you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

Reflections + video teaching on reclaiming embodiment

Beautiful Human,

I go into depressive states often. The difference between me now and the me seven or more years ago is that i have a container that can hold these states. They can come and go and i have the margin to feel, to be curious about them, hell (and i used to hate the suggestion of this so forgive me if this sounds icky) to even let them teach me.

Part of how this container came to be is that i reclaimed my body, my relationship to her (yes, i don’t use object language when referring to my body) goodness, her power, her intelligence, her needs, her voice, her pleasure, her grief, her pain. I awoke to the ways in which i had been conditioned to consider her broken, problematic, even sinful in the religious paradigms i was raised, something to be managed, policed, prodded, forced. Something to endure. These perspectives were compounded by the traumatic experiences that resulted in a dysregulated nervous system alternating between anxiety and depression.

One of the photos i took during a workshop of reclaiming our connection to our embodied beauty apart from the cultural conditioning of the body as an object.

The great irony was that i considered all this normal. It was my normal, my baseline, my foundational way of being in the world. Disconnected from a body that felt like too much — too much sensation, emotion, need, desire, the muchness of girlhood (though i know males can relate) largely unacceptable in the family and world i grew up in. It makes sense. This world had traded its relationship to the feminine for the authoritarian, linear, performative, and controlled ways of an untethered masculine and its promise of power. One of its sacrifices, the vulnerable and exquisite body as the locus of Self.