Nervous system regulation is necessary, yes. Breathwork helps, absolutely. And pleasure practices can be transformative. But without explicitly connecting eros to political resistance—without that foundational understanding that our capacity for pleasure is contested territory under fascism, that reclaiming it is an act of defiance and the fuel that reminds us what we're fighting for—we're just maintaining ourselves to keep showing up to our own slow death. We're settling for endurance when what we actually need is aliveness rooted in why we're fighting: for a world where all bodies get to experience pleasure and joy.

I saw a funny meme on Facebook the other day. It said something like “Who masturbates for pleasure anymore? We do it to go to sleep!”. It was one of those “it’s funny because it’s true” moments. I mean I do still masturbate because I’m horny & I want to orgasm, but I haven’t made love to myself in some time. I think we all can agree that there’s a difference between fucking and making love, and I would like to get back to making love to myself. It’s one of my goals for 2020: regular lovemaking sessions.

I know that my entire life’s work is built around listening to the body, heeding it’s wisdom, but what’s the wisdom in my body’s belief that I’m deliberately & selfishly putting it in harm’s way? I cannot, and don’t want to live a life where I’m literally grounded, unable to move beyond these imaginary borders of city, state, nation, continent. But neither do I want to be at war with my body.

So I sit with this discomfort. And I hope that starting the conversation will be enough to shift it. Now that my body knows that it’s been heard, perhaps we can come to some sort of agreement, some sort of way to move together rather than in conflict.

Even though I don’t have children, I am overwhelmed when I think of the magnitude of her losses & I cannot imagine how she survived as long as she did. Now either she was a mistress of Faking It, her Suppression Game was on fleek (that’s what I believe now), but she managed to live & love & laugh for those 24 years. I did not know that Survivor’s Guilt was killing her until it killed her (not that I have any idea what I would’ve done if I had known--I don’t think I was really cognizant of that as a thing until then). I strongly suspect that having a child to raise is what kept her from sinking into a non-functioning depression born of out everlasting grief.

It became clear that even though I talk a big game about healing from trauma not meaning that you become the person you were before (I used to love flying as a kid), and I fully believe it, I was somehow only applying that to others & not to myself. I hadn’t realized that in the back of my head I was still thinking that I was gonna find the magic lever that would make me believe that riding in a plane is completely safe. She gave me permission to reframe my desire into one that was actually doable: to not let my terror guide my experience.

The other day on one of my coaching calls (I was the coachee, not the coach) we were talking about dying in to freedom and dying into captivity and I decided to interpret that as dying into expansion and dying into contraction, but somehow I wrote “constriction”.  And then someone else on the call was talking about contraction and so then added “/contraction”. And then the guide started talking about the contractions of orgasm (or maybe they talked about the contraction of childbirth & I started thinking about the contractions of orgasm). And as the discussion continued I started thinking that there’s actually a difference between constriction and contraction. 

You take a risk on being seen for  all of who you are: your sterling qualities & the ones that you’re not so proud of; no masks just you and your naked authenticity. In an intimate relationship the other person accepts all of you & values you in your entirety. It doesn’t mean that your partner doesn’t want to scream every time they see you’ve left the tube off the toothpaste or that you don’t curse their name for the way they put the toilet paper on the roll (over, you heathens!). It means that your inability to remember a punchline, and your tendency to shut down when you feel stressed, are seen as just as valid as your ability to know when they’ve had a bad day just by how they open the door, just as valid as the way your eyes light up when they say your name. In an intimate relationship, you are not devalued for your humanity.

I feel guilty because I on my worst days I believe whole-heartedly  that the US cannot be saved; that it is descending into vortex of hate and violence, greed and incompetence, selfishness & ignorance that it cannot recover from. It’s not that those things haven't always existed in this country but that the current Administration has made it so this the government is no longer pretending that it's not killing off the “undesirables” (Black, Indigenous and other People of Color; the disabled; the poor;  immigrants; queers, etc etc) and is just flat-out gearing up for a live version of The Purge, only one that happens 365, 24/7. And I feel guilty because I have the privilege to escape that battleground when so many of my people can’t.

