Pap Smears, Peacocks, and other strange things: My HPV + Cervical Dysplasia Healing Journey

Last month I had a “normal” pap smear.

This was a very big deal and very relieving given the long strange, trip I took during my twenties into the land of HPV, cervical dysplasia (sometimes incorrectly called “precancer”), the associated medical rigamarole and natural treatments I found and used successfully. I shared this briefly in an Instagram post and several women asked if I would share more about my journey the healing protocol I used.

I believe that my body healed fully from this imbalance / virus several years ago and mostly I haven’t thought about it much or been worried - until I actually got a pap smear, then I was extremely anxious - but I did not get a pap smear or seek any sort of medical diagnostic confirmation of this until basically now, so I wasn’t really in a position to share my story or the protocol I used with any confidence, until now. So….I’ll share both of these things in detail, for free, holding nothing back, so if you or someone you love has the desire for this information, insights or inspiration, it is here for you. If you have questions ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer. Feel free to share this with anyone and try out the things I have done to heal myself, but don’t make a religion out of it. This is not a “Cure your cervical dysplasia in 3 easy steps!” type thing, this is just my life. I am not a doctor or anything.

So to start this off right and not keep anyone guessing, first I will tell you what medicines appeared to be the ones that reversed my grade 3 cervical dysplasia (the most advanced / worst level of dysplasia before it is considered cancer):

• Yin Care Effective Herbal Wash

• Turkey Tail mushroom tincture (orally)

• Receiving an energetic/shamanic healing from my friend

That’s kinda it, but it’s been a real journey anyway. (I don’t get paid to promote these products or services, although perhaps I ought to.) I’ll share the protocol in depth at the end of this piece too. Feel free to skip around if you like. AND, this is how it all happened:

I remember very clearly the day I was diagnosed with genital warts.

I was twenty years old and had just gotten back from a month of backpacking in Thailand. Which was a mixed bag of experiences, and where the above photos were taken and I look like a child, but anyway: My pussy was kind of itchy and hot, and there were one or two very small bumps on my perineum, almost like ingrown hairs but without pain and in a spot where no hairs grow. I could have almost missed them, but I didn’t. I went to Planned Parenthood to get things checked out and was told matter-of-factly that I had both a yeast infection and genital warts, a type of HPV. The clinician got out a little bottle of some sort of acid solution and said she could burn off the warts, it would just sting a bit. So I said yes and she did. There was also a whole little, inconspicuous colony of warts which I had not seen, at the top of my thigh.

I thought, Wow a lot of help condoms have been: I have warts on my taint and the top of my thigh, two areas entirely unprotected by condoms in any situation.

The acid left a little raised scar on that spot at the top of my thigh, which I have to this day. The clinician sent me home with a pill for the yeast infection and told me I would have HPV for the rest of my life, don’t worry about it, there is no treatment, just come in for my annual pap smear to make sure I stay healthy, as it can increase the risk of cervical cancer.

Fucking great. There is no treatment but it can lead to cervical cancer so don’t worry about it? Jesus.

My mom picked me up from Planned Parenthood in her car and I cried as I told her what happened. Then I grumbled and moped for a day or so and felt bad about myself.

I hadn’t been with that many people sexually and had always been rather cautious so was a bit surprised by this development. Now I’m not surprised, since I have read repeatedly all over the internet that 80% of “sexually active” adults have HPV in the U.S., and many don’t even know it, so it is pretty easy to be exposed to it and to contract it. I mean, 80%? That is a huge, huge amount of people.

In my case, there were three possible people it could have come from, all guys, and I’m fairly sure whoever it was had no idea he had it. With warts as tiny and painless as I had, it was easy to see how. In my mind I kinda landed on one of the three as The One, the Giver of HPV, because he was the one I knew least and because I had been rather publicly shamed by my “friends” for having slept with him, and that experience hurt me very deeply. It jolted me out of a certain innocence I had had - somehow even in our very sexually confused society - where connecting sexually with someone felt like a natural and joyful thing, potentially a part of friendship and just part of being human. Being slut-shamed that time (and several other times) really troubled my heart and it took me years to feel through the shame and rage I felt.

The feeling of shame is so awful. If certain health conditions have associated emotions (many people believe that) I have always connected the feeling of shame with HPV and with that incident, so sitting with that and loving it away, loving myself as I am, has been a part of my journey too, in addition to the more concrete medicines I have used. I don’t know if this is true for others; I just offer it up as true for me.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Abnormal Paps and Colposcopies

It was two years later I had my first “abnormal” pap. I was twenty-two. The recommendation at the time was that I come back in six months for another, and make sure that I have not had anything in my pussy for 48 hours and that I am most certainly not menstruating at the time. So that is what I did. I was in a new relationship at the time and I remember the relief my girlfriend and I both felt when I got my results: Normal.

I thought I was done, that my abnormal pap had been an error of some kind. About a year later, in August of 2009 I accidentally missed my scheduled pap smear because I was with my mom in the hospital. At that moment, she was dying of complications from ovarian cancer and I was midwifing her through to the other side.

my mom as I remember her, before she was sick, circa 2005

I had been doing seasonal farm work which was then ending as the fall came. I also lived in a cabin on the farm where I worked. So my work and living situation were about to end and my mom had just died, so I didn’t exactly have anything holding me where I was. I had a long-distance lover who really showed up for me in a big way to support me during and after my mom’s death. She was amazing actually, and it solidified the bond we had been forming in a more casual way over the past year. So I moved fifteen hundred miles to make our long distance relationship into a short-distance one (spoiler alert: We are still married). And...I didn’t get myself set up in my new city to receive any sort of medical care for YEARS. The thought of any sort of invasive pelvic exam and the paper gown I would have to wear, all of that, made me think of my mother’s hospital death, and I just cried and couldn’t make myself do it.

Also, let me be effing clear here about ovarian cancer: My mom got her regular pap and pelvic exams and mammograms and all that shit. A pap smear is basically a screening for cervical cancer and nothing else. It does NOTHING to detect ovarian or uterine cancer. My mom had enormous tumors on each ovary and more small tumors which had spread to her liver and her intestines by the time it was detected. And she got all her checkups and shit, all the time, and they found nothing. She was fat - a fact not a criticism - so it would have been a bit harder to palpate the tumors in her pelvis and abdomen, but it wouldn’t have been impossible. It’s just no one did it and she, like most people, wasn’t in the habit of massaging or palpating her own belly.

For a few years, I was a massage therapist and the particular work I did involved massaging the abdomen and breasts. Over time, I found a dozen or more lumps in the breasts and bellies of my clients, lumps they had not found. I always told them. Usually they were of course not cancer. The body forms lumps all over all the time and it’s not necessarily a problem, but what struck me is that they had no damn idea. They, like my mom, were not in the habit of really touching and knowing their own breasts and bellies.

I got into the habit of massaging my breasts and belly a few times a week and paying attention to what I feel with my hands, the subtle changes and shifts during my menstrual cycle and when I gain or lose weight. Mostly it is relaxing though and keeps my breasts from swelling and aching terribly right before my period starts, as they used to always do.

I digress. Back to abormal paps and colposcopies:

By the time I got a pap smear at Lyon-Martin in San Francisco years had passed. I don’t know how many. My partner Cait got one too. Her’s was normal and mine was not. So they had me come back in for what they called a colposcopy. But they lied: It was also a biopsy. The doctor used some sharp little tool and cut four tissue samples from my cervix, two from the outer part and two from the opening of the cervix. No I did not have any pain killers of any kind. Yes the metal was freezing cold and they refused to warm it up.

