Category: Explorations and practices
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Energy loops? Another layer of “reexperiencing”
I can’t remember the first place I read the term “energy loops,” but it almost immediately resonated with my experience of a particularly challenging trauma recovery phenomena. You’ll have to excuse the less linear nature of my attempt to describe something so abstract. In the mental health field, we tend to focus on reexperiencing as a…
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Timeline Hopping
Working with past and future selves, naturally lends itself to considering the impact of your experiences and choices on how we express ourselves today. Something that emerged in the recent reiki group was this tendency to see a negativity bias when we work with past and future ideas of self. Quite often when we think…
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Spirits of plants
When I was in art school, I had a substitute teacher for just one class of the semester, and she lectured on plant and animal communication. I should note that this was an art history class and this topic was in no way related to the curriculum. She introduced me to The Secret Life of Plants and…
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Dissociation and finding balance in cycles
The idea for this essay started as I was reading a Pitchfork article about dissociation and music, that was a surprisingly nuanced and interesting take on dissociation in the cultural zeitgeist in general and songwriting more specifically. It tied together and stimulated some thoughts I’ve been mulling over about this particular cultural moment, and the influence of…
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What does it mean to “hold space?”
I am quite fond of this turn of phrase, “to hold space,” “holding space,” to be a “space holder.” It became my preferred way of describing what I do after learning from and with Shawna Murray-Browne, and leaning away from terms like client or patient if I can.But I also think that just changing the words doesn’t capture the actual difference between working…
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What it takes to Thrive (and survive)
Oof… I needed a break to get this piece finished. And I’m happy to say I rested very deeply. More often in thisspace I am focused exploring how we cultivate the inner resources needed for a satisfied and meaningful life, and untangling the mixture of beliefs we develop in our environments and those in alignment with our…
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Manifesting without Attachment
I wrote several different possible introductions and titles for this essay, I’m still not entirely settled that I’ve found a succinct way to say it. Because maybe I’m not really talking about “manifesting” at all, but more of an alternative to the concept. In my experience it is clear that to a certain extent, manifesting…
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Finding novelty in a time of Sameness
In one sentence we’re already arrived at a contradiction. The pandemic era is full of these, and one is that on the micro level of environment we are often existing in a vast expanse of sameness. The natural opportunities for spontaneity are less present (even as that has perhaps shifted for some since the beginning…
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Rest is a Portal
There’s no aspect of a cycle that doesn’t require a time of apparent dormancy. And yet that dormancy is often an illusion; it’s no so much that there is no movement or change as it is an unseen process. Eurocentric or “western” culture doesn’t value the unseen process very highly. The capitalistic culture doesn’t even…
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Cord-cutting, Releasing, Resetting
Probably one of the most challenging aspects of growing and healing, is learning how to let go of the past. In my view letting go doesn’t mean forgetting, or not caring, or “getting over it,” but letting it rest in the past rather than reliving it again and again. “That was then, this is now.”…
Inward Vision 