2023 is the year I’m really getting back to writing. Hopes include writing new pieces for a new manuscript, finishing an older manuscript, sending pieces out, celebrating a couple publications (coming soon— actually one of the publications is pulled from below!)— all of it. And here I am, already the beginning of April, so many days I scheduled for writing consumed by other things. A classic tale but I’m going to stick with it.
I’m trying to find my way back to the manuscript I’ve been working on since 2013. I worked with an editor last year and while I implemented some of the edits, getting really down deep into the book has been challenging. I have plenty of good reasons— it’s hard to return to a book about trauma and abuse, my body has needed a lot of care and attention for awhile now navigating long covid and the triggers and fallout and the brain fog and the trouble finding words sometimes, my healing arts practice is busy busy busy and I’ve been developing a big program in collaboration with others since last September, my new dog had a surgery, I had a surgery, the bathroom that has black mold in it is being remediated and fully replaced— you know- the things that make up a life, a full life. And yet, I really long to finish these edits, start pitching it to agents, start finally loosening my grip on it because I really do think it needs to be in the world.
So while I find my way back, today I’m sharing an essay from a couple years ago. It’s an essay that moves through bodies, through plants, remembers the possibility of healing, the inevitability of finding our way back, body as the ultimate witness.
Adapted from a keynote given at the 2018 Transformative Language Arts Network Power of Words Conference, it was published over at VIDA a few years ago. I’m feeling nostalgic— covid and getting older have left me feeling so separate from past versions of me. Much of it comes from the pages of the manuscript I mention above that I worked on intensely from 2013-2017 and am returning to again so consider it a sneak peek— really, the meat of the book I’m working on, the heart of it.
It’s a long one, friends.
Please note this piece is original material with documentation and publication going back to 2013. Bc I’ve so often been stolen from it must be said— if you feel inspired by anything in this piece, please cite appropriately.
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LIVING IN LIMINALITY:
working with the wounds of trauma through altered states + poison medicine
What is the center what is the center what is the center of this.
Ah.
The body.
I am very good at starting everywhere besides the body, all that Libra stellium vata air air air spinning around in my head.
We’re gonna talk about
THE BODY
(capital letters)
The body that knows failure, that knows rupture.
The body that is a huge scar.
The body that is a huge beating bloody wound.
The body as the ultimate witness to trauma.
The marked body.
The traumatized body.
The queer body.
The freak body.
The forgotten body.[i]
The body as primary material, the primary source.
The body as an archive.
How the body is always reaching for homeostasis, for medicine.
How sometimes the medicine is poison, sometimes the poison medicine.
How sometimes it’s as simple and as complex as finding the right dose.
The architecture of a body.
The architecture of trauma.
The body as in between. As a bridge between ‘before’ and ‘after’— the third space, the third land, the overlap in the ecotone (remembering of course that there are endless befores and afters). In between the two ends of that long winding spectrum.
Always on and pushing at the edges.
“The body” as never singular, always multitudes. Multiples.
My body as a sharp edge[ii].
My body as a wandering question[iii].
My body as a graveyard.
My body as a site of wreckage, roots deep.
My body as a battleground.
My body as a bundle of live wire nerve endings.
My body as rows and lines of thread.
My body as a pile of rubble.
My body as a holder of names and secrets.
My body as dearly departed.
My body is essaying. It is working through.[iv]
My body is searching, often weary and worn.
My body as the site turned back on itself.
My body as the feeling I just can’t shake[v].
My body, survivor body, as the ultimate failure,
as the ultimate blessing.
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Failure brings clarity—a place to root down into and bloom. I don’t believe failure is the end. It’s not only collapse. Maybe failure is the beginning. We can grow out of failure into new.
I, the big mess, want to be a healer. I, the big mess, want to be healed.
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I work with plants as an herbalist making and selling herbal remedies as well as doing herbal consultations. I work with words as a writer and as a somatic writing workshop facilitator. I work with the breath as a breathwork facilitator both with individuals and groups. But the intention in all of these modalities is the same: to hold space for people doing deep personal work as they move through trauma, as they work to balance or understand their mental health or to interrogate, and often, change their relationship to substances. In all of these practices clients report they notice shifts in their bodies and in their lives, sometimes monumental and sometimes more subtle. In this work there is a tending to and a witnessing of young parts and wounded parts and in turn, when receiving witness, these parts often finally feel seen and become more integrated into the whole. I work to offer my sessions on a sliding scale, where clients decide at what pay level they can afford, because I believe healing work needs to be accessible to more people if it is to actually heal us individually and collectively.
