E: Exhale

Embodiment and endurance that leans into the unknown and toward each other.

Every atom chooses me each day.

Yours, too.

We all sit here, miraculous swirls of atomic stardust choosing to align day in and day out. They coordinate to leave us recognizable to long lost friends we cross paths with in public places - calling out our name as a question, opening a portal to fresh connection and a flood of memories. They also leave us easy to trace, track, even hunt through surveillance systems and those same public spaces that offer connection and love.

Each of us, in our evolving shapes and consistent forms, deep in grooves of habit and culture, always on the precipice of choice and even sometimes moving through it.

What will we do with all this possibility?

Earlier this season, I started to write to you about embodiment, about the ways somatic practices and lineages have made their ways into my life, grounded my politics in a transformative way, and opened new possibilities for self and whole as I experience them. The writing poured out in ways that I am still sorting through, tracing back awareness of the externalized practices and lineages as well as the hyper-personal stories of awareness, activation, dissociation, and healing. That writing erupted so intensely beyond what a newsletter can hold that I am gratefully awakened into larger work through it, with it, and eventually back here and in other places to share it. For now, let’s start with the breath.

My embodiment work is guided by practices that start and move with the power of breath. The self-created tools I found to be in or escape my body as a young person were operated through the on/off switch of controlled breath. My formal training came later, both through yoga and folks at the Embodiment Institute, grounding me into and through the breath, tying me consciously to the world beyond, the inherent interconnections the breath offers.

Holidays and elections, horrifying headlines abound. Lately, I am finding a particular need for the exhale side of breath these days.

Exhale. Make space for your parts, relax the diaphragm. Escort waste out of your being and offer it to the plants about. Release. Relax.

The thing is I forget to breathe when the pressure around me mounts. “Your body breathes automatically,” you say. Aha! I have overridden this protective truth with extended held breath, unconscious controls I’ve developed. I forget to breathe, I hold my breath, I break free from the soothing tools and try to muscle against the forces that be. When I find myself there, the next step is always a necessary exhale.

Of course we need the inhale too, the fresh wash of new offerings into the body, the expansion to take up space and wriggle the creaks out of the spaces between our bits and parts. For me, I need to start with the emptying, finding the release and openness that comes from the bottom of the exhale. “Let’s start again,” the exhale offers. “Let’s find our baseline, and build from there.”

It’s a new Gregorian New Year. And, here in the US, we’re headed into a presidential administration that promises to wreak havoc. I see the election as evidence of our shared situation, rather than an aberration. The election is evidence of great disassociation and devaluation, denial, disconnection and a chaotic storm of untethered truths, unaccountable and morally fantastic, weaving the United States together in ways that cut across time.

Exhale as you exert. I feel deeply called to orient, in particular in this moment, to my own ability to choose and do. To be in relationship and account with other builders and doers who can sever from ideas and ego and choose to see what is hard and possible when we choose to care for each other in ways so thorough that new ways of being must take shape.

What does it mean to orient to those who are honest about our situations, and are called into harnessing the resources we have to care for each other and build the worlds we deserve rather than submitting to the external threats and challenges? To be in community and connection with the imperfect human solutions of community, the brilliance of folks willing to try? One way I’m connecting into these questions and intentions is and through the mutual aid and reproductive justice work of the Yellowhammer Fund (— you’re invited to join me in supporting their effort!).

Exhale into the abyss of uncertainty. “Free people will not be conquered,” we are reminded in a recent episode of How to Survive the End of the World focused on “Tactical Disobedience”, as we are invited to consider our own foundations and connections and what we will and will not accept. We don’t know how we will receive threat or pressure, what we will need to face or resist, what folks beyond our immediate circles will be forced to face that we will need to work to know or see, what we will need to name or identify within the chaos of what is ahead. It’s daunting to hold. Release. Exhale. Take stock of where you are, what you have, how those tethers and connections most central to your truth and your place hold and endure. Wonder actively at what we can see and do differently as we are called into awareness ahead.

I know a lot of people—some of my closest included—fuel their endurance with a dose of distance from the in’s and out’s of politics and headlines. Multiple people have recently told me that “we’ll all be ok”, and in between the lines draw a tight circle of who “we” is so they can choose to be safe no matter the cost of complicity.

We all have to find a way to orient to the world that actually allows us to continue in it, but I ask you if you are a headline-avoider, to join me in the breath work that opens space for your own fortitude to expand, your awareness, your openness to the stories, your willingness to think past a quick swallow of mass media news and listen to each other to take on an expanded tenderness and willingness. To work the muscles of discernment not in judging each other but in hearing each other past the talking points and deeply down into our wishes for the world, the future, and today.

{Please check out their podcast. I’m truly curious what you think.}

I know you are not all in the US. But of course the flows of the United States spill over in many ways, and in other ways we are expressions of each other from afar, variations on themes we need to understand better, see better, willingly defy the calls to deny.

Calls to deny each other’s humanity, for example. Deny that we have answers to the question “but what do we do? Who do we follow?”. I’ve been working with an organization to publish a report we’ll be sharing in just a few weeks that elevates the stories of grassroots rural organizers across the United States that I’ll flag for y’all in notes or chat when it goes live. Honestly, one difficulty of the work designing the report was choosing admist how many great answers to these questions exist when you seek them out. So many groups living at the frontline of the threats who are buildling powerful networks, coalitions, organizations, communities, folks bridging over the rabid desire to dehumanize and subjugate and instead creating space for joy, safety, cultural cohesion, true histories and better futures for all. Work that starts with with trans communities, with immigrant communities, with Native communities, at the borders and in the deep thickness of the country, folks feeding each other where closed factories forced desperation, and so many more stories. The effort is a reminder of what can be possible if we move past doubt and into willingness to see and find and follow.

Effort to move past the calls to distort words and their meaning. Words like anarchy that have been smeared in the grand campaign to help us forget own capability, helpfully restated recently by Carne Ross, for those hoping for a brush up.

Effort to move past the calls to deny our potential by swallowing ourselves up in the division of our times.

Exhale. Exhale and release all the poison. Find a fresh starting point. Choose, again.

My friend Eddy Zheng greets everyone with the words, “Happy New Breath”. The first Asian American juvenile sentenced to life to lead a public community foundation, Eddy and I first met at a leadership training years ago. His life story is always a reminder of the chance for new choices, new ways of being, and the collective efforts and dreams required to actually make life possible. When we met, I was developing “the Freedom Project”, an artistic examination of what folks really mean when they say ‘freedom’. Eddy responded to the question, “What does Freedom mean to you?” with the clarity that it “the ability to appreciate the breath sustaining our lives”.

What do you want to appreciate and build into? Where are the paths you feel comfortable and clear on, where do those paths intersect and cross those who you hear about in the headlines but do not know?

I feel the openness of the space in front of us, the humming undercurrent of fear, the horror at what the world allows and enacts through multiple genocides and crises, the ache of exhaustion at things foretold and all being endured, the heartbreak at the clinging to false promises that separate us, the grasping at knowing so many of us have tuned to, rather than the willingness to be in the unknown, the quiet and uncertain, the potential of it all. No matter what comes, we will have breath as long as we are here. Exhaling, inhaling, knowing we are made of stardust. The atoms chose you, and again we are asked what we will choose.