Wilderdaad

Zij zien een familielid, toevallige passant, misschien de postbode

Hij erkent een monster

Zij zien de norm, eén van velen, de nooit terug tikkende tijd

Hij herkent zijn lijden, ziet een voorbode

van wat zou kunnen, de magie

van anders-zijn, ook gruwelijk-zijn

hoe zijn scheppende schaduw door de scheurtjes

van normaal schijnt

Zij zien keuzes, succes en een prima aan het einde van de dag

Zij ziet een verborgen leven

Zij horen moeilijke vragen, een periode die wel overgaat

Zij voorvoelt verlangens, onderdrukking

is maar zolang vol te houden

zo lang als vol voor te houden

Zij willen

maar zíj twee verlangen

om te verwilderen

Zij zien een wij versus zij, een ik en een jij

Hij voelt alleen in allen eén

Verschillen van elke toonaard

Ongeacht je burgerlijke staat

Zij verwachten, Zij rekt de tijd

Zij maken onderscheid, Zij solidariteit

Zij klappen voor de aangepasten

Zij ziet aangedosten

Iedereen is een vagebond

Leert zij van mond-tot-mond

Intense mensjes

denken voorbij grensjes

herkennen wensjes

voorafgaand aan woorden

daden en stoffige lesjes

Een wereld in wording

De beste theoretici

zijn van nature intimi

van het Leven, spel en natuur

als geboortegrond

van een verwelkomende

woekerende cultuur

Geïnspireerd op dit essay en deze quote:

“Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural," and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp 'our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently (Terry Eagleton).”

Waardenvol

"Dus, meisjes: het leven zal niet beter worden en niet makkelijker, maar het wordt anders, en zelf zal je ook veranderen. Maar blijf wel voelen, zoveel mogelijk, zonder zelf kapot te gaan."

Wijze woorden van Eva Meijer*. Blijven voelen. Zoveel mogelijk zelfs.

Toen ik 13 was, schreef ik tussen ondertussen gerafelde rapporten, knipsels en verbleekt gedoodle:

"Het gevoel van de mens. De geest. Nooit wordt het gevoel helemaal blootgesteld, omdat dat het diepste in je hart is. Dát ben jij! Het gevoel dat je bang, blij, angstig, verdrietig, vrolijk en zoveel andere gedaantes geeft. Het is, vind ik, het belangrijkste van een mens, het maakt je waardevol."

Ik ga door en schrijf over hoe gevoel allerlei staten kent, kwetsbaar is en respect verdient. Om de zoveel tijd, of gevoelsstaten, herlees ik deze vroeg-puberlijke reflecties en waardeer ik de ontpoppende, of eigenlijk al doorleefde wijsheid. Wist ik veel.

Ja. Gevoelens maken je waardenvol, letterlijk.

Eva Meijer schrijft over het intensieve, psychisch lijden onder meisjes en jonge vrouwen. Over hoe zij een werkelijkheid leven die ook waar is, hoe ongemakkelijk ook. Er is veel ellende, onzekerheid, gemis aan verbinding. Een realiteit die, in lijn met de categorische adviezen van mijn 13-jarige ik, waard is erkend te worden. Het is er.

Meijer: "Misschien is ze iets aangedaan, misschien voelen ze het gewoon, onder alles."

Omdat ik zelf zo geleden heb, wil ik het wel uitschreeuwen. Uitschreeuwen doet me wel goed, voorkomt verder lijden. Lieve allen, leef je niet alleen ín, leef je ook uit, uít het leven.

Meijer:

"In plaats van de meisjes en hun gevoel als afwijking te beschouwen, zouden we allemaal beter kunnen leren meer en beter te voelen, over anderen, de wereld, jezelf. Als beginpunt om beter voor elkaar te zorgen. En een andere taal te vinden voor gevoel – want beleidstaal of medische taal hebben er niets mee te maken."

Schrijven is mijn vrije haven geworden. Tegenwoordig zit ik vaak achter een piano. Spelen kan ik technisch gezien nog lang niet. Menselijk gezien kan ik het wel. Op gevoel. Elke noot, elk akkoord, een wereld zonder woorden, vol waarden en - ja - ook lijden. Ik vind een nieuwe taal. Dankbaar dat het kan.

Voor even klopt alles precies op de melodie van mijn gevoel.

*De column van Eva Meijer lees je via deze link.

A protected way of being awakened

"I can see myself in your eyes. You see yourself in my eyes."

Many moments in time intensify yearning for plain and profound wisdom. A little yet big human being just found words for a concrete, sensorial experience of interconnection, laying in my arms, nearing sleep, a protected way of being awakened.

Slowly her eyes closed. A week of many first impressions left her body tense. My high body temperature, an internal fight with a rising inflammation, made it extra cozy for her to be held, kissed, and rocked. I felt intensely energy low. Nonetheless, having her in my arms that way, in that state, with the slowing of time and expansion of space, also felt quite hallucinogenic and meditative. A deep-rooted yet floating sense of love fueled blood vessels and warm vibes. Her face was the ultimate beauty of the universe, nothing in nor around me could escape the accompanying sense of unity.

Like happens often when something feels precious, my mind imagines sentient beings enduring extreme hardships, violence, and alienation – those in deep need for precisely these moments. Oh please, take care…. It starts to ache more when the imagination reaches the outer areas of my heart’s bodily connections. It is of importance to me that this stream of consciousness does not stop at sentiment. It is a visceral experience of interconnection, a being in-hereness together. Without embodiment, wisdom gets lost in duality.

And I was silently hoping I could somehow savor some love for those in serious need, to go beyond the ‘wired up’ love that kinship is. There is much to honestly say and de -glorify about parenthood. But, I just knew, absolutely sure of myself, this was one of the most transcendent moments I had known up till now. It is medicinal, really.

It is in the bodily expressed trust of a vulnerable child that awareness can re-embody confidence in becoming a responsible human-animal acting beyond conditioned binaries. Diaper changing can also be game changing.

In our brief moment of prosocial sharing, our mutual caressing and untroubled caretaking, union between instinct and intuition, intellect and emotions was loud and clear. We slowly stroked each other’s cheeks and shared the heat of the incarnated moment when, finally, her awareness entered one of the biggest mysterious so close to her day-to-day wisdom, dreams.

