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.

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.           

     

WHATS BeeN GOinG On?!?! 1st: Grandma Turned 90

My grandmama turned 90 a couple of weeks ago. Me, my mama, her two sisters and everybody's respective kids and partners gathered in western mass. to celebrate. and wow.

my grandma was always extremely strong, direct. encouraging. with her dementia she has softened; she is kinder than ever, constantly grateful, always smiling, shaking her head and saying things like "i cant believe it" or "youre gorgeous." it's like all of the love juice that has always been a part of her actions is now bubbling to the surface, being articulated in the only words she thinks worthwhile saying. what used to be what she did but never said, now she says. she says love.

i realized that this wasnt new (i used to think that her dementia was bringing on this new uber-loving thing) when i saw all of her children gather for her birthday. her children are all, first and foremost, incredible mothers. the three sisters are strong, deep, giving, unbelievable mothers. they are fierce. they support eachother. the incredible mothering that my grandma provided has extended itself and thus increased exponentially, as the next generation has taken her love in, digested it through each personal lens, and spread it onto their own families.

at the birthday i saw the magical transmutation of love and skillful mothering through the generations. it doesnt stop. it is steady fire. the more you give it, the more it grows. this is a clan, there are secrets to these skills; not discrete things you can write down, but ways, intentions, care.


all hail grandmothers.

self-story: It Didn't Wait, and Why Should It?

These days are so long I could drink a beer now and sober up with the sun still reminding me I'm metabolizing. 
That backpack has held so much.
It's crazy.

I asked for two cups, one with ice and one without. I waited a few minutes, then switched the ice from one to the other and poured my beer into the cold empty glass. This made me feel clever, effective, and secretively excellent.

Earlier I sat by a river that's been chewed out from below, tugged across itself more than once to fit different money's meanings and now it's pretty and where it is and there's a weeping willow behind enough grass that the willow looks like maybe it's dangerous.
I sat there and read, remembering only between chapters and at slow parts that I'm alive and that means I don't know anything.
A soft bending cord which was also a branch brushed my face, so I stopped reading but not because I remembered but because I am and that's very different.
On the leaf I held between fingers loosened suddenly from pages it took me seconds to realize that the tiny beatle was giving birth.
You know, birth in a patient way, the way egg-laying creatures can squeeze and push all for a life that right now is smooth, featureless, unrecognizable as "next" but might be next one day.
When maybe isn't maybe worth it, it's definitely everything.

I debated for 5 egg-lays if I should take a picture. I was confused because I had immediately wanted to do this; then when I decided that it was hollow and modern and therefore bad I had wanted to write about the egg-laying instead; then I decided that it was fucked up that all I could do while watching the violent honesty of egg-laying was to try to stop wanting to capture it and make it mine forever.

The tiny beetle made me sad. I was reading about love and women and mothers and jealousy and murder and broken-hearts and the foreverness of certain types of sad. That beetle worked. It would barely finish one impossibly long yellow egg before its butt found a new dot of leaf to establish sticky contact with and place the next maybe life just-exactly-so. Its diligence made me sad, like here this beetle was, giving its whole life simply to its task of maintaining eternity, and it didn't hate itself or its pregnancy or its decisions. I wanted to call it love. And this one thing that loved simply was going to walk away soon; the distance would be huge. There's a sweaty palmed closeness in our human families and so my heart broke wondering if the only way to hurt was to stay and the only way to love was to leave.


Now I feel safe and a little drunk at a table far from things too dangerously simple they might break my heart. It doesn't look like it to the other people here, but this is all I have. I can see my bike out the window and there is the bag for clothes, there is the bag for books. It's a funny feeling, to sit down next to a stranger at a cafe and let them see everything; the whole house piled against the table legs, the water botter is also the cup and the scarf is also the blanket. Maybe my sadness back at the tree came because of its easy potential for home; that could be it, my water bottle resting just so in the roots and everything already there so why do I keep leaving?


I bought a beer so I could make it make sense. This public life means that dropping 3 bucks makes me feel normal. Yeah, I'm a customer; I'm not sitting here for hours because it's inside and quiet and almost like a private sort of space and cause there is no other private space for me to go, this is as close as it gets. I wonder if the bags give me away, but I'm white and young and have a camera and they didn't even card me cause they already trusted me.


Back when I was at the willow I took out my camera, and by the time the lens had focused the tiny beetle had crawled completely out of the frame.

everything that existed at the moment of writing this.