You already know my results. Cervical dysplasia is rated on a scale of 1 - 3 with three being the closest to looking like cancer, without actually being cancer. Mine was a three. Sometimes cervical dysplasia gets called cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), and more often called “precancer” which is BULLSHIT. There is no such thing as “precancer.” Cervical dysplasia may or may not ever turn into cancer. It often goes away on it’s own without any intervention. I feel the use of that word is partly a scare tactic and partly a simplification, using a familiar word in place of an actual medical diagnosis. But anyway, the recommendation for me was a LEEP procedure, which was explained to me as, “Like just taking a paper punch to remove those top few layers of cells from the middle of [my] cervix.”

At this point in my life, in my mid thirties, after I have officially determined I do not want to give birth or have my own children, if I had that diagnosis or recommendation now I would maybe just do the LEEP procedure. The success rate is quite high I believe. I know a handful of women, several of them elders, who have done it with no issues and no recurrences. But at the time, sometime in my mid twenties, my whole body rebelled against it. I felt sick at the though. It felt wrong in every way, in every cell of my body.

I was in natural healing world myself, my partner an acupuncturist well versed in other healing methods and in herbal medicine, and I myself studying ayurveda and yoga, so I decided to see if I could treat it with herbs, food, and whatever else, before choosing to have surgery. For some reason, I didn’t think the surgery would work or help me in any way. I have no idea if that is true or not, it seems like it usually works quite well for others, but that was my belief at the time. What I did learn later is that it can be very challenging to give birth vaginally after having a LEEP procedure, due to the fact that the cervix is possibly ringed entirely with scar tissue and so has a hard if not impossible time stretching enough to allow a baby’s head to pass through. An old friend of mine is a labor and delivery nurse and has assisted hundreds of births by now, and she told me this.

So what I did was study and research and create an herbal formula for myself to take orally and one to insert vaginally. I also engaged in a lot of emotional and ancestral healing work which I will share more about in a minute. I was experimenting. Six months later, per my doctor’s recommendation, I had another colpo/cervical biopsy to monitor my progress. Which turned out to be nonexistent. I was still a 3 out of 3.

Okay, it wasn’t worse so that was good, but I needed a new approach, clearly. Before sleep one night, I asked for a guiding dream to help me understand what was going on and what I ought to do. That night I dreamed I was driving north up highway 1, sand dunes covered with ice plant to my right and a winding cliff edge drop-off to my left, and beyond that the open ocean. Cait was asleep in the passenger seat next to me. As a I drove, I saw a group of peacocks in the sand dunes. All were male, all fanning out their tails. I tried to wake Cait up, (“Baby wake up! You need to see this!”) But she just mumbled in her sleep and wouldn’t wake up. I kept driving, and soon it happened again, another slightly smaller group of male peacocks gathered together in the dunes, all fanning out their tails. So I tried again to wake Cait up to show her, and again she wouldn’t wake up. My dreaming self recognized, with a sense of peace, This is not for her. It is for me.

When I woke and pondered this mystical and strange dream - which I still recall with such clarity, more real than what I ate for breakfast today - the feeling I got was that this is my own path and I cannot rely overly much on other people to support me - and that I don’t need to. I had defaulted to relying on Cait so many times - emotionally, for help with my health, for money - and I knew that this was partly about me developing my own power and sovereignty. I read about peacocks in myth and symbolism, and I encountered the idea that in medieval Europe, before light and refraction and color was understood, people believed peacocks had metal in their feathers, and that they were like magical little alchemist birds, able to eat poison and turn it into their beautiful metallic-looking feathers. Which is of course bullshit but they didn’t know that, and peacock became a symbol of alchemy.

So I began to ponder and stay open to how I was being asked to transform my lead into gold. Which is a powerful point of self-inquiry anyway, wherever you are in your life.

My love Cait and me, circa 2016

From an acupuncturist colleague of my partner, as I was at the clinic where she worked one day, I learned of a product called Yin Care, which is an herbal wash used for all sorts of medical conditions. They have been doing clinical research for a while now on using it to treat HPV (and herpes too I believe). They have all sorts of protocols for different conditions. My partner’s colleague didn’t know the product well or have a specific protocol for me, so I called the company itself and was able to speak with one of their staff clinicians who sweetly and for free told me exactly what to do for my condition. He spoke with me twice (for free!) rather casually, even giving me his cell phone number, and just told me what to do and so I did it.

One day I was driving home from a dance retreat in Point Reyes, heading south on highway 1, through hilly, wooded land. Suddenly there was a break in the trees, the landscape opened, and I saw a group of wild turkeys by the side of the road. They were arranged haphazardly, their tails fanning out (as turkey tails always are in every moment.) They looked exactly like the peacocks of my dream, but chubbier and more brown than blue. Next to me in the passenger seat was a girl I carpooling with. I did not know her well, I was just giving her a ride. She was absolutely asleep, while my friend Raha was in the back resting too. A moment later, we passed another group of wild turkeys, like the first but fewer. I felt a shock wave through my whole body, as I knew some sort of a cycle had been completed. I was driving South now, and in the dream I had been driving North. I didn’t say a word to my travel companions but just sat in this knowing, stunned.

Later another shock wave hit me when I remembered that turkey tail mushroom is used to treat cervical cancer, with great success if taken early enough. I had not thought of taking it myself, to treat my cervical dysplasia, until right then.

Cait and I both use a pendulum to ask yes-no questions and get dosages on medicines. After practicing for a few years, I feel very confident in this method of gathering information. I use it the most to ask about if medicines are right for me or for clients, and to get correct dosages. So I asked about turkey tail mushroom and got a definite “yes!”, the pendulum swinging excitedly.

It turned out I had a client at the time who worked part time at a specialty store which sold culinary mushrooms and all sorts of culinary and medicinal mushroom products. He and I did a little trade and I got a 2 ounce bottle of turkey tail mushroom tincture, and then another. About halfway through that second bottle I got the sense it was no longer needed, and indeed when I asked with a pendulum, the answer I got was the same.

Almost a year had passed since my last colpo, and I had another one scheduled. They had told me to come every six months (since I had refused the surgery, that was their recommendation, which I believe they arrived upon somewhat randomly, as they told me they had never had a patient who refused surgery and chose to treat their own cervical dysplasia themselves and still chose to come back for monitoring, ever) but I just couldn’t seem to get my ass there.

That last colposcopy had gone rather badly, aside from the results being disappointing. When the doctor took the sharp little tool out of the sterile plastic and attempted to take a tissue sample from my cervix, the metal wasn’t sharp enough and instead of snipping off a bit of my flesh, it just pulled. I felt every organ in my pelvis and abdomen strain as she pulled on my cervix, trying to get that tissue sample. I had never known a pain such as that before and I cried and cried. She tried again with the same result before admitting that she needed a new one.

I was very sore and emotionally drained by that experience. While it was happening, I saw my mom on her deathbed, remembered all the pain she had been in at the end, all the tubes and wires running in and out of her, all her open wounds, and I felt my body to be her body, in those moments, and I felt out of control and buffeted by the powerful forces of technological medicine.

So I put off going back but I eventually did it, and this time it went without incident, unless you count another four tissues samples from my cervix as an incident. I had the sense a corner had been turned. Whatever the results and despite all this pain, I knew in my gut my cervix was healing.

As I waited for my results, my friend Kelley offered to do a shamanic healing for me and I accepted. I think we did a trade, massage for shamanic healing. She led me on a journey to and through the Otherworld. At one point she prompted me, You can ask for a healing if you want. So I politely requested a healing, from which Otherworld guide now I’m unfortunately not sure, and instantly I felt an icy rush up my pussy all the way to my cervix, and in my mind’s eye I saw a disembodied hand reach inside me and pull out a large blue and white marble - a particular marble I remember buying as a souvenir on a class trip as a young girl - which had been lodged in my cervix, and the hand held it up for me to look at. I felt it being plucked out and I felt a huge release of tension at it was removed, and a spaciousness inside which I had never felt before. Kelley guided me in composting the energy of the marble, letting it return to All-That-Is. For days I felt the sense of openness and relaxation in my pelvis. It felt like I had been carrying around a brick in there for years and hadn’t known it, and now I was finally free.