I also have dreams. Encompassing love. Yes, I do believe this exists – in unimaginably multiple forms and moments. Want to share your experience?

Tearified

“I heard a story from a friend about a woman who was always laughing, always happy. She was this happy person, very attractive, attractive in the sense that people just surrounded her because of the joy she radiated. And one day, it was either him or someone else met with her and said, "So why, what's your secret? What's the secret of your joy?" And she said, "I'm joyful. I'm happy because I know how to cry. I know how to cry." And maybe that is the thing for me here: there's something reductionistic about the pursuit of happiness – i.e., let's build a tower of Babble and climb into the ethereal regions, the atmospheric regions, the highs. Let's get high, let's escape the lows, the doldrums, the depressive, let's escape the flood of tears.” (See this link )

That sounds crushingly simple. Crushing a learned need for complicatedness – a way of justifying my observative, interconnected, associative and embodied experience of life by rendering it more “expertise-like.” “I’m happy because I know how to cry” – yes, please. It sounds vividly playful, also. Not a rigid categorization of negative versus positive or good versus evil, but a very layered, dynamic, dialectical, and indeterminate process, our minds communicating their bodiliness, not bodylines. No need to pursue lightness to counterbalance the darkness. Difficulty with tears, to be direct. We project disharmonies upon the performative nature of tears. As if we are “tearified". Something might overwhelm us. Life will.

I have been sick, laying in bed with intense aching muscles. Feverishly, I notice how being drawn into bed is silencing some traces of a psychological sense of being existentially threatened. Being pulled into this body is like being pulled in the shapeshifting world. I give in to the limbo reflected by a changing body temperature. My skin hurts as it does easily. It is the otherwise soothing because suiting blanket that feels awkwardly uncomfortable, but I rest my case anyhow.

This pain will probably pass.

While I am slowly recovering from this almost traditional New Years flu it is the resistance that comes with an increasingly less steamed mind that creates suffering. Getting-better now sounds paradoxical.

How to be happy? This “how to” is an interesting question. It pulls me back into my also increasingly more yearning mind. The “how to” is precisely this. The pain is “intertaining” me, laying with it comes with some happiness, not only because I lost track of many pursuits of future joy, also because the pain undermines a sense of separateness. I need to ask for help, cancel appointments, and certainly not overcomplicate this particular experience. I am because I am process.

Some tears ran over my cheek as I allowed myself to experience the painful skin. It was no fun, but it was a ritual birthing gratefulness for this bodily process. I don’t want to bypass physical suffering, but I do see it as an opening towards life’s experience. At some point in the process, this mindful seeing will diminish and life experience – what we coined dying – will fully take-over. Or so I imagine it to be by now.

Every time we get out of bed, we implicitly strengthen certain power structures over others. Being healthy over being sick, being useful over being useless, being beautiful over….Through the cracks in habitual thinking that being-sick offers, I notice certain mental and behavioral tendencies with brightness. Listening to the so-called sick is insightful for our social beings to learn how to be and become with these ever-changing complex worlds amidst an existential falling apart.

Intense permeability

How shyness is best transformed into an even more intense permeability

I remember quite a lot of people talking about my supposed shyness above and beyond my head, literally. Words flew over my body, casting a spell with the magic of the self-fulfilling prophecy that our socialized identities frequently are. Shyness meant being afraid – aware – of the impact of other people’s opinionated positions. More than often, this fear also related to those intimately close, suggesting some sort of existential sin in being together, in being sensitive and receptive, similar yet different. Maybe it wasn’t a lot of people. Important though. Those with authority.

Even if coined shy, I was already a verbally very intense child and was told numerous times to quiet down the first years in primary school. A combination of a need to imagine and associate rather than learn step-by-step, the becoming of a passionate word smith and an animated body made it challenging to sit still and pay attention to other people’s priorities. I found my way in the system by creating many hour-to-hour, or even 15 minute-to-15 minute schedules - and securing a world of my own, inside. I talked less and less aloud but enjoyed petit leadership qualities in interaction with the other kids. I also counter-intuited socialized or even disciplined shyness by running for the podia wherever I could, founding an outlet for authenticity, or at least certain creative forms, in dance, poetry, and public speaking. Once a performance was finished, I often ran off the stage, or so something inside of me holds on to as a vivid memory, trying to keep the subsequent encounters with students and teachers as brief as possible. But, I did not succeed, diligently I wanted to mirror everyone and – to be honest - deeply loved people’s otherness, in-thereness. And it was addictive, at least a bit, particularly winning.

Developmentally eager, I sought a different, additional approach to renewed self-expansion and knew by now that development is a manner of “othering” like I did on stage. By not-being-me I became more-of-me, or more creatively me, transcending the felt imprisonment a partially suppressive, socialized self was. So, I decided to experiment with a different kind of language and communication style, not so much fixated on being kind, to try out self-transcendent activities (from bungee jumping to the experiential study – that sounds eloquent - of psychedelics), and juggle identities with cloths, music, social preferences, and perspective taking through listening, reading and writing. No shying away from the promising complexity of adolescence…

As a young adult there was a fruitful follow-up to this exploration when I was evenly juggling different career paths, study wise and with respect to jobs and extracurricular activities. All these processes surely expanded my understanding of life, humans and what Báyò Akómoláfé calls the “trouble with authenticity” on LinkedIn:

“From a processual, non-representational, posthumanist perspective, every social encounter paraphrases bodies in the sweltering heat of intra-action. Indeed, one cannot meet another without becoming modified. 'Our' identities - never reducible to choice or preference - do not pre-date the relational arrangements that are the condition of their emergence.

In some sense then, we drunkenly tumble through a hall of distorting mirrors wherein every greeting surface is a risk, bending, stretching, pulling, re-threading the inauthentic, cavorting with unseen possibilities. Failure is the motif, the very ground of encounter. We will not be seen. We will not be heard. We will not be reproduced. We will be paraphrased.”

Whereas my potential “keeping the options open” was paraphrased as a “she can not make any decision” when I was younger, I came to see it (again and again) in a different light once the emotional contagious state of adolescence transformed into the more autonomous, even if still poignant existential seeking of the following period. Ambivalences were re-interpreted to be part of a process called positive disintegration.

I remember how fond I was of literary studies offering me a world of words engaged in overcoming the need to pin down the world in neat categories, engaging me in paradoxes and ambiguities that felt enlivening familiar to the innermost streams of my experience and thinking. Here enters a gratefulness towards my parents patience in letting me seek my own paths.

