Summer Composting

Summer Composting

May 30, 2025

Summer Composting

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.” Rainer Maria Rilke

Inspired by a recent energy work session, I am exploring the idea of allowing myself to be composted. I imagine I am lying down on the earth and letting all that is old, outdated, and unhelpful within myself to be composted. Allowing life itself and the earth to move into my body and being and alchemize what is ready to be given over to the dark soil, to the unknown, to breaking down and becoming the nothing that emerges as something. Letting myself be dissolved.

We humans can hold on to identities and the roles we play in our work, our families, our communities, but also to the internal identities – a good person, a kind person, a productive person, a spiritual person, etc… Of course it helps to have a sense of ourselves, and indeed we do need the ego to develop that self; it’s not that we want to float around as edgeless blobs but instead can we be curious about the ways we cling to or get stuck in old patterns and what impact that has on us. 

As I let more ease into my days, my mind, my heart (not easy, I might say), I can see how familiar and habitual it is to work hard, push, do, fill up time and space. That old way of being is ripe for the compost pile, but its roots are deep and tangled, so one go of it is not enough. It’s a practice. To over and over again let myself be emptied, merge with nature, surrender to the alchemical process, to feel the earthiness and how it ushers my being into a deeper service to the soul.

Grief is doing that in my life right now. In general, I think grief has a way of leveling us, of taking us down to the bones and composting what is extra, not coming along into the future with us, unnecessary or outworn. But I am also opening to the possibility that there are other ways to break down the old tangly, invasive, and strangling patterns. Maybe it doesn’t have to be the fogginess of grief that does it (although I am a willing apprentice to that process), but can include other lighter and conscious ways of giving over to the earth, to the truth of change, to the falling apart, decaying, and emerging as something else. Each time I practice this composting meditation of sorts, I end up feeling a bit cleared out, less bogged down, less heavy, and there is something nourishing about that: the idea that nature’s organic way of breaking things down so that they can be renewed and renewing is also a process I can embody myself.

How does the idea of composting resonate with you? Any other gardening images or metaphors that align with your own body and soul?

I came across a poem recently that seemed to lean into this idea of merging with the earth that I am exploring:

Yes, That’s When

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.

I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.

Beltane, a Season of Having and Being

Beltane, a Season of Having and Being

May 1, 2025

Beltane, a Season of Having and Being

As I was allowing myself to sink into reading other people’s essays and writings about Beltane, and as I was preparing for my own workshop coming up that will include some of the themes of this seasonal celebration, I had a realization that this year feels like a Beltane year for me. And then I asked myself what I meant by that. 

As I reflected a bit more, I remembered how enamored I was with Imbolc last year. Not that it didn’t play as much of a role in my consciousness this year, it did; but there’s an energy around Beltane this year that marks it a little differently. I wondered if I am going through my own seasonal cycles; last year was an Imbolc year, this year a Beltane year… what will be next year? Perhaps the cycles are not only what is reflected in the world around us, the natural world and ritual world, but also reflective of what is happening in our inner cycles and movements. 

Maybe I am beginning to feel the light of the bright fire inside this year. Maybe my senses are waking up a bit more this year, or I am tuned into the sensual aliveness of the natural world. Maybe creative ideas are coming into more full color and light.

I had an energy work session recently that sparked an insight around moving from a needing/doing/proving space within myself to a having/being space. Beltane feels like a having and being kind of season. 

Part of what was arising during this energy work session was the reckoning with how the absorbed messages from patriarchy and capitalistic society (just to name a few) around success, achievement, not enough, keep doing more, have impacted how I feel about myself, how I operate in the world, and what I expect from myself and others. It’s a tricky message because while it encourages us to do more, it simultaneously tells us to not get too big or too much, to function inside limitation. What a dilemma! 

I can sense hints of the dissolution of this old paradigm within myself, small examples of moving beyond it – some that come from gaining experience and insight through my own therapy and healing practices; some from life events, deaths and changes that catalyze things into a different perspective; some might just be part of aging and seeing enough of other ways of being that they’re beginning to take hold.