In my personal healing work, which includes working with the above, as well as working in a ceremonial and ritual way with psychedelics and plant medicine, I’ve started considering the trajectory of my healing as being on the Poison Path. Named by Dale Pendell, he says, We seek medicine in the very poison that seduced us…the forbidden knowledge, but knowledge with the power to heal. There have been many extremely harmful experiences, many experiences with violence, in my path and so, in order to survive, I’ve had to find the wisdom in them. Knowing that they have deep somatic roots, I’ve had to find a way to integrate them. Embracing the poison, the darkness, the shadow— living in the liminal spaces and places, living in the questions and uncertainty, in the frequent shifts between realities, both in myself and with other people, has become where I feel most at home, where I’ve come most alive and where I’ve encountered the most brilliance. This work helps me stay here, helps keep me alive.
Some of the writing in this essay is from an in-progress manuscript that I am finishing called “Assaults & Rituals.” It’s a book about the impact of and residuals of traumatic experience in a body and also re-learning to have a relationship with a body. It’s about being destroyed by love but first being saved by it. About being destroyed by plants but being saved by them. About being destroyed by loss and grief but being saved too. That’s the risk. That which is poison is also medicine. That which is medicine, in the wrong dose, can also be poison. Very often that which we seek rides a fine line in between.
Write Like a Survivor
In much of her writing, Bhanu Kapil wrestles deeply with trauma, the body, and the impact— what remains and what is forever altered— also always writing into the impact of colonialism, racism, and diaspora. In “Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics,” Kapil speaks about her mother’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, how Kapil’s writing is always trying to locate her mother at that exact point she crosses the border that altered her mind. In her writing she often connects the diagnosis of her mother’s schizophrenia to her living through one of the bloodier civil wars this planet has seen. She goes on to mention reading Franz Fanon: I came across the accounts of the high incidence of schizophrenia and mental illness in newly decolonized North African populations.[vi] She writes about consciousness changed by crossing borders, by knowing violence. A knowing of oneself in one place, and then another, and the internal ruptures that occur.
Kapil asks (w)hat if I say I want to write a healing narrative? It’s sort of horrifying, as an experimental prose writer, to have this thought, in prose. How can I compress then unfold this soft-tissue memory…? How horrifying it can feel to give voice to the healing narrative, how imprecise and maybe even inappropriate language is— trying to make something real and failing because words sometimes are not enough. Those of us outside the structures and paradigms of dominant narratives are forced to reckon with our own failed bodies, as we wrestle with wanting to give language to them. What does failure of language mean to a body that knows its own failure but can’t quite give words to the failing? The dead and never living bodies[vii]; the racialized bodies, the non-consensually gendered bodies, the queer bodies, the disabled bodies and on. The ones deemed dead, or of less use, but also never allowed to live outside the projections of others. The bodies that experience the ruptures most acutely and then are told to shut up in the aftermath. The failure, over and over, of trying to find words for feelings in the body. The limits of language.
How is one to communicate a sentence whose subject wants more than grammar allows? And what might this want sound like?[viii]
Words as a language that are never quite enough but always are. Words as a suture to lace up the rupture, the wound. In an effort to heal, to bring together the before and after, dig into the new space.
I do not know the impact of a bloody civil war on my body nor do I know how skin is a liability, a threat, or the impact of colonialism, racism, and displacement but I connect deeply to wanting to find language for the unwritable, to borders, real and imagined, crossed, transgressing a body. To be in one place and then the other and what does a body know in each? How does it fracture or change? What must be forgotten? What can never leave consciousness? And how on earth could we ever believe there is only one reality?
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What is the physicality of a wound? What types of loss feel nearly impossible to come back from? What kind of life settles into our bones if we don’t take the time to grieve these losses? Can we dive into the wound, the loss: excavate and unearth it?
Giving language to trauma is not just remembering it or replaying it in ones mind in order to write; it’s feeling the somatic remains. What does it mean to have deep wounds almost beyond language? Beyond words? What does it mean to always try to find words anyway? How can we move into this writing the unwritable, this way of knowing in the deep well of the body?
Contrary to many dominant narratives, trauma is not always a one-time rupture (though certainly sometimes it can be). More often it is layered over a lifetime, further impacted by the daily micro and macro aggressions of racism, homophobia, classism, transphobia, colonialism, ableism and more. People are dwelling in the wound all the time in creative work— often because many shame this type of personal or “confessional” writing, they learn to cover their tracks. They learn to distance themselves from the trauma that brought them to words. I really believe centering our deepest wounds and writing into them allows us to understand them more deeply and transform them. There aren’t a lot of spaces to do this— so many people think it’s shameful to give voice to what crushes us. It’s not “real” writing, they say. You need to get some distance from the pain, they say. As if trauma is always a single moment and not ongoing/ frequent/ daily. As if we aren’t all living in a time full of violence and grief. As is there is still a completely healed and whole destination we must reach.