And here, I am.

I would like to live this life as if it is at risk because it is. There are at least some parts that don’t want to buy into a presumed safety or managed coherence, even though I don’t want to deny (possible blind spots with respect to) privilege, relative safety and comfortable, backward rationalization.

At times, it was difficult to disentangle black-and-white trauma reactions from a deeper sense of our life’s sacred motionfulness and thorough ungraspability. It took another decade, it is taking this decade, to integrate a yet more expanded, relaxed sense of my self by letting the wounds speak for themselves instead of trying to raise them to the level of eternal healing and health.

Learning about the roots of the shyness from the standpoint of individuality, recognizing a deep sensitivity, lead me back to a different lens, namely seeing the shyness as expressive for our thoroughly collective, communal, and becoming ways of being this life form. Emotions being in constant motion, learning to lean into my feeling body, shattering conditionings by actively inviting the felt sense of our interdependency, daring to be even more permeable than the identification of shyness seems to suggest, I experiment with overcoming those past “socializations,” re-rooting a fundamentally alive sense of being. Shying away from one fixated stance or identity, dancing generatively with the falling apart of our perceptions due to an ongoing stream of sensations embedded in relationality. What a trip!

I like to be hold, but there is no-thing to be held. It’s in the holding that we both come alive to a sensitivity neither characterizing me nor you, opening the gates towards a nourishing and expanding othering in our most intimate inner lives.

I was never solely sticky sticky shy, very much alive though. Like we all are, I intuit, existentially. Permeable, and – able at it, so I learned. Failure can be the leitmotif towards fresh aliveness, a process enriched by many paradoxes. Even during our dreams we keep our inner eyes open, I noticed.

How happy I am now to receive the following testimonial of a wonderful (also co-)creative journey. It is honoring to have experienced this trajectory with such an artistically alive, other human being :

'Journeying creatively with Lotte as my writing coach has been a truly unique and inspiring experience. During every session Lotte and I explored new perspectives that expanded and enriched my writing process. Lotte is incredibly easy to talk with and it was so refreshing to be able to discuss deep, complex themes. Lotte also gave insightful, encouraging, and useful feedback throughout and this has unquestionably made my work better. If you have the opportunity to creatively work with Lotte I highly recommend you do so.'

Lil Jedynak Ph.D.

PS: looking for creative accompaniment? Working on an intensely personal and/or artistically complex writing project and long for someone to think along, provide fruitful questioning, perspectives, sources, and/or activities to deepen and co-guide the process? Feel welcome to approach your project also in a lively processual, relational manner. You can mail me to schedule an explorative online meeting: lotte@alotofcomplexity.com

Sacred instead of scared

“The depression is recognizing the destruction of the sacred."

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Source: this video

I am struggling with my abstracts for the International Dabrowski Congress. Years ago - this phrasing is becoming an echo in these entries - I might have struggled with an inner critic stating that my work was not valuable enough to be part of the program. A struggle with self-esteem remnant of recurring disintegrative experiences and a deep seeded need for unconditional love. Now, I sense an existential desperateness at the root of my struggle with words, forms, and motivations.

“Ah yes, I see…..well…This is good,” Dabrowski might have said.

A well-effective reality function surely should spur the greatest imagination to get us out of these doomed dominant cultural narratives and conditionings leading to destruction of nature and wellbeing. But we tenderize first by familiarizing ourselves wholly with the bottomless desperateness.

A scared part of my mind cries: what good can this contribution do? My more mature, sacred instead of scared part knows; be gentle, reach far by allowing constraints to inform your creativity. This is critical work, precisely in the face of everything that is going on, going down.

Inhaling and exhaling, I find my way to the piano, pausing between words and tuning into sounds which will not express my emotional and creative views for many years to come, but nonetheless already isolate a horizon out of a resonating heart.

Evenly obtaining a sense of direction out of Dabrowski’s writings, I am again trying to find my words and cluster them into a coherent yet freeing abstract, communicating what feels both deeply personal and crushingly transpersonal. This sense of direction is more processual than ideal, and that feels vital.

“The period of real, essential moral maturation is often one of spiritual void: of isolation, loneliness, and misunderstanding. It is the time of the "soul's night," during which the then existing sense of life and forms of connection with life lose their value and force of attraction. The period will close, however, with the working out of an ideal, the arising of a new disposing and directing center, and the appearance of forces of disapproval, shutting out every possibility of a return to the initial level. This is the process of development of personality. The third agent, having now gained the right to be heard, will admit no retreat from the road ascending to a personal and group ideal (Dabrowski, 1964).”

The writing process makes me want to talk to a tree, let it turn my thinking upside down to let my sentences embody a collective wisdom like the roots naturally do, like we humans could do. I think of the performative talk "Rooted giftedness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs-Kjj3_hEQ) and allow my mind to free float ideas, perspectives, transgenerational, emotionals streams, fitting creativity, and communally nourished courage. A mixture of ripening sadness and focused excitement will guide the way forward. Fluidly and - depending on the perspective - messy more than linearly.

Valuing inner work as part of the sacred, seeing our deeply personl relationship with life, this is critical.

Synthesizing the self

“It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does not live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption."

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

How much analysis can a psyche bear? After a while there is a wholesome urge for synthesis, a dimming of self-related thoughts, a dimming of the flashing light of self-scrutiny one can shine on the perks and margins of one’s mind and habituations, a relaxing into the body, an incorporation of feeling and higher quality thought processes, a slowing down of developmental urges and a sinking into the flow of choices directed by an anew appreciated and refined inner knowing. I can only resist for so long, resist this sense of direction with respect to the creation of an everyday rhythm and routine and, in the midst of these caring acts, the growth of a grander scheme of actions born out of courageous imagination and previously guilt inducing decisions with respect to time and space, attention and focus. I can resist for long, but not forever, or this would bring about a tremendous lack of vitality.

It keeps on raining here. There is no end to our worlds changing weather patterns, can our emotional regulation keep up? Relational conflicts on micro and macro level will appear and disappear, but they cannot be at the center of my attention chronically, or continuously. An inner knowing is also an inner ordering. An inner emotional ordering with a practically worked out plan. The word ‘plan’ triggers that annoying and demanding resistance again. But the story attached to the resistance doesn’t do me any good, it is firmly rooted in by gone experience, I should only extract wisdom from these reappearing sensations and not dwell in their appealing sentiments.