There are stronger moments of tapping into an experience of expansion, of broadening into a different approach to my own life and what difference it makes inside and out to begin to let go of the old obstacles and binds. But as it goes, there are also familiar and occasional pulls to contract, to question and doubt; the old messages say stay small, be careful, better to doubt yourself than to take on too much. Oh, they are so painful!

I can feel my whole energy field collapse around me, the sense of possibility begins to shrink and my system resorts to an old way of operation that being fearful, worried and cautious is how you stay safe. I can see how that threat response is so informed by familial, societal, and historical influences and patterns. The way to stay safe is not to venture too far out of the barriers, the predictable window, the known parameters. Something gets passed down in us and reinforced by societal messages and impositions. We develop energetic/nervous system/emotional/physical habits around “avoiding threat and danger.”

Personally (and professionally) I believe it can be part of our growth and work as humans if we want it, to find where those habits of survival and perceived safety are not necessary and may actually be holding us back from being and having. We can become curious about the places where there’s some flexibility in our system and potentially start to shift the outdated patterns. (Caveat: Not every protective mechanism can or should be released, especially in a world where danger and threat does exist for so many; and not everyone has to want to do this work.) 

If it does appeal to us, what better season to make a practice of receiving through our senses, letting in the smells and colors of the natural world around us, feeling the warmth of the strengthening sun and allowing ourselves to have it. How can we lean into this season of coming into light and growth and blossom, and begin to gently untangle where we have been living in limitation, expectation and demand? If I can lean into the sensual and fire-y aliveness of Beltane, even consider that it might be okay for me to have and be, what will come next? It is often in the in-betweens, as Beltane sits between spring and summer, where we can find an opening for something different and new.

How is the season of Beltane showing up in your own life? What old patterns are you untangling, creating new space for aliveness?

Friction and Flowering

Friction and Flowering

Mar 31, 2025

Friction & Flowering

Dancing our way through the becoming

I feel the tug of war between warm and cool, between connecting in and connecting out, between surrender and taking action, between slowing down and mobilizing…

Spring is indeed here, the daffodils and the hyacinths are coming into bloom and the celandine is taking over the yard. And yet, somehow, the next steps for me are not yet clear; somehow there is still fogginess and unreadiness to mobilize into decisive action, even a need for rest. There has been so much churning in the natural world, the cosmic world, the social/political world, and even in my personal world. The churn can be tiring, and I still sit with the question of what to do while the energies are still on spin cycle, and there’s some rinsing to be done. 

What I find myself doing is allowing as much as I can – allowing myself to fall alseep when I need rest, to be carried by the energy of the day even if I don’t know where it’s going, to release control a little bit more, and to hold myself gently when I cling tight in hopes of directing the process. There is no directing the process of flowering – I plant the seed, I give it what it needs for nourishment, and then I wait and I let the unfolding happen. Maybe I think I have a sense of which day the bud will open and what the color will look like, but it’s always as if it’s happened while I’ve been sleeping. One day it’s just a hint of itself pushing through the green sepals (a new word I learned today), and then the next day a full flower is there, a pleasant surprise to my weary and sleepy eyes. 

And so it is with my own internal process – I see the colors emerging, I know the time and weather is ripe for development and flowering, but I cannot rush the process and I cannot predict each element of the outcome. My work in this moment is to take care and allow, to give space while also paying attention, to move and to rest as my body determines, to dream in the moonlight knowing one day the flower will be shining in the morning sun.

What Shape of You Wants to Emerge?

What Shape of You Wants to Emerge?

Mar 3, 2025

What Shape of you Wants to Emerge?

Inspirations from David Whyte’s poem, What to Remember When Waking

I feel like a broken record, even to myself. Emergence, emergence, what wants to come forth, step forward, flourish, begin to take up space? These themes circle around me and within me these days, not surprising given the season we are in here in the northern hemisphere. Also, maybe not surprising given the tenor of these times, and the need for imaginal and creative visions of life. And then there’s the personal element of feeling on the edge of expansion – a seed inside that is wanting to grow, still fuzzy yet as to what it will become. For all of these reasons, emergence is a thread running through the elements of my days, both internally and externally.