If this all sounds totally nuts, well it sounds a little nuts to me too. But it is the truth of my experience, as well as I can tell it. Life is wild and complex and full of things I do not understand.

In due time, I got the results of my colposcopy: One. A grade one down from a three. I was elated. The new recommendation was not a LEEP procedure, but instead to just come back in a year for monitoring. It may be worth noting that none of the medical staff acknowledged that I had been actively engaged in healing. They behaved as if this was something that “just happened sometimes”, and they showed not the slightest interest in what I had done to heal myself.

I wish I could remember for sure what year this was, how long ago it was, but I don’t quite. I think it was about five years ago, as of this writing. And I didn’t go in for another colpo. Or a pap smear. Or anything, until last month. I was maybe 95% certain that I was clear of any sort of abnormality or unhealthy cells on my cervix, and I just couldn’t seem to get myself to go in to have another four snips off my cervix, and I didn’t really want to get a pap smear simply because they are not very accurate - they are a screening not a diagnostic - and I thought it possible my pap would still be abnormal (despite the fact that I was clearly healing) and then they would recommend a colpo and I just couldn’t seem to make myself do it. Everytime I tried to make an appointment, I ended up just crying. Like, ugly crying into my hands and getting snot and tears all over myself and remembering the time the blade did not cut but pulled on all my organs, and remembering the paper gown, and remembering my mom on her deathbed.

At some point I got a flash of insight or inspiration or something, and I looked up the history of gynecology. And holy moly. Gynecology has a terrible, terrible history. Writing about it in depth is beyond the scope of this personal blog post. I’ll simply say that James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology” experimented on / actively tortured enslaved black women and poor Irish immigrant women in order to learn how to perform the surgeries he “pioneered”.

Don’t believe me or want to learn more? You can look that shit up easily same as I did. It’s all right there. Anyway, that asshole is considered the FATHER of gynecology! The whole field is grounded in his work and in his perspective, or maybe it’s the other way around. But same difference.

Any gynecologist I have met in my own life seemed to be a fine person doing their best in this complex and sometimes difficult world. Yet. Gynecology itself, as a field, is institutionalized violence against women.

I recognize that is a strong statement. And, I stand by it.

Seeing it in that light I understood more why I shed so many tears on this whole journey and why I felt so resistant to making those appointments. Instead of feeling irresponsible and like a fuck-up, I had a lot more compassion for myself. I wasn’t sure what to do though! According to my pendulum, I had no trace of HPV or unhealthy cells on my cervix, so I left it at that for years, choosing not to participate in this system of violence, only occasionally worrying about it or getting mad at the medical establishment.

It was only when the potential of me having a new lover arose (my partner and I have an open-ish marriage), who was very responsible and gets tested regularly and all that, that I thought, Holy shit I need to actually know for sure that I am not passing on a dangerous virus into my community.

Cait has had no sign of HPV or cervical dysplasia in our ten and a half years together, and she has had a couple pap smears, and I have been with others who I have told my full story to - I have never concealed it from a lover or potential lover - and they have, as far as I know, not contracted HPV from me or had any issues, but truly how could I know how another person would respond to exposure to that virus, if I had it? I couldn’t know. So I sucked it up and got a pap smear. I was terrified. Every step of it was terrifying, except the thing itself. My new doctor at Bluestem Health in Lincoln, NE was chatting with Cait the whole time, having medical provider public health shop talk, and she did it really quickly and painlessly. She told me my cervix looked “great” and that she saw no scar tissue (which I used to have, from all those biopsies). I was terrified to get the results, and when I learned my pap was normal I felt lightheaded, could have nearly fainted.

On Sexual Violence and Ancestral Healing

For a while in the beginning, after my first colpo, I went down another sort of rabbit hole doing ancestral and emotional healing practices I kinda just made up, and I explored how to compost violence and inherited trauma. I was struck by the legacy of sexual and physical abuse which occurred in my mother’s lineage, when I stopped and thought about it, and it felt connected to this physical problem I was having on what is the doorway to my own womb. My father’s side of the family also knew great violence, but somehow it has always felt distant to me, like hearing a story, watching a film. Stuff from my mother’s side of the family felt and still feels intricately tied into every cell of my body, or like I’m in the soup of it, swimming in it constantly.

My mother’s womb, the womb in which I began my life, had been violated so many times. First by an elder brother and then by other men as the years went by. I had this sense of that sort of violence stretching back in time to the misty past. It did not start with my uncle, that I was sure of. And I was equally as sure my mom was not the only one my uncle hurt in that way.

I sat with this knowledge and the memories of what my mom had told me about this, and felt and saw the energy patterns playing out. One of the energy patterns was silence. A heavy leaden silence, and a forgetting.

The more I sat with this, the more I began to forgive my uncle. I started writing angry letters to him, and found that as I wrote, I wasn’t angry any more. I just felt sad. And I saw felt the heaviness of that silence and forgetting in him too, and I saw how he lived out his whole life in reaction to the harms he caused when he was young, probably without knowing he was doing so. So I wrote him a letter telling him that I know what he did, and that I forgive him. That I want him to make peace with himself and his own heart. Everyone makes mistake and causes harm in their lifetime and eventually there comes a time to accept this and to try to forgive yourself.

I didn’t have his address, so I called another family member to ask for it. It took months for us to make contact. My first voicemail was choppy and indecipherable to her, it turned out. I called again. Then when she finally called me back, the connection cut out right before she gave me the address and we had to call back again.

It felt like all those difficulties in communication were not so much due to me living on the side of a hill and sometimes having bad reception, but to the heavy cloud of silence and forgetting in my family. I felt as I sent that letter that I began to pierce through that fog and let some sunlight in. I know he got the letter, I saw it in his eyes when I saw him a year later, but we have never discussed it.

I don’t know how much this relates to my healing from HPV, but it was such a big part of my journey I feel I must share it. Rape, sexual violence, and other forms of violence are not personal problems, not unique to individuals or families, but systemic.They are part of a culture that created single use plastics and cut down the forests of the entirety of Ireland for timber - some of which timber was used to build ships for the transatlantic slave trade, another campaign of systemic violence which of course this same culture also perpetrated.

These things are all one thing. People have to be violated and traumatized from a young age for these other types of exploitation to occur, to either participate actively in them or allow them to happen. People have to be cut off from their own bodies, their own sources of nourishment, pleasure and power, to rape and destroy the Earth and other people.

So I work to heal this in myself in many ways all the time. But at this time in my life, I said prayers and made offerings to my ancestors who had been raped and abused, including my mom, and I wrote that letter to my uncle. After I did this work, my colpo was still a three, so maybe it didn’t help with this specific medical condition I was dealing with, but I felt I was being asked to do it anyway.

That’s it. That’s the story, as far as I recall. Thanks for witnessing. I welcome your comments and if you are on a similar journey to me, I wish you so much support and love and knowledge and growth.

+ + + + +

In more detail….

The Protocol I Used To Heal

1. Yin Care Effective Herbal Wash

For me, what I did, was: I m ixed in a little bowl 2 capfuls of water : 1 cap full of Yin Care solution. Put a (organic cotton!) tampon in the solution until it soaked it up, then awkwardly and kinda uncomfortably shoved it up my vag, as deep as I could get it so it was theoretically close to or touching my cervix. That was every night before bed, removing it in the morning, starting on the day my period ended, and going straight through until my period came again, about three weeks. Or maybe I was told to take a little break around the time of ovulation? I don’t remember. That is one treatment cycle. That was all I did. But I was told some require another cycle. I was actually told to use a stronger concentration of 2 caps full of the Yin Care solution : 1 cap full of water, but that burned like hell so there was no way. I reversed the ratio and asked the clinician I was (very informally) working with if that was okay, and he said it was fine. There are other situations where Yin Care is used as a wash or a douche, but he said for the severity of what I had going on, this stronger, more sustained application of the tampon holding the medicine on my cervix all night was better. I just price checked this product, and you can buy it online from any number of retailers for $27 or so a bottle. I only ever needed one bottle.

