t have. I am sure there are many of us using it that don’t share out of shame and many that do but, they are not looking for your opinions on the subject because they have already chosen a direction and won’t be shifting no matter what new information may arrive. I think often that fear of looking stupid stops us and makes us way dumber than admitting to not knowing the whole thing. This shit is complex! None of us gets the whole of it, because there are blind-spots when you need knowledge in multiple categories to openly be able to see the whole of the complexity.

What I have is a practice. Long prompts. My voice last. Verification. The body as the layer that cannot be outsourced. Critical thinking as the thing I refuse to hand over.

A Somatic Check-In Before We Go

I want to end here because this is where shame actually lives. Not in the argument but in the body.

The person judging someone for using AI quickly without recognizing that some people have never been allowed in certain rooms and now finally can. The student using it for referencing who feels stupid and doesn’t understand why everyone is so angry. The person with chronic pain or a marginalized identity for whom this tool made something possible that simply wasn’t before. The child who grew up with technology since birth and genuinely cannot understand what the issue is because it’s all just the world they inherited. The person afraid of being left behind. The person already left behind. The cynic who decided if the world rewards greed they might as well follow suit.

We are all actually in this together. All confused. All trying at different levels with different resources and different stakes.

I live in the middle. I am nonbinary and most of my life I exist somewhere in the middle that causes discomfort and confusion in most of the people around me. I understand that discomfort. The middle is not comfortable. The middle means slowing down when everything around you is rushing. The middle means letting that spike and ping in your chest have a place in the choices you make, even when it means pivoting, even when the sunk cost fallacy feels so unbearably real.

I understand the anger too. This technology is insidious and harmful and misused and misdirected just like social media became... a tool that literally had the word social in it that did anything but that. Every platform that has excelled has excelled on the space that grows between us rather than the depth we can grow together.

But I think there is another way. And at least here, in long form, in the kind of writing that takes time to read and time to write, we can arrive at something more nuanced than the binary allows.

We need to grow together. Pause together. Process together. Co-regulate together. Learn together and integrate. Or this technology will do nothing but separate us even further.

That is not what I want.

Is it what you want?

Where does this land in your body right now? Not the argument. The actual felt sense of it. That place is where the conversation needs to begin.

in practice of living in the complicated

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

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I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

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So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

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I have been on the receiving end of comments recently that, if I were a more fragile version of myself or earlier in my writing life, could have been a quitting moment. Not because they were cruel exactly, but because they were careless in ways that are hard to name and harder to recover from in public. Being misgendered. Being talked about in third person in my own comment section as if I wasn’t there reading every word. Being told, at length, what my writing is really about and what I really need, by someone who read one essay. And a funky icky sensation in my body of both disgust and shame until I realized it was being projected upon me.

I don’t think that person was malicious. I genuinely believe most people want to show up well for each other. I just think a lot of us were never taught what that actually looks like in a comment section, which is its own kind of intimate public space that we are all still figuring out together.

So here is what I know, from being on both sides of it.

A short guide to commenting like someone who actually gives a shit:

You are reading one excerpt of a complex human doing their best. Hold that.

Nobody’s whole story lives in a single essay. The piece you just read is one window into a life that has been going on for decades without your witness. Comment from that humility. You do not have the full picture. You never will. That is not a problem to solve. It is the condition of being in community with another person.

Come curious, not concluded.

The best comments arrive as questions or observations, not verdicts.

Instead of: “This is clearly about your fear of abandonment.”

Try: “The part about leaving before being left really stayed with me. I’m curious whether that pattern showed up differently once you named it, or whether naming it changed anything.”

One closes the person down. The other invites them further into their own story. Curiosity is not a softer version of insight. It is often a deeper one.

Ask yourself whether you have enough information.

One essay is not enough to understand someone. A pattern you noticed is not the same as a truth about them. Before you hit send, ask: is this a genuine response to what they wrote, or is it a feeling I brought in with me?

Instead of: “I think what you’re really saying is that you never learned to receive love.”

Try: “I found myself wondering whether the difficulty receiving care was always there or whether something specific shifted it. You don’t have to answer that, I just noticed it stayed with me.”

The first assumes. The second stays in the room with them without taking over the room. Similar to the first point on curiosity but deepening the curiosity even in areas you feel skilled in. This is the trickiest place to add all sorts of confirmation biases as you are naturally seeing patterns in the practices you use most often.

Leave your biases at the door, or at least acknowledge them on the way in.

Your framework is not neutral. Your training, your background, your identity, your wounds all shape what you see when you read. That does not make your perspective invalid. It makes naming it an act of honesty.

Instead of: “As someone who has done a lot of attachment work, I can see this is an avoidant pattern.”

Try: “I come from an attachment lens so I might be seeing this through a particular filter, but I noticed something in how you described pulling away. I’m curious if that resonates or if I’m mapping my own stuff onto yours.”

The second version brings your framework as a possibility, not a diagnosis. It keeps the person as the authority on their own experience. Remembering, we don’t know this person. We don’t know what they do know or their skills. We don’t know enough to make a diagnosis, period.

Bringing yourself in is part of what makes a comment human. The question is direction.

There is nothing wrong with sharing your own experience in a comment. In fact, it is often what makes a comment feel like a genuine exchange rather than just a reaction. Twenty years in somatic work, and I still read something that opens a question I haven’t been able to answer yet. That is worth saying. That is connection.

The question is whether you are bringing yourself in service of the other person or in service of your own need to be seen. One opens the conversation. The other quietly closes it.

Instead of: A three-paragraph story about your own healing journey that ends with what the writer should consider doing.

Try: “Something in this cracked open a memory I haven’t thought about in years. I don’t have anything useful to add; I just wanted you to know your writing did that.”

The first makes the writer a supporting character in your story. The second makes them the reason the story surfaced at all. That distinction is everything. Who knows too, that comment right there would make me personally curious enough to ask what the story is, but I think that conversation is a lot more organic when we can make it similar to slowly growing a friendship versus trauma-dumping on a stranger.

It is okay to want more. Say so specifically.

Telling a writer you wanted to stay longer somewhere is one of the most useful things you can offer. It tells them what landed and what opened hunger in the reader. That is different from telling them what they should have written instead.

Instead of: “I think you glossed over the part about your mother too quickly.”

Try: “I found myself slowing down at the part about your mother and not wanting to leave it. I’d read a whole essay just on that.”

One is a correction. The other is a gift. Both communicate the same observation. Only one of them makes the writer feel seen rather than managed.

Insights are welcome. Unsolicited teaching is not.

Some writers genuinely want pushback, perspective, and honest input. I am one of them. The key phrase is that they want it. Offering insight nobody requested is not generosity. It is an assumption that your read of someone’s life is more useful to them than their own.

They did not ask you to be their teacher. Wait for the ask. That is the whole discipline.

The difference in practice: If someone ends their essay with “I’d love to know what others think” or “has anyone else experienced this,” that is an opening. If the essay ends with a closing statement and no question, they are sharing, not soliciting. Read the room.

Do not perform your credentials as a form of care.

Listing your accolades before offering help is not humility. It is hierarchy dressed as healing. The size of your resume, your age, and your experience do not determine the quality of your presence.

Instead of: “As a physician who has worked in this field for thirty years and has chosen to give back rather than pursue higher income, I think what you need to understand is...”

Try: Just your human response. No titles required. The most useful thing you can bring to someone else’s essay is your genuine reaction to it, not your authority over it.

There is a specific kind of harm that happens in healing and wellness spaces that does not always look like cruelty. Sometimes it looks like someone who genuinely believes they are helping, who has real knowledge and real care, and who still manages to make you feel like a case study rather than a person.

Predatory healing is still predatory. The intention does not change the impact.

The logistics, because some things just need to be said plainly:

• Use someone’s correct name and pronouns. Every time. Without exception.

• Do not talk about someone to someone else in their own comment section while they are standing there reading it.

• If your comment is the length of an essay, write an essay. Substack will give you your own page for free. It is a good outlet. I recommend it. I do it myself… like this post here!

What I actually believe:

Most people want to be good at this. Most people just have not been shown what it looks like.

Comment sections are one of the few places on the internet where genuine human connection is still possible, where someone can feel actually seen by a stranger who took the time to respond to something specific and true. That is worth protecting.

We are all one excerpt at a time. We are all complex humans doing our best inside a sliver of what we share publicly. The most generous thing you can bring to someone else’s work is your actual presence, not your expertise, not your framework, not your story at equal length.

Come as an equal. Stay curious. Leave them a little more seen than you found them.

Now I want to hear from you. And I mean that in the specific way this essay is asking for.

What comment have you received that you would have preferred another way? You don’t have to name names. Just the shape of it, what it did in your body when you read it, what you wished had been said instead.

What did I miss? This list is not complete and I know it. There are patterns I haven’t named that you have probably lived through or caught yourself doing. Add to it.

Has a comment ever genuinely changed how you thought about your own work in a good way? What made it land differently?

This comment section is now a live practice container for everything this essay asked for. No pressure. Just an open door and the radical idea that we can actually get better at being human together, one comment at a time, on the internet, in this economy, with everything else going on.

I believe in us. Mostly. On a good day. When peri-mental-pause isn’t kicking my ass.

in the practice of living in how we show up for each other

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Leave a comment

This is what good practice feels like from the inside. Not dramatic. Not a giant transformation. More like finding the one food that was causing the belly gurgles and finally resolving it. More like deep listening that is slow enough to trace the roots of something while staying present with the pain simultaneously. Compassion in action. Gentle, slow, sustainable, soft, and present.

We are interconnected because we are here to help, and we feel it… in the bones, in the hands, in the muscles, and in the heart and mind. It is what appears without words when we are actually present rather than performing presence.

I have felt this. I have also felt its opposite.

Twenty years in this work has shown me both. The session where something real moved. And the session where I was so certain I knew what was happening that I stopped actually listening. Where my framework or system I have learned was the focus beyond the real-time moments with the person in front of me. Where I was technically skilled and genuinely absent at the same time. Sometimes, it was stress or tiredness. And other times, it was the inability to help in the way I would have wanted.

This essay is about the distance between those two experiences. And what it takes, honestly and without shame, to stay closer to the first one.

The Loving Ones Are the Hardest

I was twelve years old sitting in a youth group meeting when someone I trusted told me I had to choose. Christianity or hell. Heaven or my family.

I cried at night for weeks after that. My parents were Jewish and Ba’hai. I was worried I would actually lose my parents if I didn’t convince them to convert. I felt helpless and torn. The people in that room were not cruel. They genuinely believed they were saving me. They loved me in the way people love when they are certain they have the truth and you do not yet.

That is the part that makes it so hard to name as harm. When the people applying pressure are doing it from what feels like love, from genuine care, from a framework they trust completely… the receiver is left holding a confusion that has no clean edges.

Was that harmful? They meant well. They were my community. They were trying to help.

Yes. And yes. And yes. And it was still harm.

I am grateful, even now, that I have never been someone who chooses quickly under pressure. Not at twelve, not now. But most people are not built that way. Most people, when someone they trust tells them with confidence that they know the truth… they move toward it. Because love and certainty together are extraordinarily hard to resist. It is a trust fall gone unnoticed, wrapped in societal pressure.

This is where the ethics of a service practice get most complicated. Not with the predators and the obvious grifters. With the ones who genuinely believe they are helping. With the astrologer who loves you and reads your chart without asking because they want to understand you better. With the doctor who follows protocol because they were trained to trust it. With the coach who sells the $50,000 course because they genuinely believe it changed their life and could change yours.

Unclear intentions are not always cynical. Sometimes they are just unexamined.

That is what makes the five questions necessary. Not for the bad actors. For the rest of us.

The Extraction Problem

We do not talk honestly enough about how much of what passes for service is actually extraction.

I once worked in the sales department for a coach. The breakthrough calls genuinely moved me at first. I got to sit with people in real vulnerability, hear where they were and where they wanted to be. I believed in what we were doing.

We were helping therapists transition into coaching. People with real skills whose income would always be capped by time, who had no path to ever actually retiring. The work felt aligned.

Until my boss told me to ask people to pull from their savings if they didn’t have the money. I said no. He said those clients did best because they couldn’t afford to lose. Then he told me to ask them to pull from their 401k. I said no again.

And I started seeing clearly what I had been slowly accommodating.

He didn’t have to charge what he charged. He could have used a sliding scale, helped more people, still made plenty. But the growth had become the point. The money had become the point. The end result for him, not his clients.

I don’t think he started that way. I think he genuinely wanted to offer what coaching had given him. But somewhere along the way the transaction became the organizing principle and the service followed rather than led.

That is how it happens. Not usually in a dramatic moment of corruption. In small accommodations that each seemed reasonable at the time.

I have watched astrologers and tarot readers light up in a room, not when someone has a breakthrough, but when all the eyes are on them. I have watched practitioners use their frameworks to categorize people at dinner parties, on first dates, in casual conversations… reading without asking, knowing without consent, and then acting on what they think they know.

Most of them genuinely believe they are helping. That is the part worth sitting with.

Belief in your framework does not make its application ethical.

What Consent Actually Means

Consent in a healing or service context is not just signing a waiver or agreeing to a session. It is ongoing, specific, and informed.

It means asking before reading. It means naming what you are doing and why. It means checking whether the person in front of you actually wants what you are about to offer… not assuming that because you have knowledge, they want to receive it.

It means understanding that your chart of someone, your read of their nervous system, your assessment of their type, your diagnosis… none of that belongs to you. It belongs to them. And using it without their knowledge to inform how you treat them is a power move dressed as insight.

Some of the most rigorous consent education I have encountered comes from BDSM practitioners. These communities understand they are working with vulnerable nervous systems in real time and have built extensive frameworks for negotiation, ongoing communication, and aftercare accordingly. People go to these spaces and call it healing because in many cases it is… one of the few places where desire leads, communication is explicit, and capacity is honored without shame.

In a healing context the dynamic is different but the principle holds. The practitioner guides. But the person in the body always knows first when they are at capacity. That knowing deserves to lead. Always.

I try, when I am with people outside of a session, to meet them in what they are actually sharing rather than what my training tells me I could know. This is harder than it sounds. Twenty years of reading bodies does not turn off. But there is a difference between noticing and acting on what you notice without permission.

The noticing can be information. Acting on it without consent is a boundary crossed.

Confirmation Bias and the Closed Practitioner

Here is the uncomfortable truth about systems, including the ones we love.

We find what we are looking for.

A practitioner trained in attachment theory will see attachment patterns everywhere. A Human Design reader will see types. A somatic practitioner will see nervous system states. A bodyworker will find tension wherever their hands land. A doctor will see what the protocol prepared them to see. This is not dishonesty… it is how human cognition works. We organize incoming information around existing structures. It is efficient, and it is also limiting. The work to look outside of our pre-existing frameworks is the life practice.

Daniel Kahneman spent decades documenting how confirmation bias operates… how we selectively gather evidence that supports what we already believe and discount evidence that challenges it. This happens in science, in medicine, in spiritual practice, in everyday conversation.

In the 1840s a physician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that maternal and infant mortality rates were dramatically higher in wards staffed by doctors than in wards staffed by midwives. He traced it to doctors moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies without washing their hands. When he introduced mandatory handwashing, mortality rates dropped from around 10% to under 2%.

He was dismissed. Mocked. Professionally destroyed. The medical establishment was so certain in its existing framework that it could not receive evidence that contradicted it. Women and babies died for years because institutional confidence overrode observable reality.

The harm was not ignorance. It was certainty.

The practitioner who is certain they understand you has stopped being curious about you. And curiosity is the actual instrument of healing.

Licensure and clinical supervision exist precisely because these patterns are universal. They are a floor, not a ceiling. Having them does not mean the questions stop existing.

Gravity is a theory. The gut microbiome upended a century of medical assumptions. Female hunters existed across cultures and were erased from the historical record because the framework said otherwise. What we call knowledge is almost always a working hypothesis with a margin of uncertainty we rarely advertise.

This is not an argument against frameworks. It is an argument for holding them loosely enough to actually see the person in front of you and the anomalies that may exist in every moment.

I Am In This Too

I want to be clear before offering any guidelines: I am not writing this from outside the problem.

I have caught myself in sessions moving toward what I wanted to know rather than what the person needed to share. I am autistic and have OCD… the desire to know, to categorize, to complete the pattern, is genuinely one of the hardest things I navigate in my practice. It is also, honestly, part of what makes me good at this work. The same wiring that pulls me toward over-knowing also helps me notice things others miss.

But I have had to learn, slowly and with real effort, that noticing is not the same as sharing. Completing the pattern in my own mind is not the same as serving the person in front of me. My desire to understand someone is not the same as their invitation to be understood.

I have gotten better at this. I am still working on it.

This essay is not a shaming document. It is not a checklist for identifying bad practitioners and dismissing them. It is an invitation… to all of us who do this work… to get closer to the values we already hold but sometimes drift from without noticing.

Course correction requires first knowing you’ve drifted. That is all this is. A compass, not a verdict.

Five Questions for the Ethical Practitioner

These are not a checklist to complete once and file away. They are questions worth returning to regularly… before sessions, after difficult moments, whenever something feels slightly off but you can’t name why.

One. “Do I have consent for this… not implied, actual?”

Consent in a healing context is specific, ongoing, and informed. It is not the same as someone booking a session or paying a fee. It means naming what you are about to do and asking if that is what the person wants. It means checking in during rather than assuming the beginning covers everything. There will be moments when a client gives over trust, but some part of their body or mind is not actually okay with the pace of that moment. Learning to read body cues and the energy of the room is just as valuable as checking in with words.

Research on therapeutic ethics is consistent on this point… informed consent improves outcomes and protects both practitioner and client. But beyond the legal and clinical frameworks, consent is simply the acknowledgment that this person’s body, story, and experience belong to them. Your training gives you tools. It does not give you access.

Ask yourself: did I actually ask, or did I assume?

Two. Am I doing this to know or to help? And do I know the difference in my own body?

This is the hardest question for practitioners who are genuinely curious… and curiosity is often what drew us to this work in the first place. The desire to understand is not wrong. But it has to be in service of the person, not the practitioner’s need for completion or certainty.

I have wanted to make a shift in a session that simply was not going to happen that day, and I have had to let my own ego go in that moment. If only a small nudge happens, that is okay. Not every session is going to be life-changing, and that is okay. It does not diminish the practice of slow and steady consistency of care.

Kahneman’s research on thinking and decision-making shows that we are often the last to know our own motivations. We construct explanations for our behavior after the fact that feel true but aren’t always accurate. This means self-knowledge requires more than introspection… it requires external feedback, peer consultation, and genuine supervision.

Ask yourself: if this person never knew what I just noticed, would I still be doing my job well?

Three. Is this for them or for me?

There is a particular kind of energy in a room when a practitioner is performing rather than present. When the insight is offered for the reaction it will produce, rather than because it serves the moment. When the framework is applied because it makes the practitioner feel competent rather than because the person needs it.

This is not always ego in the crude sense. Sometimes it is anxiety. Sometimes it is the need to feel useful. Sometimes, for those of us who are neurodivergent, it is the almost physical discomfort of not completing a pattern we can see clearly.

I have felt all of these. The work is not eliminating the impulse but developing enough self-awareness to pause before acting on it.

This one may be the trickiest in the age of late-stage capitalism in the wellness industry. Everything has become more performative, and the performance can creep into the session without you noticing. You want your client to see you, and part of you thinks something extra is needed for that to happen. But ordinary, consistent service is usually a lot less flashy than what we see online, and it tends to be where the most genuine moments live, for you and for your clients.

Ask yourself: who benefits most from what I am about to say or do?

Four. Is the service still the point, or has the transaction become the point?

