Come back to your senses. Literally.

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If the world looks like it’s lost its senses, maybe it’s because… it has.

Literally. 

Our senses aren’t irrelevant afterthoughts to human life.

Sensory information is data; our bodies and our brains interpret that data to create our lived experience.

In one aspect, our senses are overwhelmed: by constant screen use, noise pollution, light pollution, exhaust fumes, pop-ups, traffic noise and exhaust, artificial flavors, overstimulation. 

On the flip side, we’re starving for rich, true sensory connection—for pleasure.

Pleasure, too, is data.

What if the craziness in the world is pointing to a primal need to return to… pleasure?

To take in data that soothes our nervous systems because of its evolutionary familiarity?

We forget, sometimes, that we evolved along WITH everything else. We are wired from our reciprocal connection with all that is—through our senses.

What might pleasureful senses feel like?

Sound: Birdsong, crickets, crashing waves, raindrops, wind rising and falling in the trees—sounds we’ve evolved along with, but don’t always get to hear, nowadays.

Touch: Dirt underneath our feet, the way different earths talk to our toes in different tongues. Human touch: playful, sensual, familiar, warm, safe. Co-regulating our nervous systems in community through safe, healing touch.

Taste: A palate rehabilitated from the onslaught of artifice, that can taste with delicacy the wholeness of whole food, discern seasonings, know satiation that comes from food as an immersive experience, not just fullness. The tentative touch of tongue to the unfamiliar. The knowing taste of tongue to sun-kissed skin after emerging from the sea.

Scent: The million different scents of earth after different types of rain. Fallen pine needles toasting in the summer sun. The varied terrain of our human bodies. Wet dog. Dry dog. Ocean. Trees in the morning. Night blooms.

Sight: Beauty. Horizons. The billion shades and patterns of ocean waters, sweetwater brooks, puddles, tide pools. The Milky Way, unadulterated by light pollution. A newly-fledged cardinal chasing its parent, vibrating its wings and chirping to be fed. A baby anole wagging its tail as it stalks bugs. Cumulonimbus clouds. The humble pinecone.

All of these sensory experiences speak to us; they remind our bodies what our life is about, how life feels through pleasure, where we find pain.

To come back to your senses, try feeding yourself with conscious pleasure.

This is how we re/member ourselves, and remember our place here on this planet.

This is how we come home.

Learn from nature’s patterns: radiate

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Learn from nature’s patterns: radiate

This one’s pretty obvious. Nature shows us endless examples of the radial:

• dandelions

• the sun and stars

• hands and fingers

• the iris of our eyes

• a drop rippling outward in the water

• sunflowers

The lesson of the radial?

Let yourself shine your radiance—in all directions.

Throw yourself out there—in all directions. 

AND

Receive from all directions.

Draw nourishment from all directions.

Put out feelers in all directions, so they can draw in the nurturing you need—into your core.

Let your own radiance feed your core: your heart.

This may be the secret wisdom of the radial: that it flings itself outward in all directions… because it knows all roads lead back to the heart.

Shine on, wild ones. Happy rewilding.

Dare to meet life intimately

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Dare to meet life intimately.

Life will only be as fulfilling as the depth with which we’re willing to meet it.

Surface-level connections will fulfill us… at the surface.

But our depths crave intimacy and sharing. Intimacy craves depth, not masks and walls.

What if we stopped holding life at arm’s length?

What if we entered into an intimate relationship with all that is?

What if we were willing to walk through life…

… holding everything with care and protection

… seeing fully

… being seen fully

… open

… being opened

… sharing

… embracing what is, not what we think should be

… releasing masks and performance

… touching and being touched

… loving wholeheartedly

… being moved by life?

The tragedy is that we’ve narrowed down the idea of “intimacy” to something that only happens behind closed doors. (Another tragedy is that sex does not necessarily include intimacy—sometimes, it’s anything but.)

But why not be intimate in every realm of our lives? 

Why not share deeply during lunchtime?

Why not be willing to be moved by a random conversation in line at the drugstore?

Why not hold with care what you see on your walk?

Intimacy is everywhere, if we have the courage to meet it: a type of quantum entanglement that thrills in knowing us—as we know ourselves—more and more fully.