These last years, I thought this house was broken and my home lost, but it was the first time I was building one with an emerging sense of togetherness, timelessness, and spaciousness. Having the experience of being (with) everything and everyone at once – nothing and no one to embody in the eyes of the frightening, distanced other - felt crushing at first, but it molded into the acceptance of the ebb and flow of life, the cherishing of what is aware at any moment in time, and a listening to what emerges instead of a pushing against reality.

A synthesis of reality and imagination now lies in the realization of caring deeds. Everyday. At some point the analysis slows down, all the questions can be kept awake without posing them repeatedly aloud, and one ‘lives in the answer’, as Rilke might say.

My mind is made of soundscapes telling it how it is, emotionally and existentially. Cultivating calmness, love, awareness, presence… is of upmost importance. The world is crying. Stress is triggered easily; I have seen and see it in our homes. Slown down even more and act with clarity and determination from that spacious place, Lot. The emotional spectrum of life is not integrated in me yet. Until that day I will be writing about it, no question about it.

Rock-solid sensitivity

Isn’t it remarkable how we can feel lost and disconnected, conflicted, and depressed, and then, sometimes and even suddenly, find our way back home in this world we all birth into awareness anyhow. So many years have passed since I, like I had experienced off and on from a young age, felt that daunting existential uprooting. Senselessness. If I could only replace my former, now bleeding passions with fresh ones, I thought, this would safe my searching, if existing soul. The task was not transactional though, and my repeated bodily ‘no’ to many internal and external creative suggestions kept pressing me to dig deeper.

And you know, when you dig deeper, there are all these emotional and existential layers to dislodge. In the background of one's complex psyche there is no running away from the unmet mommy and daddy issues, the cultural blind spots, devastating realities of this life and world, and, eventually, utter and disorienting uncertainty. Digging deeper was a way to consciously process an “emptying out”, solid, sometimes unwelcomed emotional work to have a felt sense of the spaciousness that surrounds us and, by inhaling it, expands our hearts also. Fully leaning into the interdependency of my life, lived through in the arms of a loving other, has changed my self-perception.

At some point, something inside of me also loosened the gratifying identification with emotional work. Now this is scary. Here, the question “Who am I?” has no answer but a pure, silent but all-encompassing sense of being. The ‘I’ that I knew to be did not give up easily and started to create new layers, new complications to fill up the excitable threat of emptiness. Identification with ‘doing’ and suffering goes a long way when it is entangled in an egoic, once needed grasping for safety.

But I experienced and acknowledged what love is, actually. A going beyond needs and deeds. Rock-solid sensitivity sipping through everything. Vulnerable without a doubt. Shaky, not broken.

I am sure this year will come with new layers and unpredictable kinds of unlayering. But this is not a house for all too complicated stories anymore, or so I intuit now. The sadness that for so long got stuck in my stomach and couldn’t find the way out of my toughened body other than wrapping it in longer and lengthier concepts, has found a welcoming, softening stream. How funny, I found the keys to the open door of my heart. Wordless, but intensely expressive, nonetheless.

Welcome to the awakened inner child spreading the vibrations of curiosity and renewal against the conditioned odds. I feel playfully senseless in this exploration.

Lost in translation

“Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.”

Bell Hooks

Pieces of a healed heart, fragments of a long lost diary

"Our lives got lost in a particular type of hardness we both inherited. You kept diverting whenever emotions were verbalized, I lived on the surface of your easily irritable – and so firmly soft – skin. Equally, I was buried too deep under my words, verbal ferocity alternated icy silence. You spoke aloud, I got frightened enough to eventually fight back, but actually did so from the beginning by not showing my true colors. You had such an exquisite awareness of inauthenticity. I wondered, what does this tell me about you?

This time around, I learned, it wasn’t only those painful memories which I pushed brutally to the margins, I fought with your survival force and the baggage we both came with painted our relationship sinisterly blueish black, too often at least. We tried so hard to be kind that it, at times, surely failed. I tried to polish what was rocky. Poetic descriptions nourished intense moments of melting away our resonating resistance. Often enough, though, these were almost sentimental attempts to create romance out of suffering. You ignored your inner conscience and frequently, a test to your inner strength, you failed. Seemingly bitter at the outset, internally deemed by self-rejection, or so I learned along the way. A mirror that I longed for and always was there, or so I learned. Is it unlearned, maybe?

That crushing hardness got the best of us, dissecting even our perfected defense. We never stopped trying until we learned to let go. And here we are now, my love. Finally, my love. We are chopping our heads of as one might say in tantric tradition. Al those misfitting words, egoic grasping for deeply unnourishing safety; let us forego those prevailing instincts and highly personalized yet awkwardly recognizable demons. Let’s take care of our bruised memories. Remember consciously, forgive open heartedly. Let’s heal by stroking hands, breathing in sync and let loving others enrich our shared emotional landscapes. So that we finally define, together and in utter respect for the complex inner worlds contributing to the conversation, what love is. So that both practice and critical thinking immerse themselves in the embodied world of being human in the enlightening eyes of our lover. Our lovers, those teaching us through reflection to never shy away from being the courageous beloved willing to love beyond thoughts and fulfilment.

Gosh. We never defined it, Love. We just played by the rules. Either those inherited by our fragmented body, our family or by culture. Let us define what love is and start all over from there."

A passage is arriving

As a passage is arriving, time is ticking and creating heightened consciousness of where I was and where I am going. My eager heart and symbolism craving psyche try to run ahead, try to see beyond the enticing horizon, at times neglecting the existential truth that is found in the longing only uncertainty births vividly.

There may be some grasping, but it’s just a wave of emotional intensity rising in oceanic awareness. I try to keep my head above water, and then I dream of sitting on the bottom of the deep sea, peacefully awaiting how the rock-bottom means I will rise anyhow, anyway. Air bubbling up from my mouth symbolizes the first eruption of artistic outlet.

