The Practice of Decision-Making Part 2: Yo’ Body

This is the second in a series of articles about The Practice of Decision-Making – situating the experience of decision-making in the context of healing. Decision-making is an anxiety-riddled experience for many folks navigating this age of information. By transforming the process of decision-making into an opportunity for self-healing, we step beyond the bounds of the decision itself, reclaiming our inherent value. And, conveniently, we learn to make better decisions for ourselves.

Yo' Body

This is the first thing.

It’s the last thing.

It’s the thing in between all the other things.

But don’t stress if you forget to check in with your body after every phone call. Whatevs, it’s still there whether you actively check in with it or not.

Checking in with the body is the embodied way to connect with the meta-process of self-healing while decision-making. It reminds us of our wholeness and value that exists far beyond the margins of the impending decision. It reminds us that this thing that seems so incredibly important right now is just as temporal as all of the transient sensations in the body.

Different folks check in with their bodies infinities of ways. Essentially, checking in with your body just means that you take a moment or twelve to direct your attention to your physical experience. I often start off by directing my awareness to my breath. Not changing it, just noticing it. Then I scan my body and occasionally ask myself questions. “Where do I feel this right now? What is the quality of that sensation? Does it change when I pay attention to it?” I make it up as I go along. You’ll intuitively know what questions you need to ask the more you practice. It’s true. Try right now – get still and see what question comes to mind. Trust that question. It’s a good question.

 That’s how I figured out the stuff about my solar plexus, shoulders and heart (see part 1 of this article). From this body-centered awareness I also notice the qualities of my mind, as though it were just another body part. “What types of things am I thinking about? What is the pace of my thinking?” And emotions - “How do I feel right now?” Always No judgment, I’m not trying to find specific things. I might just notice numbness all over. The point is to take that time, not to make fancy breakthroughs of understanding.

For me, the hardest part of checking in with my body is remembering to do it. A good way to remember is to link it with some other action. For example, every time I realize I need to pee, I remind myself to check in with the rest of my body while I’m at it. Or put up a reminder on your computer. Now I link up body scans with basically any strong emotion, but I’ve written reminders on my palm, I’ve drawn pictures on my coffee makers, and I literally have a tattoo that pretty much serves this function (no, I am not suggesting you go get a tattoo, but if you’re getting one anyway it may as well be functional… just sayin.)

Our bodies are our wisest teachers, hands down, BLAM, easy. So freakin convenient, too. Check in to your whole self, and regularly – you are still whole, you bring your whole emotional physical intellectual and spiritual being with you. You are not the decision itself, you are essentially and always yourself. And this is you, making a decision. Interesting. Just like we get familiar with the experience of being “on” alcohol, or being “on” caffeine, learn to get familiar with yourself “on” decision-making. The adrenaline rush. The quality of your thoughts. How you view your time and how you view yourself. This is you on decision-making. This can be fun.

The Practice of Decision-Making

This is the first in a series of articles about The Practice of Decision-Making – 
situating the experience of decision-making in the context of healing.

Decision making. OH. There is that feeling in my solar plexus – tight, full, dense. My shoulders squeeze up along my back in hopes that if they could just cover my ears then I wouldn't hear all the voices of doubt in my head. 

My heart races to match the pace of my thoughts.

My heart races to evade the claws of commitment, each choice threatening to define and confine the rest of my young limitless (until now) life.

I’m standing still but I’m panting from the loops my brain dances.

Decision making. That shit stresses me out.

I’ve noticed that a lot, and by a lot I mean all, of my friends have had to deal with anxiety around decision-making. I think there is something generational about this – we do live in an age of endless options and infinite information, after all. Many folks nowadays are over-educated, over-informed and over-whelmed by the possibilities of existence. If this is going to be a theme then we better start developing our decision-making skills accordingly. And let’s not settle for simply reducing anxiety. Let’s actively thrive. I mean, we might as well while we’re alive and whatnot.

I recently faced a deep ‘ol decision making experience with all the trappings of a Big Decision – time commitment, monetary commitment, potential commitment to career and life path. Dear Ones, I came through, and I’m damn proud of my decision. Not because I think my choice is so awesome, which it is, but because I feel so empowered through my process of decision-making. I got to know myself better, especially the parts I usually try avoid. Through this experience I’ve singled out some tools and approaches to decision-making. I hope they will help others find healing and clarity as they navigate their own juicy, possibility-filled lives. This advice is mostly geared towards life-path style decisions – where to live, where to work, where to learn, etc. If the tactics I mention don’t resonate with you, great. The main point is that we deserve to feel empowered and inspired by our decision-making processes, and we can be. Figure out what works for you; then tell me about it.