Money and recognition as outcomes of good work are legitimate and necessary. Practitioners deserve to be compensated. There is nothing inherently ethical about poverty and nothing inherently corrupt about financial success.

The question is what organizes the practice. When a course is primarily about the practitioner’s revenue rather than the student’s transformation… that is extraction dressed as service. When a reader’s primary pleasure is being the person in the room who knows things… that is performance dressed as care.

And then there is the subtler version. The one most of us who run practices in the digital age have to reckon with honestly.

Influencer culture has normalized visibility as a measure of value. Likes, shares, follower counts, engagement rates… these are now the metrics most of us use to run our businesses, whether we chose that or not. Showing up is necessary. Building an audience is part of how healing work reaches people who need it.

But something shifts when the number of eyes becomes more interesting than the effect of the work itself. When pride in the work quietly becomes pride in the reach. When one ethically ambiguous compromise… a slightly misleading claim, a boundary stretched for engagement… opens a door that gets a little easier to walk through each time.

This is not a character flaw. It is a design feature of the systems we are operating inside. Capitalism and patriarchy do not just shape our economics. They shape our nervous systems, our self-worth, our definition of success.

If we hold do no harm as a genuine principle and not just a phrase… we have to stop letting these systems quietly govern our healing spaces. That work starts on an individual level. It starts with the hard and unglamorous practice of asking ourselves these questions honestly, even when the answers are uncomfortable.

Ask yourself: am I more interested in the reach of this work or the effect of it? And when did I last actually check?

Five. How do I actually check myself… and do I have systems in place to do it?

Self-assessment alone is insufficient. Confirmation bias does not announce itself. The practitioner who is certain they are ethical has usually stopped asking the question carefully enough.

What this requires practically: peer consultation with someone who will tell you the truth. Supervision if you are in a clinical or therapeutic role. Community accountability structures that are genuinely reciprocal. This is a willingness to be questioned by the people you serve without becoming defensive. In practice, this looks unglamorous. It looks like a colleague who will tell you when you're being strange about a client. A peer group that meets without anyone performing. A supervisor you actually tell the uncomfortable things to, not just the wins.

It also requires spaces actively designed to decenter the practitioner’s ego… healing containers not organized around one person’s authority, that draw on multiple frameworks and traditions, that build in mechanisms for feedback and course correction.

These structures do not appear automatically. They have to be built intentionally, against the grain of both patriarchal models of expertise and capitalist models of individual brand building.

Ask yourself: who in my life would tell me if I was causing harm? And would I actually listen?

I often sit with a life mission statement I made alongside Julia Butterfly Hill… the woman who lived in a redwood tree for over 700 days to protect it from being cut down. Together, we laid out my lifetime morals, values, and principles, what I believed in. What brought me joy. What I was here to do.

I return to it when something feels off. When I am unwell or uneasy or moving too fast. Usually, when I look honestly at that document, I can find what I have drifted from.

If you are unclear right now about your own morals and values, it will show up somewhere. In a session where you feel hollow afterward. In a video you made for the wrong reasons. In a check you took from a client you didn’t believe in. In a conversation where you watch someone glaze over while you speak. In a moment of profound loneliness when community is your highest value.

That is the course correction. Not punishment and doesn’t need to be shamed. It’s information.

Have the values. Then design a life where those values lead the work rather than follow it. Society will often choose against this. If you don’t have your values clear, society has already chosen them for you.

We all deserve this together.

If you are sitting with this essay and realizing your own values need clarifying, I built a pay-what-you-can course for exactly this... Come if it calls to you.

In the practice of living in the ethics of showing up

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Articles for further Funsumption (consumption that is fun)…

I have been a patient more than I expected this year.

Twenty years of somatic work, training in more modalities than I can list in a single breath, and I have spent the last few months sitting in waiting rooms under fluorescent lights, watching nurses with exhausted eyes try to care for people inside a system that no longer lets them.

Every time I say it out loud, “the system can no longer practice do no harm, not the way it’s built,” something happens. The eyes change, and the life that is inside the body turns on a little more. The nurse leans in slightly. They have stories, personal and professional, and they are excited to share with someone who wants to hear. And then they straighten up and move on because there are rooms to get to, and the system does not pause for grief even when grief is the most clinical thing in the building.

I think about that a lot. About what it costs to care inside a container that was not built for caring.

I left the wellness industry before it fully became what it is now. Not because I had it figured out. Because I could feel where it was heading and I didn’t want to harm people in subtle ways I wasn’t willing to accept. The packaging. The pricing. The performance of expertise. The promise of transformation that costs more than most people can afford and delivers less than most people need.

So I kept learning instead. And I am still learning now, partly through the strange gift of becoming my own client and observer of everything I have spent twenty years trying to understand. I am quite befuddled by my own process as I think this experience of sitting in waiting rooms and doctor’s rooms as of late has really shown me so much of how I have designed a remarkably different strategy than that of the “normal” healthcare experience.

I am not a master of anything I do

There are practitioners I have trained alongside who are better than me at every single specific thing I have studied. Better at Thai massage. Better at craniosacral work. Better at NLP. Better at the Mayan abdominal work I learned in Mexico or the Ayurveda I absorbed in India.

What I am is wide. A seeker. A dabbler. An investigator who will meet a new client with a condition I have never encountered and spend the following weeks learning everything I can about it before our next session.

Client by client is how I learned. Each person their own case study. Each body its own anomaly.

This is something they don’t teach enough in training programs. They don’t teach that cadavers don’t look the same on the inside. We study diagrams as though they do. We learn from models that suggest a standard interior. But open any two bodies, and you find a different arrangement of the same parts, shaped by a different life, different losses, different years of holding something that needed to be held. Psychology works this way, but even more on trust in the language of the world.

Every person who comes to me is the same; the rough external human container is accompanied by a completely unique interior.

If I had specialized early on I would have missed most of what I know.

I try not to draw the nose before I look at it

In life drawing class, you learn something uncomfortable about yourself early on. Most of what you put on the page before training is not observation. It’s an assumption your brain built to create systems of understanding. You draw what you think a nose looks like based on every nose you’ve ever seen, stored and averaged into a symbol. The drawing looks like a nose. It doesn’t look like this nose. The one actually in front of you.

When you learn to stop drawing the concept, you can then start drawing the shapes and lines you actually see. You see the specific shadow under this nostril, the particular angle of this bridge, and that’s when the drawing starts to look like the person sitting in the room with you. You have just found presence in observation.

We all drew the same house as children. Two windows. Pointy roof and a door. A sun in the corner. Maybe a tree and some grass and flowers. That house exists nowhere except in the collective symbol bank of childhood. It looks like a house. It looks nothing like any actual house any of us has ever lived in.

Medicine and wellness do the same thing. We learn the diagram. We study the model. We draw the patient from assumption before we’ve actually looked at who walked through the door.

I was trained this way. I still catch myself doing it. The difference twenty years makes is not that I’ve stopped assuming. It’s that I notice faster when I am, and I put the symbol down and look again.

“To begin, begin where you are.” — The Tao Te Ching

I am something that doesn’t have a clean name yet

I have trained in Thai massage. Osteothai. Chi nei tsang. Mayan abdominal massage. Shiatsu. Trigger point therapy. Craniosacral work. TRE. Acupressure. Massage therapy. NLP. DBT. Business coaching. I studied yoga while learning Ayurveda in India. I absorbed Thai language and Thai culture and the philosophy underneath the technique — the ethics of the floor, the equality of the mat, the idea that healing happens at ground level between two people who have agreed to be honest with each other.

And then something happened after enough years and enough training.

The modalities dissolved into each other.

Now I don’t lead with any of them. I lead with the body in front of me and reach into twenty years of training for whatever that body actually needs right now. Sometimes that’s nerve-touch therapy. Sometimes it’s abdominal work. Sometimes it’s a question that opens something. Sometimes it’s sitting quietly while someone cries and not doing anything at all except being present.

If you were a spectator you might recognize pieces of it. Two people on a mat. Clothed. Hands moving. It looks like bodywork. It looks familiar.

And then you lean in closer and you notice: these people keep talking. They are working on something emotional at the same time as the body. And now it seems like normal conversation. Just two humans in a room.

And then that person is crying.

And you think — how did that happen? When did this become something else?

It became something else the moment it started. It just took a while to be visible.

“Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow.” — bell hooks

The waiting room is already in the session

A waiting room communicates something to the nervous system before any treatment begins. It signals safety or threat. Belonging or otherness. Come as you are or perform being healed.

I think about the acupuncturist in Chinatown where the waiting room is full of elderly people and the energy is completely different from the spa downtown where it’s quiet and beige and everyone is waiting to be individually served. Both are healing spaces. But they are asking completely different things of your nervous system before the session even begins.

Most waiting rooms begin the dissociation early. They signal: leave your real life at the door. Enter the bubble.

But dissociation is not healing. It is postponement.

The body knows when it has arrived somewhere that feels like home and when it has arrived somewhere it must perform being home. That difference lives below conscious thought. It lives in the breath, in the shoulders, in the gut’s first response to a room.

I try to skip the waiting room entirely. Come to where you already are. Begin in your actual life.

I work on the floor

The table puts the practitioner above the client. Literally. The elevated position, the white linen, the lowered lighting, the ambient music selected to relax you before you’ve had a chance to arrive — all of it produces a feeling. The feeling that you have entered a specialized space managed by a specialized person who will now do something to you.

That’s the problem.

Healing is not something done to you. It is something that happens in the space between two nervous systems that have agreed to be honest with each other.

The mat equalizes everything. When I am on the floor and you are on the floor we are both a little uncertain about what’s coming next. Neither of us is performing expertise from a position of elevation. We are both in contact with the ground. We are both present because the space is asking us to be rather than sedating us into compliance.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Rumi

The floor is that field.

I work clothed

For many people, especially those carrying histories of trauma, violation, or complicated relationships with their own bodies, the requirement to undress is its own obstacle. The sheet becomes a thing to manage. The exposure becomes a distraction from the presence the session requires.

Research on bodywork and trauma recovery consistently finds that dissociation is one of the primary barriers to healing through touch. The session that begins with an act of vulnerability the person didn’t fully choose can recreate the conditions that caused the dissociation in the first place. This also means how someone asks the first assessment questions (for more about that, check out All Sickness is Home Sickness).

You stay you. The session begins with both of us already in our bodies, already present, already equal.

Home is where you don’t have to explain yourself before you walk in. A session should feel the same.

I stay when someone cries

In massage therapy school, they taught me that if a client cries, you are supposed to leave the room.

I sat with that instruction for a long time.

I understand the reasoning. Liability. Professional boundaries. The fear of doing something wrong in a vulnerable moment. The institution is protecting itself from the unpredictable territory of actual human emotion.

But I have sat with bodies for twenty years, and I can tell you, for most people, a practitioner leaving the room at the moment of their most unguarded emotion is not protection. It is abandonment wearing the costume of professionalism.

The body knows this.

“There is no love without justice.” — bell hooks

I stay. I want to be on the floor if someone starts crying (most of the time, unless they prefer I leave). I want to hold a nervous system, not manage a draping situation. I want to be with someone. Fully. Without the structure of the session getting in the way of the real work that can happen.

Healing happens in community, and that is what I want to support. I want to be the community that person needs in that moment to the best of my ability.

I don’t watch the clock

My sessions can last three hours. Real healing work doesn’t end at the hour mark. It ends when the work is done.

Some people arrive worried I will judge them as they judge themselves tenfold. They worry I will notice they haven’t done the exercises they know they “should do” or the meditations that would help them. They know in some ways that they have been ignoring everything their body has been saying. They arrive braced for the version of care that comes with accountability attached, which sounds more like an angry parent or bossy teacher.

That is not what they find.

What they find is: it’s okay. You can start again today. The mess you came in with is not a failing. It’s the data. Let’s work with what’s actually here rather than what you think should be here.

No, you are not crazy.

Yes, we can work on this together.

I see you.

Buddhism calls this beginner’s mind: approaching each moment as though for the first time, without the overlay of what you already know or expect. DBT calls it radical acceptance: meeting what is actually present rather than fighting it toward what should be. I keep learning this too, I am there with my clients… learning not to judge myself and integrate with the gratitude versus the shame of it all.

It is all the same practice. Looking at what is actually there. Meeting it without assumption and beginning in the place of not yet knowing.

Sometimes it takes twenty minutes. Sometimes it takes three hours. The mat on the floor doesn’t care either way. Neither do I. I am there, curious and humble in the process with you.

A note to the practitioner

If you are reading this and something in it unlocked something: perhaps it’s the sense that the container you are working inside is limiting what you can actually offer, that your license protects you and also boxes you, that you have been wanting to work in a way that feels more honest and less performed … I am not going to tell you what to do with that.

But I will say that feeling is data. The same kind of data the body gives when it’s trying to say something the mind hasn’t found words for yet.

The middle way is not between doing and not doing. It is between assuming and looking. Between the diagram and the actual body. Between the house you drew as a child and the house that is actually in front of you.

You already know some version of what wants to come next.

“Knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is true wisdom.” — Tao Te Ching

The work is learning to trust it.

in the practice of living in the comfortably uncomfortable,

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

The moving took forty minutes.

Because it required something more demanding than technical difficulty. It required the surrender of your own pace to the pace of the creature you were serving. It was about finding and holding stillness like a butoh dance with wildlife.

The butoh of care, Tonimo’s grandmother had called it once... the dance so intentional it stops being movement and becomes presence. The body not moving through space but becoming the space the space needed.

Every step at the turtle’s speed. Every pause held for the turtle’s duration. Not Tonimo’s patience. The turtle’s time.

She led the conversation with the mother, hum, pause, wait... reading the response in the orange and the data on the reader and the quality of the mother’s stillness... while Pera and Davan prepared the receiving site and Simi held the moisture blanket and two neighbors Tonimo still didn’t know well stood at the perimeter making sure no one came through who would add the wrong kind of attention to the situation.

She felt the forty minutes in her body the way she felt long meditations. The legs softening into the earth. The jaw releasing in stages, a millimeter at a time, without being asked. The breath finding the low register it only found when she stopped trying to find it. Something in the chest opening that she hadn’t known was closed until it wasn’t. The noticing of the hunch, the breath short. The panic softly tempting.

This was what turtle speed did. Not simply slow. It was the pace at which the nervous system remembered it did not have to hold everything up... at which the muscles discovered they had been braced for something that was no longer arriving... at which the body dipped, like a heart dipped in chamomile, into the warmth of being and doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing, at exactly the speed the world required.

She thought of her grandfather’s hands. Slower than you think. And then slower than that.

She breathed.

The whole corridor breathed with her.

Olu stood where she had asked him to stand. She felt this without looking. The quality of his stillness had changed... the same way Simi’s had, the same way the six-year-old’s had from the beginning, the way everyone’s did when the turtle’s pace became the room’s pace. Not because anyone decided. Because the body, given the right conditions and the basic courtesy of not being rushed, always knew how to find the frequency the living world was already broadcasting on.

This is the thing they don’t tell you about community. It’s not about agreeing. It’s not about sharing values or showing up to the same meetings or even liking each other much. It’s about finding a frequency and staying in it together long enough for something to happen that couldn’t have happened alone. The turtle taught this. The turtle had always taught this. Two hundred and twenty million years of curriculum and she never once handed out a syllabus.

The elder wrote.

The six-year-old did not move. Did not speak. Watched with the full weight of their small and total attention... which was the most useful thing any of them could have offered, and which, in the world of Ma, was a thing fully understood.

When the mother finally, slowly, made her way toward the saxaul grove... not guided, not carried, choosing the direction herself with the deliberateness of an animal who had been making calculations nobody in the group could fully access... Tonimo felt the orange in her vision begin to soften.

Still present.

But less urgent.

The color of something that had been heard.

The lower back eased.

Rison moved forward three steps and stopped. Her version of the collective exhale.

The mother reached the saxaul grove, circled it twice, as if reassessing, and began.

Nobody cheered. Nobody should have. The elder wrote. The six-year-old leaned slightly forward. Simi put down the moisture blanket and folded her hands in her lap and watched with the expression of someone filing something in the part of themselves that would shape everything that came after.

Tonimo sat beside Rison and put one hand on the fox’s back and felt the fine-boned aliveness of her... the aliveness of an animal who had chosen, for reasons of her own, to be here. Because, animals and hands, and human connection to animals and nature are a part of our existence on the planet. They all felt it. They wanted to feel it. It was that intimate sense of belonging and thriving combined and intertwined.

The turtle had needed something. The something had been provided. Not by Tonimo alone, not by any one person’s expertise or authority, but by the neighborhood’s collective willingness to be less important than the situation for forty minutes.

Not the technology.

Not the knowledge.

The willingness.

By evening the eggs were in the ground.

Sixteen of them, the reader confirmed, with the satisfaction of a system built to celebrate life rather than simply document it.

The neighborhood had mostly dispersed. Pera had gone home to dinner. Davan had filed the soil assessment in the corridor record. The two neighbors Tonimo still didn’t know well had introduced themselves, finally, on their way out. Their names were Birch and Olu... they lived on the far side of the eastern path, and Olu had apparently been watching the restoration corridor for two seasons from his window and had wanted to be involved for just as long.

“Come find me,” Tonimo said. “Anytime.”

He would. She felt it not in the mind first but in the chest... carrying a quiet wanting and had finally found the door unlocked. The heart began to open just slightly enough to remember.

The six-year-old had gone home with her father, holding something in her face that would take years to become language and was already, even now, becoming something in the tissue that would never fully leave.

Cosi closed his notebook.

He sat with it closed on his knee for a long time. Looking at the saxaul grove. Not as a memory keeper. Just as a person who had lived long enough to know that some moments did not need recording. They recorded themselves. In the tissue. In the quiet shift of the air. In the way a six-year-old’s hand had found her father’s without looking.

“How many seasons have you been at this?” he asked.

“This is my first full year,” Tonimo said.

He nodded slowly.

“You move like someone who has been doing it much longer.”

“That’s the lineage,” she said. “It lives in the hands before it lives in the mind.”

They were both quiet after that. The good kind of quiet. The kind that doesn’t need to be filled.

She looked at her hands. The magnifying glass. The reader dimmed on her wrist. The hands that had learned from everyone who came before her that the first requirement of this work was not knowledge but presence. Not expertise but availability. Just this. Just hands. Just being the right kind of still in the right place at the right time.

The sunflower on her hat held the day’s light the way flowers hold things. Openly and undecided.

Rison had circled the perimeter of the grove once and was now curled at Tonimo’s feet. Satiated with the work and the enoughness of the day. Rison knew the work was done for the day.

The mother was still. The eggs were held. The grove was doing what groves did... receiving, holding, keeping the temperature, running the slow chemistry of life in the dark. Not progress. Process. The difference between the two is everything.

Tonimo lay back in the restoration corridor grass and looked up through the saxaul branches at the sky.

The blue was becoming a new era of the day.

Eleven minutes. Every evening. The blue that sorted all the oranges of the day and turned them into something quieter. Something that didn’t need a name. The blue that had no business being that color and was that color anyway. Every evening. Without being asked. With complete confidence in its own rightness.

She thought about growth. Growth is not forever. Not in the body or the lifetime. The body does it for twenty-five years and then stops. How, after that, the whole project changes. Not expansion. Integration. Not more. Enough. The slow thriving of a thing that has found its frequency and learned to stay in it.

Tonimo had been enough for the turtle.

Rison had been enough for Tonimo.

The neighborhood had been enough for the eggs.

The elder had been enough to write it down.

The six-year-old had been enough to witness it.

This was the whole of the practice. Not the extraordinary moment. The ordinary one. The belonging that doesn’t require you to be more than you are. The frequency you find when you stop performing and start listening. The thing that was always already broadcasting, waiting for someone to tune in.

