Tag Archives: embodiment

the soul’s own home is breaking open

Swadhistana Chakra, water colour by Vamakhepa

This morning I wrote into the fog of the day with this tea, this candle, these fingers on the keyboard. I’ve been writing this post all day, needing breaks to stretch, to walk, to nap. Maybe eventually I’ll get it done enough to share.

The pain in my back flared up again after I got back from Atlanta. I was worried about traveling, afraid that something would torque badly when I lifted my bag into an overhead bin or sat for so long in one position on the plane. Overall, though, my back seemed to be at ease when I was back east, and did not complain the way it is now. Could there be something about being back in Oakland, in the space I am creating for my writing work, that’s sparking this renewed spasming? Continue reading

listening to the body’s stories

graffiti: black wingsThis isn’t like that — this is like something else. (That’s how it begins.)

Last night, I went to one of Vanissar Tarakali‘s workshops, Do It Yourself Trauma: Healing principles and practices to support your personal healing process. I want to follow my own instincts, these desires to let others both help and witness me into my body, to do the incredibly simple but also simultaneously (sometimes) devastating work of just noticing what’s going on in my body and letting it be. Last night Vanissar talked about emotional first aid (she talks about it on her blog here), and then we practiced some of what she described: grounding into the body, physical practices to meet and/or engage with particular feelings, appreciating the body for doing all that it does to take care of us (and this includes our trigger responses, the stuff we do that we don’t want to do anymore because it doesn’t serve us but it did serve us once upon a time), lots more. The three hours flew by! Here’s a great thing she said: if you beat yourself up for the ways that your body responds when it thinks it’s threatened, that’s going to seem like a threat! Whew.

What do I want to say about this? This morning I am both more achy and less — the armor around my shoulders (which last night I began envisioning like a pair of shoulder pads, the kind that footballers wear) feels softened. Not gone, just malleable; not penetrable, but able to shift some.

Continue reading

who does she think she is to believe in herself that much?

graffiti of green grass with small red flowers poking up and the text, in black, "small flowers / crack concrete"

"small flowers crack concrete" -- what a perfect tiny poem for today

Thinking about a life worth living, and I’ve got a quick write this morning — I like how this regular blogging practice gets me to type up workshop writes a little more often!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Continue reading

embodiment: the power and use of writing about sex

heart graffiti with hand and love emerging from the top valves...

image via travelingbeard.com

Good morning!  A morning write, and then it’s off and out into the world — I’ve got spiced decaf this morning instead of tea and why am I telling you this?

This is about getting the words started.  This is about saying whatever will move the fingers across the keyboard so I can get to whatever comes next.  Sometimes you have to write the stuff that will move you to and into what you needed to write — that doesn’t mean that the stuff that you wrote first was bad or  wrong.  In fact, that stuff was necessary: it got you to the other part, the part you most wanted to say.

Continue reading

Why sexuality and sexual trauma writing together, in the same ‘house’?

I still panic, sometimes, talking about the fact that I lead both erotic writing and sexual trauma survivors writing workshops; there’s still that ingrained sense, for me, that these two things just don’t go together. I don’t think I probably need to explain this as often as I think I need to – and yet, every now and again, I dive back into the why.

Why sexuality and sexual trauma writing together, in the same ‘house’? Restorying our sexuality lets us come back here, into our bodies, the site of trauma, the site of violence against us if we are survivors of sexual trauma. Restorying, writing our desire, our history and too our now longing, re-embodies us in a safe-ish way (writing’s not completely without risk, of course: if the writing is to carry and convey the depth and breadth and truth of a story, an experience or possibility and that means the writing needs to be embodied and that’s a big fucking deal for sexual trauma survivors – embodiment). Writing is a way to settle into ourselves, slow back inside our skin – not the only way. One way.

When we write desire – any desire: fantasy or fiction or what just happened this afternoon – we are back in our skin, we experience the want, we feel its flesh and tingle and joy, and, too, struggle and ache and loss and fear. We can write, and so we can feel, a body free of flashbacks – and, too, we are deeply familiar with the truth of an erotic desire riddled with holes and loss and so we can describe it fully, gorgeously, achingly real and hot.

Continue reading