Decision-Making as a Practice

People have yoga practices and meditation practices. I’d like to talk about developing a decision-making practice. That was the big switcheroo for me this time around – as I realized that a big decision was going down, I took a deep breath and some wiser voice deep down inside reminded me that this was just one more opportunity for self-healing. The narrative went something like this –

“Well A-Ro, we didn’t see this one coming, but for today’s self-healing exploration, we will be 

investigating how we deal with decision making.”

Cute. Don’t get blindsided by the decision on hand. It might appear that the biggest deal in your life is figuring out the right way to turn, but that’s a decoy. The biggest deal in your life is your life, and this moment is an opportunity to get intimate with your own unique anatomy of big-decision-navigation. Say “yes” to this learning, let it be valuable in and of itself, and the immense pressure on your decision will lift and all that ensues will be caste in the light of self-love and healing.

So now we have two co-developing processes – the process of the decision itself and the meta-process of you, beautiful holy and complex creature that you are, making that decision. The tools I am offering address both processes simultaneously. In other words, the very way that we go about making decisions should be self-reflective and healing, while supporting clarity and good, solid decisions. One hand washes the other, eh? But actually. It’s true. You will make a better decision through holding a healing lens over the process. This is pretty standard knowledge. Has anyone ever told you to “just follow your heart?” Yeah, easier said than done. It’s not like you can knock on your chest and ask if anyone’s home. Listening to our hearts means radical self-acceptance - accepting our truths, our unspeakables, our vulnerability. It requires grounding and meditation, even if that is a 2-second meditation. When someone tells you to follow your heart, they are asking you to engage in a self-healing practice. They intuitively know that our healthiest wisest selves speak from that still place, and that’s the self we’d like to enlist in decision-making. Please. Thank you.

So then what?

The next few posts will go into a handful of aspects I’m currently finding important for decision-making. I have too much to say for one post. Some are tools and some are perspectives to hold on to throughout the process. The whole practice is always spiraling back, reflecting on itself. So I’m not posting in order of “steps,” but rather in the order of my own natural flow of awareness through the process. Mix and match, jump in and out, develop your own story. Here’s what’s up in the posts to come:

Yo’ Body – Centering and re-centering the body as home-base throughout the Decision-Making Practice.

Writing Is So Awesome  - Game-Plans and Personal Reflections. Utilizing the written word to articulate our underlying needs, dive into the bigger truth of the situation, and alleviate stress.

Play All Day – How approaching your Decision-Making Practice with an attitude and expectation of playfulness transforms the experience, motivating you and honoring your dignity.

I’m looking forward to hearing others’ experiences of decision-making and the approaches that have helped them. Please share! We’ve got lots of big ol’ decisions coming up on in the world, what with the need to protect the planet and liberate the majority of people from massive marginalization and oppression. Here’s to walking our truth with every step and loving the crap out of ourselves. May this practice and all practices serve all beings, sentient and not, through space and time. Bless it and be it. MMmmmmm.

The Half Moon – Her lessons, Her possibilities, and an Embarrassing Story involving Mentrual Blood

The Half Moon tips over herself tonight. Tonight is the First Quarter Moon. I haven’t done any formal research into quarter moon rituals, and I would LOVE and NEED to hear whatever insights and information you may have. But technical knowledge or no, I do know what intuitively resonates with me about this Halfling in the sky and I’m pumped to share these thoughts

with you!

We sing rollicking songs and feast ourselves by communal fires for the Full Moon; we solemnly lay our seeds of personal intention on the New Moon. For a while now I’ve felt deeply at home in these lunar rituals. They are so blunt and relatable – moon is big and round, I can see at night, let’s party. Moon is dark, the infinity of the starry sky is revealed and internal shadows come to the surface, let’s set intentions that may come to harvest by the next full moon. But the quarter moon has remained mysterious to me, an untapped invitation for ritual and healing.

What does the Half Moon have to teach us?

The Half Moon teaches us to find our stillness by noticing our stillness. The Half Moon is a fleeting moment in the sky, a tender instant strung between the slightest tip one way or the other. We catch sight of this moment and it appears so solidly decided, HALF, a line brazenly drawn straight down the middle. But in fact we are witnessing the space of quiet between exhale and inhale. She teaches us that stillness is not a final destination that follows years of meditation and holiness. Stillness is what comes when we notice that we are, at this moment, already still. Look at the moon and imagine that there is no where she is coming from, no where she is going to. Let expectations and memories fall away and accept her as she is. Notice in yourself how you are at this moment still. No where to go, no place to leave. What if your present moment on your path was the only place you had to be?