There is no single way to write, to have a body, and no single way to survive. We can never actually leave our bodies, as hard as we might try (and as wise as we are in our reasons for trying) and are therefore always already embodied.
As a survivor of multiple forms of violence, at times it feels like my mind is forever altered– not necessarily in a bad way but in a way that is confusing to other people. And many people moving through traumatic experiences or illnesses or traumatic loss often speak to this idea of a life “before” and a life “after.” Over the years, I’ve had writing mentors and teachers note I often switch between tenses or always write in the passive voice or maybe they have a hard time following the trajectory of the narrative because the writing (and my memory) is non-linear.
Even if I think I’ve left my body, in fact I am always in it, always using it, creating with it. In this sense, using my body (fingers and hands) to write about my body and my sometimes feelings of disconnection can bring me back to it. It places me right in it. It allows me to push into something I often pull myself out of; it allows me to settle into the wandering question that haunts my soul and hacks and saws at my body[ix] It allows my body to be both the question and the answer.
Sometimes writing feels like an unloading, a sharing of what is often seen as damaged and conflicted parts of my self: turning those sharp edge(s) away from my flesh.[x] Sometimes I find a new understanding of something I’ve gone over and over in my head but I don’t see it until it’s been pulled out and scrawled on a piece of paper. Using writing as a healing tool is messy work, at times counterintuitive; it demands we explore that which is often unspeakable. But if undertaken, the writing can also lead to release, a change in our cellular memory. As Louise DeSalvo of “Writing as a Way of Healing” notes: writing about traumatic or troubling life events initially unleashes difficult, conflicting emotions. In the long run, though, we feel better emotionally and are healthier and achieve a level of understanding of our lives that only writing can provide.[xi]
Poet and essayist Seema Reza writes about the process of navigating difficult terrain, as well as the monsters in ourselves and others in her piece “Becoming Ourselves Through Writing, Even When It’s Uncomfortable“:
According to the research on writing and healing conducted over the last three decades, writing in a way that merges the chronological fact-based account with the subjective emotional experience for 20 minutes a day can have a significant impact on physical health—white blood cell counts go up, sick visits are fewer, blood pressures lower. Also, when you kick up dust inside yourself, when you make connections that you hadn’t made before, discover things about yourself that you hadn’t previously considered, you can feel like sh*t…. In the transition from passively experiencing emotion through actively arranging it into words and finally arriving at witnessing it upon completion, we are changed.
I look for words to hold the shape of skins, traced over and over. I write from inside the wound, inside the places people would rather I heal before reporting from. I reject the ways people believe a survivor should be in their body as the only way to heal: the whole and healthy and clean ways. I am committed to affirming that my way of connecting to my body is an inherently embodied practice. So long as I have a body I am embodied.
When words are not enough, then I return to hands, return to the handmade and tangible. Use the stitch of the embroidery thread to quiet my mind, another kind of altered state. A practice of repetition. A visible narrative. I use my body to interpret my body— the hands that mark, the hips that twist, thighs that bruise; the experiences, the losses, the visceral sensations that singe through the bruises. Transgress old limits and borders.
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I can never quite figure out the appropriate tense when I write. How then is always now and now is some kind of future I can’t always find words for. Even when I’m in the present I am writing in the past.
I write in sentence fragments sometimes. [T]he bliss of a disorienting text…) [xii] They feel right to me, they sound right when I read them back to myself. Fractures, stops and starts. Like speaking, like thinking, like lines of a poem collapsed into themselves.
Can form be writing in repetition, writing in fragments, writing without a care for linearity, writing to simply write that which feels unwritable, writing with no concern for clarity—writing the way memory and traumatic experience live in a body, writing the way traumatic memory gets stuck in the throat.
If a stitch can be completed over and over, to make something both made of stitching and something else entirely, can writing?
The answer is yes.
Bhanu Kapil writes of the fragment as “rough”— where the edge of it is, like glass or fur or light, so that it adheres to other fragments, not through historical or phatic means: but through the force of attraction. I place the fragments in a chrysalis: to recombine.[xiii]
Poison Medicine
We are made and unmade by each other’s touch. Touch a type of witness and also a kind of unanchoring. A wrecking.
