Hello y’all. Here I am, a bit late this week. I’m moving at a pace that my system can handle amidst a significant amount of upheaval. I’m grateful to show up here when/how/as I am. I appreciate you being here whenever/wherever/however you are. Perfectly imperfect, imperfectly perfect.
I wanted to share just one last time that Cultivating Culture is starting next Wednesday, October 5th at 4 pm MST! Space is filling quickly, so if you’re at all interested, please fill out the brief form linked within the course overview found here.
It would be such an honor to share in this experience with you. I’m not certain when I will offer this course again, now just might be the time. Please feel so encouraged to share this with anyone you think might resonate.
One more note: I encourage you to read Iranian artist Farah Ossouli’s delightful captions. She is a gorgeous alchemist across many mediums.
Sending big love to each of you,
Rachel
Steam lifts and swirls. Light filters through tree limbs then windowpanes then linen, turning the dust radiant in its gaze. Steam and light meet in an ethereal, emergent dance as a delicate choreography unfolds on the table before me. I am in my beloved friend’s tea room in her tiny adobe home.
Sentience surrounds us. Everything emanates its unique expression of aliveness. My own awareness is sparked into an amplified frequency, a heightened sensitivity, the buzz of total presence.
Tea glides between my lips. Its temperature is at the very precipice of burning my tongue – enticingly, exhilaratingly hot – just on the edge of danger. I am enchanted by this precision. Every detail is sensuous and stimulating: kettle resting over open flame, water humming then tumbling into the pot, ancient leaves awakening and releasing their stored potency, after being meticulously, laboriously picked with reverence thousands of miles away.
A tea ceremony is elegance embodied. Every component is referential to the meta pattern of pouring and drinking tea as an experience. The fluidity of hand gestures cascading through and into one object after another – kettle, tea pot, cup, mouth – like a stream pouring over stones, sliding through channels, then pooling into a vessel. Slurping, swallowing, and inner warming: we become the tea. Our organs, our muscles, our cells steep as tea pours in and fills up. Moisture presses through pores releasing trapped toxins through our skin-soil. Flowers bloom in our bellies. Drinking tea feels like remembering ourselves as watersheds, cycling and recycling one of the most sacred resources. Breath is water. Inhale, sip. Exhale, pause.
Today, after five cups of deliriously hot tea, tears erupted like a geyser.
I have cultivated many practices of deep listening and mindfulness over the years. I feel uniquely attuned to my inner landscape, touching in frequently with my thoughts and feelings, grounding into present time - whether with the alliance of a journal or simply noticing my attention and my breath frequently throughout each day. Tracking, shifting, discerning, integrating, releasing. And yet, and yet, I sit on the cushion, I immerse myself in one of the oldest, most prolific and, in some ways, most ordinary medicines – and I realize how much resides unacknowledged in me, how much has entered my field that wants to be witnessed.
Yesterday I made space to take in the news of Jina (Mahsa) Amini's ruthless, grotesque murder by Iran's "morality police" for exposing her hair in public. Those words rot in my mouth. The patriarchal, imperial regime (whether it’s Iran or the U.S. or…) arbitrates morality with calculated insanity, strategic arbitrariness, hypocritical ferocity, recycled monstrosities over and over and over again. The same violence masquerades in infinite, infuriating permutations shielded behind euphemisms like "law", "order", "justice", "service", "protection". In this paradigm language is a weapon, reality is an illusion. We are ensnared – the lie to survive the lie.
Today, the agony of her senseless death steeps inside me as the tea settles into my belly. I'm hot with rage. I'm sweating with pain. I'm crying with grief. I'm melting with love. Love for my sisters of all genders. Love for my brothers of all genders. Love for people consciously, constantly de-enlisting and dismantling these cruel systems and re-claiming themselves as agents of change. Love for those who I trust will find their way there soon. Love for life that deserves to be uninhibited, unrestrained, exalted, expressed. Love for Jina Amini. Love for all beings leaving too soon, catalyzing tsunamis of revolution in their wake. Love for a world where women, where all are free.
The feeling beneath the feeling beneath the feeling.
Yesterday my puppy ate a raisin. For a split second I thought "eh, whatever", but then something instinctive flickered, and I went to Google to find even one raisin could kill a dog (depending on many factors). I called the ER. They said to come immediately given how small she is and the unpredictability of how she would respond. The risk was severe kidney damage if not fatality, so the decision was obvious. The only animal ER in the entire state of New Mexico is a 40 minute drive away. I'm a functionally dissociative type of person under stress. I learned young how to evacuate my body psychospiritually and somehow go through the motions physically in crisis. Just go. Just drive. Don’t feel. Survive. I thank these strategies as I heal to release them.
Today, the intensity of that scare steeps inside me as the tea settles into my belly. I'm seeping tears of grief. I'm boiling with self-criticism. I'm steaming with guilt. I'm dissolving with love. Love for this precious, pure, defenseless being. Love for the babies and the more-than-human beings that return us to innocence and joy simply by existing. Love for a present-future that takes a kin-centric, not human-centric approach1. Love for living out the simple, inextinguishable, life-affirming truths that bring us back home to breath, to hair, to blood, to womb, to sweat, to the loud slurps and swallows of our animal bodies, to freedom of expression, to a vast, unifying "we"-ness in which no one is left out.
The feeling beneath the feeling beneath the feeling.
The art of fully feeling remains painfully unsupported and undervalued in our culture. Feeling is the portal to the truths beneath all distortion. When we suppress fully feeling as some inconvenience or distraction or weakness, we’re severed from a highly-attuned, miraculously-constructed, perfectly-customized body of intelligence far more potent than anyone or anything beyond us. This is the sanctuary of inner wisdom, the well of infinite resourcing, but we have been convinced to ignore or constantly override it. Without the spiralic nature of feeling that casts us out in a wide arc but always brings us back to the centerpoint of stillness and peace if we stay with it, we strain under the weight of endlessly blaming, shaming, and gaslighting — endlessly perpetuating harm. When we suppress fully feeling, we’re severed from each other, from common humanity, from the unifying experience of feeling into our very existence in all of its full-spectrum nuance and immensity.
Yesterday, the day before that, the week before that, the month before that are all filled with moments I haven't felt all the way through. The hour I spent on the cushion this morning, embraced within my beautiful friend's sacred tea practice, allowed me to ride the waves of feeling damming my chest, suppressing my breath. It landed me gently on the shore of an expansive love. I yearn for more experiences, more spaces, more places just like this. I yearn for this to be the cultural paradigm. I yearn for this to be the way we commune with one another. I yearn for us to release the disempowering and divisive mis/disinformation streams, transactional contact points, addictive infinite scrolling, and inflammatory digital interactions sold to us as “connection” - the myriad of toxins eager to diffuse through the brilliance of our body processes, if only we could slow down and allow them.
I wonder how violence might transform into love by feeling beneath the feeling beneath the feeling. If violence is pain made explosive, what lives beneath the pain? And what lives beneath that? And what lives beneath that? And what lives beneath that? And what if we start with ourselves, here, now? What are you feeling, and how deep can you take it, and on what shore do you land?
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So beautiful. I've been asking myself and others this exact question recently so this one resonates particularly. Thank you.
"I yearn for more experiences, more spaces, more places just like this. I yearn for this to be the cultural paradigm." <--so much yes
"What are you feeling, and how deep can you take it, and on what shore do you land?" ! !