The jaw released. Last. Always last. Slowly and intentionally finding the mind’s connection to it.

She let it go.

She whistled softly. Just the body making a sound because it was full of something that wanted out. Like a dove landing home.

Rison’s ear swiveled toward the sound and swiveled back.

Sixteen eggs in the ground. One fox at her feet. The sunflower hat brim-down on her face, filtering the last light. The saxaul grove holding its new and ancient cargo in the silence of something that knew exactly what it was doing.

She had sat down here and dipped her heart in the evening like a cup dipped in tea, and the evening had received it, and this was enough, and this was everything, and this was the practice.

Tomorrow, she would write up the corridor notes. Tomorrow, she would check the soil temperature. Tomorrow, she would begin the patient daily work of monitoring the incubation, which would take months and would be mostly uneventful and was, she already knew, going to be the best part of the next three months of her life.

Tonight she was here.

The turtle was here.

The eggs were here.

The blue of the Gobi was doing what it did for eleven minutes every evening. Its rhythm of color.

Tonight, someone was watching.

That felt, to Tonimo, like enough.

Enough was all that was needed. Ever.

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

Five Colleges. Four Majors. Zero Art.

I went to five different colleges with four different majors. They were all art schools. I ended up starting a nonprofit community art center where I made zero art for five years.

Make that make sense. I promise I will.

In my fifth college, a teacher looked around the room and said, " These people are the most important part of art school.”

I sat in my introverted, obsessive artist’s chair and thought… “Well, shit. I thought it was to learn art.”

I did learn art. I also spent most of my time making friends outside of art school because the art school kids felt pretentious and distant from real problems. I was doing after-school arts programs in Oakland middle schools and making friends in the communities I actually wanted to serve. The fine art world and the craft world had this distance between them that I always found strange and sad. Craft gets looked down on. But craft is where community lives. Craft is where the thing gets made with your hands alongside other people who are also making things with their hands.

I went to California College of Arts and Crafts partly because of the name. While I was there they dropped the Crafts. I understood why. The art world thinks less of craft. I think less of that thinking.

So I founded a nonprofit community art center. And stopped making art entirely.

Not because I lost the love of it. Because I had something urgent to learn that had nothing to do with art. I could hire teachers. I understood what made a good one. What I didn’t understand yet was what made a healthy community. That took five years of intensive humble-pie eating. Of making mistakes with real people in real neighborhoods. Of learning that being an artist and being an organizer and being an advocate are completely different schools and you can’t skip the curriculum in any of them.

I was in the school of life and learning fast.

I’m still learning. But I’m more fluid now. I can hold the artist and the organizer in the same body without one swallowing the other. Then, I could not.

I started art school at fourteen. I am forty-one now. The inverse of that.

Aging is wild because you think you will stop having the same issues. You don’t. They just get softer. More understood. The pauses in the mind and body are still there... they’re just for something different now. They’re for remembering that you can still create. Still have awe. Still have wonder. Still believe connection is possible.

That’s what I’m building at Purring Oaks, here in Michigan. Not a gallery. Not a resume. A place where craft and fine art, healing and community can stop pretending they’re separate things. Purring Oaks hired me to create something that felt in alignment and something to repair and heal in ways I believe are emphatically possible for all of us.

Twenty years of project management, coaching, healing, and art. Thirty if you count from when I first picked up a brush.

I feel old writing that.

It’s also honest. And my bones feel it lately.

In practice of living in the making

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Not in a spa. Not in a carefully curated room with ambient lighting and a playlist designed to soften the edges of the experience. In home offices. In spare rooms. In the ordinary physical spaces where people actually live. No performance of healing. Just the work itself. My hands and someone else’s body and whatever needs to move between us.

When I am in the garden, I am doing the same thing. Pressing my fingers into soil. Feeling what is dry and what is ready. What needs breaking up and what needs leaving alone. Communion through contact. The planet and my hands in direct relationship.

This is what I know about hands. They don’t lie. They can’t perform their way through the actual work. Either they show up or they don’t. Either they make contact or they don’t. Either something moves between you and what you’re touching or it doesn’t.

Community works the same way.

This series has been building toward this. Toward the specific, unglamorous, irreplaceable act of bringing your actual hands to the actual work. Not the idea of it. Not the philosophy of it. Not the aesthetics of it. The hands. Moving. Toward. Open.

This is where we end. Not because the work is finished. Because this is where it begins.

What the Series Has Been Saying

We started in the lineage. In the Irish meitheal and the Russian mir and seventy-two days in Paris, when people made art free and cancelled rent and governed themselves with their own hands. In the evidence that your people, whoever your people are, knew how to do this before anyone told them to forget.

We moved through the rooms that kept failing. The commodified spirituality. The law of assumption that made everyone else an NPC. The flattery of being called special. The not collective but collecting. We named what we kept finding and why the containers kept breaking.

We sat with the wound. The Mercator map. The Columbus sentence. He never stepped foot on this continent. He thought he was in India until he died. We named a holiday after a man who was lost and refused to know it. We felt the cement vest of carrying shame and grief simultaneously until the body stiffens and no entrance for shifting remains. The cage that forgot it was a cage.

We learned what community actually is. Not what it looks like. What it requires. The staying. The changing. The hands before the philosophy. The chaos as threshold not failure. The question that orients everything: am I here to get something or to grow?

And now we are here. At the place where the series has to stop describing and start asking.

What are you going to do?

The Problem With Small Feeling Like Enough

I want to be honest about something before I name the steps.

Small actions are real. They are necessary. They are where everything begins and where most of it lives. The casserole. The move. The kid picked up. The Tuesday showing up. I have said this throughout this series and I mean it completely.

And.

Small actions can become a ceiling if we let them. If the good feeling of having done something small replaces the harder question of whether we are doing what we are actually capable of. If the casserole becomes the reason we don’t have to look at the larger structures. If the personal virtue of showing up for our immediate community lets us off the hook from the broader obligations our actual resources and capacities create.

I am not interested in shaming anyone. Shame produces the cement vest. Shame stiffens the body and closes the entrance for shifting. Shame is not the point.

But I am interested in honesty. And honesty requires saying: the action needs to be proportional to the actual capacity. Not to some abstract ideal of what a good person does. To what you actually have and what you can actually do.

That looks radically different from person to person. And every version of it is needed.

Action Relative to Actual Capacity

There is a disabled person reading this for whom community action looks like sending the text. Showing up to the meeting on the hard day. Being present in the online space with full attention and genuine care. Making the phone call that takes everything they have. That is not lesser action. That is the full expression of what is available. It counts completely.

There is a person with forty dollars and genuine presence reading this. Their action looks like the casserole. The move. The Tuesday showing up. The sliding scale that makes their own healing accessible to someone who couldn’t afford it otherwise. The honest conversation they have with someone who needs to hear the truth. That presence is currency. It builds the thing.

There is a person reading this with more money than they could spend living a decent life. Their action looks different. Not instead of presence. In addition to it. Because money is not community. You cannot purchase your way into belonging as we have said from the beginning of this series. But money is also not neutral. It is capacity. And capacity creates obligation.

If you have it. Actually have it. More than a decent life requires. Then the question is not whether to give but where and how.

Not to the organizations that make you feel good about yourself. Not to the ones with the most polished branding or the most convenient tax structure. To the ones already doing the work. The ones that have been doing it without your money, with the community’s own hands, for years. Find them. Visit them. Sit in their spaces. Learn from them before you fund them. Let them change you before you write the check. Because a check from someone who has been changed by the work lands differently than a check from someone managing their guilt.

On Asking as an Act of the Hand

I want to say something about asking for money because I think it gets misunderstood in community spaces.

Asking for resources is not the opposite of community. It is one of its most essential practices.

I have spent years asking for money. Not just for myself. For organizations I believed in. For the nonprofits that came through Rumble Arts during the crash. For work being done in communities that needed it to continue. I have asked on behalf of things that mattered when I had nothing personal to gain from the asking.

That asking is a hand extended. It is the bridge between the person with capacity and the work that needs doing. It is community operating through the flow of resources rather than despite the need for them.

There is an extractive version of this. The ask that is really about the asker’s image. The fundraiser who performs urgency without actually believing in the work. The organization that curates its story for donors while neglecting the community it claims to serve. That version is real and worth watching for.

But the ask itself is not the problem.

When you ask clearly and honestly on behalf of something real, you give the person you’re asking the opportunity to participate in something meaningful. You offer them the chance to use what they have in service of what they can’t build alone. That is a gift. Not a transaction.

And neither of you is only giving. Neither of you is only receiving. The organization receives the resources. The donor receives the dignity of having their capacity used for something real. The community receives the continuation of the work. Everyone is in the flow simultaneously. That is the mir logic applied to money. That is community moving through the exchange rather than being replaced by it.

If you are building something real... ask for what you need. Ask clearly. Ask without shame. Ask with the full knowledge that your asking is itself a communal act. Reaching toward. Trusting that someone might want to be part of what you’re building.

And if someone asks you... receive them honestly. Let their need be real. Let your response to it be real too.

Giving and receiving are not opposites in community. They are the same motion in different directions. A community that only gives in one direction is a service relationship. A community where the flow moves in all directions is something alive.

When You Know You Aren’t Doing Enough

This is the part most essays skip. I don’t want to skip it.

You will know. Your body will tell you before your mind does. There is a specific quality of contraction that comes from living below your actual capacity for contribution. It is not guilt exactly. It is more like incompletion. The sense of a circuit that isn’t quite closed. The weight of knowing that you could do more and are choosing not to.

That feeling is information. Not punishment. Information.

It is your nervous system accurately reporting the gap between what you are capable of and what you are doing. And like all somatic information it is asking not for shame but for response.

The response doesn’t have to be enormous. It has to be honest. One step closer to your actual capacity. One organization you’ve been meaning to learn about. One conversation you’ve been avoiding. One resource you’ve been sitting on. One Tuesday you show up for instead of finding a reason not to.

The incompletion feeling does not go away through ignoring it. It goes away through action. Small or large depending on what you actually have. But honest. Proportional. Real.

A Map for the Next Steps

These are not prescriptions. They are invitations relative to where you actually are.

If you are beginning:

Start with one person. One relationship you actually tend. Show up for their actual life in one specific way this week. Don’t announce it. Don’t post about it. Just do it. Feel what it feels like to complete the circuit. Let that feeling be the motivation for the next one.

If you have been trying and keep hitting the walls named in this series:

Go back to Essay Two. Read the section on the two traps. Ask yourself honestly which one you’ve been falling into. Appropriation or performative smallness. Neither makes you a bad person. Both are patterns you can change. The change begins with the honest naming.

If you are building something:

Ask the orientation question before every decision. Am I building this to get something or to grow something? Is this structure organized around extraction or reciprocity? Where is the power sitting and does it need to be redistributed? Who is not at the table and what would it take to create a seat for them? These questions don’t have clean answers. Ask them anyway. Let them be the ongoing practice.

If you have resources:

Do the research before you write the check. Find the organizations already doing the work in the communities most affected by the harms this series has named. Visit if you can. Learn before you fund. Let yourself be changed by what you find. Then give in a way that expands their capacity without expanding your control over them. Give and release. That is the meitheal logic applied to money.

If you need to ask for resources:

Ask. Clearly and without shame. The ask is a hand extended between capacity and need. You are offering the person you’re asking the opportunity to participate in something meaningful. That is not weakness. That is community. Reach toward. Trust that someone might want to be part of what you’re building.

*If you are a practitioner or healer:

Your sliding scale is political. Your accessible pricing is community infrastructure. The person who can afford your full rate is subsidizing the person who can’t. That is the three-tier model the mir used. Name it that way if it helps you hold it. Your work is not separate from the community building this series describes. It is one of its most intimate expressions.

If you are exhausted:

Rest is not abandonment. It is maintenance of the capacity to keep showing up. The mir didn’t work anyone to depletion. The meitheal fed the people doing the harvesting. You are allowed to receive as well as give. Community that only takes from you is not community. It is extraction with better language. Rest. Fill. Return when you can. The work will still be here.

If you don’t know where to start:

Start with the body. Place your hands on your own sternum. Feel your own heartbeat. Notice that it has been doing this work your whole life without being asked. Your body already knows how to show up. It has been doing it since before you had language for any of this. Trust it. Follow it toward the people and the work it recognizes as real. It will not lead you wrong.

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What We Are Actually Building

I want to name what is actually at stake in all of this. Not abstractly. Specifically.

The communities being built right now by ordinary people doing ordinary things with their hands are the counter-evidence to everything the manufactured cynicism wants you to believe. Every casserole is a refutation of people suck. Every move helped is a small resurrection of the meitheal. Every honest conversation that stays in relationship through disagreement is a living demonstration that humans can do this differently.

You are not just doing good. You are building the proof.

And the proof matters because the alternative is being built too. Simultaneously. With significantly more resources and significantly more cultural amplification. The billionaire who prefers AI to biological humans. The law of assumption practitioner alone in a room with their own assumptions calling it awakening. The witchy store full of beautiful objects and no actual obligation to anyone.

What we are doing is quieter. It does not make the news. It does not trend. It happens in home offices and spare rooms and Tuesday evenings and harvests that don’t get photographed.

And it is more ancient and more resilient and more true than anything being built on extraction.

The Closing of the Arc

This series began with a map. The Mercator projection that taught us the world was shaped wrong before we could read. It moved through the rooms that felt like home and weren’t. Through the wound and the grief and the cement vest and the cage that forgot it was a cage.

It ends here. With hands.

Not because hands are a symbol. Because they are the thing itself. The meitheal was hands. The mir was hands. The Paris Commune was hands opening schools and canceling rent. Rumble Arts was hands building a mosaic and opening a door during a crisis. My work is hands pressing into tissue trying to help a body remember it is safe. My hands in the garden are hands in communion with what is still growing.

Columbus never stepped foot on this continent. He thought he was in India until he died. He was wrong about where he was and wrong about what he found and wrong until his last breath and we named a holiday after him anyway. We built an entire civilization’s origin story on a man who was lost and refused to know it.

We can build a different story. We have been building it the whole time. In the spaces that don’t make the news. In the ordinary unglamorous irreplaceable daily practice of people who show up for each other without being asked.

If we can build a civilization on a lie, we can build lives on truth and love and build from that too.

That story is old. Older than Columbus. Older than the cage. Older than anyone who ever tried to convince you that people are not worth the investment.

We are building the world we want to see. Hands giving. Hands toward. Hands open. Hands held. One hand at a time and all of them together.

Your hands already know this. They have always known it.

Bring them.

A Somatic Check-In

Place your hands somewhere on your own body. Wherever they want to go. Chest. Belly. Face. Wherever.

Feel the weight of your own hands on your own body. The warmth. The pressure. The specific sensation of being touched by someone who will not harm you.

This is what you are capable of offering. This exact quality of presence. This specific warmth. This willingness to make contact without performance.

Now think of one place in your life where those hands are needed and you have been hesitating to bring them.

Not the grand gesture. The specific one. The real one. The one your body already knows about.

That is where you begin.

That is where it has always begun.

in practice of living in action

brook woolf

This is the final essay in the Lineage of the Heart series.

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Essay One- Before the Forgetting: What Your Lineage Knew About Community Essay Two - Why Is It So Hard to Find White Community That Isn’t Quietly Gross Essay Three - The Wound Underneath the Search Essay Four -What I Got Wrong About Community (And What It Taught Me Anyway) Essay Five -Bring Your Hands

If you found this first, start at the beginning. If you’ve read them all, thank you for staying with me through the whole thing. That staying is itself the practice.

If this series found something true in you I’d genuinely love to know. I’m new to writing publicly and every comment, share, and subscription tells me this work is finding the people it’s meant for. There is enough room for all of our stories. Passing this along is itself an act of the tradition we’ve been talking about. Thank you for being here.

Leave a comment

this writing is free. intentionally, always.

i’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. i’m not interested in reproducing that. so everything here is open. no tiers. no locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

but writing is also how i’m building a life. and lives need tending.

so here’s how this works. if you have a little extra and something here moved you... buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. if you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. that’s the whole system. it runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

no pressure. no wall. no guilt.

just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

buy me a tea

Sources and Further Reading

On Action, Reparations, and Material Repair

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations (The Atlantic, 2014) — available free online

• William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

• Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (Berrett-Koehler, 2018)

On Mutual Aid

• Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (Verso, 2020)

• Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) — available free online

On Disability Justice and Access in Community

• Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence blog — leavingevidence.wordpress.com

• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)

On Healing Justice and Practitioner Ethics

• Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal (Random House, 2024)

• Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Healing Justice Lineages (North Atlantic Books, 2023)

• Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology (Berrett-Koehler, 2018)

On Giving, Funding, and Resource Justice

• Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth (Berrett-Koehler, 2018)

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017)

On the Full Arc of This Series

• bell hooks, All About Love (William Morrow, 2000)

• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017)

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)

The message she sent was simple.

Turtle mother, eastern wall, eggs imminent, wrong location. Need hands. Bring the moisture blankets from the ecology shed. Someone tell Davan we need a soil assessment in twenty minutes. Anyone with portable shade structures from the last solstice, please bring two.

She sent it to the neighborhood channel, not the formal system. The formal system was for things that required documentation. This required people.

Ma people came to things that mattered, and many things mattered. They moved with the ease of a community that had learned the difference between urgency and emergency somewhere in the body rather than the mind. They felt what sustainable felt like in the bones. Their body in movement but not buzzing. Urgency meant: this needs attention now, together, with full care. Emergency meant: something has gone wrong. This was urgency. The neighborhood understood it through practice, often diligent and consistent.

Tonimo crouched at a respectful distance from the mother and hummed.

The frequency she had found through years of patient work... the one that sat just at the edge of what the turtle’s nervous system registered as familiar rather than foreign. Just saying, in the only register that crossed the distance between their two kinds of knowing: I am here. I have noticed you. I am not a threat.

The mother’s circling slowed.

Rison sat three meters back, motionless. She understood that her job right now was not to be a fox, but to be an observer.

Pera arrived first. Sixty-three years old, former soil ecologist, currently what she called semi-retired... which meant doing all the same work but choosing when. She had the moisture blankets under one arm and her soil kit under the other, already reading her scanner before she reached Tonimo, moving with unhurried precision of someone who had learned that quiet arrival was the most useful form of urgent arriving. Four decades of that lesson. She finally had it now.

She crouched beside Tonimo without ceremony.

“Eastern sector clay content,” she said, just above a murmur. “Drainage is wrong. She’d have known if she could feel what’s three feet down.ooef.”

“She felt something,” Tonimo said. “She just didn’t have the translation.”

Pera looked at her with forty years learning, squinting at the seriousness. “Where do we move her?”

Tonimo pointed to the grove of young saxaul trees forty meters north. She had been watching that soil for two seasons. The mineral content was right. The afternoon shade from the restored tree corridor would keep the temperature stable. The drainage was natural and old... it had been receiving things and holding them correctly for thirty years. The ground with a memory of being trusted.

“How do we ask her?” said a voice behind them.

Simi. Fourteen years old, from three houses down, who had been following Tonimo around the restoration corridor since she was nine with the relentless curiosity of someone who was going to do this work whether anyone trained her or not. She was holding the portable shade structure under both arms, slightly out of breath, sunflower seeds from the community garden still in her front pocket... her whole face arranged into the expression she wore when she was trying to learn something faster than learning usually allowed. Slightly out of breath with a half smile and half disconcerting cheeks.

“Same way you ask anyone,” Tonimo said. “You make it clear you see them. You make it clear you’re not taking over. And then you make the better option obvious and let them choose it.”

Simi sat down in the dirt beside her without being invited. Something Tonimo did and Simi had absorbed by proximity... sitting at the animal’s level. They made themselves small not in posture but in intention and stopped being the largest thing in the space.

