This week's garden
& the little plants of thoughts I have on this beautiful Sunday
Sometimes writing turns into fear. I fear writing, for I hardly know if the words I am using are my salvation or my dishonor.
— Grada Kilomba
On Healing
I have spent years, with many teachers and healers, trying to tend to what I called ‘my broken body.’ I have worked with horses, sound, nature, breathwork, somatics and herbs. I’ve spent so much money, pursuing the next medicine or medicinal hands, anything that promised me a new body.
And I am not dismissing any of these things. I am, very likely, the combination of all of these practices. It is perhaps how I am writing to you today. I remember there was a time (or many times) when the pain was so enormous I could not move. And while the weeds of pain still stand healthy and unyielding in me, it no longer chocks the work the way it did before. The art and the grief breathe and live together. The fruit trees grow beside the poison ivy, neither conquers the other. It’s not that the beauty in my life is strong enough to weed out all the poison, or, that the poison erases the beauty.
AND there is something troubling I’ve been noticing about what I call “the project of healing.” This year I was getting my certification in somatic yoga, and suddenly I found myself moving further and further away from my studies. Every class was agony. I was annoyed, frustrated, impatient. I recall one class where the teacher had just received a call from her son that he had totaled his car in the rain storm but ‘that he was fine.’ She went on to teach the class in the same monotone voice, telling us that this is what her practice of yoga was for, for moments like this. I wanted to scream! Is this what healing is teaching us? Is this what our practice is for? So that when our heart drops we can keep a steady face and go on with the Great Plan? So that we become inflexible and stoically tolerant of life’s tenderly frightening and painful encounters?
This moment delivered the first whispers of disillusionment and serious questioning I began to have. I slowly tapered my monastic, lifeless meditations, and I began to ask: is healing the work of distorting the body’s natural response? How dangerous would that be? And how conveniently aligned with the objectives of capitalism and religion it is.
If our body is feeling deeply unsafe, is the work to breathe through the fear, or to listen to the message? What is missed, what is abandoned, what is left unchanged or unbuilt when we treat each howl as a moment we must regulate through? Imagine an animal was trained to breathe against his natural instincts in the presence of a predator. What purpose would that serve except to sever us from our already tragically wounded intuition and make us easier prey?
My little city garden
You could say that people with trauma live in flight or fight and that healing helps them settle the body, that not all fear is real fear. Or, that there are people living traumatic situations and need something to hold them through that. Yes AND these methods do not replace the desperately needed medicine of change — and the medicine of touch. Interestingly, I have never been given the one thing I needed most in the healing world. I was never held. My skin was left professionally untouched. I am talking about the innocent holding of one’s hand, or the light touch of one’s shoulder. I am talking about the moment that does not ask you to speak, or breathe, or rely on the resources of your own body. I am suggesting instead that there is the neglected medicine that our ancestors and aunties back home know so well, that no one has to be trained for. The healing herb of touch. Am I alone in thinking its tragic that we are missing this?
***
What I’ve found in my own life and the lives of others is that we are told to breathe through the pain while the source is left untended. I remember being sent to a therapist once in high school, then afterwards, I continued to be sent to my father’s house on the weekends, which was a deeply disturbing and unsettling place to return my body to and destroyed whatever possibility rose in that session. And I remember being listened to professionally while I continued to live deeply unloved, deeply unheld.
If we are sending in armies of healers into the world who do not hold the capacity to witness, who arrive with one eye into their work, who are emptied of healthy rage, who have unlearned the art of saying NO with their bodies, then doesn’t the work of healing begin to resemble the same nature of colonization and religion — of severing the indigenous spirit from the natural impulses and organic needs of the body?
Of course the great project of healing is conveniently endless. My friends and I have cried over all the ‘work’ we’ve put in that still sends us into day long tremors and night long cries. Is it that there is still so much more ‘work’ left to do? Or is that one morning we must wake up and say Enough! That perhaps liberation is as Minna Salami so beautifully worded it, “The absence of suffering from being yourself.”