The Half Moon teaches us to accept our duality. The Half Moon shares her darkness and her light equally. Her darkness gleams down, unafraid to sublimate into the expanse around it. Her darkness accepts its place in the infinite, the chaos and the unknowable. Her light shines down without a doubt of its worthiness to glow right there amongst the stars. No mind that she is as much in darkness as she is in light, there is no need to wait for complete cheery light to take her place in the sky. The Moon shows up even when she shows up in pieces. She teaches us to hold up our value unapologetically, raggedness and all. Both darkness and light are gifts to be honored and revered. How do you react to your own darkness? How do you react to your own light? What are you afraid of sharing with others and how do you talk to yourself about sharing these things? Do you ever feel pressure to feel one way or another, but not both? Look at the Half Moon in her proud expression and consider how you might speak to yourself in a way that accepts your complexity.

It’s important to understand that connotations between darkness and negativity are often rooted in historical attempts to validate racism. How might a culture that works to spiritually reclaim its darkness also heal its engrained assumptions about dark skin? Perhaps we can heal our own personal engrained racism by doing the spiritual work ourselves. I believe that personal healing is directly linked to cultural healing and the moon offers countless opportunities for us to experience how.

The First Quarter Moon, Specifically

Ok, so technically this isn’t The Half Moon, it’s the First Quarter Moon. Which is nice phrasing, because it reminds me that this whole this is a cycle, not just a ping-ponging back and forth between New and Whole but a stretch across New, past Whole and a pull even further into a new New. Fun.

For me, the First Quarter Moon is a time for reflection and recommitment. On the New Moon I set some intentions for myself. How have I been relating to those intentions, if at all? Are those intentions still relevant for me or can I release some of them from my consciousness? And in general, how have I engaged with my life since the New Moon? I take this time to re-read journals and notes, give myself permission to radically change, and finally to Recommit.

Recommitting means ruthless honesty – what can I truly commit to; what do I truly want to commit to? I may have gotten trigger happy on the New Moon and made lots of intentions I don’t want to or can’t truly hold to, now I have a chance to reconnect with my truth and stick with what’s real. Recommitment should feel celebratory and like a relief – Yes! I get to hold on to what I care about and stop trying to commit to things I don’t care about! It should not feel like a promise or a burden. It’s more functional to commit to processes rather than goals. I commit to saying “I love you” to each of my body parts as I lotion up after a shower. I don’t commit to completely accepting everything about my body. That’s an end goal; I’ll get there one day. For now, I’m sticking with “I love you.”

And Finally, An Embarrassing Story Involving Menstrual Blood

I bleed on the Half Moon. That’s right, as in now. It has been my practice for a while to collect all of my moon blood in a jar (I use a menstrual cup so that’s fairly easy) and honor a piece of sacred ground with it after my flow is over. Moon blood is seriously nourishing and I love to offer it to sacred herbs and trees. It’s nice and feels way more reasonable that wasting all that nourishing goodness on a cotton swab stuck in someone’s septic tank.

But today the worst nightmare happened. I was packing up and getting ready to leave after a day working at the restaurant. I was in the bathroom and decided to take advantage of their running water (my cabin has none) and dump my cup before leaving. I had my jar and everything, did the deed, and left the bathroom. And left the jar in that bathroom. In the 2.5 minutes it took me to realize my fuck up, someone else used that bathroom and TOOK MY MOON BLOOD. I searched and searched but really there was nothing to do. Someone went in to that bathroom, lord knows what they think they found, and lord knows what they did with it.

No one said anything to me, and I’m pretty sure no one ever will. We will just go on, me and whoever it was, working side by side, never acknowledging that both of us have held a jar of my menses in our hands. Now that’s a special bond to share with someone. Who knows, maybe there are covert witches at work who need some blood for their own moon altar. I know that my moon altar is pretty bummed about the whole thing.

 Don't waste your red gold down the drain, grow a tree!
I wouldn't put it on houseplants though, to be real.
This ain't me, I found this image online.

So on this First Quarter Moon, I am learning to accept my shame and to accept that I stand out. I’m learning to accept that sometimes my internal matters physically and emotionally come to light when I don’t intend them to; that’s the risk I take on by dealing so  intimately with my internal matters. I am more willing to handle the consequences then I am willing to tuck my darkness away. I just hope my co-workers can handle those consequences, too. Yeeeeeeesh.