2. Turkey Tails mushroom tincture

I believe I took 2 droppers full of tincture a day (orally) for however long it took me to go through 3 ounces, maybe a 2-3 months. I suggest a double extraction (water and alcohol) to get more of the medicinal constituents, if you can find it, or get the whole mushroom and learn how to make it yourself. All this is available online pretty affordably.

3. An Energetic / Shamanic Healing

I also received an energetic healing/psychic surgery facilitated by my friend Kelley Kessler, who practices a kind of shamanic healing. I had this one particular session with her after I had completed the Yin Care protocol and was still taking the turkey tails extract. It was an extremely powerful experience that I believe was integral to my healing as much as the above herbal medicines. If those plants and mushrooms worked more on the physical manifestation of this viral condition, this energetic healing worked on the level of the spirit to shift to make change there.

My school was Cultish and so are lots of other things, OR pt. 1 follow-up to "Decolonizing Ayurveda: Realness and Heartbreak"

One year ago, I wrote and published a blog post called “Decolonizing Ayurveda: Realness and Heartbreak”. Over the past year, it has been re-shared on social media by other people and I have had emails from strangers about, what feels to me now, this ancient snapshot into my deep, weird process: Emails from students thanking me for my writing and asking for advice, and one wonderful email from someone who offered me a very thoughtful critique which I was so honored and touched to receive. That someone would take the time and the energy to lovingly critique my writing / my thoughts on this, stunned me. And it also showed me, oh shit, I have been utterly silent here on my blog as my process around this subject, the subject of taking a deeper look at ayurveda through a social justice lens, has unfolded. I have shared some on Instagram, but not here. That blog post was intended to be preliminary and quickly followed up by more serious writing. I had not meant to be so silent this year, but it’s been a weird year. I’ve been writing the whole time, but not sharing my writing, as it still felt so raw and I am absolutely terrified to share my story and my thoughts with the internet at large. Also, each scholarly book I have read on the subject has given me more insight but more questions too, I still have some significant unanswered research questions, and then my work around this took a different turn when I realized how cult-like my ayurveda school was.

In this blog post and more to follow, I intend to share what I have learned and am still learning the past year+ re: ayurveda and social justice (and a bunch of related subjects). It is messy and imperfect and my great hope is that in another year I look back on this with even more insight and knowledge and perspective from others that enrich my own. It is my hope that I am creating a body of work that will be accessible and available for everyone, in right timing, so you don’t have to dig through google scholar and these impenetrable college books, as I have been doing, and that my work is transparent and humble.

My intention is to write a book on Ayurveda in the West, through a social justice lens, and my own (and others’) journey with it, and to create a podcast for the project so there is an audio component and a public space to share the interviews I intend to conduct. But a year has gone by and I have not started the interviews yet, have only reached out to a couple people to interview, and I’ve just been reading scholarly books and articles, and doing some of my own writing. As I wrote out the outline for this book I want to write, I saw that I needed to thoroughly write out my own personal narrative, for my own clarity. It took me a long time to do that. I actually put it off madly and distracted myself from doing it for months.

Two notes before I dig into this:

1. ) What follows here is not about “decolonizing” ayurveda. It is about other stuff. (Although writing on the subject of decolonization will follow.) As decolonization is described in the very good article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.”

2.) Also, so we are clear, I welcome constructive critique and call-outs, just know that more writing is on the way so if part of what you are critiquing is an absence of something, know it may be coming. Also know I am doing my best over here, working as a laborer and trying to put my life back together after I moved 1500 miles and abruptly ended my former career, and also that I do not ask or expect any other person to take the trouble to educate me on anything. Honor your own precious energy and your own pain and I am here trying to do the same and loving us all for doing that.

So anyway. I was putting off writing out my story. Then I had the opportunity this summer to attend an artist residency at a biological research station in Western Nebraska. I thought I would be mostly painting pictures of plants and hiking on the trails. But what actually happened is that I injured my foot so badly I could barely walk at all, could barely hobble to the bathroom and the cafeteria. There was nothing to do but sit in my cabin and do….something?

Oh shit, I thought, I have to work on my book. I have to write out my own experience with ayurveda, ayurveda schooling, and all the rest. Obviously.

So I did. For four or five days, I made that my main project. I sat on my ass with an ice pack on my foot and I wrote, alone in my cabin. And from that writing came wave after wave of emotion and deeper understanding of my experience, understanding I did not have before. It was excruciating. No wonder I had been putting it off.

The biggest thing that came out of that time, other than the writing itself, which is all sitting in a folder in my google drive, was the new clarity that my school, the California College of Ayurveda, was more like a cult than I had realized. I mean, I knew but I didn’t know.

It wasn’t and isn’t a cult proper. Certain things are gratefully missing - for instance, it is expected that students graduate and leave; there is nothing weird or coercive about trying to keep people there. Also, as far as I know, there has been no gross abuse of power or sexual abuse of any kind. I have discussed this with three other former students who I am still in touch with, and none of them knew of anything like that happening. So it isn’t a cult. But, this is how it was like a cult:

1. There is a leader who is above accountability, who makes all the rules and can change them at any time.

2. There is a very curated, bounded worldview being taught there, and anything outside of that world view is dismissed. No substantive questioning is encouraged (or tolerated actually), only clarifying questioning, all leading back to the truth as the leader teaches it. It is understood that ayurveda has all the answers, and “ayurveda” as it is taught there is defined by the school’s leader. All the teachers were educated at the school itself, so there is little variation in perspective.

3. Other schools and other perspectives are often dismissed or criticized.

4. There is a salvific quality to the teachings. As in, if you eat this way and do these exercises and take these plant medicines, you will be healthy and blissful. You will have perfect health. If you don’t do these things, you won’t be. If you are doing these things and are still unwell, it is a failure on your part (somehow) in doing these thing properly. Any problem at all is referred back to the same bounded worldview.

+ + + + +

A lot of this is actually spelled out pretty clearly on the school’s website, for the observant person to see. Had I been looking for it, I would have seen it long ago. This is all taken directly from the school’s website, accessed July 6, 2018 (Italicized notes at the ends are my commentary):

Academic Standards are what we stand for.  Dr. Halpern has been a leading force in developing standards of education the United States and is a co-founder of the National Council on Ayurvedic Education. CCA's program exceeds the guidelines of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. CCA has the highest academic and clinical standards in the West. >> pretty sure Dr Halpern created or helped create the guidelines of the national ayurvedic medical association. Also, honestly, from my perspective this program was not academically rigorous at all.

Success

Because of the clarity and focus of CCA's educational process, CCA has graduated the most successful practitioners in the United States and the West. Our curriculum is not only strong in Ayurveda but also in the business and marketing skills that are necessary to be successful in today's world. >> “clarity and focus” = bounded worldview. CCA speaks highly of their cohesive, organized curriculum, but do not say how much of ayurveda they leave out in order to have that curriculum.

Making Medicines

CCA offers the only program in the West where residents and interns have the opportunity to make each and every medicine they prescribe to their patients. Our herbal studies program begins in Level I and grows with each level of study. Students can also participate on our 1 year Herbal Apprenticeship Program. >> The very complex, traditional formulas are made in India at herbal pharmacies there, which is why many people just buy them from those Indian companies. CCA instead created their own system of designing herbal formulas that are not the same as the traditional formulas. This seems like another way of creating a bounded reality where there is more control. Though it doesn’t related to the school being cult-like, it is also worth noting that they purchase most of their bulk herbs from Mountain Rose herbs and Banyan Botanicals, two herb companies which are great in many ways but are not owned or operated by Indian people. There are reasons for this - there are major safety and quality control issues with herbs from India and Indian herb companies, but it does not change the fact that the practice is neocolonial. For an ayurveda school to be run by a white american guy and mostly staffed by white and not indian people, and then to buy their medicine from herb companies owned and operated by other white people, is neocolonialism. Is extractive. The people who should be benefiting aren’t.