I used the David Whyte poem, What to Remember When Waking, in a workshop this weekend (copied below). I have heard this poem many times over the last stretch of years, and it finds me differently each time I hear it. At this moment in time, I am hearing it as a question of emergence, inviting us to leave space for the bigger thing to come through, the presence of creation before it is tangible, the oak in the acorn.

It’s a process that most of the time I would really like to rush; other times I am quite fine just staying a seed in the dark earth that doesn’t have to make its way anywhere.

To sit with the process of becoming isn’t easy or comfortable. It gnaws away at my patience. The journey of waiting through the fallow times can vacillate between a wild excitement and a hopeless numbing – when will the thing just happen? When will I know what is next? When will the flower finally bloom? 

As Whyte’s poem suggests – the plans we can make ourselves are too small to live. I am finding for myself that the work of holding space for what is yet to emerge requires many containers. The container of my own body, moved and present, able to hold the changing sensations of emergence. It also requires the container of community, of others who are in the process of unfolding with awareness. And it requires connection to the bigger/larger/beyond. On a given day, that might be ancestral presence, the earth herself, or dipping into meditative/spiritual/depth practices and lineages. It is in the remembering to touch into one or more of these containers as often as I can, and to allow myself enough time to feel held by them, that I can tolerate and even begin to savor being with emergence itself.

What to Remember when Waking?

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

—David Whyte

Reflective Prompts:

What is taking shape in you? What is calling you out beyond the limits you have on yourself? What are you living into in your own process of emergence? Who and what is helping you navigate the process?

Patterns

Patterns

Oct 20, 2024

Patterns

Looking for the thing that is different.

NOTE: Much of what I am writing about here comes from my work as a somatic experiencing practitioner and psychotherapist, as well as my own lived experience on the receiving end of these modalities.  I am not an educator, so any misrepresentation is all my own. If you want to do personal work in these areas, I suggest finding a practitioner to accompany you in the process.

Somatic Patterns

Often in somatic work, if a pattern or sequence keeps showing up and feels familiar (this always leads to that), then we might start to wonder – is there an over-coupling happening? What that means is that certain responses may have gotten wired together possibly because they fired together out of trauma response, a survival adaption, self-protection. So, our systems have developed a strong and protective habit – when I notice this sensation/feeling/experience, it goes right to this other sensation/feeling/experience. For example, when I notice something like anger/heat start to rise, my muscles in my jaw begin to tense around that experience. Usually, these over-coupled responses move very quickly and undetected unless we are doing the work of paying attention.  

When we start to unwind that process and get curious about it, firstly there can be a suspicion from the system itself. After all, it’s this over-coupled response that has ostensibly kept the person safe in some way, even if it causes other kinds of struggle, stress and pain. When we start to slowly untangle that pattern, it can release trauma physiology that was bound in there (anger, fear, etc…), which in itself can take time to work through, allowing space for the movement and expression of things that never got a chance to be expressed.

Ultimately and hopefully, after working through this experience, we may feel our own aliveness returned to us in a way that we aren’t used to. We may feel less exhaustion from all the “protecting” that our system has been doing. We may feel more access to emotions we haven’t before. I am saying all of this in a simple direct way to describe it, but in no way does that mean the journey of it is simple and direct. It can take a long time and it’s natural to move away from and towards the process many times. And we may even decide not to untangle certain things, and that’s okay, too.

What I have been attending to lately in this work, is keeping a look out for the thing that is different. If these protective patterns are familiar and habitual, we can learn to be attentive when something different shows up – a new sensation, emotion, perspective. When we notice something we haven’t seen before, we can take a moment to explore it; it could be something that has been off the radar (under-coupled) and in fact potentially helpful and resourceful. In the example above, if we can tolerate a bit more of the anger/heat before our jaw muscles tense around it, we may find that we are able to put words on that sensation, like “No” or “I don’t like that.”It can feel scary to look for what is different. Our brains usually perceive different as threatening on some level, so again it takes time and doing the work in small pieces to develop enough safety to allow for the different thing.

