feminization of structures, trust in one’s own experience, finding support there

In the middle of a distance session recently, a client informed me that she was back to working in a restaurant, spending a lot of time standing and walking on concrete floors, and was feeling it in her body. I could sense what she meant; her bones felt as though they had gone a bit rigid, lost their buoyancy.  I was encouraging her to attempt to soften her bones, reminding her that our bones actually have a fluid quality to them, and that we are, after all, fluid beings. Embryologically speaking, we are fluid before our bones ossify. We begin as fluid, we are born of fluid, created from fluid. And furthermore, we forget that our bones are alive! They are full of marrow and produce our red blood cells! They have a spongey, springy, and resilient quality to them. If you cut a bone in half, you would find in it’s cross section a sponge-like matrix. I guess because the only time we see bones is when the body they were in is no longer living, we can get the impression that our skeleton is this inanimate rigid structure that carts us around.

Anyway, I could nerd out all day talking about bones, but that’s not the point of this post. At the end of the session, this client expressed that she was moved by the metaphor of the fluid nature of the bones, drawing a connection between a rigid skeletal structure in the body to the outdated patriarchal systems that are failing us right now. To use her word, she’d been thinking a lot lately about “feminizing” systems. 

I loved this connection. This gorgeous epiphany she was generous enough to share with me struck me on multiple levels. For one, it reminded me, yet again, why I do this work. I never tire of the way the body constantly offers a way to hold and see one’s self in both the macro and the micro - that really they are one and the same. We are able to see ourselves reflected back to us from the world, through our bodies. Our bodies are a portal through which we can begin to understand ourselves as a fixture of and within - not apart from - the world. We are not separate. One obvious way this point is being illustrated right now is with the pandemic, how we get sick because someone else is sick. Our actions and our very existence affect those around us whether we like it or not. 

Secondly, I love how she phrased “feminizing” systems. In the way of our bodies, whether it is softening our bones or being kinder to it and allowing it more rest, food, allowing it to look a way our society tells you it shouldn't look. In the way of witnessing the rapid cultural exposition of the brutalization of patriarchal white supremacy, in the way many of us white folks are seeing through our conditioned whiteness, acknowledging how we benefit from it AND how we suffer from it, how it keeps us small, how we are not really free because everyone is not free. I am thinking about how we could consider the location of the birth of the concept of whiteness to be a white body. And if we are to do the work of decolonizing ourselves in this way, it is critical that we bring in the body, that we start from the body (which, in my opinion, is really the only place to start from, ever?) 

Bruce Tift speaks of embodied immediacy, in his book Already Free.

“What is most reliable? What can we count on? What can we rely on for support? In my experience, what we can most consistently rely on for support in our lives is the the truth of our immediate experience. This doesn’t mean that whatever we experience in the moment is “true”- we can have distorted mistaken perceptions, even hallucinations. It just means that our immediate experience is whats always available; it’s where we begin.

By support, I mean the experience that we’re standing on ground that’s really there, that’s not theoretical, and that we can engage with our life without constantly questioning ourselves. We feel that our experience is reliable, even when different than others’ experiences.”

In my own life, I am acknowledging the subconscious conditioning that’s prevented me from marketing myself more unapologetically as the energy worker that I am. Bodywork is already quite feminine in nature, but the direction I am heading is even more so. More listening, less doing. Energetic work is very experiential, it listens to the subtle truths of the body’s wisdom. We are dealing with direct experience, with truths that hold power and expression regardless of external validation. There’s a feminine quality to trusting what you know to be experientially true, regardless of what outside sources tell you what is or isn’t happening. There is real agency to be had in living directly from one's own knowing. 

Lastly, I am reminded of this Adyashanti quote:

“Each moment is the moment that needs to be happening. Each experience we have is the divine invitation. The texture and flow of our lives, from moment to moment, is itself what reveals freedom. Life itself will reveal to you what it is you need to see through in order to be free.”

This is the feminine quality of life. Life is living and happening through us, delivering unto us the necessary path for our evolution. And life, as we know it, happens through and in our bodies. 

Deepest gratitude to this client and to all my clients.