A Return to Communication! A Poem about Loving Myself! Maybe communication is loving myself! WOOOOAAAHHHHH

Oh the Juicy Yummy Goodness of writing, of output! It can all seem so arbitrary at times, right? But that doesn't matter, what matters if the feelings excited in my belly by writing things down, by sharing them with others. Hello Others, already so much closer than we could have ever expected.

I am grateful to share this moment with you.
First I am going to catch up a weeeeee bit but if you'd just like to read a poem you can scroll to the bottom of this post.

I am signing back on to this blog because I think we have more conversations to have. I'd like to hear from you. So this is me leaving you the first voicemail. Tag. You're it. Ha.

Since we last shared moments, I have been in many places. Physically, my body has rolled around the island of Puerto Rico, it has sublimated into ether on the mountains of Tennessee, it has condensed into cold rock at the altitudes of Colorado, and it has spread broadly into the countless memories and creativities of Upstate New York. Emotionally and spirituality, well shit. That is many stories. All of which have shaped me into this present moment, so though we can't catch up on all the juicy details I trust that the all tastes I've accumulated along the way will flavor the words I put out today.

What's real right now:
I am living alone in a one room cabin in New Paltz, NY.
I am spending most of my time on self-healing practices, which right now looks like yoga, journaling, and meditation.
I am alive.
I am very excited to use this space to get real about healing, about gender, about hope. Themes coming up are boundaries, commitment, lunar ritual and coughing.

For now, here is a poem I wrote in my attempts to address my intention of the day: Absurd Obscene Self-Love. Sometimes it's easier to embody something by pretending it is a dream. What does your dream of Self-Love look like?

Self-Love Dream

In my self-love dream I have many fishes to tend to.

My thighs cup the glowing bay where they found a safe place.

Their flickering muscled movements paint me back my secret colors

So I’m cultivating many, many fish.

Each Spring I spill them out into the roadside gullies and they feed the whole Earth.

Even you.

In my self-love dream the struggle is the best part.

Strangers gather on Thanksgiving around TV sets and watch me weep on the big screen

They eat chicken wings and knead moist tissues in their moist hands

Afterwards they are silent

Or they cheer

One sighs            “Masterpiece” 

 and another pledges that one day they will weep like me.

In my self-love dream

My fingers are my lovers.

My palms orient to the soft parts of my hips

And the whole truth is renamed                              

pressing.

I hold up Pleasure again and again to marvel

Before I melt back into the tide.

Inevitable.

In my self-love dream all of the ants know my name

And even when no one smiles at me at the library

All of the ants still know my name.

In my self-love dream

I am not sitting in this chair.

My ass sits in the outstretched hand of Mother Earth herself. She’s just holding me here.

Even though it’s silly and I could really just use the chair,

She doesn’t mind.

She says              

 Sometimes Love is silly.

In my self-love dream

I am sitting in this chair.

I am breathing and I notice that

                                I am still breathing.

It’s too late,

And im too tired,

                                                                And my hair’s wrong,

And I cannot believe how impossibly beautiful

I am.

In my self-love dream

I wake up.           

     

Words in space! Permaculture, Queerness and Feminism Article is up!

interview with Nicole: http://www.permanentculturenow.com/permaculture-queerness-feminism/

What a surreal experience. Nearly 9 months after I saw down to answer the questions of Nicole Vosper of UK's Wild Heart Permaculture, I get the email. Our interview is published online on Permanent Culture Now.

9 months (i dont have to mention the symbology). This article was written lifetimes ago, and yesterday. Of course I winced at my wordiness, the buzzy vocabularly, the backwards and forwards grammar. But I also smiled. Because I love the person who answered those questions. Back then (yes, back then... only 9 months ago) I was burning fresh from Occupy, I was frustrated with activism and an activist, I was tired of wary of revolution and a revolutionary, i was disgusted by academia and an academic. I was angry and thought the right words could explain myself into wholeness. And in some ways they do. In so many ways they don't.


Just like a child, a project that I started at one moment in my evolution has suddenly been born and has an identity unique and throbbing on itself, separate from the journey of me, yet still connected.  My own jounrey has moved away from the wordy venom of that time - I feel tenderly towards those who inadvertantly oppress, because I recognize their foibles as my own and embrace the opportunity to learn and heal these habits together. Still, I respect where I was coming from at the time; it was a necessary step before the turning inward that is now my teacher. I think my favorite point of the article is that diversity is about joy and real-life friendship. Ironically, my main point was that words just get in the way and there is real relationship at stake!