“What if she doesn’t want to go?”... everyone paused together.

Davan appeared gracefully with the soil assessment kit and confirmed what Pera and Tonimo had already agreed on. An elder named Cosi settled onto a flat stone at the edge of the forming circle and opened his notebook without announcement... he was the corridor’s memory keeper and this was what memory keepers did. They showed up. They witnessed. They wrote. Because some things deserved to be held in more than one kind of record. Cosi was an amazing artist and storyteller. There was even a weekly campfire with Cosi; the village would circle up together and share space.

“She chose,” Cosi said, without looking up. “Write that down.”

He’s talking to himself. About the turtle. But everyone hears it.

A child of about six had followed her father here and was now sitting in the dirt beside Simi, watching the turtle with the enormous open attention of a person who had not yet learned to filter out what was interesting in favor of what was appropriate. The turtle was interesting. The child was present. In the world of Ma these were sufficient qualifications. Just being is enough support.

The group had settled into the low, gentle, frictionless movement of coordinated care... Pera preparing the receiving site, Davan filing his soil read into the corridor record, Simi learning the moisture blanket protocol from a neighbor who had done this before... when Tonimo heard the footsteps.

Not wrong exactly. Just fast. Diminished to the panic of a slow-moving reptile, it was time.

She felt it before she identified it. A shift in the air pressure of the space... the body registering someone moving at a different frequency than the frequency the situation had established. Her lower back registered it as a low flicker of orange. Not alarm. Attention.

She knew who it was before she turned.

Olu.

He lived on the far side of the eastern path. She had seen him at the edge of the corridor before... usually at the window of his house in the early mornings trying to learn a language through the glass. Two seasons of watching. Two seasons of wanting to be on this side of it. And now, finally, here... moving through the saxaul corridor with the barely contained energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment. Now seemingly a little lost in the overwhelm of precise excitement.

He was not careless. That was the thing. He was the opposite of careless. He was full of care in the way that made care dangerous... the care that moved faster than the situation could receive it.

The road to harm is paved with exactly this kind of love. Tonimo knew this. The turtle was about to know it too.

He was three meters from the mother when Tonimo felt the orange flare.

The mother stilled.

Not the stillness of calm. The stillness of an ancient creature running a very fast calculation about threat.

Tonimo did not look away from the mother.

“Olu.”

Her voice was the same register as the hum. Low. Slow and methodical. Not a command... the frequency she used when she needed to reach a person the way she reached an animal. Through the body. Through the place in the chest where people kept the thing they actually meant underneath the thing they were doing.

He stopped.

The mother’s calculation continued. Tonimo kept the hum beneath her voice... kept her own body at the frequency that said: still safe, still seen, still here.

“What you’re feeling right now,” she said. The hum continuing under the words like a current under water. “That pull toward her. That wanting to help. That’s exactly right.” A breath, slow and low. “That’s the whole thing. She can feel it too.”

A pause.

“She just needs it to come from where you’re standing.”

The corridor held very still. Even the six-year-old seemed to understand that something was happening that was not about the turtle only.

Olu’s breath was audible. She heard him find it... lose it slightly... find it again.

“I don’t...” he started.

“You don’t need to do anything differently,” Tonimo said. “Just bring it from there. All of it. Everything you’ve been feeling at that window for two seasons.” Another breath. Slower. “She can receive that from here. You don’t have to get any closer for it to land.”

Something shifted in the air between Olu and the mother.

Tonimo felt it in her sternum before she saw it in the reader. The orange settling. One shade softer. The mother’s ancient eye moving, slowly, from the direction of Olu’s feet to the direction of the saxaul grove.

“Can you feel your feet?” Tonimo said.

A pause that lasted the length of three turtle breaths.

“Yeah,” Olu said. His voice had changed. Lower. Something in it that hadn’t been there before.

“Stay there,” she said. “Bring everything you have.” The hum underneath it all, steady, the thread connecting everyone in the space to the frequency the moment required. “Just bring it from there.”

The orange softened another shade.

The mother circled.

Once.

And stopped.

And turned toward the saxaul grove.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed loudly. The elder’s pencil stopped on the page and then resumed. The six-year-old’s hand found her father’s hand without looking for it.

Simi looked at Tonimo with the expression of someone who had just learned something that was going to take years to understand completely but had already, irrevocably, landed deep in the body. In the cells and later in the day will arrive in the muscles and bones.

Tonimo kept her eyes on the mother.

The orange at the edge of her vision was the color of late afternoon now. Something older and warmer than urgency. The color of a thing finding its way to where it needed to be.

To be continued in Part Three: Turtle Speed.

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional hopeful musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

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This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

I didn’t say it that way. I would never have said it that way, well, maybe my smartass younger self would. But, for sure, that is what I believed underneath the language I used, underneath the grant applications and the mission statements and the genuine love I carried for the neighborhood I was moving into. I believed I had something to give. I believed the community needed what I had. I believed my job was to bring it.

That is a savior complex. Wrapped in white guilt. Wrapped in real love. All three things true at once.

I named the center Rumble Arts, named after the idea of the natural elephants’ vibrations in the ground leading people to the source, water. To life. We took over a converted family business building on the west side and we built something. For five years, we built it. Programming, partnerships, community events, a three-story Ganesh mosaic on the wall because I was twenty-one and nobody stopped me. It was imperfect and alive and real.

And somewhere in those five years something happened that I did not plan for and could not have manufactured.

The community changed me.

Not because they were patient with my mistakes, though many people were. Not because they corrected my politics, though that happened too. But because I stayed long enough for the actual relationships to form. Long enough for me to stop being the person who came to give something and start being a person who genuinely needed what was there. Long enough to be humbled out of my original premise entirely.

By the time the 2008 financial crash hit and the funding landscape for nonprofits collapsed almost overnight, something was beginning to shift in how Rumble Arts operated. We weren’t a center with a mission anymore. We were a community with relationships. And when other nonprofits started losing their funding and their programming spaces, we didn’t make a strategic decision to house them. We just... opened the door. Because that is what you do when you are actually in community with people. You open the door.

Each organization that came through taught me something I hadn’t known to learn. About how to work alongside people rather than for them. About what partnership actually requires. About what community actually is.

It is not what I thought it was when I arrived.

What I Thought It Was

I thought community was something you built. A structure. A center. A container with programming and mission alignment and the right people in the right roles. I thought if you designed it well enough, community would follow.

I thought it was about shared values. Find the people who believe what you believe. Create the conditions for them to gather. Community would emerge.

I thought it was about giving. Show up with something to offer. Be generous. Be consistent. Community would recognize and receive that generosity.

All of these things are related to community. None of them are community itself.

What It Actually Is

Community is what happens when you stay long enough to be changed by the people around you.

bell hooks wrote that she had to practice being willing to leave the space of her study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community. That word changed is the whole thing. You can attend something for years and remain fundamentally unaltered by it. That is not community. That is presence without porousness.

Prentis Hemphill writes that to belong is to rest into the collective. To be woven into the all. Not to earn your way in. Not to perform your way in. To rest into it. That distinction changed something in my body when I first encountered it. Because resting requires surrender. It requires trusting that the ground will hold you. It requires letting go of the management of how you appear.

adrienne maree brown describes community as emergent. You cannot plan your way into it. You can only show up relationally, build authentic connection, and see what arises from the conversations and the visions and the needs. The patterns emerge from the simple repeated interactions. Not from the strategic plan.

I think about this when I run healing and bodywork sessions. I don’t play music. I rarely light incense. I work out of home offices and I am genuinely glad about it. I don’t want the space to present as a spa. I want it to present as real. Healing doesn’t need to be beautiful to be honest. It needs to be honest to be healing. The room that says nothing is being performed here is the room where something can actually happen. Community works the same way. Strip the aesthetic away and what you have left is two people, or ten people, or a neighborhood... willing to be present with each other without the performance. That is where the actual thing lives.

What I know from thirty years of trying:

Community is the thing that forms in the staying. Not the arriving.

It is built from small repeated actions not grand gestures. The showing up before you’re asked. The following through after you said you would. The Tuesday when nothing is sacred and everything is ordinary and you come anyway.

It requires difference. Not just tolerance of it. Actual contact with it. The discomfort of being in real relationship with people who do not think, feel, or move through the world the way you do. That discomfort is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. It is where growth lives.

It is mutual. Not charitable. The moment one person is consistently giving and another is consistently receiving, you have a service relationship. Service relationships are valuable. They are not community. Community is when the direction of care moves in all directions and nobody is keeping score.

It holds disagreement without dissolving. Real community is not a space where everyone agrees. It is a space where disagreement can happen and the relationship survives. Where conflict becomes information rather than threat.

It changes you. If you have been in a space for a long time and you are exactly the same person you were when you arrived... you have been attending, not belonging.

What It Isn’t

It isn’t shared aesthetics. A group of people who look the same, dress the same, consume the same things is not a community. It is a demographic.

It isn’t shared belief alone. Doctrine does not produce the meitheal. Shared values are a starting point. What you do with your hands is what builds the thing.

It isn’t a network. A network is people you can call when you need something professional. Community is people you can call when you need something human.

It isn’t a product. You cannot purchase your way into belonging. The crystals and the course and the initiatory container are not the thing. They may point toward the thing. They are not the thing.

It isn’t comfortable. Or not only comfortable. The most alive community I have ever been part of required me to sit with versions of myself I didn’t like, in proximity to people who reflected back things I wasn’t ready to see, in conversations that asked more of me than I wanted to give. That discomfort was not a sign something was wrong. It was the sign something was actually happening.

It isn’t fast. Years after Rumble Arts I tried to build an online coaching collective. The vision was genuinely communal. Sliding scale pricing. Practitioners supporting each other. Collective promotion alongside individual practice. A skillshare built on the understanding that we would grow together before we grew individually. It fizzled before it fully began. The people I tried to build it with were still running extraction logic underneath the community language. They wanted income before investment. Results before relationship. Promotion that paid off immediately or not at all. They weren’t bad people. They were people who had learned, as most of us have, to evaluate any collective endeavor by what it returns to them personally and quickly. That is capitalism in the nervous system. And it is one of the most common ways community fails before it begins. Even people doing healing work, people who understood the language of community, can still be fundamentally oriented toward extraction when it comes to their own time and resources. The language of community is not the same as the practice of it. Not even close.

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On Asking and Receiving

One of the things I had to unlearn — and am still unlearning — is the belief that asking for resources is a sign of weakness or extraction.

I have spent years asking for money. Not for myself alone. For organizations doing work I believed in. For the nonprofits that came through Rumble Arts during the crash. For communities that needed what they were building to continue. Asking for money on behalf of something real is one of the most communal acts I know. It is the hand extended between the person with capacity and the work that needs doing.

There is a version of this that is extractive. The fundraiser who takes more than they give. The organization that performs its mission for donors without actually living it. The ask that is really about the asker’s comfort rather than the cause’s need. That version is real and worth naming.

But the ask itself is not the problem. The ask is the bridge. You give the person with resources the opportunity to participate in something meaningful. They give you the ability to do work you couldn’t do alone. Neither of you is only giving. Neither of you is only receiving. That is community operating through money rather than despite it. That is the mir logic applied to fundraising.

The belief that you shouldn’t need to ask, that the truly committed person figures it out without reaching toward others, is another form of the individualism this series has been naming all along. Asking is not weakness. Asking is community. Asking says: I cannot do this alone. And I trust that you might want to be part of it.

That trust is itself a communal act. Receiving graciously is also a communal act. Giving and receiving are not opposites in community. They are the same motion in different directions. Both are needed. Neither is more virtuous than the other.

If you are a nonprofit leader, a community organizer, a practitioner with a sliding scale, someone building something real... ask. Ask clearly. Ask honestly. Ask with the full knowledge that you are offering the person you’re asking the opportunity to participate in something worth participating in.

And if someone asks you... receive them. Let their need be real. Let your response to it be real too.

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Why It’s Hard to Find

M. Scott Peck, who wrote one of the earliest serious books about community-building, identified four stages that every genuine community moves through.

The first is pseudocommunity. Everyone is kind. Conflict is avoided. Differences are glossed over. It feels pleasant. It produces nothing real.

The second is chaos. The real differences surface. People try to fix or convert each other. Conflict emerges. This is where most groups dissolve. It feels like failure. It is actually the threshold.

The third is emptiness. The hardest stage. It requires surrendering the need to fix, control, or convert. Sitting with the discomfort of difference without trying to resolve it. Grieving what you thought the community would be. This is where genuine openness becomes possible.

The fourth is genuine community. It doesn’t arrive as a destination. It arrives as a quality of presence that becomes available when enough people have moved through emptiness together.

Most of what we call community never gets past stage one. The pleasant surface. The shared aesthetics. The comfortable agreement.

The groups that dissolve in chaos, you know, the ones that feel like failures, were actually closer to something real than the ones that stayed comfortable. They hit the threshold. They just didn’t know it was a threshold.

How to Recognize It in Your Body

This is what I want you to know more than anything else in this essay.

Your body already knows the difference. It has been tracking this longer and more accurately than your mind has.

When you are being collected, something in the body goes careful. Watchful. Slightly performative. There is an alertness to how you are landing, how you are being received, whether you are saying the right things in the right way. Your chest is slightly held. Your breath is slightly shallower. You are auditioning even if nobody told you that you were.

When you are actually belonging, something releases. Not all at once. Gradually, over time, in the accumulation of small moments where you were yourself and it was received. The chest opens a little. The breath drops a little lower. You stop monitoring your edges quite so vigilantly. You can be quiet without it meaning something is wrong.

Prentis Hemphill says there are some things that are too big to feel in one body. You need a collective body to move them through. That is not metaphor. That is physiology. Your nervous system is designed for co-regulation. For the presence of other regulated bodies. For the specific safety that only another human being can provide.

The longing you feel for community is not weakness. It is your body accurately reporting what it needs. It is physiologically correct information. And it is very old.

Trust it more than you trust the aesthetics of any room you walk into.

Steps Toward It

These are not a program. They are not a system. They are what I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, across thirty years of trying. Take what is useful. Leave what isn’t. Come back to this when you need it.

Start smaller than you think.

Community does not begin with a center or a collective or a strategic vision. It begins with one person you actually show up for. One harvest you help bring in without being asked. One Tuesday you come anyway. The mir started with neighbors. The meitheal started with showing up. Start there. Build from that. Let the larger thing emerge from the small repeated actions.

Bring your hands before your philosophy.

Show up for someone’s actual life before you try to build anything larger. Help someone move. Watch someone’s kid. Drive someone to the appointment. Cook something and bring it over. These are not preliminary activities before the real community work begins. They are the real community work. Trust gets built here. Everything else gets built on top of trust.

Ask the honest question before you enter any space.

Am I here to get something or to grow? That question will tell you more about your readiness for community than any philosophy or spiritual practice. Neither answer is wrong on its own. But if the answer is consistently and only about what you get... you are still running extraction logic. Community asks for something more reciprocal. Not self-erasure. Genuine interest in the flourishing of the people around you as much as your own.

Ask for what you need. Receive what is offered.

Asking is not weakness. It is the bridge between need and capacity. It is community operating in real time. Ask clearly. Ask honestly. Ask on behalf of yourself and on behalf of the work you believe in. And when someone offers you something real... receive it. Let it land. Don’t deflect or minimize or immediately reciprocate to avoid the vulnerability of having needed something. Giving and receiving are the same motion in different directions. Both are how community lives.

Stay through the chaos.

When the differences surface, when the conflict emerges, when it stops feeling pleasant and starts feeling hard — that is not a sign you chose the wrong community. That is the threshold. The groups that stay through the chaos and move into the emptiness together are the ones that become something real. Leaving at the hard part is the most common mistake. The second most common is pretending the hard part isn’t happening.

Let yourself be changed.

This is the requirement bell hooks named and the one most people quietly resist. Come in willing to be altered. Not destroyed. Not erased. Altered. Let the people around you teach you something you didn’t know you needed to learn. Let your original premise be humbled. Let yourself arrive somewhere different than where you started. That willingness is what makes you a genuine participant rather than a visitor.

Expect to get it wrong and stay anyway.

I walked into Rumble Arts with white guilt and a savior complex. I got it wrong in ways I am still understanding. I stayed. The staying is what made it real. Fallibility is a condition of membership in any genuine community. Not a disqualification from it. You will misread things. You will say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. You will bring your unresolved history into spaces where it causes friction. So will everyone else. This is not failure. This is the actual material community is made from.

Notice what your body already knows.

Before your mind has words for it, your body knows. It knows the difference between being collected and belonging. Between performing and resting. Between auditioning and arriving. The contraction below the sternum. The quiet opening when something is real. Pay attention to those signals. They are not anxiety to be managed. They are information to be trusted. Your nervous system has been doing this work for as long as humans have needed each other, which is as long as there have been humans.

You were born deserving of this.

Not because you’ve done enough. Not because you’ve healed enough or learned enough or gotten your politics right enough. Because you are human. Because belonging is not something you earn. It is something you were born into the need for and the right to. The belief that you have to deserve community before you can have it is capitalism in the nervous system. It is the market logic of worthiness applied to love. Let it go. You are already enough to begin.

What I Know Now

Community is not what I thought it was at twenty-one. It is more demanding and more ordinary than I imagined. It requires more patience and less performance. More hands and fewer grand gestures. More staying and less arriving.

It is built from the same material it has always been built from. Showing up. Following through. Being changed. Staying through the hard part. Bringing your actual self not your curated self. Letting the harvest be more important than the credit for bringing it in.

It is not a product. It is not a feeling you purchase. It is not a room you walk into and immediately recognize as home.

It is something you build slowly with other people. Something that builds you in return. Something that arrives not as a destination but as a quality of presence that becomes available, gradually, in the accumulation of ordinary moments where you were real with each other and kept showing up anyway.

It is the most ancient thing. And it is available right now. In the ordinary texture of this week. In whoever is close enough to call. In the small action you keep meaning to take and haven’t yet.

Start there. That is enough. That is everything, actually.

A Somatic Check-In

Think of one person in your life you have been meaning to show up for but haven’t yet. Not because you don’t care. Because life is full and the moment hasn’t been quite right and there’s always tomorrow.

Feel what that unfinished showing-up lives in your body. Where does it sit? How does it feel?

Now imagine actually doing it. The specific small action. The text sent. The food brought over. The hour offered. The hands brought to the harvest.

Notice what happens in the body when you imagine it complete.

That feeling is community beginning. That small. That ordinary. That available.

It starts with you doing the one thing you already know you could do.

in practice of living in belonging

brook woolf

If this found something in you I’d genuinely love to know. I’m new to writing publicly and every comment and share tells me this work is finding the people it’s meant for. There is enough room for all of our stories. Passing this along is itself an act of the tradition we’re trying to reclaim. Thank you for being here.

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If you’re still sitting with the harder diagnosis, Essay Two — Why Is It So Hard to Find White Community That Isn’t Quietly Gross — names what keeps failing and why. Essay Five — Bring Your Hands — is the closing call of this series. It comes next. Where the action lives.

Leave a comment

this writing is free. intentionally, always.

i’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. i’m not interested in reproducing that. so everything here is open. no tiers. no locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

but writing is also how i’m building a life. and lives need tending.

so here’s how this works. if you have a little extra and something here moved you... buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. if you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. that’s the whole system. it runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

no pressure. no wall. no guilt.

just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

buy me a tea

Sources and Further Reading

On Community, Love, and Being Changed

• bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000)

• bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (Routledge, 2009)

• bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (Routledge, 2003)

On Healing in Community and Collective Bodies

• Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal (Random House, 2024)

• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017)

• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014)

On Emergent Community and Interdependence

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017)

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)

On the Stages of Community Building

• M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (Simon & Schuster, 1987)

On Mutual Aid and Resource Sharing

• Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (Verso, 2020)

On Social Capital and Community Decline

• Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

A note before we begin.

