Greetings friends.
I’m home for a full month after lots of travel, still. I’ve undertaken a new fitness project, I have new goals and a personal trainer who is brilliant and who helped my foot pain within one day of our first meeting.
Anyways, so, I am, anew, fascinated by the body and the mind’s relationship to the body. I have ADHD and someone, somewhere said you have to resparkleize things when you have ADHD. So movement, agility and strength training are resparklized for me right now.
Minds are funny because they want a straightforward plan and an agenda. They want binaries and dualism, they want absolutes. Life is wild because nothing is clear and nothing is guaranteed. Life is nondual; it’s nonlinear. When I teach my Childbirth classes, or work with families in labor, I always get asked, how long will it take? What will happen first? And babes, like, there’s just no answer. Which is what makes it so cool! It’s the draw and the resistance. We say we want depth, mystery, the wild the raw. Then you get in there and you’re like, will this be done by 3? lmao.
Modern life is precarious enough, and we have grown accustomed to a linear, straightforward process, and we rely on predictability for comfort. The mythic, the mystical, these things are not reassuring to the ego. They never were! And they’re especially incompatible with the GCal, optimized, productive, demanding lives we live today.
In 2008, I was a mess. I had just returned from my semester abroad (I know, poor baby) and the constellations of my friend group had all rearranged, I was taking Existentialism AND Postcolonial Lit (oops), and I had picked up a habit of slugging a bottle of wine before going out to the bars and smoking unfiltered Gauloises. I broke out in itchy hives all over my body. I was living alone, in an old house split into four apartments, with bats in the attic. I was always hanging out on the roof late into the night with my friends. There was no one there to tell me, Kate, it’s six in the morning, tell your friends to go home.
I worked at a small, local grocery store then, and one day an older lady came through my checkout line and encouraged me to sign up for her yoga class at the university the following semester. The second time she asked, I did it.
That changed everything.
I slowed down. I felt what was happening in my body. The uncertainty and fear about the first unscripted days of my life, when I would graduate from college. The way that 2008 had been an economic disaster that no one in America was acknowledging, but it was a household name in Europe. This would my the first time making it up on my own, and I didn’t know the rules to monopoly or even know where they playing board was or what it looked like.
I started going to yoga class 4 days a week. I practiced feeling and breathing, moving, aligning, adjusting. I turned to my breath, again and again. I stopped drinking and smoking (not for good, not then) and changed my diet around until the hives went away. I got distracted, missed class. But I kept returning.
I shudder to think what kind of anxious asshole I would be if it weren’t for yoga. I learned to tolerate being inside my own brain.
This is part of the magic of the body as anchor to presence. Where the mind wants to figure everything out, we turn to the body, with curiosity and friendship. Not more information from Tiktok. Not the op-eds for the cheap drug of rage, or the fashion girlies for the cheap drug of escape. We turn to the present reality of your body, moving through space. Meeting uncertainty with presence, movement, and breath. Just returning. Getting pulled of track and coming back. That is the practice. And the process of embodiment and wisdom.
So that’s what I’m (trying to be) up to. What about you?
my work
If you’re up for quiet listening to the body’s wisdom and deep recovery in your nervous system Craniosacral therapy. In addition to the private studio I typically work out of in North Side (book here), you can now find me in Manchester and the beautiful new space, Wildfire Wellness- book here.
Prenatal Playground is where a customized alignment-based movement plan supports a more comfortable pregnancy, smoother birth, and easier recovery, all with a light heart and a sense of curiosity. There are still a few spots available in the pilot version of the program.
of interest/open tabs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory I wish I had a tracker that could tell me how much time I’ve spent on this website lmao.
I’ve been remembering with curiosity what books and stories I was really into as a child, and one of the ones I was excited to recover was ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS!! anyone with me?
Locals: Fundraiser for TAOU2 (My fave yoga studio TAOU’s 2nd location in south side!) next Friday the 29th at Gallery 5
Locals again! My new friends at Wildfire Wellness also have a sister company called the Mynd Conservatory- a contemplative movement space. I haven’t checked out a class there yet, but I will this week or next.
Yes to all of this! (especially Island of the Blue Dolphins)