99.9% Of You Is Literally Made For Expansiveness
Multiple things are always true at the same time. Understanding this, possibly more than any other single thing, has had the greatest impact on my life. We are earth creatures made of muscle, blood, sinew, and bone. We are 99.9% air.
I’ve tried many varieties of therapy over the years, starting at age 16. I think most of them did me some good. At the very least, almost all those therapists had a sympathetic shoulder for me to lean on when I felt miserable, and at best, I learned a few things about myself.
I’m still a person who has a therapist now, and I’m damn glad and privileged to have that option.
The thing I was missing then, is what might be missing from your life now – the tools for changing things and moving forward. I felt stuck.
After about two decades of traditional therapy, I was tired of someone simply listening. I wanted – craved, tools.
I didn’t want to just talk about the past. I wanted to feel empowered to make real changes. I wanted to feel better, not just have someone understand why I felt badly.
I started looking into every therapy type and healing modality I could find and doing some comparisons between what they all offered. Over the course of a decade, I spent about four years and thousands of dollars getting certified in a few different health coaching programs, plus another three years becoming a Reiki master* (I’m not advocating white people do this, please see footnote), even more years taking classes in energy medicine, reflexology, spirituality and religion, learning about essential oils and supplements, chakras and meridians, crystals and spells.
I joined a narrative therapists practice group, researched the body/mind connection, learned how our body’s responses to our environment, foods, and hormones affect everything, taught art therapy, and held groups on a variety of health subjects like our parasympathetic nervous system and being Highly Sensitive, (which was my intro into neurodiversity and understanding my own neurospiciness because of shared traits) out of my wellness center in San Diego, CA.
The tail end of that incredibly verdant part of my life was filled with understanding kink and the body’s pain response and reward system, along with our need to reparent ourselves, which led me to offering optional Pro Dom kink services and teaching kink as a healing art.
I learned a lot during that decade and did my best to keep sharing with others through workshops, speaking at conferences, and writing.
My own physical health has its ups and downs. There’s no perfect tool kit that will permanently keep you from ever being ill or needing to rest or needing to grieve. There is no “healed” place you reach where you’re done healing and the rest of your life is perfect. And there’s no magic secret that you’ll learn that will be the answer to everything you’re hoping to change about yourself. You can spend your entire adult life searching, putting off actually living and being happy “until then,” but I promise you, it’s a big waste of time and energy and keeps you from being embodied, in the present moment.
The rewilding you might have heard about is a way to see all of you, not just the parts of you that are socially acceptable, the parts of you that have been forced to comply and play along and perform, putting the parts of you that are sad or sick away because they need to be hidden. You were taught to live this way by your parents, who learned it from their parents, and so on, all in an attempt to live without being picked out of the group as a troublemaker. Being a member of the group in good standing, or, “normal,” is safer. The pressure to be just like everyone else is super real and it’s built into us from when we’re tiny. It’s a safety feature to belong to the pack and teaching you to be this way was how your parents loved you.
The truth is that the messy, inconvenient, shadowy, loud, sick, angry, and persistent parts of you are why you’ve survived this long on this trauma-filled planet. That obstinate, crass, sullen teen part of you that you pretend doesn’t exist? They deserve your gratitude (and maybe a break). The whimsy and fun you long for? Your younger parts have been holding those things (hostage?) for you and you need to make space to incorporate them.
Doing this work means that over time, you can manage what life throws at you with more capacity and grace, both for yourself and others. The big knocks come but you don’t fall down. You feel the impact, sure, but you know how to receive and process the grief – and give yourself all the time you need to do it. Or maybe you do fall down and give yourself a rest, telling yourself what a great job you’re doing instead of wishing you could be different. You feel less and less like you have to smear makeup on your face and force a smile for the benefit of others. You wear makeup only when you want to and it brings you joy.
You get a greater perspective and understanding about what’s yours and what to leave for someone else, because not only is it theirs, but trying to do their work doesn’t help them and it sure doesn’t help you.
You will know and love your Self and system so well, that you have your own back and validate all your parts like a motherfucker, which makes you unafraid to say what’s true in any situation and to any person.
My health history involves sexual & medical trauma, DDNOS, and multiple autoimmune conditions, which is complicated and painful. I know what it’s like to live minute to minute, feeling pretty sure that you don’t want to be here tomorrow, because the only thing worse than how you feel in that moment is understanding that you have to do it again tomorrow and the day after that etc. I know what it’s like to feel nothing for months at a time. I know what it’s like to be surprised I turned another year older, again, and feel baffled that I’m going to do it all over again for another year.
And, I also know what it’s like to have joy – real joy. I know what it’s like to build an intentional life, to feel like myself, finally, and be surrounded by people who love me for me. I could never have known how great my life would be now. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d tried to explain it to me. I could not fathom what I didn’t believe could be true. I didn’t feel I deserved any of that for myself. I now know what it’s like to want to live through this next year, and in fact, hope I get a long life to come in this funny meatsuit I’m walking around in.
My life is not easy, even though it is fulfilling and worthwhile. I live with chronic pain and disability which complicates things. I strive to stay in my rituals and daily schedules because it helps maintain my mental health, keeping the 3am demons at bay so they don’t take over weeks of my life. My earlier years were filled with the results of mental illness symptoms and that comes with very real casualties, even today, in the lives of those who knew me then. Like many folks in the trans community, I’ve had huge personal losses in the last few years. Some of these hits are of the magnitude of which I could not have believed I would live through, let alone still be able to feel joy after experiencing.
This is the stuff we are made of, though. Life is contradictions, pain and pleasure. Multiple things are always true at the same time. These are the real building components, the raw ingredients, of life. We are mostly air – 99.9% of you is expansiveness. You have more bacteria cells in you than human ones, making you more of an earth alien than a human. Sadness and joy exist in you at the same time. There is beauty in the sunset you can only see over the power lines and street lights.
You are at once the most important person in the universe and also of very little consequence.
I find those statistics to be comforting. I like science and math and magic mixed together. I think therein lies the truth, which is that we can’t know everything, but that everything knows us.
Today more than ever, so many of the idioms we grew up with are proving to be true:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Be the leaf in the stream.
Go with the flow.
Don’t become the experience, but keep your eyes open, see what it is and feel it.
Don’t be afraid, or do be afraid, and keep going.
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
The clouds and the trees are just as important in my toolbox as being a witness to my big feelings. I need bubbles and prisms. I need ropes and floggers and flowers. I need a recognizable window of tolerance to give me the choice of how I want to act instead of being stuck in reaction mode. I need to be able to truly love myself and know I’m good no matter what anyone else says. I need to be able to laugh. And I need time doing absolutely nothing.
Sometimes I live in this Carl Sagan Quote: “Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust.”
I love you <3 xLeoh * Please read this very clear and informative piece by Lore McSpadden-Walker about Reiki lineage and best practices. I no longer advertise Reiki as a part of what I offer and I no longer give attunements. Energy work will always be a part of what I do as a mentor and Pro Dom and I’m in the process of traveling through my own heritage to see what my roots have to share with me about where my natural gifts come from.
PS. I’ll be back soon(?) to talk more about 30 Days Of Anything and tell you how I’m doing on moving my body. I hope it’s going ok for you and if you forgot all about it, go ahead and start again today! Why not! xo
—Previously posted on Substack