Sometimes what sustains us also poisons. Like monarchs and their persistent need and desire to feed on poisonous milkweeds, even though the poison is an evolutionary development by the milkweed to try to dissuade the feeding. In a battle of exploitation and defense, as Anurag Agrawal explores in the book “Monarchs and Milkweed: A Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution”, monarchs and milkweeds are always chasing and running from each other. In fact, milkweed is the monarch’s exclusive food source. Monarch colors, their very vibrancy, which they are known and loved for, are because they are literally filled with the poisonous sustenance of milkweed. Other animals and predators know to stay away simply by their coloring.
All things that feed us, stimulate, awaken, enliven, all can be used as poison or medicine. Over 500 years ago Paracelsus, Swiss physician and chemist spoke of the basic principle of toxicology: All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison. Water, oxygen— anything in excess can kill. Love too, can kill us, if we are drawn to the kind of love that harms as much as it heals. From the mundane to the extra-ordinary, many try to walk the line in between. Some poison we learn from quickly, or learn to back away, some draw us in, inexplicably and it isn’t until years after we begin a relationship, or an entanglement, with them that we are blessed with their wisdom, long after the wounding.
Ever since I was young, I have wanted to feel both secure and at risk at once. Some may call it a death drive but I’ve never been fearful of things that could kill me. Instead, I often feel drawn to them. There was a risk, pushing the edges in how many whiskey on the rocks I could drink, to jump out of airplanes, to have my arm lit on fire, to choose lovers with cruel hands and mouths. Some of it was simply just familiar, feeling butterflies in my stomach that I hadn’t yet connected to a trauma response of fear, of fight and flight. But there was also a deep desire to lose myself, to drown my overwhelming pain out. I began to notice these behaviors were stand-ins for other types of care I felt unable to give myself. In all obsessive or compulsive or addictive tendencies, below the drive to erase or dissociate, there is a deeper desire to connect, and sometimes these tools just felt like the best way to go about it. They worked, until they didn’t. Growing up in the eighties and nineties when D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was a staple in public education, I bought the hyperbole about drugs and addiction. I was told, and believed, just one time would “hook” me but alcohol was everywhere and far more socially acceptable. In my twenties and early thirties, as I struggled with my excessive alcohol consumption, which veered into the kind of use that gravely impacted my life and relationships, I knew I didn’t need any more issues or more harmful tools to drown out the traumatic tenor of my life so I stayed away from them. There was a kind of wisdom in me, in the staying away during that time in my life, but I had no idea drugs and psychedelic plants and medicines could actually be used to heal. And yes, addiction is a crisis the world over but what was the first crisis, for myself and many others, was trauma— a loss of connection to myself and spirit and the world.
Over the last 5 years of working with psychedelics ceremonially, I’ve searched these medicines for answers to my questions. Psychedelics are undergoing what many are calling a renaissance but there’s plenty of exploitation— many working to jam them into a broken medical model while limiting access, or strip them from the indigenous and cultural traditions that they come from leaving violence in the wake of ceremony, or by separating out an alkaloid and disparaging the whole plant or substance, or by taking money from right wing organizations to fund research for PTSD. But the very complex issues aside, their ability, throughout time and currently, to treat a variety of mental health issues and illnesses is astounding and promising and many are calling it a future for working with trauma.
In working with psychedelics, I’ve learned quickly that for every answer I get in this work, it usually came with another question. Things are not neat and tidy in plant medicine work. Rather, it became clear it’s all happening at once, like Dale Pendell writes:
That it is real. That it is not real.
That it is both real and not real.
That it is neither real nor not real.[xiv]
Plants have an uncanny way of connecting us to many truths at once. In these altered, or non-ordinary states, we are able to tap into another type of consciousness, often out of reach in our day-to-day. In working this way I also began to develop a respect for the wisdom I could connect to in dissociative states, a symptom of the complex PTSD I live with; a product of experiencing multiple forms of trauma throughout my life. Often disparaged, a world began to open up for me and I began to see there was so much to learn in these states too and that all states are embodied experiences. That doesn’t mean what we receive in these states comes through crystal clear. Instead, in my continuous working with plants, in this living in the liminal, in this asking questions and getting answers but not necessarily the answer, I’ve become increasingly comfortable with not knowing. In a time of where linearity and the ability to recall “accurately” is expected from survivors, which we’ve all seen again in the recent news, it feels powerful to find places in my experience and in my life where I can say without shame, I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.