An intimate life is a gift to humanity.

Why not live life as if it were a love letter to the planet?

The savior and the nurturer

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Celebrate small, everyday acts of nurturing. Tell stories about them.

As long as we idolize heroes, we will unknowingly perpetuate the need for hardship and violence that give rise to them.

I say this not to diminish acts of heroism; life will naturally give us reasons to need them, and thank goodness for them.

And, we humans artificially manufacture many of the situations that give rise to the need for saviorism, as well. Create a problem, sell the solution. Let things fall apart, swoop in to fix it. Poof, instant heroism.

Why are so wed to the story of tragedy and the hero?

Maybe, in part, because it’s romanticized—we see and hear stories of it all the time. We love the story of the lone savior swooping in at the last minute to save the day.

Maybe, because it’s dramatic—and the drama of the adrenaline rush can be seductive.

Maybe, because of who it elevates—the lone wolf, the solo savior, the One—all reasonable role models in a fragmented, isolated society. If we continue to hope for a hero, we don’t have to do the mundane work of nurturing, maintaining, caring for, repairing, healing.

Maybe, because it’s good PR.

It’s time to elevate new narratives: stories that render the ordinary extraordinary; of reverence toward countless minuscule daily acts that affirm and nurture life—the ones that make life worth living.

We need nurturers as much as we need saviors. 

Maybe, when we can continually celebrate and uplift the nurturers, we’ll find we need fewer saviors. 

Maybe when we tell story after story of small acts of caregiving, we’ll have less that needs saving—and more that is thriving.

Small acts of kindness, to ourselves and others, are every bit as crucial as sweeping episodes of heroism.

We need firefighters to come in and stop the blaze with a deluge of water.

AND, we need those who plant new seeds, water them consistently, nourish them, and help them grow. We need nurturers who create conditions for life to thrive.

We need this for ourselves, and for our planet.

Not as big + dramatic, perhaps, but still a matter of life and death. Growth does not happen without the right conditions.

Celebrate small kindnesses. Elevate a caregiver. Create legends about tiny, joyful things. Live that kind of legend.

What’s a tiny story of nurturing you witnessed or embodied? Tell me in the comments, I’d love to know!

To heal masculinity is to honor femininity

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To heal masculinity is to honor femininity.

As much as we need to heal masculinity, we need to honor + elevate femininity.

It’s no secret that humans are terrified of the feminine. She has been subjugated, abused, mocked, erased, silenced, burned, buried, violated for so long we no longer see the myriad ways this continues.

After all, the feminine is the great unknowable force—the dark, tangled chaos of pure potential, rather than the clean lines of what’s already known.

She’s the creativity that disrupts the assembly line.

The sensuality that disrupts untouchable order.

The intuition that disrupts reason.

The empathy that disrupts the need for violence.

She f*cks with predictable profits of arbitrary systems.

But because masculinity has not been healed, still a shadow of what it could be—though it is finally in the process of healing—it has not had the balls to meet her where she is: to be potentiated by the full force of the feminine.

Worse, masculinity KNOWS it has chosen the smaller game, and hates her for it. And so, it has tried to make her go away.

We only dominate what we fear. And whatever gets dominated has no choice but to grow stronger in order to survive.

Plot twist, baby.

Clean, rational lines haven’t gotten us what we need—nor has oppressing the feminine or celebrating the imbalanced boy-masculine.

Healthy, happy lives need more dimension: more diversity, more creativity, more intuition, more body, more empathy, more expression, more color, more connection, more nurturing, more daring. More damn sunlight, clean water, rich earth. More possibility.

We need healthy masculinity to MEET—not subdue or submit to—healthy femininity in order to feel our human power + align fully with life.

As we potentiate ourselves, we need to embed the healthy feminine into our systems: our familial systems, our economic systems, governments, businesses, processes, methods, coding, data, narratives, science—to align them with the full spectrum of life, not just profits.

And life is the gift of the feminine: Real, embodied, shifting, emergent, entangled life. A high-quality life worth living + loving. 

Welcome to the divine feminine. She sees you, and she raises you—because she longs to be fully MET in her full power.