But what if you an artist, an activist, an organizer, someone who is used to “professional collaborations” took those same criteria that you use to figure out who you want to collaborate with & used it to vet partners. I’m not talking about the criteria regarding their particular knowledge or skillset (although that criteria is certainly valid—I myself am looking for someone with a high “emotional IQ”), but the criteria that excites your passion, that makes you feel like you and this person can co-create something grand & meaningful, that makes you sense there’s a perfect dovetailing of your vision. that makes you feel like you can take risks, can be vulnerable. can let down your walls in the service of something beautiful. Someone who you feel like you see & understand & whose trust in you feels like a gift.

My Fierce Femme Sister Of My Heart once posed a question in a presentation she was giving “How do we transmute our rage so that it doesn’t kill us?” Suppressing it doesn’t work. Denying it doesn’t work. Medicating it doesn’t work. I haven’t consciously tried all of those methods, but examples of them not working abound. So I try to vomit my grief & my rage as often as I can. It’s seemingly endless so I don’t know that I’ll ever get it all out, but I know I don’t want to live with it stoppered inside me growing & festering.

So recently I’ve been saying “Good night” when I go about my nightly errands (so much cooler at night, so I do all of my non-produce shopping & fresh meal acquisition after dark). And I noticed how challenging it was to feel like I was saying “Hello”, rather than “Goodbye”. When I let myself feel it, I noticed that “Goodbye” invokes a closing of my heart energy, a preparing to sever a connection. So instead of feeling open to people as I greeted them in the evening, I was actually closed off to them & their energy. I’d never noticed it before because it’s so subconscious that I didn’t notice what was happening in my heart, in my energetic connection with the humans around me.

I believe that "healing from trauma" is about regaining access to those parts of you that shut down in order to cope, and/or the things that trauma took away from you. Sometimes the reclaiming doesn't work for you, but it's still important to try. What are the things that your trauma(s) took from you? Are you perhaps unconsciously already reclaiming them? If not, what are small things that you could reclaim?

I learned so many things at her bedside that inform my work as a healer. It was at her bedside that I learned how to set a sacred container that engages all the senses no matter whether or not all the senses are perceptible to observers. It was at her bedside that I learned how much loving touch can communicate, absent of words. It was at her bedside that I learned how to be present with intention & love while knowing I was essentially powerless to affect the outcome.

In situations of peril, the body has one goal: survive. Whatever the decision your body made, it was an informed decision. Whatever ultimately happened, whether your rapist was foiled or succeeded in their attempt to rape you; your body was still doing it's job the best way it knew how with all the tools it had at its disposal. 

Trauma is what happens to a body & mind that survives. Trauma changes us, literally changes our brains: a brain that went through a traumatic incident works differently than a brain that has not. And trauma changes our body in many ways. Whether there are visible scars or not, there are places on our body that hold memories/images/flashbacks/pieces/feelings of the event(s) that changed us.

But still, the truth hidden in my body was that I started fucking men again not because I authentically desired them, but in some kind of unconscious wish to please my dead mother. And my body carried a lot of sadness about it.

De-centering the race/ethnicity & sexual preference/orientation of the victims is a form of erasure. Ignoring that queer & trans POC are more likely to be victims of violence allows that violence to continue.

The power that comes from recognizing how your healing journey mirrors the healing journey of your clients & how those healing journeys affect each other. And why you need to be clear on what healing you're receiving from the healing work you're offering in the world. 

People often confuse "story" with "fiction" & in some contexts that is a completely valid equation. But when we're talking about stories of the body, that equation doesn't hold up so well. "Story" is the body's documentation of an event & how it makes sense of that event. 

As a Queer Black Woman, I understand those difficulties. More importantly, I understand those difficulties somatically. It is not a theoretical understanding, not something I've read about or studied. It's a lived understanding: I feel those difficulties in my gut, they exist in my body with every step I take in the world.