In my early twenties, I internalized the message I needed to be able to talk about my experiences with violence in a logical, factual, linear way. And write that way too. Like many survivors, I struggled to do so and so spent years doubting myself, my experiences, and my embodied memory. But psychedelics don’t work that way, they don’t have those kinds of demands— the factual brushes up against the nonsensical, the beautiful with the grotesque, the loving energy or incredibly violent images all dance in and around each other. Psychedelics supported me in trusting myself and my experiences and less and less did I find myself caught up in trying to provide a real narrative. Psychedelics and plant medicine work freed me from the constriction of being a reliable narrator. They allowed me to start trusting dream states, psychotic states, dissociative states, and other altered states, in myself and in those I work with, as all incredibly relevant, valuable, real, and full of wisdom, contributing to a more whole and larger narrative. Out of every healing modality I have worked with, psychedelic and plant medicine work have been the most instrumental in my growth and in the acceptance of myself. Each time I work with these medicines, I find myself writing through the experience as much as possible, working to carry back the wisdom on the page.
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Poison medicine is my favorite medicine (and also the most feared medicine)— especially and finely attuned for this world we live in that, for many of us, has always been fracturing, splintering, burning but has now reached a fever pitch. This kind of medicine work, a type of grief work but also a type of joy work, of returning to pleasure and joy after we have traversed the underworld and its secrets. It’s the work of finding the plant guides and people guides to hold us in the dark while also finding the plant guides and people guides to remind us there is still some light to find.
On my fire escape garden among many other plants, I grow datura. Datura, a poison plant, a plant many warn will truly make you lose every last bit of your mind, if ingested, some believing the harm can be mitigated by building a relationship with datura first, pledging your dedication. Datura blooms only at night, each bloom wilting by the morning, reminding us of the wisdom and healing in the shadow; that which kills can also heal. That we can be held in these places.
But also all plant work is a kind of celebration, a kind of witness. In the years where I’ve chosen to finally take my healing into my own hands, plants truly have been one of the most powerful guides. They continue to be my most powerful guides, always showing up at the right time. Mimosa, widely regarded to be a plant to help reconnect the seeker to joy after long and sustained periods of grief, also showing up on the path just when I need them. After a deeply painful end to a relationship I was terrified to lose, I unexpectedly found mimosa on a drive from my hometown, where I went to recover, and to my home in Brooklyn. I shrieked when I saw them. Cried out. Drove abruptly off the road and collected them in my basket. Smelled and toughed the fragrant hot pink flowers. Ushered them home and into vodka to be tinctured. I chose mimosa’s joy to be the primary medicine in my tincture blend in honor of the underworld journey called At the Threshold.
And violets, early in spring, with their joyous faces, rising from below inside the earth, turning their faces towards the light. Sprinkle bloom through fields of grass, their deep purple a contrast to the boisterous yellow of dandelions often close by. But did you know not all violets bloom with their faces turned towards the sun?
Underground, a secret convening of these same faces that never rise above the soil. They remain bedded under, yet go to seed just like the ones with their faces towards the light.
Writing In Community
In speaking about intentional poison medicine and psychedelic work, addiction must also be a part of the conversation. I’ve received funding from Poets & Writers the last couple years and it allows me to offer trauma focused workshops, “Would Dwelling: Writing the Survivor Body(ies),” at a place called NYHRE (now OnPoint NYC.)
NYHRE is a needle exchange and clinic for people who want to reduce the harm of active injecting drug use and substance use and they also have an incredible healing arts program where people can access a host of modalities including acupuncture, writing workshops, spiritual groups, energy work and more. The community is largely people of color, many are LGBTQ, many are experiencing housing instability and either searching for work or underemployed, many are survivors of abuse in childhood, many are living with HIV. Many have been incarcerated, where they have experienced even more violence. Many people have received a diagnosis like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, chronic depression, PTSD and more. Many have been pathologized and harmed by medical and psychiatric institutions. What I’ve witnessed is the merging of personal violence and institutional violence, how these types of violence mirror each other and are so frequent and ongoing, making healing from any of it feel nearly impossible. The people that are members of the needle exchange are often visiting the clinic to receive medical care, social services support, healing work and so there is a rotating group of participants in my workshops.