Years of existential unrest have come to an arrest, so it seems, and the slowing down that wintering invites us to, gives rise to a clear awareness of this new-found sense of direction. A sense of direction born out of release, anchored in the motionfull now, increasingly embodied in the relational realm of life, shaping the conditions for a creative spurt. Even if my body intuits a yet deeper integration of life’s presence in this life form, a gracious rest offered by listening to my being's need for relaxation, mediation and contemplation, there is nothing to steer or direct, for now. A settlement of the sense of direction on a new plane of development without some inner repressive force pushing the way forward to the detriment of my intrinsic trust. Not coincidentally this transition coincides with our daughter’s passage to school. My mind is thinking along with my pelvis, co-creating a home will mean the world to her, to us. I hear myself saying aloud: “I want to be sensitive and alert with respect to her wellbeing.” Practically, we are putting effort into making this parental awareness possible with the help of lively communal ties and most of all, moments of untroubled presence.

An embodied hierarchy of values is immerging out of four years of reorientation. That which gives voice to decisions vital to our parenting resonates with that which shapes a new creative, intellectual and social road. Suppressed ideas, critical questioning, and intuited road maps for my work in emotional development rise to the surface. This process is, next to being an offspring of, amongst others, motherhood, also inspired by my regular visits to the monastery House of the Beloved, a space and place, a gathering of people seeking deep connection, that surely fits - and 'awakingly' transgresses - the curiosities, values and passions driving me to study emotional development since many years. Less suppression leads to a firmer belief in the integration of many different disciplines, practices and perspectives in this life’s study and study of life; a loosening of my limbs stiffened by internalized power structures, stretching the emotional, intellectual and imaginational reach of my creations. As if everything that I have been delving into all those years, a grateful broadening of interests and social connections, is now ready for a ‘vertical integration.’ From head to toe, letting real life existential research guide the way (as it essentially always has), breaking the apparent walls between the personal, professional and spiritual, walls that were conditioned by cultural dominant narratives and personally endured hardships. An intensifying and sensitization of awareness, actually to discern what to focus on. How gratifying it is to look back on intensified ambivalences and sense how a shaking of the system encourages an actualization of seeded potential.

We will see. The eye that sees is one with the ‘I’ that shakes.

Not letting fear dictate this free fall called life, leaning into intuitions and questioning: what practice leads us to positive disintegration?

2024

"Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion."

Martha Graham

Thank you for all our online meetings, your heartfelt appreciation and loving kindness. Let's dance in our own idiosyncratic ways. Let us cherish and evolve precisely those moves and motions which fit the flow of your and your loved ones wellbeing and flourishing. Let's nourish and care a new world into being. Be fierce in your courageous love.

No one sees the tears

“There were many occasions when planning an out-of-order sign across your heart seemed the wisest decision to make. Only you didn't. Instead you kept your heart open, invited people in. And even when they were reckless, messy, and selfish, you chose to remain open: a shift that never ends, a light that always stays on, a beacon in the darkest nicht, a melody that carries on. I am in awe of you: an open prairie among an ever-changing cycle of wind."

Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts

And isn't this the ultimate quest? For what is life other than a test to the openness of ones heart, a profound questioning of your willingness to surrender to the overpowering magnitude of birth and death, even beyond the security of a wishful, binary understanding? So many lives and loves have travelled through my heart and, time and time again, challenged my tenderness, the little brittle way of being porousiously me, under a skin that is both holding me here and eating me up from the outside.

"I yearn too, my darling, you know…because...."

....No one sees the tears of a crying whale.”*

So many stressful conversations formed by the echoing residues of painful past lives, so many not-to-be endings and black-and-white defenses… Our hearts shatter when we turn on the television and watch how violence keeps running through our veins. But we must keep our faith, she must prevail over our minds preference for fate. If its not brutality towards the other that keeps our lifes energy stuttering, its often our desperate self rejection holding us back from supporting each other unconditionally till the open end. But we must. We were never born to be separate. Our very feelings, what else is there, depend on it. For it must be a devotion to the full emotional spectrum of being colorfully alive which fosters our courage to open up. Falling into grace, skin to skin melting away all our relative fears.

Do not close your heart. Breathe life into your permeability. Your love-being is the ultimate dedication of your unquestionable death, a testimony to its lifelong, instinctively intimate closeness.

*artwork by Rogier Roeters

Merry giftedness

Oh, how would I have loved a communal initiative to tell each other remarkable stories, co-create eclectic and joyful dances, feast on beautified dishes, try out artistic endeavours, gather around a warming fire, and let go of our worries about our shared, perpetuating past and uncertain future. My imagination runs wild with games to play, conversations to have and deep emotional preparation for a new year, even anchoring the tendency to withdraw into good old wintering in the soothing sentiment of Christmas songs. You know, juvenile hopefulness, promises of laughing love and careless, communally nourished gratefulness.

And maybe, I am sure, for some this is reality. And, surely, some of this abundance will be part of this year’s personal passage to more hours of sunlight. And maybe, I feel, me and my loved ones will birth precious gatherings in the future, winter times or otherwise.

But, for now, I am not going to focus on any kind of fulfilment. This year, my biggest practice lies in the sense of not needing to do anything, in being present wherever we decided to be these days, to gently tune into everybody’s momentary wellbeing, and to allow myself to be with whatever there is - or isn’t. No need to take care, no need to mediate, no need to cater, no need to make more fun than presently in tune with my inner world.

These days, I grant myself the gift of not needing to gift anything to the world. Merry giftedness to all !

A demon nourished into daimonness

Self-rejection has been one of my closest companions since puberty. Oftentimes, when I felt hurt, wronged or in any way conflicted by friends or family, I retreated into the safe haven of looping self-denial. Experience had taught me that my deepest feelings and safety were at crucial times not of keen interest to care takers, so (close emotional) intimacy was a threat to my self-preservation. I surely was nourished by other love languages, but the impact of our family’s (and, in a broader sense, community’s) disrupted cohesion was evident.

Of course, I crave intimacy like anybody else and of course, when I went out into the world to explore and create a new sense of belonging, that came with challenging situations – living together is complex. And thus, I said sorry repeatedly (and, yes, again) out of a fear of abandonment and projected an image of perfection frustrating relational freedom, often suppressing the actual simplicity of a feeling and the downright reality of reciprocity in social connections, particularly those near and dear. I ended up moving from avoidance to clinging, not finding much rest in the ongoing ambivalences. I knew better, but I was afraid. There was a learning process going on, my brittle inner value system was a whispering guide, but it felt painstakingly slow at times.