Internship

While most internships only include observing a teacher seeing patients or having students evaluate other students,  the internship program at CCA emphasizes seeing real patients either in our community clinic or through our field internship programs. This gives students the real world experience necessary to be successful. In internship, the focus was more on filling out the paperwork properly and following standard treatment protocols than on anything else, as far as I could tell. It was not medically rigorous at all; it was challenging in all the wrong ways.

Cohesive Program

Every facet of CCA's training program is designed to coordinate a student's learning experience. Rather than provide students with seminar teachers who do not coordinate with each other, CCA's teaching staff is a completely integrated unit working together to assure a cohesive learning experience. >>Self-bounded worldview, thought control

Excellence in Teaching Staff

Teachers at CCA are hand-picked by Dr. Halpern for their knowledge, their ability to communicate clearly, and their ability to teach in an organized manner. Many have been teaching for more than a decade.  CCA's teachers are among the most experienced teachers in the country. >>Self-bounded worldview, thought control

+ + + + +

I read about narcissistic personality disorder, which it seems is almost synonymous with “cult leader” and saw that my school’s leader had many of those qualities. Because I have no desire to make this a personal attack on him, though it may come off that way anyway, I will not go deeper into that here but instead leave interested people to do their own research on NPD and on cult leaders.

I was pretty freaked out at this point so I emailed three friends from school and got their perspectives on all this. All of them basically said, yes to most of this, yes to narcissism, but no it wasn’t a cult because of the reasons I mentioned above - about it not being hard to leave, about no abuses we know of, also not alienating people from their families or public shaming (two other common things cults do). I also reached out to two former teachers. One didn’t respond and one did. I include her email copied below and I have left it completely 100% unedited, except to conceal her identity:

Molly,

  This actually strikes me as slightly humorous. I have to disagree with you. I worked at the college for 4.5 years and it was definitely Not a Cult.  Dr. Halpern has a giant ego, absolutely true. But he doesn’t even run the school anymore, there’s a general manager that does, a woman, who is awesome!

Dr. Halpern created the school with Dr. Lad and Dr. Frawley, he has taken a lot of classical references and A Lot of time and care to try to make it great. His heart is always actually in the right place. I witnessed the college was his child, created the same year his eldest son was born, and it went through the same acts of control a parent has over their child’s development. It’s a trip to be a parent, trying to guide without instilling your own stuff. The process revealed all of his flaws, much like parenting does. He stepped away, when his son went to college, totally paralleling the process. There has not been any sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior. The college is genuinely a portal of transformation for all who enter, but not with any expectation of anything in return. I spoke regularly with Dr. H about the various approaches of other schools and he was not negative towards them at all. He just wanted to create a place that was whole, offering a more a westernized approach for our society, especially with his western medical background. That was his niche for a different way of learning this material.  There are certainly other more traditional schools. I agree there was a lot left out, but it is also always evolving and growing to incorporate more.

I’m sorry you have these feelings or thoughts, but I just don’t really think there’s any validity to your claim.

I’m glad you reached out to me though. It’s important to acknowledge your feelings and identify the root, so healing can take place. But no, CCA is not a cult.

Ayurveda compared to anything else we know of in the West, seems strange and kind of culty, but the college is a genuine place of learning and healing, and Dr. H is just a human.

:)

Hugs and blessings to you,

xxxx

+ + + + +

Her smugness and invalidating of my own experiences, her saying things I had witnessed with my own eyes did not happen, was hurtful and hard to swallow, but it also confirmed all my suspicions. Her invalidation was oddly validating. We messaged back and forth briefly after this, and I asked her to please look up the word “gaslighting” and not contact me again if this remains her stance. I told her I am blocking her on social media.

This teacher was someone I truly liked and admired, and to say these things to her and block her did not feel good, but the idea of not doing it felt worse.

I had been trying to share some of this as I go along, on my primary public channel of instagram, mostly so that it isn’t so lonely. I shared this post on July 6, from my cabin at the artist residency:

Right after I posted this, two women reached out to me saying they had been in similar situations with ayurveda schools that were not my school. They both sent me personal messages about it. One of them sent me a series of messages in which she told me she had attended a different cultish ayurveda school in California, that she has also been in what you could consider a “real”, abusive cult as well as grown up in another country under a totalitarian regime. We messaged about this and we ended up talking on the phone for an hour and a half. This woman, a total stranger, took that time and energy to listen to me and talk with me. She asked me to tell her my story and when I was done, she asked me, “What do you need now?”

What do you need now?

What a compassionate question! Just her asking that question caused my whole body to relax.

“I think I just needed someone to ask me that,” I sniffled.

I know she is, you know, another human with faults like anyone else, but that night, to me, she was nothing short of an angel. She didn’t invalidate my experiences in any way, though her own were so much worse. She told me about her experiences in all these cult-like groups, and about her recovery process, and I cannot thank her enough for doing that.

Quickly, I realized this was a whole other topic that only relates tangentially to what I thought I was going to write about in my book. Two other people reaching out to me saying they also attended cult-like ayurveda schools which were not the cult-like ayurveda school I attended may mean my idiosyncratic experiences are part of a cultural phenomenon that is a lot bigger than I thought. (The subject of another blog post!)

Then I started to see how many organizations have cult-like qualities, even some informal, loosely organized online communities have serious cult-like qualities. I started to see bounded worldviews being espoused by charismatic authoritarian leaders who are above accountability in their own sphere, everywhere. And some other cult-like characteristics that go along with that, including public shaming, breaking down of the ego, and salvific promises.

I mean, the government is like a cult is many ways, actually. And organized religion shares many of these qualities too though neither of these organizations are cults.

Things got a little weird in my head and I cried a lot.

That phone call with the angelic cult-survivor kept me afloat and from feeling simply insane.

As I read about recovery from cults, I saw some of my own experiences of the previous year written out plain as day:

The sitting on the porch drinking coffee, waiting in the emptiness and absence of knowing, waiting for the spring to fill again. My own worldview had crumbled entirely and what I thought had been my north star was actually part of a shifting summer constellation. The only north star is the actual north star. But I’m not a sailor so what does this even mean? How do I organize my life, my career, my mind? How could I ever trust an authority figure again?

Ayurveda, as I understood it, was not just my “job” or my “business” or how I earned my bread. It was those things, but only because I believed in it so strongly as to devote my life to it. It was also how I organized my day, to a certain extent, and my framework for understanding the world, the body, health, food and nutrition. So once so much of that had been called into question, I had no idea if any part of it was trustworthy.

So I sat on the porch, or in cold weather, on the floor of my study wrapped in a quilt, and drank good coffee out of my owl mug because it brought a sense of joy to my troubled heart.

I stopped meditating because I had been doing it so long, I didn’t know who I was without meditation and I suddenly felt I must know. I read a couple articles on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the person who brought to the west the type of meditation I practiced, and he seemed pretty cult-leader-esq, so I was like, screw that. I’m done. Not because meditation is bad (it is certainly good, I believe) but because of these other reasons. I had to sit in the emptiness of not having “practices” and see what showed up for me, or what came back in.

I came to see that I had leapt headlong into ayurveda as a study, a practice, and a career, precisely because of the bounded worldview and the salvific promises which were offered, not just by my school, but by most anyone writing or teaching about ayurveda. And I had done so to fill a very real emptiness inside myself. I didn’t realize I had latched onto those easy “easy answers” but I had, and in turn I sold them to other people to earn my livelihood and tried to bring others into the bounded worldview of the ayurveda I knew. It was a lot to sit with, new perspectives and awareness piling up on top of one another, too much to even keep the other people in my life up to speed on.

