Life update~
What's alive, what's moving, what's inspiring me, what's breaking my heart...
Hello!
Have I told you recently how grateful I am that you’re here? You, reading these words right now.
Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for exploring cyclical consciousness and recovery from colonial patriarchy with me. I’m often blown away by the insight and the giggles and the wisdom of this little community.
I’ve just come out of one of the gnarliest illnesses I’ve had in a very long time. More than a week of extreme fatigue, aches, pains, congestion. Don’t get me wrong, I love a psychically transformative fever-induced delirium as much as the next person, but I was starting to lose my mind a little at my own lack of capacity.
Not so much in a “worth is productivity” way (though I won’t pretend I’m so enlightened that those internalised capitalism tinges didn’t pull at me just a little)…
…but more in a “if I don’t have an outlet for my creativity and expression, I start to internalise my own madness and drown in it”.
I used to drink to make that madness feeling go away.
I write and teach and create now.
Not having the capacity to do that, while staying sober, was challenging to say the least.
Lots of ritual and ceremony, and leaning into loving community.
Being so sick for a week reminded me yet again, in yet another way, how very fucking fragile the illusion of safety and comfort is inside of colonial capitalism.
I’ve spent many years disentangling my own relationship with myself from my productivity and external output.
The narrative I hold around who I am, is now (mostly) free of that.
-of course, there are still some wounded and desperate aspects of my ego that cling to my productivity as my identity, but they’re not as loud anymore, and certainly not dominant-
My own internal narrative around my relationship with myself does nothing to the world’s relationship to me though.
It’s always harrowing to meet that edge.
Being unable to work meant rescheduling sessions, taking hours off, pushing everything forward - which meant loss of income.
Being too weak to walk meant taking ubers.
Being too achy to cook meant ordering in.
It means spending way more money than I usually would, while simultaneously earning way less.
It’s harrowing to realise that if that continued forever, I’d be absolutely fucked. We’d all be. I know that a lot of us are.
Harrowing to realise, again and again, in very tangible ways, that if we’re not productive and efficient according to capitalist metrics - we’re discarded by this world.
The internal work is great (and vital, and all-important, and transformative, and everything), but campaigning for systemic change in the external world is desperately important too.
I’m ever inspired by the change makers and campaigners doing that work.
Ever inspired to keep digging in and showing up for a free and just world for all bodies.
Speaking of which, I shared a post on my instagram yesterday that caused something of a stir.
It was about how very widespread and normalised menstrual pain is… to the point where we now assume that suffering is the default experience of having a menstrual cycle.
That pain is just “part of the deal” of being a person with a womb.
Our pain is so normalised that it’s become its own genre of comedy - shaming our bodies and assuming they’re problems we have to endure or cope with - all as a way of building feminist comradery.
Here’s the post - have a peek.
I am not ignorant to the widespread suffering of menstruating people.
I am not naive to the debilitating pain so many of us experience on a monthly basis.
Years ago, I was diagnosed with stage 3 endometriosis myself.
What I DO question though, and will CONTINUE to question forever, is a world where menstrual cycles are only mentioned in tones of derision or exhaustion - if they’re mentioned at all.
I will continue to question a world designed by and for cis men - leaving menstruating people totally (and very intentionally) uneducated on what having a menstrual cycle means.
I got quite a few comments around “are you saying that in a free world, if there was no capitalism and no patriarchy, periods wouldn’t hurt at all?”
By and large, yes.
That’s what I’m saying.
Our bodies are never the cause of our suffering (even if our suffering is extreme).
This is a huge, systemic problem. One that we’re a long way off from solving; because a world that educates us on, honours, celebrates, and radically accepts the cyclical nature of our bodies- and of life itself- is not a world that’s compatible with colonial capitalism at all.
A cycling body won’t find its peace in the oppressively linear, hierarchical, binary values that colonial patriarchy upholds. It can’t - it works on the antithesis of all of those values.
(Which is why cycle work can be so very transformative when it comes to decolonising the mind and body).
This isn’t to say that all pain and suffering would magickally go away in a free and decolonised world.
Of course there would still be the odd month of increased discomfort - just like we’d have odd months where we don’t sleep as well, or our digestion is a bit whacky.
Not to mention that of course we all have different constitutions - sometimes pain simply stays.
BUT.
In a free and decolonised world, that pain would be met with the compassion, empathy, and attention it deserves.
It wouldn’t be treated as an embarrassment, a personal failure, or something to just “suck up and deal with”.
Most of all, it certainly wouldn’t be treated as the default.
Cycle work is my bread and butter, and the central point through which all my other philosophies and practices move.
The years I studied my own body, and cycles in general, so as to better understand my endometriosis and how to meet it - they provided the foundations for all my anti-colonial and anti-capitalist work now.
I’ll be sharing about it a lot more in future. I thought I was already sharing on it plenty, but clearly not!
So if you’re here, and you wanna stick around, do strap in for that. 😉
Meanwhile, the world is getting more and more unhinged.
Every time I think “okay, surely we’re at the bottom now. Surely there’s no lower depths this destructive death cult of a paradigm can sink to”, down we go again.
You know all this already though, if you’re here I’m gonna assume you’re following the fall of the empire as closely as I am. You’re witnessing the depravity too.
I have to be grateful though - and grateful intentionally, because without it, the despair is very seductive.
Grateful that it’s all becoming more visible, grateful for the mass awakening that’s been triggered by it.
Grateful for the huge surge towards collective care and anticolonial praxis that’s unfolding right now.
Grateful too for all the ways that I myself have been shaken more awake over the past year.
Any illusions I was still holding, they’ve collapsed now. Any hope that we can find our way *within* colonial patriarchy, any hope of “reform”- gone now.
I thought I was an abolitionist before. I didn’t know what that word meant, before.
The REWILDING community has been my anchor.
We’re two months into a five month pilgrimage through the five gates of the pelvic bowl right now. We’re studying the Ovulatory Rite, and what it means to hold + take up space within the movement for collective liberation.
I’ve been teaching on expansion, how to hold visibility, how to trust intense sensation. It’s been glorious, feeling all of us collectively RISE to the call.
Oh how much our bodies have to teach us.
Oh the uncharted terrain we can explore with our bodies as our maps and our compass.
I’ve been escaping into some delicious books recently.
Consuming creative work that’s “slow-cooked”, bodies of work from the minds of geniuses who have lovingly tended their works over many months - even years - is such a beautiful respite from the very addictive bite-sized content of social media.
(No shade whatsoever on socials and their opportunities as creative outlets. I fucking love it. But balance is nourishing right now)
I’m re-reading the Alchemist by Pablo Coelho. It’s my “I have the flu” book. What a tonic that book is. Have you read it?
I’m also making my way through Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by the incomparable Angela Davis.
Reading great works from the minds of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand is galvanising as all hell when things feel bleak.
Not just for the tips and tricks on “how to be a revolutionary in effective ways”, but also for the Knowing that we are not alone. That our fight is old. That those who came before us were mighty, and surely felt all the same things we feel.
It’s a balm to the isolation that creeps in when things feel dark, heavy, and irrevocable.
I’d recommend it, heartily.
How are you?
How’s your body and spirit in these pivotal and desperate times?
What’s keeping you grounded, inspired, replenished?
What calling are you responding to?
💛