Masculinity doesn’t need to be detoxxed, it needs to be healed.

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Masculinity doesn’t need to be detoxxed, it needs to be healed.

What does healing mean?

Heading back to wholeness.

Our current cultural norm for masculinity is utterly fragmented—it requires a vivisection of self that is not just unhealthy, but dangerous for everyone.

Men are conditioned to suppress emotions, not show vulnerability, not share their joy and their authenticity, not express themselves in the full spectrum of possibilities. Seeking care or comfort is “for sissies.” They don’t even have the same variety of clothes options women have—simply wearing pink is considered edgy (how in the world did that brainwashery happen?!? So fucking arbitrary.) When they do show any of this, they’re denigrated—for being too feminine.

All of the epithets thrown at men are about the valuelessness of the feminine:

“Don’t be a pussy.” “You cry like a girl.”

What utter bullshit. Completely arbitrary, made-up bullshit. If it were just arbitrary, okay. But the problem is, this does real damage on a huge scale—and not just to women and girls.

The problem is, these parts of ourselves are not just feminine traits of the female gender, they are human needs.

The dominant mainstream indoctrination of masculinity requires men to separate from their humanity. Let this sink in.

This disconnection from self makes men susceptible to being manipulated, and the rage, isolation, and shame they feel are harnessed—because anger is profitable. Because sexism is profitable. Because racism is profitable. Because homophobia is profitable Because shame is profitable. Because divide and conquer is profitable, and it is the oldest trick in the book—because it works.

As bell hooks wrote in her landmark book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, “The first job of patriarchy is to disconnect men from themselves.”

The horror of it all is that shame, isolation, and disconnection breed violence, oppression, and rage.

Sometimes that violence is turned outward and expressed as racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, degradation of the planet and its creatures, slash-and-burn development, domination, exploitation, hoarding, plain old assholery.

Sometimes, that violence is turned inward and expressed as depression, mental illness, self-harm, or suicide.

Everything we see happening in the world today is utterly predictable.

Disconnecting anyone from themselves results in violence—the only variable is how it manifests.

I consider this a crime against humanity.

The antidote, then? Give men (and everyone) the opportunity to reconnect with themselves. To heal. To love. To love themselves, so they can love others.

What would healing masculinity look like?

• Embracing the full, healthy range of expression + emotion.

• Learning how to express anger in healthy ways—not lash out in violence, rage, oppression—so that it can then be transmuted into generative activism.

• Learning how to regulate the nervous system, especially when it’s stuck in a protracted state of fight, which manifests as dominance, violence, exploitation, overpowering, general assholery.

• Learning the skills to connect intimately and vibrantly with all of life, not remain detached, apathetic, or scornful of connection.

• Learning how to discern what one’s needs and desires are, how to communicate them in a healthy way, and how to get them met in a healthy way—so we don’t resort to manipulation, control, or domination to get them met.

• Discovering what nourishing, regenerative relationships look like—with the earth, our loved ones, communities, and self.

• Dismantling the idea that growth = accumulation. Accumulation is just more stuff. Sometimes, that’s dead weight, imbalance, or false growth, or growth according to someone else’s beliefs. True growth includes letting go of certain things, as well as expanding in the direction of what we truly love—not what others tell us we should love.

• Shedding the myth that dominance = power. Dominance is actually a coping mechanism for NOT feeling one’s power. (What a paradigm-shift—the news isn’t that women feel powerful, it’s that MEN DON’T.)

• Understanding that true power comes from within—that love of self is key to our own power. This may well come with learning how to atone, make amends, forgive, grieve, learn new skills, unearth deep soul desires, share gifts, create joy, create health and a healthy environment.

• Learning that healthy, aligned masculinity is the perfect complement to healthy, aligned femininity—not its foe, controller, or oppressor, but its potentiator and balancer.

• Learning that healthy, aligned femininity potentiates and balances the masculine, as well.

• Knowing that this is a healing path for ALL humans, regardless of gender. That we are all flowing with the energies of masculinity, femininity, androgyny, non-binary, and countless other currents that we can heal and express in healthy ways.