Inter-generational Patterns

If we take a wider view and look at how it shows up not just in our bodies, but in our lives, I think of inter-generational patterns. When we find ourselves saying “this is just how I am,” or “this is what my family does,” we might be seeing some of those familiar survival adaptation patterns showing up as our personalities or how our families relate to each other. The somatic abolitionist Resmaa Menakem says “trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality… in a family looks like family traits… in a people looks like culture.” When trauma isn’t recognized or seen for what it is, or supported in healing, it can start to be misperceived over time from within and without. 

It doesn’t mean it’s all bad or that we need to throw everything out. In fact, there are likely great resources and resilience in those adaptions that are important and useful to have, a strength. For example, when we are threatened, we want our body to protect us; when we are in a new place, we want to have a sense of keen awareness and boundaries. It’s just that when those survival mechanisms are kicking in all the time, whether they need to or not, that there may be room for other choices and possibilities. The purpose of those adaptations may no longer be present in the same way. Nervous system work is really about flexibility, choice and capacity in our systems, not about throwing one thing out to cling to another. 

Creative Patterns

This is a long and winding way to say that when we notice something different from our usual patterns and habits, it may be worth exploring. We don’t need to be working with trauma in order to do that, that’s just my way of exploring these concepts in my work. They can show up in our creative processes as well. When I dance, I may find myself in the same patterns and movements – going in the same direction, making the same gestures.

When I am writing, I may notice I use the same phrases, words or form. If I can look for the surprise, when I can catch myself off guard, when I am disinhibited enough to allow something new to emerge, that may be worth paying attention to. 

What familiar and habitual patterns do you feel curious about in your own life and creativity?

Is there anything different that you noticed today, no matter how small or subtle? A sensation you weren’t aware of before, a sound in the nature around you, the way you handled a difficult situation, or a word you used in a poem that you’ve never used before?

References:

Somatic Experiencing: www.traumahealing.org, www.somaticexperiencing.com
Resmaa Menakem: My Grandmother’s Hands, www.resmaa.com

October and Ancestors

October and Ancestors

Oct 4, 2024

October and Ancestors

October – the season of change, of decay and dying; not dead yet, but on its way.

October, the season of wind and darkness, of shifting time.

Literal time shifts – the night gets darker, morning too, and the clocks will eventually change. And the other kind of time begins to shift as well – the otherworld gets closer, the darkness and the veil begin to surround us. Whispers through the worlds find our hearts, letting us know we are not alone.

The otherworld tells me of its presence: I am here. You are not alone. There are so many of us, known and unknown to you, here as close as the dark, as close as the fall breeze, as close as the falling leaves underfoot. We are here, lean back into our holding, let us catch you.

Ancestors. 

Back and back and back again.

Those I have names for and those I do not. They can reach forward from the other side, through the veil with their wishes and their wisdom – have this, hold this to your heart. It may feel at times that the circle right around you is all you have, but there are ripples of us, rings of love going back through time, ready to fill in empty spaces, answer questions that plague your heart, listen to deep longings that are still yet wordless, and give the yearnings of your soul a place at the table.

Even if the details of us are gone, hard to find and track down, lost in archives or burnt in churches hundreds of years ago, we are still here. Right here, in this shifting season, in this walk into deep time. The fire is lit, and we are waiting.

I tell myself to remember that the hearth is the place of gathering, the place of cooking and story-telling, of sleeping and mending, of healing and silence. It is the flame we gather around to hold us in connection. It is the fire within us that has been lit from the hearth that keeps us connected into ourselves. The flame passed down through centuries, across oceans, in births and in deaths. In this shifting time, as the veil is reachable and the darkness holds us, each fire, each flame, is a signal of our ancestors’ presence, like a hand on the heart. We are here.