Behaviorally, from adolescence onward, I perfected the art of self-rejection through a form of rigid control born out of emotionally shattering experiences and educational frustration. Minimizing my calorie intake and pressuring myself to work out intensively was a way to preserve what was left of a sense of self after too much disintegration, too soon. Once I got over that thirteen-year long struggle with eating disorders, the demons kept popping up, more subtly and covertly sabotaging intimacy, selfcare and creative opportunities potentially leading to a frightening visibility beyond the illusion of my grip on reality’s unfolding.

During this whole period, I also learned to be a keen observer of my own behavior, thoughts, feelings, and tendencies.

Self-awareness goes a long way but can equally be a shapeshifting disguise for a learned protection to keep the overview and to keep people at a controlled emotional distance.

With a growing sense of ease, I can appreciate the increasingly smooth self-awareness at the center of my intrinsic directive drives. What a conflictuous ride has it been.

And how insightful. Fragilities, I learned, are frustrated forces seeking passage through cracks of the dominant system.

Now….. I release emotional residues and, word by word, complicated, masking stories. Now, I am a witness more than an observer. A witness of a submission of the safety-seeking-self, giving to a lively fragility, stumbling in between my mind’s habituation to certain stories and my body’s growing, unveiled sensitivity. Identification with self-rejection is disintegrating, or so it appears now. Because, I laugh with a taste of softening irony, who am I to judge myself so harshly? This transformation, a release, comes with a welcome freeing of mental space to practice discernment instead of rejection. I long and practice truer kinds of intimacy nowadays thanks to guidance one can only find in reciprocal relationships and those beautiful, existentially rooted friends and mentors.

The force of self-directed judgment of course slipped through the cracks of the rather strong inhibition and oftentimes has made it hard for some of my loved ones to…rest in a form of commitment they surely deserve. I am learning to be straightforward when something feels off in a connection and practicing working it out together. The whole process has been going on for years, is rocky and ups and down are inevitably part of it.

The eating disorder that I once called a “monster”, which for so long had an imprisoning grip on my life through internalized anger, is now perceived as an object of my consciousness. Nothing that characterizes me, and no-thing that deserves my whole embodied power – the illusion of power it provided is released as such, making it possible for me to recognize it’s shadowy residues in subtle relational tendencies. Memories of the mental fixation are a reminder of our shared human vulnerability, bringing me closer to a sharp awareness of our psyche’s deep focus on survival. Something that teaches me, however strange this may sound, that underneath that demon is also a thirst for authenticity, a ‘daimon’ (term inspired by the Daimon Institute) waiting to be spirited with attunement, openness, and honesty.

Tenderness is the name of the game. Embracing complexity doesn’t stop on the surface my skin, I can project these perspectives inwards and let it ripple out in the reflections of non-judgmental, embodied awareness. Throughout all those years I surely see loads of manifestations of the person I am also today, and in different ways have always been. Caring, energetic, humorous, sensitive. And even those qualities, claimed as such, aren’t that important anymore – or at least loose localized emotional weight, becoming an orchestra of interconnection rather than something to proof in response to demanding uncertainties. Being lovable or loving enough isn’t the right motivation; love is being-here. I guess that, through the inner silence rising after the flood of emotional peaks, peace is entering the scene. Peace.

Wow, let me just sit with this for a moment. Peace. Before hasting towards an end goal, let me reverse the intensity of this feeling of gratefulness back into my body through conscious breathing. We will see what life brings, I feel responsive, but am not in charge, even if I definitely feel charged often enough...

Importantly, in here is a home for those demons enlightened to be the daimon they always feared they were. And, if they must roar to honor that life’s energy, let them, Lot. Inhabit, don’t inhibit your being.

The image I was born with

# me finding out life is full of meaning after all

A while ago, I had an intense experience of unconditional love. Flowing out of a period of overfocussing on something unreachable, because projected outside of myself, in response to grief because of suffering around the world, in interaction with my existential research into anger, and as part of a transformative relational crisis, my emotional world synchronized into a state of intense unconditional love during a trippy meditation.

Like other people’s descriptions of such experiences, in those moments I no longer practiced a contoured (and separated) self. Lacking precise descriptions, all I knew to be consciousness. And even though there were brief moments of resistance towards the all-encompassing reality of this consciousness and interconnectedness, whatever we might call ego could not resist for long. ‘I’ lost all ability to talk, imagine and …worry. What I ‘saw’, felt in every cell of my body, was that awakening is being with what is, unconditionally. It was quite an impactful process to be in.

Reality is just…reality. And, mind you, that is a lot. Every(no)thing! Everything that I normally rejected (and might still do, in the relative sense), including violence, felt part of the unity of consciousness sensable during the meditation.

Afterwards, I humanly struggled to – ha! – get a grip on that experience. It surely altered something inside of me. Or maybe it brought me back to something I had ‘known’ before. For a couple of weeks, I felt a swift entrance to what I might call a deep silence ‘inside of myself’ which had the same quality as the heightened state. It felt like the birthplace of a new quality of ‘interiority’. It catalyzed a fresh dive into literature about spirituality and existential development and it boosted my active acceptance of anger (and everything I associate with it) as part of our human experience.

The grasping for meaning that rose out of that intense experience also came with a couple of strong emotional responses. Projections got a hold on me again! It goes too far to share every one of them in this reflection, but the main characteristic was an internal fight against the depth and breadth (also known as ‘void’) of that sensed awareness in the peak moment. In response to a climax of fear popping up when I tried to consciously lean into the void (or silence), something inside of me started to fight reality. The irony, anger got a grip on me! Also, in interaction with our daughters’ intensities, namely her rightful exploration of embodied power, my body and mind were challenged to integrate the emotional intensity of anger. I had been taught to deny anger in my body, and now it was time to integrate that suppressed and often self-rejecting energy. In particular, it was time to own a fuller extent of my life’s energy instead of projecting or suppressing it . "Add" to that the discovered, now deepened need to take ownership of the impact of complex trauma.

This was testing, could my cherished connections, and should I add frightened ego and heroic superego?, ‘survive’ these outbursts? All the while I was questioning many of my learned assumptions and convictions, which took a toll on my mental and emotional energy level and was quite disorienting. Surely, that experience of unconditional love wasn’t easy to smoothly integrate throughout my whole system. Some old conditionings were fighting hard to be seen and recognized. Relational and personal emotional work is ongoingly part of the journey.