There is more to be said on all of this, and more to be learned and researched too. If you feel you have also been in a cult-like organization and you didn’t realize it before now, consider getting support right away, from a trusted friend or a therapist, or if you don’t have anyone like that, feel free to send me an email. mollie@molliemoorhead.com

If you went to my school or another ayurveda school and your experiences echo my own in some way, please tell me. I’d love to hear your story. If you also went to my school or worked for it or are really invested in ayurveda as a profession, and you feel threatened by what I am writing, that makes sense. So, be mad at me. It’s fine. But don’t contact me to tell me I’m wrong. I already feel like I’m going to vomit just sharing this, don’t make it harder. Also I am not practicing ayurveda anymore so I don’t actually have anything to lose professionally.

Here are links to two different popular articles i read that helped me understand more about cults, and that I referenced above in my writing out how my school was cult-like:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/27/cults-definition-religion

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spycatcher/201208/dangerous-cult-leaders

Thanks for reading and witnessing.

Adieu, for now.

Mollie

The Pitfalls of Upward Mobility / Where I am Coming From

I have gone back and forth from working as a laborer and as a professional. Right now, I'm somewhere in the middle of the two. When I was living in the Bay Area the last few years I became thoroughly settled in professional world, and most of my clients were professionals too. In so doing, I lost touch with what it is to to be a laborer, both the really great things about it and the super shitty things. I didn't realize how hard it was to work in commercial kitchens until I did it this past year again, because before when I had done similar work I was so much younger. When I was in my early twenties my feet never hurt. In my early thirties, that is not the case. 

I have also gone back and forth between overworking and underworking, based on circumstances both internal and external. And likewise, I knew but didn't really know, how hard it can be to make ends meet working as a laborer or being underemployed, or both. And if you have kids, if you have accrued some debt, or your partner is not working, or you have issues with housing, DAMN it can sure be hard to make it all work, to even meet your basic needs.

This all may be extremely obvious to most people, but because I had distanced myself from that reality, it didn't feel as real to me for a time. In the Ayurveda school I attended, and in subsequent business trainings, repeatedly I was told to charge professional rates for my services, that people respect you more for doing so, that it undervalues the work and your own time if you don't, etc. That always felt to me like a half-truth. Sure that's all true in a certain way, but it's also true that many people could never pay those rates, or could only do so occasionally. What of those people? That was a question I was never able to answer, but I was sick of being poor so I thought I would try out this professional thing and see what happened. 

One thing I learned pretty quick was that many people have A LOT more money than I ever knew. I grew up with not a lot of money, and I had no idea how much money people had. No idea! And that they were not just willing, but happy, to spend it on something they valued.

What I also learned, by and by, is that in charging 'professional' level rates and living as a professional (albeit in my own rather frugal way) as nice as it was, there was something I had lost along the way: My roots. 

I don't mean to imply that there is anything inherently wrong with being a professional or earning lots of money. By this point in time, I have made many deep friendships with people who are high-earning professionals, and I do not have the belief they are bad or "doing it wrong". But in my case, by serving primarily professionals I was neglecting the people and the culture that raised me, the people I come from. 

This is something that came into my mind often over those years, but I would remind myself of the struggles of the people I served and how real those struggles were, and how it didn't matter who I served, just that I was of service. I had come to see that in many ways all people have similar struggles even if the specifics are different. 

But it wasn't enough! Because in upward mobility, we forsake where we come from and we cut ourselves off from our own sources of nourishment. 

I realize that is a big statement. Maybe it doesn't apply in every situation - I don't know or really care. You can decide for yourself. But speaking for my own experience, this is how it feels. If my own old friends and family couldn't afford my rates - especially now that I am back in Nebraska, that does not feel right or good. There is something not right about that. Me being a 'professional' was an experiment. And now I know cannot ignore, overlook, or forsake low income and working-class people ever again.

That is why I am offering by-donation herbal consultations as I ease myself back into seeing clients again after my year (mostly) absent from that work. As I began to feel ready to take new clients again, I knew it had to feel good, it had to be aligned with my values, and it had to feel really humble. I spent several months envisioning what that could look like and this is it. 

I want to take it slow for lots of reasons, so that's why I am doing two days a month, but depending on how it feels and evolves and what people want, I may build out my schedule from there, keeping those two by-donation days and having other days that have more of a fixed rate, I don't know yet.

Much of my life has been about forward motion, but the past year has been anything but that. It has been a descent. I have been the hero journeying into the Underworld like Orpheus, Hercules, Izanagi, or any of the rest. I am grateful for the depth of humbleness I feel now and for these experiences I have that which have brought me to such humbleness. Thanks for being on the journey with me. 

Accidental Crowd-Sourced Poetry

I asked people on Instagram to "Share your favorite thing about the summer Earth &/or Sky" and the responses, all together, were so beautiful I wanted to share it here too. This is it, in order:

I love the summer because of the warmth and colors.

Long days with long shadows!

The gathering of fireflies in long grass at night, and the small and sight of beautiful, butterfly-loving milkweed in bloom.

Fresh wet grass on bare feet!

The warm feeling of sun on skin.

So many hours of daylight.

I love that I work late enough to see the sunset on my commute, and this evening that included watching the moon rise over the mountains!

Extra time outside!

Indulgent endorphin rush of accepting role as bug-host-mother when watching fireflies and giving in to scratching itches (then having scabs to pick later). Oh and heat-naps and berries, especially mulberries.

When the sky turns yellow before a storm.

Watching the sunrise.

The low creep of day light leaving, the cooling coming of night. 

. . . . .

since I decided not to

Since I decided not to have children a month ago, I feel a delicate and beautiful feeling I don’t have words for. It feels like such a precious and elusive feeling that I just want to sit with and be with, but it slips away or I distract myself from it because I’m not used to it and I don’t know how to live from this place of such softness.

I write to try to understand it. If it were a painting, it would be a wash of blue watercolor underneath my skin, some deeper layer of me. This soothing beautiful blue washed over me from the inside out, brushed in a single stroke top down, with the rest of me drawn in thin lines of black ink.

If this feeling were a landscape, it would be an alpine lake or a fjord.

I keep thinking of a short story by Maridel Le Sueur which I love and have read many times. It is called “Annunciation,” and it’s from the perspective of a woman who is pregnant in very shitty circumstances. Her man is out most of the time looking for work but not finding it, and she has nothing to eat all day. But she is happy to be pregnant despite these circumstances, and the story is essentially her trying to express this dreamy, blissful feeling she feels that she can’t explain and no one else understands. She sits on the dilapidated balcony outside her room and looks at the pear tree all afternoon. Everyone pities her and her husband is mad at her for not getting an abortion, and she doesn’t know how to explain this sweetness and this beauty that she feels, that she feels like a pear or a pear tree or that she and her unborn child are like tender, wild, little animals. She writes on scraps of paper to find words for what she feels, to understand it and remember it when she no longer feels that way.

It is one of my favorite short stories and I re-read it at least once a year, but I have been thinking of it every day this month.

Every day, it comes to me at some point, because I feel a similar way.

And it doesn’t make any sense as my circumstances are opposite to the character’s. But the dreamy way she feels, this feeling of indescribable beauty and tenderness inside and inside herself, and just sinking into it, I feel too.

Especially I feel this beauty in my relationship with Cait, the facts of which are nothing new or super special: Us being together as two women with an 18-year age difference, being together for - it will be 10 years in august - and intentionally choosing not to have children. What is beautiful about that? I don’t know how to explain what is beautiful or why it feels so blissful but I feel it.

We have gotten older together and our bodies have changed. And that is part of the sweetness too, in a way I don’t even quite understand.