And of course, there are lots of parts of the interview that now have an even deeper truth, so much more physicalized now that I smile to know that back then, I already knew:

Nicole: Big question but in short how does society need to be re-designed for real gender & sexual liberation? What role can permaculture designers play?

Annie-Rose: Start loving yourself! Love other people, people who are different from you! Stop being afraid! To me there are many correct answers to this, all of which require that folks believe that they have the right to be happy.

Please take a look at the article and share your thoughts. I could talk more about the article, but I'm more interested in your thoughts!

guilt.

credit: http://www.thegully.com/essays/puertorico
/010430vq_calderon.html
learn more

I have not dared to travel outside of North America for almost 10 years. Let me be clear - I haven't had the cash or the need to leave North America, and 10 years without international travel isn't exactly something to whine about. What I mean though is that I couldn't conceive of it; I couldn't let my mind imagine my body elsewhere. Cash was one reason, another was that I have wanted to understand the upsurdly huge country I was born in before I expanded my brains too much. But guilt was the biggest reason that I couldn't imagine international travel. Internalized colonialist guilt. Shit's real. Allow me to explain.

I have been terrified of what it means to travel, as a United State-ian (what is the word for that? there is no word for that! only more colonialist-whiffing "american!" WTF?!?). How could i possibly eat authentic local food, when the words authentic+local+food are probably in a new McDonald's ad for McRibs, coming to a puebla near you? I was frozen with fear of extracting resources, cultural, spiritual, and material. Of furthering a well-worn pattern of American self-centeredness ("All the world is my oyster!").

I have been stuck in a stasis of guilt. 

This is stasis, cause guilt doesn't do anything. It is an important stage to go through, cause it's so very sad what has happened in this world and it shows some useful empathy to internalize it just a touch. But guilt, in my case, has resulted mostly in fear and motionlessness. It has gone on too long. It was well intentioned, yay, awesome, but guilt doesn't change the screwy importation patterns and misplaced government spending; it doesn't undo cultural shame and imported diabetes. For me, guilt damned my learning about these issues to paper only. Without real engagement, all I could do was read zines and get mad, get more guilty. That is an elite, detached sort of learning that leads to out-of-touch non-profits. It was so obvious to me that to learn about helping the earth, I needed to get my hands into it. Why did my desire to heal some of the United State's international impact convince me that the best thing i could do was stay silent and as far away as possible?

I bring up this issue because I think it has pretty darn broad implications. People have guilt because they are cis-gendered men so they freak out and leave the room when rape is discussed. People have guilt because they are not a person of color so they start sweating and panicking as soon as they're the only white people in the room. This guilt has important roots, but it is distracting us from the work at hand. It is distracting us from the reality that oppression is not the end of the story. Oppression is the first step on the path to liberation, a path which we must actively create. No one else is going to do it.

I am asking, of me, of you, of your cat if that is somehow applicable, to take your tinges of guilt as an invitation. Here are some loose steps:

1. Look at your guilt-moments closely. Those are teaching moments. They are telling you what your shadows are; they are telling you what boundaries your soul is secretly aching to press up against. This is not easy work! Guilt comes cloaked in many guises - you may feel offended, attacked, isolated, defensive, bored. Learning to identify when guilt is at play may take awhile.
2. Press into your guilt - ask questions of those who trigger guilt in you, be humble, research more about the sources of your particular guilt. Read some history. Be honest about what you do and do not know. Mostly, mostly mostly mostly, listen.
3. Be an ally. Talk to those cis-gendered dudes friends about what you've learned, talk to other United States-ians about what you heard. Help bring these topics out of the shadows. And, following all that most deeply satisfying listening you've been doing, see how you can help. No, you don't have to found an organization, but maybe you can contribute to efforts that are already underway. 

This is serious healing work. In this gloriously changing universe, it seems we need to look at our wounds and our burdens, look at them honestly, and embrace the pain of healing. It will be uncomfortable. It will make you cry. It will situate you in the community of life and transform stasis into freedom. Change comes from tiny itty bitty individual actions - don't doubt the importance of this work, even if it seems self-involved. Everything that flows from it will be far stronger, wiser, and kinder.

So anway, I'm in Puerto Rico right now. Of course I start my international exploration by diving into the belly of the beast and landing in a modern-day colony. I have no grasp of what's going on. I'm only at the beginning of asking my questions. But in this quiet space of listening I can feel minute layers of my silence and ignorance evaporating.

I still have no answers, but I am no longer afraid to look for them.