I started this Substack partly to hold myself accountable to a novel I’ve been living inside for years. The Practice of Living: Book One. It is set six hundred years from now, in the society of Ma... a world built on healing justice lineages, bell hooks’ theories of love and liberation, Chinese five-element medicine, and the belief that care is the most sophisticated technology we ever buried.

These pieces are not chapters. They are characters who didn’t make it into Book One but still live in the world of Ma. They were too alive to leave behind. So I’m leaving them here instead... with you.

Maybe we get to build this world together. That feels like exactly the kind of thing Ma would definitely approve of.

PART ONE: The Lineage

Cedar first.

Before the eyes opened... before the body remembered it had a day... before Rison made her sound, not quite bark, not quite word, somewhere between the two like a comma the universe placed there on purpose and then forgot to remove.

Cedar. Dried herbs. Ten thousand years of patient sand arriving through the green roof’s filtration membrane with the confidence of something that has never once been in a hurry. It was far from sterile in its stillness.

Tonimo’s lungs opened before she did.

This was always the order. Body first. Self later, a little rumpled, finding everything already handled, the way you come home to find someone has already made the tea and the biscuits to accompany the delicious concoction. Sometimes Tonimo thought of her whole self as a blend of the most delicious tea.

She opened one eye.

The treehouse held its breath with her.

It was alive. Not metaphor. The saxaul it grew from had been consulted before a single beam was placed... root patterns mapped, fifty-year trajectory modeled, taken seriously in the way Ma took living things seriously. Entirely, whole and complete. The mycelial network in the walls regulated temperature and moisture without asking permission, without requiring applause. Systems work when you give them the right conditions, one of care and curiosity, and have the basic courtesy to stay out of their way.

The walls knew when Tonimo was cold before she did. They had already adjusted three times this morning. She had felt each adjustment as a small tenderness. She had not been wrong about what it was.

The green roof grew three varieties of healing herbs selected for their capacity to metabolize the anxiety of young people learning to be themselves.

The roof did not know it was doing therapy. It was just being a roof. Sometimes those are the same thing.

Copper pots hung from the beams, hammered by hand, throwing early light around the room in warm slow circles. Maps covered every surface that wasn’t a window. Migration routes. Transit corridors. The seasonal movements of things that knew, without instruments, without interfaces, exactly where they needed to be and when. Butterflies across three continents. Bar-headed geese crossing the Himalayas at altitudes that should, by any reasonable biological accounting, be impossible... and doing it anyway because nobody had thought to inform the geese. Mongolian gazelle. Demoiselle cranes. The great bustard... twenty kilograms of bird that still, against all reasonable expectation, flew.

She had articles pinned between the maps. Annotated. Argued with in the margins. The handwriting got smaller and more urgent toward the edges of each page. Her thinking got smaller and more urgent when something interesting enough overtook her soul to chase all the way to the edge of what was known. The pages smelled of pencil and intention. They smelled, faintly, of her. The story of her own mixed with the story of the birds and the maps.

Two others slept nearby. Maret, seventeen, learning water ecology, talked to rivers the way Tonimo talked to foxes... constantly, with complete seriousness and the unshakeable conviction that the river was listening and had things it had been waiting to say and she was ready to write down every word of it. She had more journals than the others. Jo, nineteen, training in the seed library, had a gift of patience with plants in the same way Tonimo had patience with animals... it wasn’t patience exactly. It was a very deep love that looked like patience from the outside.

The treehouse had been their idea collectively. Ma understood this kind of learning... the kind that needed quiet. That the inner voice needed room before the outer world got too loud. That self-knowledge wasn’t a luxury. It was infrastructure. You went to the quiet space when you needed it. You came back when you were ready. The community held both without comment.

Rison was already sitting up, watching Tonimo with the amber-eyed attention of an animal who had been awake for some time. Maybe quietly impatient but still trying hard to be patient.

“Good morning,” Tonimo said.

Rison’s ear swiveled.

One of their better conversations.

Lineage Opening…

Here is what you need to know about the lineage, if you are new to this world:

In Ma, the dead do not leave. They become available.

Not as hauntings. Not as guilt. Not as the exhausting weight of ancestors who never resolved their own business and decided to make it yours. The lineage is a living archive... a resonance system built over seventy years of collective intention. You access it the way you access muscle memory. Not by thinking. By getting quiet enough for the body to remember.

The technology did not create this. The technology learned to read what was already there. There is a difference and it matters enormously.

The lineage was not history. Not archive. It was what happened when enough people paid attention long enough that the attention itself became a place you could return to.

Wonder and root.

A map that led not to a destination but to a way of moving through the world that harmed less and repaired more. A timeline not of dates but of help. Of human hands reaching. Of hope that had survived long enough to become structure.

She sat cross-legged on the treehouse floor, the interface open in the air before her, its soft iridescence catching the copper light. The resonance reader... small, curved, warm in the palm like something glad to be held... was not built to translate the animal world into human language. It was built to read the body’s broadcast. Every living thing broadcasts. Most people simply stopped tuning in a long time ago and forgot they ever knew how.

She breathed. Down past the chest... past the belly... to the floor of herself. The place the body keeps its oldest knowing. She had learned to start there. To let the breath find the floor before she reached for anything else.

At fifteen she had been terrified nobody would come.

What came instead was a chorus.

Not voices... more like standing at the edge of a forest and knowing, before you have identified a single tree, that you are not alone in it. Trees rustling in tandem. Warmth organized into shapes. Three hundred years of someone giving a damn, still warm, arriving through the soles of her feet every morning without being asked.

Over the years, specific voices had separated from the chorus like instruments finding their parts.

A woman who had chained herself to a California redwood and stayed for two years... she understood that some things could only be protected by the body’s willingness to remain. Her presence in the lineage smelled like bark and rain and something Tonimo could only call decided. Not stubborn. Decided. The difference lives in the chest. Stubbornness closes. This was an opening that had simply chosen not to move.

She taught Tonimo, without ever speaking, that resistance was a love language.

A woman who had spent decades in the forests of central Africa learning to see chimpanzees as individuals... as people with histories and griefs and loyalties... at a time when the word for what she was doing did not yet exist, and she had done it anyway because the chimpanzees were clearly people with histories and griefs and loyalties whether or not the word existed. Her presence fell into the shoulders. A settling and softening. Words that tell the inner spirit to keep looking anyway... not out of defiance but out of the simple inability to unsee a true thing. She held the love of all things and was aware of the interconnection of healing as liberation.

She taught Tonimo that patience was not the absence of urgency. It was urgency that had learned to breathe.

Tonimo’s grandfather... among the first builders of the inter-species resonance interfaces. He understood that you could not build technology to translate the animal world if you did not first spend years learning to be quiet enough for the animal world to speak. Who sat in this same desert in the early years of Ma and felt the first pulse of the restored mycorrhizal network come up through his feet and wept and wrote in his journal: it is alive it is alive it is still alive we did not kill it all. His presence came through the soles of the feet. The tree-rooted. The calloused and storied feet. The feeling of ground returned.

Between them these three had collectively spent something like three hundred years paying attention. Three hundred years of loving the world carefully enough to leave something behind worth receiving. This was what Tonimo sat inside each morning. Not ceremony. Not performance. Three hundred years of someone giving a damn, still warm, still showing up.

This morning the chorus was gentle. A low warmth the color of early light through cedar. It was like the feeling of being known before you have said anything. Tonimo sat in it for a long time without reaching for anything specific. Belly rising. Belly falling. The treehouse breathing with her.

Then her grandfather moved forward.

She felt it first in the soles of the feet. Then rising. Then the hands, which suddenly remembered what it felt like to hold something new and uncertain and alive with possibility and terror in equal measure. He did not give her instructions. He gave her the feeling of his hands in the early days... when the animals were cautious and he had learned that caution was not rejection. That it was information. That an animal’s caution was the most honest data point in any exchange and deserved to be received as such.

Slow, was the quality of it. Slower than you think. And then slower than that.

She breathed.

The treehouse breathed with her.

Rison put her chin on Tonimo’s knee.

The lineage settled back into its chorus... warm and available and unhurried... and Tonimo sat in it until the day was ready for her.

Growing Up in Love with Animals

She had been ready for the animals long before the animals had a name for what she was.

Seven years old.

The kind of child who went quiet in a way that made her family stop what they were doing and go looking. Not quite worried but not quite contented. Aware. They would search the yard calling her name like people who had learned that found her and she is fine were not always the same sentence. And they would find her... flat on her belly in the damp grass at the edge of something, face close to the ground, deep inside a world that overlapped with this one but had different rules and more interesting weather.

She had been watching a colony of beetles move a seed three times their size across uneven ground for forty minutes once and came inside to draw a map of their route. Another afternoon she spent two hours tracking the movement patterns of dragonflies above the pond at the back of the property, noting the intervals, the territories, which ones circled back and which ones didn’t and what that might mean. She had theories. She recorded them in notebooks that smelled of outside and the ink that bled when it got wet, which it did most of the time, because she was always outside and it was often raining and she did not care.

Her family loved her warm and worried. Parents with a child who seems to be receiving transmissions nobody else can hear. She was more than fine. She was seven years old and already fluent in a language nobody had taught her and she was not lonely in it... she was home. There was no home-sickness because she never left it and was never told otherwise.

Twelve.

The steps were not as sure yet... but the sentiment was there, taking shape the way a river takes shape, not announcing itself, just finding the lowest path and following it with quiet certainty. She was beginning to understand the interconnectivity of things. That the ant and the saxaul and the migration of the bar-headed geese were not separate facts but one long sentence the world was speaking... and she was learning to read it not from the beginning but from wherever she happened to enter.

A Mongolian gazelle at the perimeter of the eastern corridor. Alone. Moving in small tight circles.

Something in her gut registered wrongness on day one. Not an idea... a physical fact, the way the stomach knows certain things before the mind has assembled the evidence. She sat with it. Let it be information rather than alarm. Watched.

On the third day she told her grandmother: “Something is wrong with her.”

Her body had been saying it for three days and she had finally learned to trust the saying, or it spoke loud enough she just happened to blurt it out at the right moment. She was still learning trust, especially the inward quality.

Her grandmother ran the reader. Elevated cortisol. Disrupted movement. Animal separated from herd during migration.

“You knew before the instrument,” her grandmother said.

“The instrument knows it differently,” Tonimo said. “Not better.”

Her grandmother looked at her for a long time. Her expression was someone who had been searching for fifty years and had just, quietly, found what they were looking for. She had been looking at Tonimo for twelve.

Fifteen.

Built now. Solid in herself in a way that had nothing to do with certainty and everything to do with knowing where her attention wanted to go and letting it go there without apology. She wore one-piece anything when she could... jumpsuits, overalls, a single decision in the morning that freed every other cell in her brain to go where it actually wanted to be. Which was the birds. The migrations. The notebook filled with more animals than most people knew existed. She knew them. She took the time to listen to what they needed. The one piece was not a uniform. It was a declaration of resource allocation. Every firing cell pointed toward the living world.

The lineage opened for the first time that year. She had been terrified nobody would come.

She breathed into the fear until it remembered it was a hand.

Three hundred years of someone giving a damn showed up anyway.

She came back the next morning. And the morning after. Not every day... Ma did not require every day. The lineage was not a practice to be perfected. It was a relationship to be maintained at the pace that kept it real. Obligation felt like a held breath. This felt like coming home after a long walk... the relief of putting down something heavy in a place where it was safe to leave things.

Seventeen.

The elders came to her the way Ma made decisions... slowly, collectively, without drama. Cosi extended the invitation. She smelled like soil and spoke in long slippery and somehow flowy sentences. She had clearly learned that the best things took the time they took and no shortcut was worth the cost of what you were trying to reach.

“We have been watching how the animals receive you.”

“I’ve been watching them.”

“We know. That’s why we’re asking.”

The training did not feel like being taught. It felt like being permitted to know what she already knew... a loosening in the chest, session by session, the way a joint releases that has been held too long in one position. The trust building continued.

She was ready for love and she did not know it yet.

It arrived on an autumn morning when the corridor air smelled of cooling sand and something sweet she couldn’t name. The fox appeared at the edge of the path... sat with stillness and waiting. Not to leave an imposition but the fox knew and was waiting for Tonimo to catch up the knowing. Tonimo sat down in the sand. They looked at each other. Something in her chest went very still. The stillness of union finally meeting like mitosis.

The fox walked over and put her chin on Tonimo’s knee.

She named her Rison... the end of her own name living in the animal that had chosen her. Two parts of the same attention meeting in the desert and deciding, without discussion, not to be separate anymore. Heart meeting heart. The way family finds a soul sister in bonds before names.

The world, for once, had not been subtle about what it was doing.

Twenty-two now.

The treehouse. The cedar. The copper light. The lineage settling back into warmth as the day began to ask things of her.

She stood. Stretched. The stretch moved through the spine like something being remembered, vertebra by vertebra, the body reassembling itself for what was ahead. She reached for the hat.

The Sunflower Hat.

This requires a moment.

She had started wearing it at sixteen almost by accident... she had always been drawn to yellow, the way she was drawn to the shimmer of a firefly’s interval and the migration of monarch butterflies and the softness of different furs under careful fingers. Yellow was information. Yellow was alive. It was a full-bodied yes. She spoke animal the way multilingual academics studied language... noticing the movement of the mouth as much as the liminal space between words, reading the whole body as text, the tail and the ear and the weight shift and the breath. She had always noticed everything. It had always been a lot to carry in rooms built for people who noticed less. Sometimes even too much she was told in the sweetest ways possible. But she was still told.

The hat was yellow. She put it on.

And people smiled.

Not the polite smile. The real one... the smile before the person decided anything, that lived in the eyes before it reached the mouth. Tonimo noticed all smiling eyes. She had always noticed them. What she had not known until the hat was that she could be the cause of one.

She stood in the corridor that first morning wearing it and three people smiled at her before she had said a word... and something shifted in her chest that she did not have language for yet but felt like: oh. these two parts of me do not have to live in separate rooms. Her mind found a place where her body could be.

The girl who tracked firefly patterns and knew the hemoglobin of bar-headed geese and could read a Mongolian gazelle’s cortisol from three days of careful watching... and the girl who wanted people to smile when she walked in. Not separate. Not in conflict. The same girl. The same attention. Turned, sometimes, toward feathers. Turned, sometimes, toward faces.

She had never taken the hat off.

Some discoveries deserve to become permanent.

Rison was already at the ladder... amber-eyed... patient... with a clear position on when they should leave next. Rison was aware of the next best option most of the time. Tonimo trusted Rison and it usually worked out… usually.

Magnifying glass, left vest pocket. Resonance reader, right wrist, checked and charged. Notebook, back pocket, pencil worn to a stub because she wrote until she ran out of pencil and then simply found another one. One-piece today, deep ochre, the color of the Gobi at midday. One decision. Every cell freed.

Below, Ma was beginning its day. The corridor held the quality of dawn stillness she thought of as the forest being honest... no performance, no readiness to be observed, just the living world doing what it does when nobody is making a point of watching.

She loved this hour. The world before it knew it was being seen.

She climbed down.

Rison fell into step beside her.

The day began.

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The Turtle

Somewhere in the eastern restoration corridor, forty meters from the grove of young saxaul trees, a mother turtle was circling.

Again. and again.

The orange hue circumferenced the feelings at the edge of Tonimo’s vision before she had turned her head... slow and pulsing and urgent in the way of something that needed attending. Her lower back registered it first. It always did. A warmth. A pull. The body was already turning before the mind had finished forming the thought.

The orange was hers alone. Not the reader’s data. The thing the reader confirmed.

She turned southeast.

And then she saw her.

She was larger than most... moving with the weight of an animal that had been moving this way for longer than most things currently alive had been alive. Her shell carried the markings of genuine age... not smooth newness but the layered record of a life that had weathered things and continued anyway. She left a faint scent on the sandy floor as she moved... something mineral and deep and old, the smell of time made physical, the smell of an animal that understood loss not as an interruption to life but as one of its textures.

This turtle understood time in a way no lineage could... because she was breathing through it. Not studying it. Not archiving it. Living inside it the way the sand lived inside the wind... shaped by it, patient with it, moving at its speed because its speed was the only one that made sense.

She was ancient. Female. Tonimo knew this before the reader confirmed it... in the way she moved, in the markings, in the scent, in the circling that was not confusion but deliberation. She was looking for something specific. She knew what she needed. She simply hadn’t found the right location yet.

And she was asking.

In the oldest language where no translators existed... the one that moves through the soles of the feet and up through the spine and settles in the chest as a warmth that has a direction. She was broadcasting the way the mycorrhizal network broadcasts... trusting that something nearby was still tuned in.

The orange deepened.

Tonimo was not yet three seasons into her vocation. Her hands still sometimes shook before a reading. She was still on the path of trusting herself, realizing this trust may take quite a while to build. But watching this ancient animal circle in the wrong location with the quiet urgency of a creature who believed life was worth living and fragile and held both truths simultaneously in the same body... that was something she did not doubt.

She crouched.

And something happened that was not thinking.

Tonimo melted. The ache moved from the chest outward... all the way to the toenails, all the way to the fingertips... a longing with no object except the creature in front of her and the desperate cellular need to not disturb her.

She was not a person anymore.

She was an alert organ beating to the expression of an ancient one’s breath.

The turtle circled.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Tonimo’s jaw released. She hadn’t known it was held. Her shoulders dropped half an inch toward the earth. Her feet found the ground differently... heavier, more certain, the way feet find ground when the body stops pretending it has somewhere else to be.

This turtle carried the grief of an animal that had outlived the conditions that made it and kept going anyway... because life does not wait for conditions to improve before continuing to be alive. It does it anyway. She held loss and the love that had not yet even begun simultaneously... the future turtles whose story had not yet been spoken, the eggs that had not yet been placed.

She did not need Tonimo.

She allowed her.

That undid her completely. Not the age. Not the patience. Not even the beauty... though she was beautiful in the way of something ancient that has continued. It was the acceptance. A young human in a sunflower hat, barely three seasons into the work, bewildered with compassion, heart leaning forward... held in the liminal space where moments drift rather than pass and focus requires space and not time.

Turtle speed.

Intentional. Held. Sustainable. This was how it had survived... not by moving fast but by moving at exactly the pace the world required and not one breath faster.

Tonimo’s breath slowed with it. The ribcage expanding wider than all morning. The exhale longer than the inhale. Something releasing in the belly that felt like the relief of being in the right place at the right time for something that mattered.

Everyone deserves to be held in a way that feels safe in a way that is new and old simultaneously. Familial. Surprising. Safe. The turtle knew this without knowing she knew it. It was written in the rings of her shell and the mineral scent of her passage and the circling that said: I know what I need. I just need someone still tuned in.

Rison sat.

Did not move.

Did not make the small fox sound.

Even she knew.

To be continued in Part Two: The Neighborhood.

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Brook is a somatic data analyst, holistic business coach, and writer. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night.

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this writing is free. intentionally, always.

i’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. i’m not interested in reproducing that. so everything here is open. no tiers. no locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

but writing is also how i’m building a life. and lives need tending.

so here’s how this works. if you have a little extra and something here moved you... buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. if you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. that’s the whole system. it runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

no pressure. no wall. no guilt.

just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy me a tea

This is Lilla and me. She is the visionary, I am the organizer, and Ramon (my husband who was not on camera but is responsible for basically all the labor and creative infrastructure that makes any of this possible) was somewhere on the property doing the actual work as usual/ or maybe drumming- his favorite thing to do.