I see younger women sometimes, or photos of younger, beautiful women, and I see how I do not look like them. Often I appreciate their beauty and I find that I do not want anything about my own body to be different, do not want to be more like them and less like me. I feel this preciousness to have a body and that it could never be wrong or not enough, that however it looks I feel so grateful for it and somehow it seems so beautiful. The scars, the nerve damage, the dimples and bumps and things, somehow are so precious to me now it brings tears to my eyes, the preciousness of this body and its stories.

For a long time, I was so young. I was a pretty girl and my body was not so storied. Though I didn’t know it then, my body was more like a crisp sheet of watercolor paper.

At the time I felt the fleshy humanness of myself, how embodied life and real sex was nothing like a magazine. I felt fleshy and human and real. I remember putting my hands on my own legs in yoga class and feeling my sheer physicality loving it so much. But now I see how crisp and clean I was. And, really, I see how crisp and clean I still am compared to how I will be in another twenty or forty years, or longer. How life wears us down like river stones, my central lessons always coming down to presence and humbleness, and how life layers our bodies with stories upon stories even as it strips us down.

The time I feel it most, feel this tender indescribable feeling but mixed with a sharp piognancy, is when I put my arm around Cait in bed and I cup my hand under the side of her breast or her belly and I feel the comfortable fullness of her presence in my arms, and it feels so tender.

This feeling of, I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.

And I fall asleep instantly. Usually we both do. (Staying asleep can be a different matter), but the comfort of having her next to me is so great. This requires us to have sex not in bed, or not lying down in a potential sleep position at least. It used to frustrate me that I fall asleep instantly and that her touch, in that moment, feels so damn comforting instead of stimulating, but now it feels like such a tender thing and I don’t want anything to be different.

The woman in the story I love has this tender indescribable feeling for her unborn child and herself in her pregnancy, and I think I have this similar feeling because that love and tenderness that would have been for a child is now for me and for Cait. It's the same, but expressed through different channels.

The only thing that isn’t blissful about this feeling is the feeling of not being met in it, and the loneliness of that. But even that has a sweetness to it in some moments.

Aspects of my life the past two years have felt isolating, but now it doesn’t feel that way exactly. Now it all feels like part of the sweet, tender feeling I can’t explain. And that somehow in loving the tiny details and the ordinariness of my life and my relationship with my love, it feels like life cracks open. The wall becomes a doorway, and even sweeping the floor and laying the laundry out to dry on the hot driveway, or making toast, or just sitting still, everything, all things, feel like the most sacred ceremony. But not in a stilted way, not even serious. I don’t know how to explain. But in all these ordinary things, it’s like nothing is missing and no residue is left behind.

It feels like such a precious and elusive feeling that I just want to sit with and be with, but it slips away or I distract myself from it because I’m not used to it and I don’t know how to live from this place of such softness. And maybe it will leave me for good, this feeling. Life will close again. But for now I write it and I practice being with it.

Letter To a Nice White Person

I have hesitated sharing this story and letter because I don't want to say, "Look at me, I'm doing it right!" Because I am probably not "doing it right," actually. I don't want to hold myself up as an example of a white person tackling racism in some sort of perfect way. But many times in the past year especially, I have seen (online) people of color saying, in effect, "White people! Talk to your racist relatives! In situations where someone says something racist, SAY SOMETHING!" And I have heard a few white people ask, essentially, "How?" OR, more frequently, confide that they could not do that, due to fear of conflict.

I used to fear conflict very much and avoid it whenever I could. I understand now that conflict avoidance is a tool of oppression, a way to create polarized situations of "You're with us or against us" and keep dissenting voices quiet. Conflict avoidance is the day-to-day version of the idea that dissent equals treason. 

What I've found over the past few years, with the help of some great mentors, is that conflict is perfectly normal and fine, and not to be avoided in the least. That is what our "communication skills" are for. And refusing to avoid conflict as a default behavior does not mean seeking conflict out. I means accepting life as it comes and showing the fuck up. Conflicts are inevitable at some point in most relationships, because without intending to, we bump up against each others' unconscious expectations, traumas, and also unconscious beliefs. This is a good thing! This unconscious material is coming up specifically to be healed.  It is not random, it is not an accident. This is what is coming up to be healed.

The trick, if there is a trick, is to develop those communication skills (and, really, emotional intelligence and self-parenting) so you can really show up for the conflict well. (There are lots of resources to learn these things, once you start looking, but one of my primary teachers on this topic has been Luna Love www.lunaloveleadership.com) 

So...when my super sweet neighbor, who is an older white guy, said something super racist, super anti-black a few weeks ago, I started a conflict. And actually I didn't do a very great job of it. I was shocked by what he said because I consider him a friend, and also absolutely enraged.

What he said was that the night before, four young black men had been walking down our street around 11:00 pm. One of our other neighbors, a young Latino guy, was just arriving home in his car when he saw them, and that he yelled at them to "Get the fuck out of here." My neighbor laughed like he found that hilarious, and there was a quality of him also telling me the story to warn me to keep an eye out.

This burning-hot rage filled my whole body so suddenly, and I don't exactly remember exactly what I said. We went back and forth a few times, him insisting that what he said was not racist, that they were truly car thieves, certainly, and he has lots of black friends (who are not car thieves), etc., and me telling him, what you said is extremely racist! You are saying that to be black is to be a criminal! You are saying that young, black men, walking down our street to get someplace are not safe here!

Back in my house, I trembled and my teeth chattered violently.

The next day, he hid from me. 

So, as soon as I was able, about a day later, I wrote this letter to him. I have not edited it or changed anything about it at all, except to type it up:

Dear xxxxxxx,

You are such a kind person and wonderful neighbor. I want you to know I still know you as those things and I do not intend to withhold kindness from you in any way. We just find ourselves in our first conflict.

So…

The thing is: Can you imagine how it would be for you, if wherever you went where people didn’t know you, you were thought to be a criminal?

If any place you walked, or sat, people called the cops on you, or shot you dead just for being there? Because they were so afraid of you simply existing?

This is the reality black men live with every day of their lives.

In my neighborhood back in Oakland, a black man was sleeping sitting up in the driver’s seat of his parked car one day, and a cop shot him in the head because he “looked like a murder suspect.” Turn out that man who was killed by that cop was not the murder suspect at all, he was just a random person. (This got almost no news coverage. I know about it because I was there.)

Then there are the famous cases, the stories of boys like Trayvon Martin. And the two black men at Starbucks recently, who an employee called the cops on just for being there.

Being black in America is very dangerous.

And black people deserve our deepest, humblest respect for surviving and thriving here at all.

Anything less than that is...actually bullshit.

Four young black men should be allowed to walk by our houses w/o being harassed for their existence.

I am firm on this. I am very happy to talk with you about all these things any time.

And, as I said, you are a very kind and generous neighbor. I invite you to extend that generosity farther, and put yourself in another’s shoes.

And I’m glad you said what you did, because now we can talk about it.

Mollie

As I said, he was hiding from me, but I mastered myself and went over to his house with this letter and I found him in his garden. He was clearly hurt and furious with me. I told him I was ready to talk and I wrote him this letter. Would he prefer I read it to him or leave it with him to read on his own? 

He told me to read it to him.

So I did. My voice shook. As soon as I got to the part about this being the reality black men live with every day, I saw his face soften. He cried. We had a long talk when I had finished. Initially he continued to distance himself from any idea of him being a part of institutional racism. He had the older idea that someone could be personally racist or not, instead of what I have been taught, which is that we all live in a white supremacist system and we are all in this mess together, we all have unconscious racist beliefs and reactions one way or another, sometimes subtle ones. 

I didn't let him off the hook though, I didn't try to make things nice just to have it done. Instead, I repeated, You are a great person but what you said the other night WAS the definition of racial profiling. I invite you to reflect on this more in your own time.