• That the more we consciously understand and balance these energies, the more personal power we have to navigate and respond to life in healthy, happy ways.

• Reclaiming joy. Joy is your birthright. Turn it back on, and turn it all the way up. Then share it.

When we can learn new awareness and skills, and cultivate the courage to act on them, life itself becomes our sacred intimate, our partner in potentiation and joy.

That is true power, not toxic power—the kind that heals the self AND the collective in symbiosis. Healing is a collective act.

To heal masculinity, reconnect it.

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If you haven’t already, I highly encourage you to read The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks. I wish it were required reading for every human.

Laugh until you snort on a regular basis

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Laugh until you snort on a regular basis.

I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory.

But in case you’re not convinced laughing can actually shift a paradigm, consider this:

• Laughter can actually help the nervous system shift out of a fight or flight response.

• Laughing releases endorphins.

• Laughter enhances social bonds.

If a story elicits a laugh, it’s probably because we’re seeing something from a different perspective, opening up other possibilities.

What do all of these have in common? They help us grow.

So, really, laughter is evolutionary. 

That’s the paradigm shift: we can evolve through laughter, not pain.

Welcome to The Pleasure Paradigm: choosing pleasure IS the paradigm shift.

Go forth and get your laugh on.

Don’t you love it when homework is easy?

What it means to be humanful

Fill yourself up until you are overflowing with your own humanity. Be humanFUL.

When we are satiated by the fullness of our own humanity—when we are “humanful”—we then get the pleasure of pursuing not just what we lack, but what we truly desire.

Can you feel that tipping point where acting to fill a void tips over into sharing excitement and desire from a place of fullness? That’s our sweet spot.

But… how do we fill ourselves up?

By being fully human:

Filling our senses with healthy pleasures.

Spending our energy on what feeds us back: healthy food, water, movement, authentic connection, beauty, awe.

Healing.

Resting.

Playing.

Co-creating.

Fueling our passions, core values, and deep desires.

Fostering healthy relationships, ones in which we all get to be exactly who we are and who we aren’t.

Expanding our definition of “human” to include the environment that supports us, grows us, and nourishes us, to include all the other earthlings, flora and fauna alike, in our interconnected web of life.

Nourishing them back, so they can continue to nourish us.

Wondering.

Sharing.

Giving and receiving. 

To know ourselves and to honor ourselves is to fill ourselves up.

When you are full of yourself in the healthiest way possible, then please—GIVE the gift of yourself.

You—yes, you—are the gift you are meant to give.

Be an earthling. Love earth. Act accordingly.

In a universe where everything is interdependent, we are made human by our connection to all that is.

We’re not human perched on top of all that is. We did not evolve in some hermetically sealed capsule.

We evolved WITH all the other earthlings—saltwater, cicadas, orchids, worms, hawks, gazillions of bugs, maples, giraffes, amethyst, groundhogs, fire, dust, dew, whale sharks, waterfalls.

All of it.

We take in tiny remnants of it all every single time we breathe, eat, see, hear, touch.

The word “human” has its roots in the Latin “humus,” which means earth. We are of the earth.

When the earth changes, we change. When we change, the earth changes. We all have our place, and when one thing changes, all things do.

The only way to truly be happy and healthy is to love and respect ourselves, others, and everything.

If we are made human by all that is, we must love earth and all the other beings who share this planet (and universe, and multiverse, and…) in order to be fully human. Humanful.

I’ve started using the word “humanful,” because to me, it feels like filling ourselves up with our own humanity—in the largest sense of our human earthlingness, connected in a reciprocal relationship to all that is—not the small, arbitrarily separate sense.

When we are full to overflowing with ourselves—not in some unhealthy, ego-based narcissism, but in knowing and feeding our own generative, divine fire because it is also earth’s fire—it’s so much easier to find balance, generativity, and generosity, and spill that over into loving everything else.

It’s so much easier to find our purpose.

I think the purpose of humans is to be fully healthy, happy humans, because I happen to think that that works out well for everything else.

To me, this is how we define our humanity: by remembering and loving our true nature and our place here as earthlings—entangled with everyone and everything else.

Humanful.