In my twenties and early thirties, as I’ve mentioned, I struggled with alcohol misuse. At its worst, I was drinking frequently, often until I passed out, and I also crashed my (mother’s) car and was arrested for a DUI. I was on so many anti-depressants and other medications at the time, things I was told would help me heal, but I also was still not able to access sustainable and holistic support around the violence, and the reverberations of trauma, I had experienced in my life. My substance use was directly related to how much pain I was experiencing. It was all consuming. Pain that as of yet, was unending and overwhelming. I hadn’t yet found ways to make sense to myself. And while it is a lifeline for some people, I didn’t relate to the AA abstinence only model. After feeling like my personal power had been stripped of me through out my life, I was not interested in giving up what little power I had left. I knew I needed that power to invest in healing myself. And so I felt like I didn’t really have a ton of options. In those years I was desperately trying to lose myself, to drown out what my body knew. As I’ve spoken about, I’ve since found conscious psychedelic use, which interestingly much research shows, supports people moving through addiction and mental health crisis. Ritualistic and ceremonial medicine work with psychedelics have allowed me to profoundly shift my relationship to alcohol and also to come off of all anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, which I realized was a necessity for me to actually move through and with the residue of trauma. I had been told by doctors that perhaps I would need to be on them forever but once I started actually navigating and addressing the residue of trauma, that became untrue for me. At times, in the over ten years of taking them, they were useful, and at other times, there was an unchecked over-prescription by doctors. Certainly for many they are life-sustaining, but through my ceremonial work with psychedelics I realized I needed different kinds of support. It has been one of the most profound choices and lasting change I have experienced.
Years after, I learned of harm reduction, a model that works to, like it says, reduce the level of harm a person using substances experiences while also offering a non-judgmental lens, supporting the user to be their own healer and agent of change. NYHRE works in this model. To be in a space where I can bring some of my past into the room feels affirming and to be able to affirm what participants know deeply, to let that wisdom be welcome in the space, feels radical.
The workshop participants come connected to and living in many different realities. While some are on maintenance programs like Methadone and Suboxone, some are still using. Some are sober. Some recently have relapsed. Some are navigating different states induced by various mental illnesses. There is a kind of clear-seeing brilliance that streams through each person, no matter the state, and I know that their relationship to reality has been constantly questioned and pathologized. In many other cultures and traditions, these breaks with consensus reality is also considered a kind of awakening. Healers living among us.
What I love about being at NYHRE is how we spend just as much time writing and reading other writers as we do talking about emotions, our bodies, our frustrations with the institutions that are harming us and people we love and we also just bear witness to the ongoing violence many of us have and continue to experience. People come to group surviving horrific institutional and interpersonal violence and there are days where it would feel easy to say writing doesn’t matter. Art making doesn’t matter. But we read Audre Lorde and Mahogany L. Browne and Natalie Diaz and Tara Hardy. In these writers they see themselves and their experiences. So many times people come into the workshop struggling with huge things but by the end, they say Oh. I feel a little bit better. Or I needed to hear that poem today. Can I take a copy with me? Or I’m really angry/ sad/ frustrated/ overwhelmed and I really just needed to talk about that. This too, is a type of harm reduction. It’s being language and story build community, shifting the energy in someone’s body. It’s incremental healing. It’s also taught me so much about letting go of any plans and expectations I might have which makes room for the new ways we can build connection with each other, even in the face of such ongoing violence and harm.
I wanted to share something I wrote after a particular workshop in which some participants shared some of their experiences with violence from a young age, from adults and trusted people, and how it resulted in them enacting violence on others, impacting the rest of their lives:
Who do you turn to when you learn god is just as flawed & failing as all of us? If you learn young that parents, caretakers, priests, school teachers, rabbis and gurus are agents of harm. Violence. Darkness. When the emptiness they instill in you becomes so huge, the only way to quiet the rage & faithlessness is stuffing that emptiness full of anything you can. Checking out because you’ve already been present to too much. What I mean to say is that it is sacred work to sit inside the emptiness, the void. It is sacred work to decide, this time, the solution is to witness the depths of the darkness. To not turn away. To try to write from inside it. We didn’t place these bottomless wells inside of ourselves. They were placed in us by another trying desperately to run from their own emptiness. It’s of course not as simple as that either but what does it mean when we learn young that we are alone. That the ones they tell us to love are the same ones harming us.
That day we did only a little writing. This, in a writing workshop, could be considered a literary failure however it was exactly what was needed to come out. I think of Anne Boyer whose piece “Not Writing” explores all the ways she is not writing, the ways she is just going about her day, that in fact are also in relationship to the act of writing and these times of “not writing” are also just called our lives, the lives that lead us to writing and away from it.
We can’t separate out mental illness, violence, racism, classism. We can’t separate out violence and sexuality. It’s all tangled up. Shapes the other. Mental illness as adaptation. Survival. A profoundly wise coping mechanism. Substance misuse too. And these states we reach because of these adaptations, the lens through which we experience reality is as real as any other. There is wisdom in these places as necessary as anything else.
We talk about how in this world a good anger, we read Marge Piercy too, a righteous anger is a gift we give to ourselves and to our communities. It’s taking the hands off our own throats. It’s refusing the hands of another on our throat. It’s giving the emptiness back to those who gave us theirs. To be in the emptiness, to really be in it this time without trying to fill it with anything we can get our hands on, is an act of bravery. A gift we give to ourselves. We anoint each other’s foreheads. We bless each other with the smoke wafting from plants. With our stories. We lose faith in god and find each other instead.