At this point in time, I feel I can look back on that journey a bit more. Retro – and prospection are becoming entangled in a deeper and broader sense of reality. Impressed by the panoramic and deeply sensitive peak experience, humbled by the inner conflicts that arose out of that sensed, freeing yet frightening abyss, I get a new feeling for what it is like to be me, how it could be, perhaps even communally rooted in “the image I was born with” (See this poem by David Whyte).

More on this later. For now, feel invited to dance with me !

The hard way

“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

Adrienne Rich

Sure enough, I agree. What is “that hard way”? Whatever I might have imagined to be smooth enthusiasm and enduring love the other idea, is now a bundle of nerves rushing through my stomach, filling my mind’s space, pressing me to make a big decision where no such drama is necessary.

I know this place.

A relationship is blooming into a new phase. Conflicts are inevitably part of it, the only way out is through. The depth of the appreciation, the rightfulness of the relational compositions, the co-occurring complexity, some felt clinging and avoiding on both ends, turn it into an intimidating process. I feel a deep inner urge to disclose my truths, to confess, with a somewhat desperate longing to co-create a blank piece of paper, an emotional tabula rasa, on which I imagine a redrawing of the relational conditions, cleansing all the projections, all the childlike reaching out and the hardened self-protection.

Probability is, things will get messier, feel a bit more chaotic, and, as such, demand more trust and surrendering, more communicative clarity and experimental progress. I can’t do right what has been wronged in the farther-reaching past. I will do wrong, and I will only learn about what is right by allowing a mutual wrongdoing to inform our relational evolution.

It is in the eyes of this dearest friend that I self-recognize a continuous refinement of truths. It is not an inner pressing, overarching set of standards, it is an embodied alchemy of values expressing themselves through ongoing, fragile openness, renewed humbleness, and full-fledged appreciation of differences leading to an unknown dance of two bodies trying to break-down vulnerability into controllable motions and characters. Can we stretch wide enough to accommodate each other’s emotional reach?

Reality is teaching me to surrender beyond a highly educated role, beyond the position best suited for a convincing transcendence of old pains, even paid for. Reality is asking me to deeply look into the pain, and acknowledge how the other, just by being who they are, is inviting me to embrace it unconditionally, to open towards the evenly justifiable experience of deep pleasure, the beauty of a unique connection amid frightening uncertainties and a deep-rooted need for security. Will the other go the hard way with me?

Do we ever have another question in mind?

How grateful to be dancing with lightening, to be inspired - and contained - by the complexity and intensity of everyone of my friends, of every one of the relationships born out of striking love.

To feel - a lot

The pressing question was running circles, shaping a lower quality of mind: what can I possibly dó with this potential to feel – a lot?

As I approached puberty, my inner doubts about sensitivity's outer manifestation also grew. Looking back, I know the intensification of inner doubts is rooted in personal, social, phsyical and cultural conditionings that surpass the power of a child to feel worthy as such and at the same time convincingly competent in the external world, in the frightening, powerful and conditioned eyes of others.

The picture is nuanced, besides feeling worried and confused about my role in society – something that I, fueled by intensity, claimed must be a calling – I also noticed some of the clear qualities that came with that same potential to feel a lot. Leadership talent, a source of bursting creativity, deep connections, a strong intuition, to name a phew. But identifying these potentialities as an answer to my question – what can I do? – demanded that I synchronized the complete answer with clearcut intrinsic motivation. That same feeling-potential would not accept any other motivational quality. I must forge my own path, like Katja writes (in the attached blogpost). But to do so, I must trust. And trusting myself and others has been quite challenging at times.

Luckily, I did experience the opportunities, momentum, and spirit to go through a process of meaningful societal contribution and accompanying acknowledgement. A sense of belonging and creative expression of deep value to the wellbeing of others have nourished self-esteem. In this process, I did trust the unknown, something that was easier 'to do' back then.

These months, I am settling into a more instrinsically felt and resilient appreciation of feeling-me. A quality of experience that goes beyond the question of 'doing' and feels intimately and socially trustworthy.

Thanks to a great mentor, many mirroring friends, and thanks to caring and appreciative colleagues in the gifted field, I rest my case:

What can I possibly dó with this intensified and sensitive potential to FEEL? Well, a lot! Just being(-with-it) is sourcing new creative output.

Embodied in amazing senses, aware of an intriguing openness ‘underneath’ conditioning, breathing life into the connection that I am, trusting how the environment receptively flows through me, mirroring its subtle qualities and letting go, wherever possible, of self-preserving projections.

The theory of positively disintegrating is becoming more heartfelt, rooted in my stomach area with my body as the carrier of delicate dynamisms, broadening the scope, healing and artistic impact of sensitivity. It's a darkish night of the soul for sure, and I, once I feel into it, would not want it otherwise.

Deep inner sea

Some years ago, I had a coaching session after an assessment. The coach emphasized the importance of learning how to sink into the emotional depth of my experience. We spoke about a deep inner sea. A longing bubbled up. Surely a transgenerational longing, I did not know where it stemmed from, how to root it, or follow its seamlessly endless grasping.

The longing appeared to be a nameless and faceless deep-sea creature, scaring the one in my mind always trying to oversee the depth.

I have always been drawn to the sea. Swimming is, next to dancing, my favorite sports. Funny enough, as a young girl, I was very hesitant to learn how to swim. I refused to go into the water, but when I finally did go, and I was about six years old, the flattering story goes that I learned swimming strikingly fast. I can’t remember the details; I do know that water has felt like a second skin.

So, during that coaching session, I imagined what it would be like to learn how to be as fluid as I can be, in a continuous dance with my environment, sensing its shapes, motions, and sensations in the most inner parts of my body, and offering nourishment by mirroring graciously, falling into an intuitive life. It felt appealing, a potential I wanted to explore, a beingness I wanted to celebrate before the disintegration of this marvelous life form.

Now, some years later, I give into what is needed to do so. To be as feelingly fluid as my body – and thus mind – can be. Throughout the years, and with everything that has happened and has shaped my emotional and relational tendencies, I know that fluidness has partially been formed for surviving instead of thriving. Internalized violence has come with a long battle with myself, and not seldom also with my most intimate social environment. Since softness and clear mental discernment are dominant qualities of my social surrounding these days, I can dive a little deeper into conditionings withholding me from solidifying that characterizable fluidness.

