The Body in the Age of the Polycrisis

Embodiment is the vibe we need right now (+ Tonight's meditation)

Jun 21, 2024

Hi Friends!

It’s Full Moon day, so tonight we practice together on the Zooms. If you’ve already registered, see you there. If you still want to register, you can do that HERE. This month’s session is about letting awareness be in/as the body. More info below. But first, here’s why this practice is important…

Almost daily now, someone asks me for a meditation (or meme dump or bottle of tequila) to help them through this chaotic era. Our nervous systems are aching, and we’re at a loss for how to respond. This is not surprising. We’re a culture that has drawn a heavy line between brain and body, then gone and barricaded ourselves up in our heads.

From that tight box, we’ve tried to rationalize, dissociate, suppress, and logic our way out of everything. But increasingly, our bodies are screaming at us — for rest, for action, for justice, for joy, for liberation, for honest connection. Suddenly, the Great Western coping mechanism of cold rationality just isn’t cutting it anymore. We’re being called back to the body, where compassion, courage, and patience live.

Words like “yoga” and “breathwork” used to make me gag. I was a Type A rationalist, a science student convinced I could conquer the world with my big, smart brain alone. As far as I was concerned, everything below the neck was just there to look cute and do my bidding. But somewhere, a shitstorm was brewing.

In the midst of a wildly successful (re: toxically exhausting) career, my body and mind went into meltdown. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating. I was having panic attacks and social anxiety. And I was drinking like a sailor to drown it all out. I’d sit in meditation, hoping to find a quiet, impermeable bubble, but all I could find was my noisy pain. As much as I hated to admit it, it seemed the answers to my misaligned life were down inside the sensations, not up and out of them. So, I took the bait and finally turned toward the body.

Like a child discovering its fingers and toes, I learned to breathe as the breath, to move as the muscles. I learned to follow the swarming sadness in my chest and the anxious butterflies in my stomach. I watched them come and go, again and again, the body responding to the world with tender intelligence. My actual lived experience, I learned, was not binary. Pain mixed with pleasure, intensity mixed with subtlety, rage mixed with love, mind and body blending together.

Pouring attention into the body is a revolutionary act. The body is our compass. When we’re cut off from it, we have no choice but to look outside our own skin for direction — to the culture, to politicians, to the loudest person in the room (or on socials). Going around in circles in our lonely heads, we are ungrounded, severed, powerless.

The Tibetans have a saying: “no grass grows on the top of the mountain, it only grows in the valley.” When awareness melts down into the field of the body, we spring to life. We start to speak from our throats — not just from our cold wit. We start to love from our chests — not from our calculating anxiety. We start to make art - real art - from the burning fires in our guts and embrace the world with our silly, flailing limbs. We become tender, courageous people.

We’re in the middle of some spooky times. But the answers are not somewhere high up and far away. They are here, in the body. Only by coming home to this do we begin to heal and make change bloom in this aching world.

Tonight’s Meditation Session

TIME: 8-9 PM EST / 5-6PM PST (please be on time… we only have an hour together!)

DEETS: This month’s Full Moon Meditation session will focus on pouring awareness into the body, using techniques from Tibetan Tsa Lung. A beginner-friendly practice for loosening the cramp of feeling stuck in your head.

COST: This session is open to errybody. Please consider paying what you can within your means.

REGISTER HERE ✨

See you tonight :)

❤️ Tasha