What I’ve noticed is that the deeper I enter the world of healing, the more unwell I have become. It has oriented me towards fixing parts of myself that objectively are problematic but subjectively are deeply indigenous to who I am. This editing of the nativity in me has wounded much.
Crying often is native to who I am. This intense fear, this conquering and foreignly imported fear, is not. Psychically reading you is native to me. Having to discard my readings, or worse, prevent them, through a boundary everyone has established is a necessary pillar of life, is not.
The healing industry defines what is objectively well and unwell, but what is unwell in one space is the material I need to live, to create, to be well within my own life, in my native strangeness. I nearly destroyed the most precious parts of me, my greatest gifts, my most generous creative sources, trying to become ‘well.’
The other day I saw these planters throw a bunch of imported plants and trees into the soil without any question about whether they were suitable for this land. We’ve normalized the importation of plants that do not belong here, that do not thrive here. And what is done to the land is done to the body.
Your image of wellness is not mine. My medicine is not yours. These things belong to the regions of our own bodies.
If there is any hard ‘work’ to be done, it is perhaps only in the rewilding of our gardens.
‘The desperate man’ by Gustave Courbet — a painting I lived with for many years, folded into many journals and novels.
***
When I was younger I used to cut out and draw and rewrite paintings and passages that portrayed the characters of madness. I understood the beauty, the significance, the disguise, and necessary rebellion of madness. I admired it, and saw myself as kin of the mad ones who threw themselves under trains for love (Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy) and who walked a city deeply alone, deeply hungry, who traded all of a life for a pencil and few lines of transcendent writing (Hunger by Knut Humsun). Imagine if there impulses were shoved into wellness sessions and month long retreats. What art would that have taken from us? What life would have been left unlived and lost?
… there is no fixed, authentic self. Who you are today is not who you must be tomorrow. The worship of consistency is a prison and when you step out of the prison, you can leave the oppressive narrative it imposed on you behind.
… Liberation is a reinvention of the self.
— Sensuous Knowledge, Minna Salami
The many faces of you
I once came across an article many years ago about how having a Facebook account binds you to a certain identity, how change becomes nearly impossible when one is encountering the image of themselves online like a binding religion that cannot be altered.
And I wonder how social media has influenced the natural evolution of our many becomings if it holds us to the first image we established, the way the first recorded verses of religion hold us to something that no longer fits our time.
I started to think about this when I realized that each time I was beginning to lose my bearings and all sense of who I was, every time I felt disoriented, confused, defeated, I would open my own instagram profile, like a mirror — until I began to question what that was about.
Between my facebook profile, created when I was 18 and abandoned when I was 24, and my instagram profile, created when I was 25, I wonder what natural transitions, what pivots, what ideas I missed in my loyalty to the initial identity I began online. (I did notice a big shift in my art and who I was when I changed platforms, as if the digital migration allowed me the permission and the space for the revolution). Otherwise, if I grew in my second platform, I was always growing from the original seed. All ‘inventions’ were actually variations of the same plant.
And I’ve noticed a massive shift and growth in the woman I know who took extensive time offline. It seems only then that the enormous evolution could take place.
***
When I came across Salami’s definition of liberation (above), I realized how imprisoning social media could be and not for the reasons we often discuss. Not for the time it sucks from you, or the disorienting way it places horror and commercials on the same page, or even for the way it changes the biology of our minds and our collective definition of beauty. Instead, what if the destruction was a lot more intimate than that?
What if it robs us of our artistic and medicinal madness in the pull towards a unified, consistent image? If there is “no fixed, authentic self,” and if “who [we] are today is not who [we] must be tomorrow,” then isn’t social media, which cements the image of yesterday, a sort of portal that instead of recording the passage of time, freezes it? What happens to the nature of time in the glass earth of social media? Does any real movement happen?
Or perhaps these are all very big questions and its only a simple matter, and not so serious…