We talked about: the garden and what’s growing, bird diverters and why they matter... wallipinis (underground greenhouses ...yes really) ... love, because of course we did ... writers retreats and what we’re building toward here

And so many cat moments... some hidden and some not.

This is Purring Oaks. 60 acres in southwest Michigan. A permaculture land project, a future writers’ and artists’ residency, and the place where I write most of what you read here.

We are still building. There is so much more to show you as it grows and we build more things outside this season. Consider this the introduction.

No captions on this one ...first time live, still learning. Horizontal next time. Authentic always.

Learn more at purringoaks.com

More coming. The land has a lot to say.

Brook

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Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

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Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

I want to start with a map.

Not a metaphor. An actual map.

The Mercator projection is the one that hung on the wall of almost every classroom you ever sat in. It makes Europe look enormous. Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa. In reality Africa is fourteen times larger. The distortion wasn’t accidental. It was designed in 1569 by a Flemish cartographer to make navigation easier for European sea trade. It has been quietly teaching everyone born into Western education ever since that Europe is the center of the world. That everything else arranges itself around that center in diminishing importance.

We learned the world was shaped wrong before we learned to read.

This is what I mean when I say the wound runs deep. Not that white people are uniquely evil. Not that guilt is the appropriate permanent response. The systems are so embedded. So present from the very first images we were handed of how reality is organized. Swimming in them without noticing is the default condition. Seeing them requires effort. Most people were never taught that the effort was necessary.

That is where the wound begins. Not in individual malice. In inherited distortion so normalized it looks like truth.

How We Teach the Wound Forward

Columbus discovered America.

Most of us learned that sentence before we learned long division. We learned it in the same matter-of-fact tone as the capital of France is Paris. As settled fact. As the beginning of the story.

Here is what the story leaves out: Columbus never stepped foot on the North American continent. He landed in the Caribbean, thought he was in India, and maintained that belief until he died. He was wrong about where he was. Wrong about what he found. Wrong until his last breath. And we named a holiday after him anyway. We built an entire civilization’s origin story around a man who was lost and refused to know it.

Seventy million people already lived across these continents when Columbus arrived. The word discovery requires that their existence not fully count. That they be, in some foundational narrative sense, not quite real. Not quite the kind of people whose prior presence constitutes a prior claim.

That is not just a historical error. It is a lesson about whose reality counts. Taught to children. Repeated until it becomes the water.

The phrase person of color does something similar in the opposite direction. It defines everyone by their relationship to an unnamed white default. Color is the deviation. Whiteness is the unspoken norm from which everyone else varies. I have started calling myself a person of no color instead. Which is both a joke and a precise description of what whiteness actually is. Not a culture. Not a lineage. Not a people with a shared set of practices and stories and obligations to one another.

A political category. An absence dressed as a default. A cage that forgot it was a cage.

When you start seeing these things, really seeing them, something uncomfortable happens in the body. A kind of vertiginous recognition. How much of what I took as neutral was actually a story someone told me? That discomfort is not guilt. It is the beginning of accurate perception. It is worth staying with rather than running from.

The Three Escape Routes

Most white people, when they begin to feel that discomfort, take one of three routes away from it.

The first is guilt performance. The elaborate public contrition. The constant centering of one’s own feelings of shame as the primary response to others’ harm. This looks like accountability. It functions as its own form of self-absorption. The wound gets made about the person feeling bad rather than the people who were harmed. Guilt performance is exhausting to witness. It changes very little structurally. It is also a way of feeling the feeling without metabolizing it. The shame gets expressed and re-expressed without ever actually moving through.

The second escape route is spiritual bypassing and appropriation. Running toward Indigenous ceremony, African spiritual practice, Eastern traditions. Seeking the genuine communal warmth those traditions still hold without the accountability or relationship that would make that exchange reciprocal. The hunger driving this is real. The Indigenous elder, the Black church, the Andean lineage holder did not cause the emptiness white seekers are trying to fill. They are not obligated to fill it. Taking their forms without their context is another extraction dressed as reverence.

The third escape route is defensive numbness. I didn’t personally own slaves. I wasn’t there. Why is this my problem? This one feels like logic. It functions as dissociation. It severs the self from lineage entirely. You cannot selectively inherit. You cannot claim the meitheal and the mir and the Paris Commune as your lineage while declining the parts that participated in harm. The inheritance is whole or it isn’t inheritance at all.

All three escape routes have the same destination. Not feeling the actual thing.

The actual thing is worth feeling. Because on the other side of it is the only ground solid enough to build from.

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The Cement Vest

I want to try to describe what white guilt actually feels like in the body. Not as concept. As sensation.

Because I think most writing about whiteness stays in the head. It names the intellectual problem. It traces the historical evidence. It argues the case. And all of that is necessary and none of it is sufficient. Because the wound lives below the argument. It lives in the tissue.

White guilt, in my experience and in the experience of many people I’ve sat with, is the sensation of trying to carry shame and grief simultaneously. Two different weights. Two different textures. Neither one releasing the other.

Shame contracts. It pulls inward. It makes the chest small and the shoulders round and the breath shallow. The throat slowly closes while internally it says: I am the problem. I am the harm. There is something wrong at my core. If I just don’t say anything, then I won’t say anything more wrong.

Grief expands. It wants to move outward, to be witnessed, to be held and released. It says: something real was lost. Something real was done. I need to feel the size of it. It feels too big to hold.

When you try to carry both at once, neither moves. The shame prevents the grief from expanding. The grief prevents the shame from resolving. And what you get is a specific kind of frozen weight. Heavy. Immovable. Like wearing a cement vest.

You know you should do something. You can’t quite move under the weight of it. And the inaction produces more shame, which produces more weight, which produces more inaction.

That is not a moral failing. That is a physiological consequence of an unresolvable double bind.

And here is the thing about a body in a cement vest: it cannot be changed by the people around it. The stiffness creates no entrance for shifting. The rigidity keeps the very thing out that could help: contact, relationship, the co-regulation that the nervous system needs to actually metabolize what it’s carrying.

Malleability is part of community. A body that cannot soften cannot rest into the collective. Cannot be woven into the all. Cannot bring its hands to someone else’s harvest because the arms are locked at the sides holding the weight.

The release of the cement vest is not absolution. It is not being let off the hook. It is not pretending the harm didn’t happen or doesn’t require response. It is choosing to put down the weight that is preventing you from actually responding. From actually moving. From actually being in relationship with the reckoning rather than paralyzed by it.

You cannot repair from inside a cement vest. You can only repair from a body that can move.

Grief Is Not Guilt

Now that we've felt the difference in the body, let me name it more precisely.

I want to make a distinction that matters enormously.

Guilt is about what you did. Personal. Present-tense. It asks for confession and amendment.

Grief is about what was lost. Collective. Historical. It asks for witnessing.

What most white people are actually carrying, underneath the performance or the bypassing or the numbness, is grief. Two griefs. Almost never held together.

The first is the grief of what European communal cultures surrendered to become white. The meitheal that got traded away. The mir that got dissolved. The specific shape of communality that lived in Irish and Russian and Italian and Polish and Jewish bloodlines before each group was invited to abandon their particular identity in exchange for the protections of racial category. Something real was lost in that trade. Not just for the people who made it. For everyone who came after them and inherited the emptiness without understanding where it came from.

The second grief is for what was done to others in the name of whiteness. The magnitude of that harm is almost impossible to hold all at once. The centuries of slavery. The genocide of Indigenous peoples. The ongoing extraction that continues in different forms today. It is easier to perform guilt about it. Or to go numb. Or to run from it into the arms of the very cultures harmed by it. It is much harder to simply grieve it. To let it be as large as it actually is. To feel in the body what it means to have that in your lineage.

Both griefs are real. Both need to be held. Neither cancels the other. The loss of your own communal culture does not justify or explain the harm done to others. And the harm done to others does not make your own loss illegitimate. These are not competing claims. They are two true things that have to be held simultaneously.

That simultaneous holding is the hardest part. It is also the only honest part.

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People Suck as a Fashion Trend

In the 1970s, men wore short shorts. Not ironically. Not as a costume. As normal clothes, in public, without any particular social meaning attached. Today those same shorts read as comic. As hopelessly dated. As evidence of a prior era’s spectacular lack of taste.

Fashion cycles are arbitrary. What gets coded as masculine or feminine, appropriate or absurd, sophisticated or embarrassing shifts faster than we acknowledge. With less underlying logic than we pretend. We make fun of what was fashionable five years ago with the same certainty that our current aesthetic is the finally-correct one.

People suck has become a fashion trend in exactly this way.

The cynicism. The knowing irony. The ambient cultural agreement that humans are fundamentally lazy, greedy, narcissistic, not to be trusted, probably going to disappoint you. The mugs. The bumper stickers. The comment sections. The sophisticated unsentimental view that believing in people is naive. That believing in community is for those who haven’t been around long enough to know better.

This posture got normalized until it started feeling like realism. Like what smart people believe. Like the finally-correct view after all the sentimental illusions have been stripped away.

But we forget. We forget that people are also loving and full of care and attention and mutual respect and knowledge and wonder and wisdom. We forget because the trend says forgetting is sophisticated.

And we forget because the people most invested in manufacturing our cynicism need us to have forgotten.

Look at who is setting the trend right now. The people accumulating billions while others die from preventable causes. The ones whose continued accumulation requires that most people be understood as not quite worthy of investment. They have surrounded themselves with other people who made the same trade. Wealth for morality. Accumulation for community. Power for love. When that is your entire social world, when every person around you made that same trade and calls it success, that becomes your fashion trend. That becomes what sophisticated people believe. That becomes reality.

And now some of them are saying it out loud. Bio baby used as a slur. A derogatory term for a human being born the way humans have always been born. The preference for artificial intelligence over biological people stated plainly. Not as philosophy. As class position. As the logical conclusion of a worldview that decided long ago that humanity, broadly, is a problem to be optimized away rather than a community to be tended.

That is not a personal eccentricity. That is a cultural signal from the top. And it trickles down. Because the culture built by people who believe that, the media, the narratives, the ambient water we all swim in, teaches everyone else to see each other the same way. Lazy. Greedy. Not worth trusting. A threat before they’re a neighbor.

A population that believes in each other is ungovernable in the most beautiful way. A population convinced that people suck is much easier to keep isolated and consuming and afraid.

The cynicism is not coming from inside you. It is being manufactured and distributed and worn as fashion by people who benefit enormously from your isolation.

That is as arbitrary as the length of shorts. As constructed as any trend. And trends change. Faster than we think. People are already loving each other. Already showing up. Already building the thing. The trend just hasn’t caught up yet with what is actually happening in ordinary life. In the ordinary moments that don’t make the news because they are not spectacular enough.

The move. The casserole. The kid who gets picked up. The harvest brought in without anyone asking.

The Fear That We Are Broken

I want to name the fear directly. It lives in a lot of white bodies doing this work. It almost never gets spoken out loud.

What if we are broken? What if the harm is so total, so foundational, so woven into every system and story and map on the wall, that there is nothing underneath it worth reclaiming? What if the only honest position is permanent contrition? What if trying to reclaim anything is just another form of centering ourselves?

I have felt this fear. I think many white people doing genuine reckoning feel it. It is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing with reassurance.

Here is what I actually believe after sitting with it.

The fear of being broken is itself a product of the same system that caused the harm. A system that needed people to believe humanity was essentially unworthy required first that white people believe it about themselves. The emptiness. The isolation. The people suck fashion trend. These did not spare white people. The cage was built for everyone.

Which means the question is not whether white people are broken. The question is whether broken is the end of the story or the middle of it.

Every lineage that held genuine communal practice understood fallibility as a condition of membership. Not a disqualification from it. The Brehon Laws built in mechanisms for repair. The mir redistributed resources precisely because need was understood as inevitable and normal. The Paris Commune was full of imperfect people doing something extraordinary for seventy-two days. They were violently stopped. The fact that they were stopped does not mean it didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

Fallibility is not brokenness. Fallibility is human. The belief that we must be perfect before we deserve community, that we must have clean hands before we earn belonging, that the harm must be fully repaired before we are allowed to also reclaim what was good... that belief is capitalism and patriarchy in the body. It is the logic of worthiness as something earned rather than something inherent.

You were born worthy of repair. Your lineage was never so thoroughly destroyed that nothing worth reclaiming remains underneath. The meitheal existed. The mir existed. Before the forgetting, your people knew how to love each other.

That is not consolation. That is counter-evidence. And it is the only ground solid enough to build repair from.

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What Reparations Actually Requires

Material reparations, the actual redistribution of actual resources to people and communities who have been systematically extracted from, are real and necessary and not what this essay is primarily about.

But I want to name something about the inner condition from which material repair either means something or doesn’t.

You cannot write a check from a place of shame and have it function as repair. Shame-driven giving is still about the giver. It is still centered on managing the feeling of wrongness rather than genuinely responding to the need in front of you. It reproduces the same dynamic it claims to be healing. The powerful person dispensing from above to manage their own discomfort.

Repair that actually means something comes from a different place. From having sat with the grief honestly. From having felt in the body what it means to carry this lineage. From having done enough inner work that the response to harm is no longer primarily about how the harm makes you feel. But about what the harm actually requires.

That inner work is not instead of material repair. It is the condition that makes material repair something other than another transaction.

Owning your place in the pain does not mean permanent flagellation. It means being honest about what is true. The map was wrong. The history was told partially. The systems were built on extraction and continue to extract. That is not your personal moral failure. It is the water you were handed. And now you know the water is contaminated. And you have the capacity to choose differently.

That choice, made from grief rather than guilt, from honest reckoning rather than performance, from the knowledge that you have something real to rebuild toward, is where repair actually begins.

The Cage That Forgot It Was a Cage

Whiteness was always a construction.

Not a culture. Not a lineage. Not a people with shared practices and stories and obligations to one another. A political category invented to consolidate power and distribute it along a color line that had no prior meaning in the places the Irish and the Russians and the Italians came from.

When I call myself a person of no color I am being precise. There is nothing to defend in whiteness as whiteness because there was never anything there. The cage was the point. The emptiness was the point. A people with no specific culture of their own, no communal practices of their own, no obligations to one another beyond the shared category are much easier to organize around consumption and fear.

Releasing whiteness as an identity is not a loss. It is the removal of a cage. And underneath the cage is what was always there. The specific, rooted, particular cultures that got surrendered in exchange for the category. The Irish with their meitheal. The Russians with their mir. The specific shapes of love and obligation and communal life that existed before the trade was made.

Still there. Waiting underneath the construction. Waiting to be remembered.

That is what this whole series is about. Not the cage. What was underneath it all along.

A Somatic Check-In

I want to ask you to do something uncomfortable.

Find a place in your body where you carry something unresolved about your lineage. Not a thought about it. The actual felt sensation. Maybe it lives as a heaviness in the chest. A tightness across the shoulders. A held quality in the belly that never quite releases. The specific dense weight of something you’ve been carrying without putting down.

Notice if it feels more like shame or more like grief. Or both at once. The contraction of one and the unexpressed size of the other.

Don’t try to fix it or explain it or resolve it right now. Just locate it. Let it be as large as it actually is for a moment without managing it.

Now ask it, not your mind, the sensation itself: what do you need to be witnessed?

And then ask: what would it feel like to put this down long enough to actually move?

You don’t have to have an answer. The questions are enough for now.

The wound underneath the search is not the destination. It is the threshold. You have to walk through it to get to the reclamation. Skipping it means carrying it forever in the body as the unexplained weight that makes every room feel slightly wrong. The contraction below the sternum. The something-is-off that you can’t quite name.

On the other side of the threshold is not purity or absolution or clean hands. It is just more honest ground. Ground you can actually build from.

A body that can soften. A body that can move. A body that can bring its hands to the actual work.

That is enough. That is everything, actually.

in practice of living in reckoning

brook woolf

If this found something true in you I’d genuinely love to know. I’m new to writing publicly and every comment and share tells me this work is finding the people it’s meant for. There is enough room for all of our stories. Passing this along is itself an act of the tradition we’re trying to reclaim. Thank you for being here.

-

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Essay One — Before the Forgetting — is where the counter-evidence lives. What your lineage knew before the wound. Essay Four (coming June 13th)— What I Got Wrong About Community — is where the steps forward are. This essay is the threshold between them. You don’t have to stay here long. Just long enough to feel what’s true.

this writing is free. intentionally, always.

i’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. i’m not interested in reproducing that. so everything here is open. no tiers. no locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

but writing is also how i’m building a life. and lives need tending.

so here’s how this works. if you have a little extra and something here moved you... buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. if you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. that’s the whole system. it runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

no pressure. no wall. no guilt.

just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

buy me a tea

Leave a comment

Sources and Further Reading

On Cartography, Representation, and Systemic Distortion

• Arno Peters, The Peters Projection World Map (1974)

• J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)

On the Construction of Whiteness

• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995)

• David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (Verso, 1991)

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

• Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (Beacon Press, 2018)

On Indigenous History and the Mythology of Discovery

• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014)

• David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992)

On Grief, Trauma, and Repair

• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017)

• Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow (North Atlantic Books, 2015)

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017)

On Wealth, Inequality, and the Manufactured Belief in Human Unworthiness

• Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (Little, Brown, 2020)

• bell hooks, All About Love (William Morrow, 2000)

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009)

On Reparations

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations (The Atlantic, 2014) — available free online

• William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

Not intentionally. Just a door that didn’t quite catch. A small thing. The kind you don’t notice until you have to.

I was fully present for the first session. I had no reason not to be. I didn’t know yet. Hands on someone’s back, breath steady, the room doing what rooms do when two people trust each other enough to be quiet together.

The knock came after.

My upstairs neighbor. She’d seen a gray cat in the hallway and assumed it had wandered out from her own apartment. One cat spotted. One cat reported. She had no idea there were two of them. Both gray. Both sisters. Nearly identical.

I found one in the hallway immediately. And then I realized the other was gone.

And then my next client arrived.

I made a choice in that moment that felt both vulnerable and necessary. I told them. Not everything. Just enough. That something unexpected had happened. That I was present but wanted to be honest about my capacity. That the door between sessions would stay slightly ajar.

It felt good to say it out loud.

This is what twenty years of building real community looks like in practice. Not the performance of perfect presence. The honesty that says: I am here and I am also human and those two things are not in conflict. My client didn’t need me to pretend. They needed me to be real with them. Clarity is its own form of care. Honesty in that moment was empowerment... for both of us.

And then I went in anyway. 90% there. The other 10% quietly searching.

This is the somatic part nobody talks about. The body holding two things simultaneously. Hands doing the work, breath staying steady, presence offered as fully as possible... while somewhere underneath a quiet alarm is running. Not panic. Just the hum of not knowing. The nervous system doing its background processing while the foreground stays professional.

What I didn’t give it permission to do was surface the grief. The three year old cat I lost once. The months that took. The specific texture of that particular heartbreak. And yet there it was... arriving uninvited into the gap between focus and fear, the way old losses always do when new ones threaten.

I breathed through it. Kept going.

What nobody knew yet... not me, not the neighbor, not anyone... was that Mushroom had already made her own decision entirely. While I was dismantling closets on the floor below, she had quietly found her way up to the third floor and into a stranger’s apartment. A trick of the eye. Two gray sisters moving through the building in completely different directions while I searched desperately for one.

The math didn’t add up until the second knock.

Same neighbor. Hours later. Another gray cat found running from under the bed while the man upstairs was doing laundry.

The mystery had a reveal built into it that none of us saw coming.

I ran up with treats and hope and approximately zero social graces remaining after a full day of contained anxiety.

His name was Mark. His girlfriend Angie was there too. She kept saying don’t worry, we are cat people, we will find her. There was a warmth to that. Also a particular atmosphere in the apartment... the kind of afternoon that had clearly been well lubricated with both liquid and possibly other medicinal connections. I could tell by the air. By the energy. By the way, the space had a very specific relationship with clutter that suggested guests were not a regular feature.

