This week has been very healing for me.
I am writing this from the daybed in my office, curled up under a blanket, with the light of dawn coming in green, filtered through the leaves of my garden. My office used to be my bedroom, back when my mother lived on this side of the duplex, when I moved home after college, when my dad moved back to florida from india when he was diagnosed with cancer, when I didn’t know when or how my life would unfold. So much of my life has unfolded here in this room.
Here, I wrote academic papers on the false dichotomy of social narratives of Buddhist women, often categorizing them as either “monastic“ or “lay,“ erasing the tantric traditions of so many magical mystical women who have lived in the wilderness, practicing Dharma with their whole bodies.
Here, I first made love with the man who would become my husband.
Here, I conducted most of the first few years of my intensive study of Living Systems, reading books, checking what I was learning within my own living body, and then walking out into the garden to check it with the living body of the living world.
Here, I slept through the night when my father died, despite extended efforts by my mother and sister to wake me. That night a beloved friend, whose mother was also dying of cancer that summer, dreamt that she and I were sitting on the moon, singing the souls of the departing off to their next journey.
And here I am, now, seven years later, having made this room into my office, a jewel box sanctuary in motherhood, thickly cluttered with the erotic beauty I find in art, and artifacts, and art supplies, and heirlooms, and so many books spilling from their shelves. Here I am, in the morning light I love so much that comes in at a strange angle through the window which I have dangled with bits of chandeliers which make rainbows when the light is just right.
This is now the room from which I speak to clients, the room from which I do my work. And this week, I am working with mothers. I am working with people already leading regenerative development in their field, who didn’t have the language for it. I am working with someone going through a powerful spiritual initiation, and I am so incredibly honored to be walking alongside her. I am working with the community I was raised in, to begin to heal toxic patterns in order that we may have a future, and that that future could be one of thriving.
This week, I have had conversations on birth, and death, and sex, and organizational changemaking, and the lives and karmas our children choose when they incarnate through our bodies.
On Sunday, on my IG stories, I sent out a call for dialogue with people who, like me, fit the criteria below:
Ok friends, I am doing a bit of market research and would love to have a quick text or voice memo exchange with you if:
—You used to feel a strong sexual charge in your teens or twenties, and you miss that version of yourself.
— You’ve been through periods where your desire dipped, for weeks, months, or longer, and it bothered you.
— You want your sexual energy to feel alive again, but something hasn’t clicked yet.If this feels like you, and you’re open to sharing a bit more with me, just reply “me“ here and I’ll DM you a few questions.
At first it was quiet, and then, a flood.
The responses have revealed to me patterns that are so insightful, both to my own experience and to how the curriculum we have created in the EDGE can deeply support so many in coming to an empowered, alive relationship with their sexual energy.
I heard from strangers and friends, old colleagues and people I’ve hardly spoken to since college. Every experience completely unique, delicately nuanced, and yet following patterns I can discern.The people I heard back from included one woman I have felt enormous pain in relation to, the person with whom I unwillingly shared my most intense, painful, heartwrenching relationship with in college. Throughout this week we’ve connected about the intensity of that time, of that partner we both shared, and how concerned we still are for them while holding strong boundaries. It was deeply healing.
I feel incredibly human this week, and also very proud of the human I have become. It has not always been this way.
I feel grounded in myself and my values and my boundaries. It has not always been this way.
I feel confident and respected in the professional value I bring to my work. It has not always been this way.
In the hours after I gave birth, in the waves of pain and oxytocin and exhaustion and hunger and overwhelm, in the massive hormone cascade that was just beginning, and which would usher in my matrescence metamorphosis, I kept thinking one thing over and over and over again:
I would never look at another human being the same, knowing that someone had to go through some version of what I just did to do to bring them into this world.
Of course, like all psychedelic experiences (and childbirth certainly is one), the intensity of the realization gets muted over time. Integration into our daily lives is not a given. But I do believe that I have integrated this potent awareness of the sanctity and holiness of every life, including my own, into my work.
At every level, I am committed to our collective thriving. I am committed to the Living World. I am committed to healing the harm that so many of us are living with, in the survival patterns that live in the tissues and nervous system of our bodies, in the interpersonal patterns we keep playing out, in the organizational patterns that can and must change, of the cultural patterns that keep us trapped.
None of these things are fixed or permanent. Patterns can and do change every day. Some people call themselves pattern disruptors, but a system with momentum does not do well to be disrupted. There can be a lot of collateral damage. It must be regenerated. Regeneration takes into account the whole.
Regeneration is compost. We see what is still here which no longer serves and we compost it to create the fertile soil of better futures.
This is the nature of my life, of my work, and of the beauty I get to anchor in the world, every day, from this small, magical room.