Healing & Justice
Writing with the intention to heal is a powerful tool for those of us who have been disconnected from our own story, or have been told our story is wrong or does not matter. But access is a part of this. Finding welcoming spaces to do this work is necessary. We can do it on our own, sure, but community can help tend to the wounded places in a profound way. It’s important to remember healing is not disconnected from justice and it is imperative we consider access and privilege when doing healing work, or in creating these writing circles. Writer, healer, and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about healing justice in her book “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice”:
The work of healing justice isn’t just to learn about and share what we know about herbs, massage, acupuncture, divination. It’s also about doing all that work to shift cultural ideas about healing and who gets to access it, to shift how classism and ableism and transphobia and racism and colonization have taught us that “healing” is a luxury for someone else… the work we’re doing is not just to provide the acupuncture or the divination, but to change the framework for how folks think about “healing” in the first place. Every healing justice worker – from hairstylists to community acupuncturists, sex workers to cranio-sacral therapists- who insist that healing is a right is doing the work and remaking the world.
Diving into the wound, into the story, into the body requires persistence and patience. I think of dandelion extracting toxins from wherever it grows, mugwort dreaming through cracks in cement and through fences, ghost pipe growing in the darkest part of the forest as it holds us at the edges, the datura, henbane and belladonna reminding us of the wisdom in places others call poisonous, and iboga opening us to the depth of pain and grief in ourselves and in the world. Sometimes our teachers and mentors can fail us, show us their humanness after falling, after being placed way high on a pedestal. Plants don’t fail us but we fail them all the time, as we uproot them from their land, their homes. They remind us of our inherent connectedness. Our undeniable interdependence. These, too, are some of my teachers and my guides in this work.
Breathing Into and Beyond Language
A couple years after I began facilitating writing workshops, I learned of breathwork and began practicing. In 2017, I began a deeper study and training and since then, I have been working with clients 1:1 and in group settings. The breathwork I practice is a three part active meditation that helps bring attention to the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences living in our bodies. It connects us to the outdated stories we carry while reconnecting us to joy, clarity, creativity and aliveness. Breathwork reminds we all, each of us, hold the power within ourselves to shift and heal parts of ourselves. Jim Morningstar, a long-time breathwork facilitator, shares in his book “Break Through with Breathwork” how the healing modality,
…engages the sympathetic nervous system to help reprogram what has been frozen in the fight-or-flight mechanism. As such, fears arise and are breathed through consciously and integrated. Energy thwarted by trauma & unavailable for more creative endeavors than being on continuous “red alert” or hyper vigilant is thereby recovered.
It’s a practice of redirecting our energy to more creative and alive endeavors. There is a way breathwork is entirely beyond language but also words can be found more easily too. We get the chance to by-pass our critical thinking brain and move into the wisdom of our fuller bodies, as well as into our unconscious, which, as many of us know is difficult work but done in community or with a witness, can be incredibly powerful. Sometimes people come out of a session and feel they need to start writing or drawing immediately. Other times people share they have completely lost access to language. However people find themselves at the end, it’s often just what they need. In the workshops we usually have time for a free write after and it’s incredible to watch how fast the pen moves across the page. There’s a crispness, a real clarity of thought that comes through after we activate the breath and clear out all the bullshit that keeps us quiet and fearful.
If you want to take 3 minutes to try it for yourself, engage with the following:
Wherever you are if you’re feeling safe enough and comfortable, I invite you to close your eyes. If you aren’t quite, feel free to keep them open.
Set a timer if you have a few minutes and for 3-5 minutes just stay radically present to your breath moving through your body. Stay with wherever your mental, emotional, and physical experiences take you. There’s no wrong direction. Nothing fancy to do.
Take a long inhale, allowing your diaphragm/ chest/ heart to expand. And then without missing a beat, exhale long. And then without missing a beat again inhale. And exhale. No need to pause in between— keep it flowing..
If you need these, you can say to yourself:
I do not have to perform perfection for anyone, especially not for myself.
I do not have to hold steady 24 hours a day.
I do not have to sacrifice myself for any friend, client, lover, teacher, family member, boss, community member and on and on.
I am allowed to make mistakes.
I am allowed to be messy, imperfect, and human. I am so incredibly complex that it can all exist at once.
Allow the breath to awaken as much aliveness in you as you can. Once the timer dings, if you closed your eyes, slowly open them. If you kept them open, blink once or twice. Make a vow to bring a little bit of that conscious breathing to whenever you might need it. And if you feel called, perhaps try writing whatever comes up with some automatic writing right after the breathing practice.