They did not want me looking around.

My anxiety and my love for this cat very much wanted me to look around.

Anxiety and care won. I scanned every visible surface and corner with the focus of someone who had been running a quiet emergency protocol since noon while pretending everything was fine.

No cat.

His name was Mark.

“Oh that’s my dad’s name,” I said, already aware as the words left my mouth that this was not the right room for this particular joke. “Hopefully you’re not as traumatizing.”

Silence.

I watched it not land.

“I know,” I said. “Not all Marks.”

Dude, I doubled down.

Angie said don’t worry again. I retreated downstairs defeated... the cat still upstairs, hostage to a stranger’s weird energy and my own failed comedy.

I texted the owner thirty minutes before they got home: funny story... your cat is in the upstairs apartment.

We went back up together. Mark had shifted. Didn’t know when he’d be back now. Don’t worry, he’d find the cat. The door closed.

We walked downstairs and sat with not knowing. The low hum still running. The old grief still hovering at the edges. The present moment asking us to just stay in it a little longer.

Forty five minutes later he knocked.

Mushroom was found.

We ran upstairs. And the moment she was in our hands... my shoulders dropped. All the way. The kind of release you don’t know you’ve been holding until it’s suddenly gone. The breath that had been sitting just above my chest since noon finally found somewhere to land. The body keeping its own account of the whole day and settling it in one exhale the moment four paws were accounted for.

We walked back downstairs with two gray sisters safely home.

Locked doors and open hearts.

Read the room... and when you can’t, at least stop after the first joke.

Some days just insist on being hell days no matter how gently you try to move through them. The body runs its quiet emergency protocol while the hands keep working. The old grief shows up without being invited. The dark humor bombs spectacularly. A cat solves her own mystery by disappearing into a stranger’s apartment three floors up.

And then she comes home anyway.

The practice isn’t perfect presence. It’s the 90% that keeps showing up while the other 10% handles what it needs to handle. It’s telling your client the truth about your capacity and watching that honesty become its own kind of medicine. It’s the shoulders finally dropping. The exhale at the end. The joy that arrives after the hell.

We are not separate from our humanity in this work. We are made more useful by it.

Where do you go when you have to be present for someone else, but your own nervous system is running its own emergency protocol?

What does that feel like in the body? Where does your body hold the most tension?

How do you come back to yourself after?

in practice of living in the 90%

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

Anger is jai ron... hot-hearted. Calm down, is jai yen... cool your heart. I understand is khao jai... heart understanding. Generosity is nam jai... water flowing from the heart. Consideration is greng jai... a love so careful it won’t impose on you.

Five different architectures for the same human impulse. Five ways of saying: this matters more than my comfort.

Thai is not alone in this. The Tamil language of Sri Lanka has over forty nuanced words for love, including a specific word for the action of showing love by holding someone in your arms. The ancient Greeks had eros, agape, philia, and storge — four separate words for four separate textures of love, each precise enough to mean something the others couldn’t. In the Twi language of Ghana, akoma signifies the heart and is used to describe deep emotional connections and sincerity. In Swahili, moyo is the heart as the seat of all emotion.

These are not coincidences. These are cultures that decided love was worth the vocabulary. That the heart was complicated enough to deserve specificity. That caring for one other was real enough to name carefully.

Meanwhile, we built a world where the quarterly report went up while the neighbors went hungry. Where the efficiency metric replaced the casserole. Where the value of a thing got measured by what it returned financially rather than what it returned humanly.

And the people who rose to the top of those systems... the ones whose names we know, whose companies we use, whose art we consumed and whose crimes we eventually had to acknowledge... they didn’t get there despite the values embedded in our institutions. They got there because of them. The values were never hidden. They were just wearing nicer clothes.

We got so comfortable with it that Martha Stewart did her time and came out cooler. We recalibrated what was forgivable based on how entertaining the person was or how we had humanized them.

This is not cynicism. This is the map.

This is not only about money.

It’s about what money buys that slowly does the most damage. Not the things. The distance. The walls. The car that goes directly into the garage. The neighborhood where you never have to need anyone. The infrastructure of not-needing that gets built around accumulation and then gets confused with safety. The isolation and the convenience.

Research from Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner across dozens of studies and thousands of participants found that as a person’s level of wealth increases their feelings of compassion and empathy go down... and their feelings of entitlement and self-interest go up. But here is the part that matters most: when you lack institutional support, when you face real threats, the only way to survive is to connect with other people. Poorer people assist others more. Not because they are morally superior. Because the room kept asking them to need each other.

The architecture of comfort is also accidentally the architecture of disconnection.

The little box with the good insulation and the delivery app and the streaming service and the garage door that closes before the neighbor can wave... it works. It keeps you safe. And it slowly makes you forget that you ever needed anyone.

And forgetting that you need people means forgetting how to care for them.

Not because you’re bad. Because the room stopped asking you to.

That’s the saddest version of this. Not malice. Forgetting. The slow erosion of a muscle that only stays strong when it’s used. Care as a practice that atrophies in isolation the same way a language does when you stop speaking it.

The Thai have hundreds of words for the heart because they kept speaking them. Because the culture kept asking people to need each other in the open. Greng jai. Nam jai. The obligation of tenderness built into the grammar.

We built grammar around independence instead.

And now we’re lonely in our well-insulated boxes, wondering why something feels wrong.

Something is wrong. Caring shouldn’t be a forgotten thing. And yet here we are... having to remind each other that we do it. That we always did it. It is indicative of our humanity.

And yet.

We still drop everything for our friends.

We still bring food to the neighbor without being asked. We still build organizations centered around care even when donations are tight and grants are harder to find and the infrastructure of generosity keeps getting defunded. We still show up to protest injustice in the rain with handmade signs and tired feet and the specific rage of people who know better is possible. We still buy groceries for the person behind us whose card didn’t go through. We still stay.

Research on twelve-month-old infants shows more than 80% will spontaneously move to help a stranger before they have a language for why.

Helping is not a virtue we develop.

We already exist with it.

Love was never supposed to be affordable in that economy.

But we keep doing it anyway. Inherently. Stubbornly. In every language and every city and every ordinary moment that never makes the news because it isn’t spectacular enough to monetize.

The Thai have hundreds of words for the heart. The Tamil have forty words for love. The Greeks had four. The Akan have akoma. Every culture that took the time to look carefully at what it means to care for each other found that one word was never going to be enough.

We already know this. In our bodies. In the way we show up anyway.

We just keep forgetting that we can do it even more deliberately. That the world doesn’t have to run on values we inherited from people who never represented us. That another way is not only possible... it is already happening. In the rain. In the grocery line. In the organization that stays open. In the friend who gets on the plane.

The heart has always had more words than we were taught.

We only need to remember that we already know them.

in practice of living in the unaffordable

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work, watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. If you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

Not collective. Collecting.

That is the distinction I kept arriving at, again and again, across years of walking into rooms that looked like home and weren’t. The altar was beautiful. The language was right. Someone called me special within the first hour. And somewhere below my sternum, something went carefully still.

Not the stillness of arrival. The stillness of recognition.

I don’t feel community here. I feel collected.

What I Carried In

Before I was twelve I had already sat with a Bahá’í teacher who mentored me through multiple religious traditions as a serious student, not a tourist. I did my own private version of Ramadan out of genuine curiosity, quietly, because it called to me. I visited the Buddhist retreat space where my mother was staying and felt something real and wordless in the silence there. I attended Christian youth group on Wednesday nights in middle school. I read Osho while my mother underlined passages in the margins, having studied with him herself.

I became a vegetarian at ten because I watched Babe and decided I wasn’t going to eat him. Nobody told me to. It just became true in my body and I held it.

By the time I was also doing psychic testing and reading Rosicrucian texts that are rarely shared unless you pass certain assessments, and receiving invitations to secret magical orders I declined more than once... my scientific mind had already developed the question that would follow me everywhere: not what does this tradition claim but what does this tradition actually produce? Not the theology. The fruit. The actual texture of what gets built between people when a practice is lived honestly.

My values and ethics haven’t always been welcome in the rooms I’ve walked into. I held them anyway. They have always come from inside me, not from any group that recognized them.

I bring all of this up not as biography but as context. Because what follows is not the critique of someone who never tried. It is the observation of someone who was invited all the way in... and still felt the coldness at the center.

The Flattery of Being Called Special

Here is something I want to name carefully because I think it catches a lot of people, including people who know better. Even myself at times have gotten caught in specialness and feeling cool for a moment of gloat.

When you walk into a room and someone calls you special within the first hour, something lights up. Something that has been waiting to be seen relaxes slightly toward the warmth of it. This is human. This is not weakness. This is a nervous system that is genuinely hungry for recognition responding to what feels like food.

But being called special is not the same as belonging. And in spiritual and esoteric communities particularly, it is often the opening move of something that has very little to do with love.

The psychic testing. The rare texts handed only to those who pass. The invitation to the inner circle. The secret order that has identified something in you worth cultivating. All of it has the architecture of profound recognition... and underneath it is a collecting impulse dressed in initiatory language.

You are special enough to be useful to us.

I have been assessed this way more times than I can count. I have been found useful. I have been invited in on the basis of what I contain rather than who I am. And I declined, each time, because something in my body knew the difference even when my mind was briefly tempted by the flattery of it.

Being singled out is not the same as belonging. Belonging is not being exceptional in a group. Belonging is being ordinary in one. Being unremarkable. Being held not because you passed a test but because you showed up on a Tuesday with nothing particular to offer.

The secret order will always need the next special person. Community just needs you.

This particular flavor of flattery, the chosen one, the exceptional individual, the rare find, is deeply American. Deeply shaped by the mythology of meritocracy... the idea that recognition means you’ve earned something real, that being singled out is the same as being loved. It maps onto whiteness in a specific way too. The promise that if you are exceptional enough, special enough, initiated enough, you will finally arrive somewhere that feels like home.

But you can’t earn your way into belonging. That is the wrong currency entirely.

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The Rooms

I have sat in neo-pagan circles where the altar was genuinely beautiful. Where people spoke with real reverence about the old ways, about the land, about cycles and seasons and the wisdom held in pre-Christian European traditions. Where I felt, walking in, something that resembled hope.

And where I felt, somewhere below my sternum, a quiet contraction. A not-quite-rightness I couldn’t name at first.

I have sat in witchcraft communities where the aesthetic was immaculate... the carefully curated tools, the intentional outfits, the shelves of books with spines facing outward. Where the Instagram feed looked like belonging and the in-person reality felt like a subtle performance. Where the most spiritually fluent person in the room held the most power, and everyone else was quietly auditioning.

I have sat in law of attraction spaces where the language was luminous... abundance, alignment, manifestation, frequency. Where suffering was reframed as misalignment and poverty was a vibrational problem to be solved by the individual experiencing it. Where the implicit message underneath all the light language was: your reality is entirely your creation, which means other people’s pain is entirely theirs.

I have sat in mystery school containers with elaborate hierarchies of initiation. With gatekeeping dressed as discernment. With secrecy framed as sacred when it mostly seemed to protect the person at the top.

I have sat in liberal white Christian churches where the coffee was good and the sermon was inoffensive and the welcome was genuine and nobody’s actual harvest ever got brought in collectively... because that would require a level of intimacy the structure wasn’t built to hold.

I want to say clearly: I am not condemning everyone in these spaces. I have met genuinely loving people inside all of them. People who were trying. People whose hunger was real.

But the containers kept failing the hunger. And I kept asking why.

What Capitalism Does to Spiritual Community

Capitalism doesn’t just shape our economies. It shapes our nervous systems. It teaches us that belonging is something you earn, purchase, or perform your way into. That community is a product with a price point. That your value in any group is tied to what you bring... your knowledge, your aesthetic, your fluency, your willingness to consume the right things and signal the right affiliations.

And when people who are genuinely hungry for community go looking... they find markets.

The witchy store full of beautiful objects that promise to connect you to something ancient if you buy enough of them. The online coven with tiered membership pricing. The law of attraction course that will finally unlock your abundance if you invest in yourself at the premium level. The mystery school where the real teachings are always just one more initiation away.

The cauldron becomes a product. The tarot deck replaces the elder you’d sit with. The crystal replaces the neighbor who shows up when things fall apart.

And the hunger that walked in the door walks back out still unfed... with a lighter wallet and a heavier sense that maybe the problem is you. That you haven’t found your people yet because you haven’t quite become someone worth finding.

That is capitalism in the body. That is the market logic of scarcity applied to love.

The Law of Assumption Problem

There is a practice gaining significant traction right now called the law of assumption. It builds on law of attraction principles but goes further: your reality is not just influenced by your thoughts and feelings, it is entirely constructed by your assumptions. You are the only real consciousness. Everyone else in your life is essentially a character in your story... their behavior, their choices, their responses to you, all of it a projection of your own mind.

I want to be careful here because there is something genuinely useful in the broader inquiry into how our inner state shapes our perception and experience. That is real and worth exploring.

But follow this premise all the way to its conclusion and you arrive somewhere that collapses under its own logic.

If you are the only real consciousness in your reality... then the person selling you the course also believes that you are their NPC. To them, you are the background character. You paid real money to a figure in someone else’s dream. The premise only holds together as long as you never think about the person on the other side of the transaction. The moment you do, the whole architecture falls apart. If the law of assumption is universally true, it’s true for everyone simultaneously, which means nobody is the real person and everyone is someone else’s projection.

It only works in isolation. Which is precisely the point.

And here is where this stops being just philosophically absurd and becomes physiologically wrong:

Healing does not happen in isolation. This is not a spiritual preference. It is how human nervous systems actually work. The research on trauma — from Bessel van der Kolk’s work to Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing to Resmaa Menakem’s work on racialized trauma in the body — all points to the same mechanism: co-regulation. The nervous system heals in the presence of another regulated nervous system. You literally cannot complete certain healing cycles alone. Another body has to be present. The completion requires relationship.

Which means the most isolationist spiritual premise imaginable is also the one most guaranteed to keep people stuck in their own unmetabolized pain.

There is also something worth naming about how healing actually arrives. In my experience, and in the experience of nearly everyone I’ve sat with as a practitioner, the most significant healing moments don’t come from the direction you were facing. They come sideways. Through a conversation you didn’t plan. Through a friend saying something offhand that cracked something open. Through laughter at the exact wrong moment that turned out to be exactly right.

Healing happens in community, and often by surprise, and often not quite in the direction you were seeking... but precisely in the direction you needed.

The law of assumption forecloses all of that. It puts you alone in a room with your own assumptions and calls it awakening.

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The Casserole, the Move, the Ride to the Airport

I saw a thread recently where people were judging someone for asking friends to help them move.

Not strangers. Friends. People who presumably love this person and might want to show up for them.

The comments were incredulous. Just hire movers. Why would you ask that of people? As if calling on the people in your life when you need something physical done has become a social violation. As if the correct adult response to needing help is to pay a stranger rather than receive from someone who loves you.

We have quietly built a culture where asking a friend to watch your kid is an imposition, where asking for a ride to the airport is inconvenient, where accepting a casserole when you’re sick feels like admitting weakness. Where the marker of having it together is that you have successfully monetized every need... hired it out, subscribed to it, solved it through the market so that no one has to be inconvenienced by your actual humanness.

People stopped asking. And then they stopped being asked. And then the muscle atrophied entirely. And now there are people who are genuinely uncertain whether it’s acceptable to call a friend when they need something real... because the line between friendship and imposition has been so colonized by market logic that ordinary mutual aid feels like asking for too much.

We didn’t just lose community as a philosophy. We lost the granular daily practices that community was actually built from. The move. The kids. The ride. The casserole. The Tuesday showing up without being asked. Those weren’t nice extras on top of real friendship. They were the friendship. They were the meitheal happening in ordinary life.

And we let the market convince us they were burdens to be outsourced.

Ugg Boots and PBR

A friend of mine was once told, by someone with good intentions and genuine politics, that she should be careful not to appropriate other cultures at her upcoming party. She should stick to things from her own cultural background.

My friend, who is white, thought about this for a moment, then scoffed.

“So... ugg boots and PBR? That sounds horrible.”

I laughed for a long time. We all did. And then I sat with why it was so funny.

It’s funny because it’s true. When you strip away everything white American culture has borrowed, absorbed, and frequently failed to credit... what remains as authentically white in the popular imagination is remarkably thin. The cultural markers most associated with whiteness as a category are either borrowed from elsewhere or so thoroughly shaped by consumer capitalism that they barely qualify as culture at all.

But here’s what that joke is actually revealing: the project of constructing whiteness as a racial identity required European immigrants to abandon their specific ethnic communal cultures. The Irish who became white gave up the meitheal. The Russians who became white gave up the mir. The Italians, the Poles, the Jews, the Germans: each group that assimilated into whiteness surrendered something specific and irreplaceable in exchange for the protections that racial category offered in America.

And what filled the vacuum left by all those surrendered specificities... was the market. Consumer identity replaced ethnic identity. Brand affiliation replaced communal practice. The things you buy replaced the things your people do together.

There is even a term white trash, that exists specifically to shame white people who didn’t successfully make that trade. Who kept the front porch. Who kept asking neighbors for help. Who kept showing up with food uninvited. Who kept the communal behaviors that looked, to aspirational white professional culture, like failure to individualize properly.

The people who held onto the most recognizable remnants of genuine European communal practice got called low class for it. The people who successfully atomized and professionalized got called aspirational.

That is not accidental. That is the architecture of capitalism protecting itself by making community look like poverty.

What the Research Says

Studies of social capital, the actual bonds of mutual obligation, material support, and showing up for each other, consistently find that predominantly white American communities have seen the steepest decline of any demographic group over the last fifty years. Robert Putnam’s landmark research documented this collapse in granular detail: the disappearing civic organizations, the shrinking dinner tables, the neighbors who no longer know each other’s names.

And the communities demonstrating the highest rates of genuine mutual aid, collective grief, and material support... are disproportionately not white ones. Black churches in particular have historically functioned as what scholars call invisible institutions... providing food, legal aid, education, housing support, and collective grief processing entirely outside formal systems, simply because the tradition demanded it. The scripture was taken seriously. The fruit followed.

This is not because white people are incapable of community. It is because the specific historical project of constructing whiteness required something devastating: the surrender of ethnic communal identity in exchange for racial category. And what filled that vacuum was market logic. And market logic, as it turns out, cannot produce the thing humans actually need from each other.

The Two Traps

When white people who genuinely want something real can’t find it in white community spaces... they tend to fall into one of two traps.

The first is appropriation. Taking the forms of Indigenous, Black, or other cultures of color that still hold genuine communal practice... without the accountability, the relationship, or the reciprocity that would make that exchange an exchange rather than an extraction. The sweat lodge without the nation. The ubuntu philosophy without the African political context. The cacao ceremony without the Mayan lineage holder. The hunger is real. The container is borrowed without consent. And the underlying belief, that your own lineage has nothing to offer, goes entirely unexamined.

The second trap is performative smallness. Effacing your own culture entirely. Treating your lineage as only a source of harm. Trying to belong to communities of color by shrinking, deferring, making yourself as unthreatening as possible. Which is its own form of not belonging. And which communities you’re trying to join often experience as its own kind of burden.

Both traps have the same root: not knowing that you have something real to come home to. That your lineage, excavated honestly, past the wound and past the colonizer and past the centuries of forgetting, also holds the knowing.

You don’t have to borrow. You don’t have to shrink. You can reclaim and stand next to. That is a different posture entirely... and it is the one from which genuine solidarity becomes possible. Not guilt. Not performance. Just two people, each rooted in their own real ground, standing next to each other.