This process brings me in contact with that undirected longing. I now see that what I thought was a monster, is a deep-sea creature with fascinating and fine-tuned senses to swim (us) through the darkness.

And I found a bedrock for that deep inner sea. Earth firmly holding the sea to its chest, drawing it inwards with the help of gravity, knowing how the water is ultimately formed out of the most inner earthly gasses. Here, my attention draws equally to the meteoritic forces that play a vital role in the creation of the most fluid elements of all. Violence hasn’t created a wall out of water, it has roared it into being, onto the surface.

Not having any color, water reflects what-is. Moreso, it is part of a vital cycle, a life-giving potential that has the superpower to reshape and reshape, never in need of claiming a particular place or space for as long as Earth embeds.

Yesterday, after an intense session of emotional healing, I rested my hands and feet on the mud surrounding an elegant tree. As if I could draw in what was underneath the earth. And I could, by trusting the presence of the bedrock.

Explosively me

Hello, who’s there, inside? I am a bit afraid of my own voice, or force. Or core. Is it explosive? Well, yes, a big bang of one human life waiting to happen wholly and intensely. Parts of conditioned-me prefer to be implosive – some might call that introvert, which sounds much better and feels comfortably safe. I am sure some of the associated behavioral tendencies qualify as self-sabotage, even if circumstances are genuinly testing. But, wat is testing, actually? Rusty projections are since identifying with them imprisons my thinking, feeling, and actions. A learned sense of safety may well turn out to be a bundle of constructions.

This period, I feel like the best way to break through, or soften, let go and discharge these self-denying habits, is to name them directly within a context of attuned witnesses. With the gentle yet forceful awareness of somebody that ‘has seen it all’, my mind’s eye may see through the layers of hardened skin and reach my heart’s wisdom, communicating authenticity by allowing my motions to align with a felt sense of life. Something I could not do without the nourishing support of mentors disguised as friends , and everyone else cocreating what I, somewhat hesistant, call 'my path'.

Choosing words is, logically, a bit hard these days. However fluid and playful interpretation can be, unfiltered honesty is more important than creativity these months. This is challenging, my ego comes with an identification with the one thing I always knew I ‘had’ within arm’s reach: creativity. And hey, if the things I say must reflect the ‘real me’….well, this comes with quite a lot of pressure, of course.

Out of the emptiness that will lay bare after this emphasis on transparent self-recognition, new artistic forms will arise, I am sure, trusting laws that surpass my decision making. Because surely, creativity and honesty do not have to be opposites. Once the creational source called sensitivity is unmasked, creative energies otherwise involved in veiling depth of being are unleashed.

Ironically, a pressing emphasis on ‘self’ will dissolve simultaneously.

Whoever I interpreted to be may turn out to be much more unknown than I dare to intuit! This dance between playfulness and seriousness, or truthfulness, is stretching the emotional reach of every learned conviction. Embodiment is the stage of this dance.

Want to dive deeper into the question what authenticity really – REALLY – is? Settle yourself in a comfortable position and experience how this podcast about 'authentic presence' may or may not resonate with you.

*And see the following page for the next edition of our training in authentic presence which starts in March, will be held in Brussels, in English (the precise information about dates, location, and accomodation will soon be published).

Let her lead

What a breath smoothing interaction it was. The streaming sensitive responses of a good friend invited me to graciously offer tender embraces to respond to his evenly distributed need for care, however invisible at times.

A while ago, his attuned responses showed me that it is really possible for every – every- of my physical boundaries to be acknowledged. During a kind conversation about intimacy, he determinedly stated my autonomy and freedom to always say no and to be taken 100 percent seriously. There was a perfect harmony between his softly yet resolutely spoken words and the gentle humming I sensed from his upper body slowly swaying from left to right while addressing his values. This is how protection without any pressure or demand feels like, my inner child learned eagerly. Finally, those parts of me that still and shameful believed it was necessary to hold on to (the also internalized) distrust and the nonverbal, pressive memories of an assault, could loosen.

Maybe even for the first time in my life, my bodily integrity felt like an undeniable central reference point for every form of intimacy. The context of deep connection outside of any predetermined exchange or role made it all the more meaningful. His words were expressed in such a harmonious, direct, autonomous, and principled way, that I gave up the struggle to be alert, to notice any sign potentially saying I should be on the lookout for transgression of physical boundaries. This is what it feels like to be aware, not alert. My ‘no’ felt honored through his words, my skin felt mine, and my heartbeat not a threat but my body’s pounding bond with me. Also, as it turned out, this was the moment in which I was also ready to receive such a humane gift of tender love and acknowledgement of my integrity. An emotional – not per se intellectual - awakening to the truth of my openness, and how it has been damaged in the past, and how it is still, without a doubt, the heart of my heart.

Compassionately, I look back on learned behavior and the fear that accompanied physical closeness. I was shaken, not broken. In need for help and subtly yet ongoingly lost in the continuation of traumas we get caught in, generation after generation. Luckily, this can change.

Some weeks later, I felt totally safe to trust the openness of my body in interaction with this same friend.

While sharing reflections on emotional needs, I simply uttered the words – motions - my body was communicating. There was no script going on, thoughts ran slow, and mental images weren’t influenced by damaging situations from the past. Emotional, sensual, and psychomotor excitability could coordinate a dance of touchable closeness, fully and finely attuned to what his evenly vulnerable body needed. Just a hug. No strings attached.

Again, trusting the feedback of my body was such a strengthening experience, precisely because the setting was intimate. I deeply appreciate the power of words, and now the process is to integrate the full potential of emotional depth in those words by letting my body do as much nonverbal talking. It hasn’t been an easy journey, violence left its traces in tendencies that I know how to hide, but it’s out in the open now. I feel my body’s integrity much more vividly thanks to these kinds of interactions with loving friends, however supportive therapy has been in the past.

The bodily wisdom can be recognized, amongst others, in how touch can be a surrendering, tendering invitation to embrace every single sensation of being alive. To celebrate pure signs of life's energy. And our human form on this planet, a complex and embodied dynamic of different needs and the central role connection plays in all of this.

My body’s openness has been abused, I did not wholly learn to honor her presence, but her tender wisdom is on the rise. The word grateful doesn’t match the deep tissue relaxation this brings. It’s love. A love for my own integrity, for sentient life, and my power to stand for this truth. A testimony to the power of community.