Many times after breathing I find my creativity reignited. Some of the following I wrote in a writing group and I finished it after a breathwork session.
What the Ribs Hold
Looking for where the rib, if he were an evening.[xv]
I have written the rib piece before. I will write of it again. How it split, hairlines, many breaks, all of them small, so minuscule I sometimes wonder did they really break? And I’m not sure why it matters except that it feels like all of me dispersed and then reconfigured in those moments of fracture. It was the second time a lover chose to riptide through my body, as if it were a fatty bacon rind, as if it were a boneless chicken breast. As if taking a beating, with words or hands, was what it was good for.
I mean if you want chicken piccata, if you know you really, really want it, you go to the grocery, you check the expiration date (Is there enough time left?), you find the meatiest breast with the best date, you buy and you pound away, right?
Maybe a mallet, maybe a mason jar, something sturdy and rounded, maybe a fist. It matters little.
Maybe it will get thin enough, maybe you’ll be able to see through it, maybe your hands will shake each time knuckles connect with animal.
We so rarely ask if there are other ways to quench our desire, our ravenous hunger, our bone-splitting need, our deep-rooted grief. We reach for whats right in front of us, what’s right next to us. We drown out the pain, the searching, in another’s body.
I mean a body is a sack of meat and we haul around the rotten parts until an elder witch hands you a chef’s knife and says cut slice discard be rid of their hands on your body, all the hands on your body. But until then we find ways to do the job, we search for tenderness, for new, in hopes of righting the wrongs. We find hands that are not tender. There is a long line of not tender, almost like looking into a field of wheat, or oats,
or sunflowers.
Those sunflowers, the sheer number of them, standing motionless, faces to the sky. A reunion of cheery, golden faces looking to the sky until a heavy rain barrels down their backs, bends them forward. We look for them.
I’d like to imagine I’m milky oat tops, all lush and bursting, all milk and season change. All ripe for the picking. But many days I am a cracked hull, a shell, splinter turned full fracture, full rupture.
Sometimes I know I am still here, in this room, hands outstretched, inviting. I remember your hands on my body, other hands on my body and I can’t find a time before hands all up on me, in me, pressing palms upon palms upon me.
No body knows what to do with a broken heart. Nobody knows how to figure out this thing called continuous living[xvi] No body knows and yet it’s all anyone wants us to do. All any of us are doing.
Don’t die.
Stay here.
We ask each other to live beyond the unlivable, intolerable. We ask ourselves the same.
What is living but a free fall, no ground.
I’d like to be a milky oat top. All restoration, all plump and carefree.
+++
What’s fertile in a wound? Why dwell in one? Wounds promise authenticity and profundity, beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scars full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color. And yet—beyond and beneath their fruits—they still hurt. The boons of a wound never get rid of it; they just bloom from it. It’s perilous to think of them as chosen.[xvii]
And so, if unchosen, and if the wounding happens and continues, if the places we are taken to cause us to break from consensus reality, to tap into a new kind of reality, may we allow ourselves to find wisdom there, in those places other’s can’t or won’t dare to go.
May we not be too afraid to be in the dark/ the shadow/ the underworld.
May we remember that there is always more than one reality.
May we remember that those who heal us can also harm us.
May we learn to leave once the loving starts to hurt more than it heals.
May we remember that our internal landscape, no matter how fractured, how traumatized, how nonlinear and messy—this is also a kind of knowledge.
May we remember we have been here, in the wound, many times before.
But may we not leave before we learn what we need to learn.
May we remember the pockets of joy living alongside the pain.
May we remember we can lean on each other, that there are many wise guides.
May we remember that there is language and there is what lives beyond language too.
May we remember that we are our own wise guides.
—
[i] Inspired, in part, by Thom Donovon’s longform essay Somatic Poetics
[ii] Helene Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
[iii] Helene Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
[iv] Kate Zambreno, Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write
[v] Nick Cave, Push the Sky Away
[vi] Bhanu Kapil, in Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics
[vii] Bhanu Kapil, in Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics
[viii] Rob Halpern’s writing in the introduction for Melissa Buzzeo’s book For Want and Sound
[ix] Helene Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
[x] Helene Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
[xi] Louise DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing
[xii] Kazim Ali, Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
[xiii] Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieu
[xiv] Dale Pendell, Pharmako/ Gnosis opening section
[xv] francine j. harris, play dead
[xvi] Ada Limon, Instructions on Not Giving Up
[xvii] Leslie Jamison, Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain (acknowledging that the theory seems fairly limited to cisgender women in this piece)