What My Mother Gave Me

My mother was also caught.

She carries capitalism in her nervous system as a deep somatic fear of poverty... born from a childhood where scarcity was real and hurt her in ways I will probably never fully know. She carries patriarchy in ways she can’t always see. She spent years seeking safety in places that couldn’t hold her, in teachers and systems and communities that promised more than they could deliver.

And yet.

She sat in every room with her whole heart open. She handed me the widest possible spiritual education not because she had it figured out, but because she believed, genuinely and without reservation, that love was the thread running through all of it if you looked honestly enough. She gave me the open eye. The willingness to walk all the way in. The scientific mind that asks not what something claims but what it actually produces.

That was her lineage of the heart coming through... even inside her own wounding.

I think about her when I walk into a new room now. The capacity to feel the contraction below the sternum before the mind has words for it. The willingness to trust that feeling as information rather than cynicism. The belief that something real exists and is worth looking for, even after every room that wasn’t it.

The rooms that weren’t it taught me something too. They taught me exactly what I’m not looking for. Which is its own kind of gift.

The Slow Leaning In

I want to end with something true and not dramatic.

As I have gotten older I can feel the difference more clearly in my body. Between being collected and being held. Between the flattery of being called special and the quieter warmth of being genuinely received. The first comes fast and loud and asks something of you immediately. The second comes slowly, sideways, without announcement.

When I am met with something that feels genuinely good now... I lean in differently. More slowly. With more trust in the leaning itself than in any declaration of what the space claims to be.

I am still hoping love will prevail. Not as a naive wish but as a hard-won orientation. One that has been tested by every room that wasn’t it and came out still believing something real exists and is worth building toward.

For white people specifically, I think this path takes longer. Not because we are less capable of love or community, but because we have more not-quite-right spaces to navigate first. More rooms that look like home and aren’t. More flattery to see through. More inherited emptiness to sit with honestly before something real can fill it.

But true equality, the kind that actually means something, requires white people to find self-love and communal love at the same time. In tandem. Safely. Not performing our way into belonging in someone else’s community. Not shrinking into guilt. Not collecting initiations and rare texts and the flattery of being chosen.

Just... learning, slowly, what it feels like when something is real. And leaning toward it.

That is enough to start with. That is everything, actually.

A Somatic Check-In

Think of a room you walked into that looked like home and wasn’t.

Don’t analyze it yet. Just locate where that memory lives in your body. The chest maybe. The belly. Something that tightened or dropped or went carefully still.

Now think of a moment — even a small one — where you felt genuinely held. Where nothing was being performed and nothing was being sold and nothing was being collected. Where you were simply... together. Maybe it was as ordinary as someone helping you carry something heavy. Maybe it was a friend who showed up without being asked. Maybe it was laughter that arrived sideways and cracked something open that needed to open.

Notice the difference between those two felt senses.

Your body already knows the difference between being collected and belonging. It has always known.

The only question is whether you’re ready to trust that knowing more than the flattery of being called special.

in practice of living in discernment

brook woolf

If this landed somewhere true in you, I’d love to know. I’m new to writing publicly and every comment and share tells me this work is finding the people it’s meant for. There is enough room for all of our stories. Passing this along is itself an act of the tradition we’re trying to reclaim. Thank you for being here.

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If you arrived here first, Essay One — Before the Forgetting — is where this series begins. It’s the counter-evidence: what your lineage knew before the forgetting happened. And if this essay left you needing somewhere to land, Essay Four — What I Got Wrong About Community — is where I try to answer what community actually looks like when it works.

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this writing is free. intentionally, always.

i’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. i’m not interested in reproducing that. so everything here is open. no tiers. no locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

but writing is also how i’m building a life. and lives need tending.

so here’s how this works. if you have a little extra and something here moved you... buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. if you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. that’s the whole system. it runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

no pressure. no wall. no guilt.

just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy me a tea

Sources and Further Reading

On Social Capital and Community Decline

• Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

• Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

On Black Churches as Invisible Institutions

• C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Duke University Press, 1990)

• Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent (Harvard University Press, 1993)

On Whiteness and the Abandonment of Ethnic Identity

• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995)

• David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (Verso, 1991)

• Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks (Rutgers University Press, 1998)

On Trauma, Co-Regulation, and Healing in Community

• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014)

• Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (North Atlantic Books, 1997)

• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017)

• Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory (Norton, 2011)

On Capitalism and Spiritual Commodification

• bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge, 2000)

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009)

• Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality (Routledge, 2004)

On Community, Love, and Political Life

• bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000)

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017)

On Positive Thinking and Individualism

• Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided (Metropolitan Books, 2009)

All sixty acres. Days of clearing and mowing and mulching and weeding and weed whacking and planting. Since December 2024, Ramon and I have taken on new roles at Purring Oaks, and the land has felt that shift in every corner. Every area has been formally touched. Every edge looked after. Something has changed in how this place holds us and we have changed in how we hold it back.

I hear so many birds. The geese had their babies. The goslings are becoming bigger before any of us had a chance to meet them properly. The bees are back. The trees are full and green for miles. Summer is here.

Cyclically, this is the season of heat and movement. Beginning to feel into the fire. Proper late spring. The months the body wants to be outside, to build, to sweat, to make things. Fall and winter are for rest and harvest. Spring for returning. Summer for doing. I know my body was resting in spring... by force, by necessity, by belly pain and inconclusive tests and three weeks of learning to receive what other people were offering. That was its season.

This is a different season. I feel a new jolt of inspiration. The sun is out and I plan to be basically naked for the next two months and let it replenish whatever this year has taken out of me. I will embrace the amber warmth with every part of my largest organ, known as skin.

What’s coming at Purring Oaks:

First, a dock for a spring-fed pond! And, even better, a wood fire hot tub. The water elements are coming for when fire season is in full effect.

We are so excited about both. Fully, unabashedly excited. Because play and whimsy and restoration and healing don’t have to be separate things. A woodfire hot tub is the first addition to what we are building toward as a full onsen experience on the land. We want a place where rest and work find each other, where a body can be in water and warmth and then go write something true. We are creating this not just for ourselves but with the community in mind. When the world is in turmoil, a respite matters. Being able to build that for others feels like the work and the joy landing in the same place at the same time.

We understand the plight of the creative. The overworked. The person who wants to do everything and whose body has quietly started keeping score. We have chronic pain. We have aging bodies. We are learning to honor them because the land is telling us to. The land always knows before we do.

In August, a native water ceremony is happening here... honoring the water elements on the land, activating healing for the plants and people and animals who call this place home.

And then September or October... the writers retreat. The movement studio needs to finish first. Once it does we can host teepees alongside it for a proper glamping experience… warm, intentional, land-based. Writers and bodies and tea and cats and a wood fire hot tub and the quiet that comes from land that has been cared for.

The sunroom is waiting. The breakfast nook is ready for tea. Catopia remains fully operational with many cats included. The moon room, with its sauna, has the cricket sounds and mood lighting ready for the quietest rest.

On the book:

Editing the hopefi novel in the background. I liked the creation part better. Imagining a world centered on care, empathy technology, and interconnected permaculture principles is a lovely way to spend a day writing. However, editing is daunting in a way that makes my AUDHD brain want to do literally anything else... including, apparently, planning a dock. If you have ever body-doubled with someone on a creative project

and found it changed everything, I may be reaching out. The process is better with people. Most things are.

This is a forever project. Sixty acres. 5200 square feet of house. 1200 square foot movement studio in progress. It will never be finished and that no longer feels overwhelming. It just feels like the work. Season by season. Hands in the dirt. Making something intentional together.

Movement is here. Let’s make some moves. The season calls.

Feel the warmth where you are right now.

Notice if your body wants to move toward it or stay still.

Either is information.

What does early summer look like where you are? Send me a photo. I mean it.

in practice of living in the season of full bloom,

Brook

Brook is a somatic data analyst, healing justice practitioner, and writer. The body has its own language… twenty years in the body, and they’re still learning to read it. The Practice of Living is their Substack on embodied wisdom and collective sense-making, and the occasional random musings that keep them up at night. It’s where the learning lives out loud… still very much in the practice of it all.

Thanks for reading The Practice of Living! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share The Practice of Living

This writing is free. intentionally, always.

I’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. I’m not interested in reproducing that. So everything here is open. no tiers. No locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

But writing is also how I’m building a life. And lives need tending.

So here’s how this works. If you have a little extra and something here moved you... Buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. If you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. That’s the whole system. It runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

No pressure. No wall. No guilt.

Just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy Me a Tea

Leave a comment

Other Articles You may fancy if you fancied this one.

That is not a gift I’m giving. It’s a responsibility I’m taking on. There’s a difference.

If you are not white and you find yourself reading this... I hope it doesn’t feel like erasure. It is meant as a relay. Someone passing the baton forward in the specific lane they were handed.

The lineage this series points toward is not an escape from accountability. It is the ground repair has to be built from.

I’m still learning how to do this. I’m doing it anyway.

in the practice of living in reckoning,

Brook

I used to think my discomfort with individualism was a personality trait.

Something soft in me. Something that didn’t quite fit the pace of American ambition... the way I always wanted to linger at the table longer, build things slowly with other people, make decisions in circles rather than hierarchies. I thought maybe I was too sensitive for the world as it’s currently organized.

Then I started going back.

Not into nostalgia. Not into the edited, romantic version of ancestry that gets sold at heritage fairs. I mean really back... past the recent centuries of my Irish and Russian lineage, past the famines and the serfdom and the colonial interruptions, into what existed before the theft. And what I found changed something in my body.

My people knew how to do this differently. Before anyone told them to forget.

The Mir and the Meitheal

In pre-colonial Ireland, there was a practice called the meitheal. Neighbors would gather, without being asked, without transaction, to harvest for whoever needed it most that season. No payment. No ledger. Just the understanding that the community’s survival was indivisible. That your neighbor’s failed harvest was everyone’s emergency.

The Brehon Laws, Ireland’s legal system before English colonization dismantled them, enshrined hospitality as legal obligation. Failing to feed a stranger at your door was a punishable offense. Land belonged to the community, not the individual. Women held inheritance rights. Disability was protected under law.

In Russia, the foundational social unit wasn’t the individual or even the nuclear family. It was the mir, the village commune. Land was redistributed based on need. Decisions were made collectively. No household was permitted to collapse alone while others remained standing.

These weren’t utopias. They were survival systems... built on the understanding that humans are not, at their core, meant to go it alone.

And then I learned these traditions stretch back further than medieval peasant life. Into Proto-Indo-European tribal culture, six thousand years ago. Into Neolithic European communities that archaeological evidence increasingly shows were non-hierarchical, organized around shared resources, practicing what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas called partnership culture rather than domination culture.

My discomfort with individualism isn’t a personality trait. It’s ten thousand years of cellular memory pushing back against a very recent interruption.

Seventy-Two Days in Paris

In the spring of 1871, something extraordinary happened in Paris.

For seventy-two days, the city governed itself.

The Paris Commune, born from the rubble of war and the exhaustion of people who had been ruled over for too long, became a living experiment in what humans do when they’re given the chance to organize from their actual values. Rent was cancelled during the crisis. Schools were opened and made free. Artists received stipends so that beauty didn’t belong only to those who could afford it. Women held central leadership roles. Workers ran their own workshops. Decisions were made collectively, in neighborhood assemblies, by people who had never been invited to govern anything before.

It lasted seventy-two days before it was crushed... violently, deliberately, with thousands killed. The people in power understood exactly what was at stake if ordinary people discovered they could live this way.

But what I keep returning to is this: when the structures of domination were temporarily lifted, people didn’t descend into chaos. They built libraries. They made art free. They fed each other.

That is also your lineage, if you carry French blood. And even if you don’t... it is a map of what becomes possible when humans are allowed to remember what they already know.

The Mythology Trap

Many white people drawn to holistic healing, to ancestral recovery, to living differently, end up in Gaelic mythology, Celtic spirituality, or neo-pagan and witchcraft traditions. And there is real medicine in those traditions. The Gaelic world held sophisticated cosmology, deep reverence for the land, knowledge of plants and seasons and cycles that industrial culture almost entirely erased. That knowledge is worth recovering.

But I keep noticing something.

The mythology gets excavated. The magic gets practiced. The gods and goddesses get named. And yet... the communal infrastructure that held all of that; the meitheal, the Brehon Laws, the briugu hospitality tradition, the collective land ethics, often gets left behind entirely. What gets inherited is the aesthetic of the tradition without the relational skeleton that gave it life.

And then capitalism moves in, as it always does, and turns the aesthetic into a market.

The cauldron becomes a product. The tarot deck replaces the elder you’d sit with. The crystals, the altar tools, the carefully curated outfits and books and artwork... they become the practice itself. The witchy store fills with beautiful objects and the hunger that walked in the door, the real hunger, for belonging, for rootedness, for a community that will show up when things fall apart, walks back out still unfed.

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I want to be honest that I hold this observation with some uncertainty. There are real and beautiful communities organized around these traditions that are doing genuine, embodied, accountable work together. I don’t want to flatten something complex.

But, I’ve also sat in circles where people speak beautifully in mythological language about sovereignty and the old ways... and the group itself is organized around the most charismatic person in the room. Where the aesthetics of collectivity substitute for its actual practice. Where belonging feels conditional on your fluency with the right vocabulary, your possession of the right objects, your performance of the right spiritual identity.

As a practitioner who gets invited to many versions of “healing” or “spiritual” or “wellness” events, I will often bring my husband. Because he has nothing to offer other than by proxy, nothing to extract, as he is my plus-one, he also gets no attention or love or acceptance most of the times at these new-age and spiritual gatherings. Over the years, I have understood his wariness and desire to stay home instead.

That is still capitalism. It’s just wearing different clothes.

The deeper issue, I think, is the question of deservingness.

Many people arrive in alternative spiritual communities still carrying the core wound that drove them there: the belief that they have to earn their place. That community is something you qualify for. That belonging must be performed into existence through the right knowledge, the right objects, the right identity. This is capitalism in the nervous system. The market logic of scarcity applied to love.

And no amount of mythology resolves it... because mythology lives in the head. Deservingness lives in the body. You cannot think your way into knowing you belong. You have to feel it somewhere below the throat.

This is why the action has to come before the words. The meitheal wasn’t people gathering to discuss the philosophy of collective harvest. It was people showing up with their hands to do the work. The meaning came from that... not the other way around. The body moved first. The clarity followed.

What Patriarchy and Capitalism Actually Stole

We tend to talk about what colonization, patriarchy, and capitalism took in terms of land and labor and resources. And that’s true. But I want to name something subtler and maybe more devastating.

They stole our memory of ourselves.

They didn’t just redistribute wealth. They performed an epistemological theft... making the unnatural feel inevitable. Making isolation feel like freedom. Making accumulation feel like security. Making competition feel like human nature.

And the most insidious part is that the theft was so complete that many of us now experience our own communal instincts as weakness. As naivety. As something to manage or outgrow.

I work as a somatic practitioner. I sit with people’s bodies every day and help them locate what’s stored in tissue, in fascia, in the nervous system’s long memory. And what I see again and again is this: people carrying the somatic residue of a species that was severed from its own nature... and told the severing was progress.

bell hooks wrote that the first act of love is attention. I’d add: the first act of healing is remembering what you actually are.

Progress without process isn’t progress. It’s brute force with consequences revealed later.

The consequences are visible everywhere now. In epidemic loneliness. In the collapse of intergenerational knowledge. In the way we’ve built systems so efficient they’ve eliminated the friction where relationship used to live... the waiting together, the shared labor, the sitting around a fire long enough to actually know each other.

We moved fast. We optimized. We individualized. And now we’re living in the aftermath of a species that forgot how to belong to itself.

Counter-Evidence

This is what I mean by lineage work. Not genealogy. Not heritage. Not the sanitized version of your family story.

Counter-evidence.

Evidence that communality is not a political preference imported from elsewhere. It is the default human setting... present in every lineage before it was interrupted. West African ubuntu philosophy. Indigenous American council traditions. Andean ayni, sacred reciprocity. Han Chinese village commons. Aboriginal Australian kinship systems. And yes, Irish meitheal. Russian mir. Seventy-two days of free art and cancelled rent in Paris.

Every people, before the interruption, organized around interdependence. Around collective land. Around obligatory care. Around knowledge transmitted through relationship and touch.

When you excavate your own lineage and find this... when you locate the specific shape of communality that lived in your bloodline before colonization and patriarchy taught your ancestors to forget it... something shifts in the body. The longing for community stops feeling like a personal deficiency and starts feeling like accurate ancestral memory. Like a homing signal. Like the body recognizing what it was always meant to return to.

True equality isn’t sameness. It’s everyone having equal access to their own depth. Every person, of every lineage, able to go back far enough to find something worth inheriting. Something that says: your people knew how to love each other. Before the forgetting, they knew.

Self-love through that lens isn’t affirmation. It’s accurate historical memory. It’s the radical act of refusing to let the interruption be the whole story.

Here’s what I want white people specifically to hear:

You don’t have to borrow this from someone else’s culture. You don’t have to look only at the harm your lineage caused and conclude there’s nothing worth inheriting. You can go back further... past the wound, past the colonizer, past the centuries of forgetting... and find evidence that your people once knew how to live well together too.

And then you can bring your hands. Not just your mythology. Not just your objects. Your actual hands, to someone else’s actual harvest.

You were born deserving of community. That is not something you earn or perform or purchase your way into. It is your inheritance as a human being. The only question is whether you’re willing to extend that same birthright to everyone around you.

That is the tradition. That is what’s worth reclaiming.

A Somatic Check-In

Before you move on from this essay... take a moment.

Place one hand on your sternum and one on your belly. Feel the weight of your own palms.

Ask yourself: where in my body do I feel the longing for community? Not the idea of it... the actual felt sense. The ache, the warmth, the contraction, the reaching.

Let that be information. Let it be old. Let it be yours.

That feeling has a lineage too.

in practice of living in remembering

brook woolf

If this essay found something in you, I’d genuinely love to know. I’m new to writing publicly, and every comment, share, and conversation is how this work finds the people it’s meant for. There is enough room for all of our stories. Sharing yours, or passing this one along, is itself an act of the tradition we’ve been talking about. Thank you for being here.

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This is the first essay in the Lineage of the Heart series. Essay Two ‘ Why Is It So Hard to Find White Community That Isn’t Quietly Gross ‘ is where this goes next. It’s the essay I was most nervous to write. If this one opened something in you, that one will take it further.

this writing is free. intentionally, always.

i’ve spent twenty years in healing justice work watching people get priced out of the things that could help them most. i’m not interested in reproducing that. so everything here is open. no tiers. no locked content. no moment where you hit a wall because your bank account isn’t big enough to keep reading.

but writing is also how i’m building a life. and lives need tending.

so here’s how this works. if you have a little extra and something here moved you... buy me a cup of tea. if you have more, give more. if you have nothing right now, read for free and come back next week. that’s the whole system. it runs on honesty and trust and the radical idea that people, given the chance, actually want to support the things that matter to them.

no pressure. no wall. no guilt.

just an open door and a tea button for when you’re ready.

Buy me a tea

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Sources and Further Reading

On the Irish Meitheal and Brehon Laws

• Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988)

• Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh and Kevin Whelan, eds., Folk Life and Traditions

• Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland (Harper & Row, 1989)

On the Russian Mir

• Geroid Tanquary Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (University of California Press, 1932)

• Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) — available free online

On Neolithic European Partnership Cultures

• Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess (HarperCollins, 1991)

• Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row, 1987)

On the Paris Commune

• Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015)

• John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (Basic Books, 2014)

On Communality, Love, and Political Life

• bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000)

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017)

• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017)

On Capitalism and Spiritual Commodification

• bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge, 2000)

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009)