He eventually conceded that maybe I was right, though he had not intended it that way. He could see where I was coming from and he did not want to be a racist. He doesn't hate black people at all. He was not at all interested in any of the anti-racist literature I said I could share, but he seemed genuinely moved and reflective. 

By the time it was done, we had both cried, hugged it out, and were closer than we were before, but he was skittish around me for a few days. I find that many people expect abusive behavior in conflicts and they expect people to hold grudges. I do my best to do neither of those things ever (actually I am incapable of holding a grudge) and I find many people scared and skittish as they wait for those behaviors, not trusting the abuse and cold-shouldering won't come. After a few days, he relaxed and seemed himself again.

Did it help? Was it worth it? And what about the young Latino neighbor who actually yelled at the young Black men? 

I don't know if it helped. I don't care if it was worth it. And the truth about the other neighbor is that he lives a bit farther from my house and I have never even met him. How am I in a position to reach out to him about this difficult and painful thing? I don't believe that I am in that position. 

Did I do it right?

I don't know if I did it right. Are there lots of ways to screw this sort of thing up? There seem to be. Did I do enough? I don't know. But this felt more productive than not, and it wasn't something that I could have ignored. I want to share it because it feels important to share and I hope that it provokes thought and enkindles courage in the heart of even one person of any 'race' who cares about racial justice but hasn't yet had the courage to speak up. And....I welcome feedback, constructive criticism, and other thoughts. If I don't respond right away, likely it is because I am taking time to reflect on your words before responding.

Final thoughts, from the always inspirational Bunny Michael (@bunnymichael on Instagram):

To Have a Child or To Not Have a Child: My Very Queer, Old-fashioned, Midwestern Journey

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1989

I am three and a half years old and my baby cousin is born. She looks like a cherub. Blonde curls, caramel-colored skin, and dancing, mischievous eyes. Her sense of humor, her whole sweet, goofy personality, was present even when she was a baby.

I am a toddler, but I adore her and dream of the day I can have my own baby.

From that moment on, I have a category of mind where I put baby names, fantasies of motherhood, and information about child development and parenting. To put it differently, from that moment on, I see now that I began reserving energy for my future child.

Now, I am a 32-year-old woman with a 50-year-old woman partner. We have been together ten years. Last year we moved from Oakland, California, where we had made our home together for our entire relationship, to my home town of Lincoln, Nebraska, where we have a big community of loving friends and family, but had to essentially start over in terms of both our careers.

It took Cait nine months to re-license and then open her community acupuncture clinic. The clinic is doing well, but has only been open two months, as of this writing, so is (of course) not yet able to cover our personal costs of living. Meanwhile, I went from having a fully-sustaining private practice in Oakland, offering Ayurvedic health consultations and bodywork, to having an existential crisis where I came to question all I had learned and done and participated in, in terms of that work. I desperately needed to take a break from the healing arts and “wellness industry”, so got a job working part-time in a commercial kitchen to help pay the bills while I figured my shit out. Then I quit that job and started riding a bicycle taxi instead. Over this year, I have begun to see what my path is, what my work is. I began writing a book about Ayurveda in the West and shifting the focus of my healing work to slowly becoming a bioregional herbalist and painter of plants. But I was and still am back in a state of potential instead of actualization, much like I was in my early twenties, as I see before me the creative work, activist work, and plant medicine work, which now so clearly feels like my path.

Obviously, we have had very little money this year, and after blowing through our savings and racking up some credit card debt, we have only been able to sustain ourselves through the continuous generosity of my father. He is quite a caretaker by nature, and a frugal older person who grew up in a time and in a country where the material abundance of today was utterly unknown. So though growing up I know my parents struggled to make ends meet, my dad now finds himself in his retirement, in a good enough place financially to support us as we recreate our lives anew.

Some Lesbian “Herstory” and Being Queer Now

Years ago now, as Cait and I found our passionate summer romance transforming into something more solid, an ex lent me a book, which I read, called “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A history of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America”, by Lillian Faderman.

One of the things I learned from that book was that in the mid to late 1800s, some middle-class-skewing-to-wealthy women, primarily white, started attending university and then instead of marrying and having children, they….didn’t.

If they had the inherited money that allowed them the freedom to 1.) Not need to rely on a husband’s income, or 2.) Labor in factories, fields, or as domestic servants to earn their bread, they instead chose to write books, paint pictures, garden, travel, sometimes teach school - and often make their home with another woman. From correspondences and diary entries which survive to the present day, it is clear that some of these women who lived with women were what we would now call lesbians or queer women, although it appears that their neighbors and families thought they were best-friend-spinsters.

The shear number and variety of these stories amazed me at the time, and filled up some very hungry part of my soul which longed for history, meaning, and identity.

I have always felt old-fashioned, from another time: Violets, dresses, rosewater, fountain pens, needlework, water colors, mustard plasters and blackberry cordial sort of old-fashioned, and I didn’t know how to fit that with my obviously queer identity, until I read that book.

Then it all made sense to me. Though I was not independently wealthy, in this time and place I could have a career and live a life with another woman that was quite similar to those “best friend spinsters” of 150 years ago, and feel more grounded in the truths of this nearly-invisible but-not-erased queer history.

It is worth mentioning that those women of 150 years ago were not having children together. Indeed, that was one of the primary things they were rejecting about married life with a man!

Now, same-sex couples have children together all the time and it is a normal thing. And some "straight" couples don't. But, the thought never occurred to me to not have children. Remember, I had been storing energy away for my future child since I was three and a half, and I continued to do so, Cait and I talking often about the child we intended to have one day.

Over the years with Cait, as the idea of having this hypothetical child became more real - after we were both finished with school, and moving much closer to what turned out to be a temporary bout of financial stability - a lot of sadness arose for me about the simple fact that in order to create that child, we needed to bring in a third party in some form.

The idea of getting semen from a man, whether a random sperm donor or a friend, and putting it inside myself, made me want to vomit. And the idea of doing it the old-fashioned way, having condomless sex with a guy friend or acquaintance, sounded potentially fun, potentially erotic, also potentially AWKWARD - and really, the idea of that being the act that brought a child into my womb which Cait and I would raise together just seemed bizarre. It brought tears to my eyes many times as I thought how much I wanted the person I had that erotic encounter with to be Cait, to be My Love, not a somewhat random guy. The fact that it couldn’t be her felt almost unbearable. I felt great envy of opposite-sex couples who could have sex with each other and produce a child that way, just the two of them, on a normal date night.

Cait felt similarly sad about those facts of life, and we also found ourselves also concerned about the very real lack of money and support for raising a child. Or I did anyway. This was also something that brought tears to my eyes, the lack of social support, the raising children in relative isolation compared to our ancestors who lived in close-knit villages - and going further back still, tribal culture where children were/are often raised more collectively. Additionally, it brought up great sadness around the death of my own mom when I was 23, and the death of both my grandmothers, the fact that Cait’s mom is an aging alcoholic 1500 miles away and would be no support, and the fact that many of my closest friends who have children live out of state, and we couldn’t really raise our kids together. Though I tried to avoid these facts, to not dwell on them, they tended to creep up on me, bringing hot tears of grief and anger to roll down my cheeks once again.

Is it enough to have cats? (I often ask myself this question.)

It isn’t. Because, though cats offer great affection and companionship, and they are about the same size as a human baby, they do not outlive us or carry on our stories and our memories. We do not raise them to independence and see them off into the world on their own.

And the whole real reason I want to have children is to raise them to independence, to see them off into the world, to be a portal and a nest and the ground of being to a sweet soul, to an old soul born into a new body, here to live out their wild and sacred embodied life. That is the real reason I want to be a mother, not because babies like my cousin are so damn cute. That part is just a bonus.

. . . . .

Fort Collins, May 14, 2018

On the way to Durango, Colorado to attend the Good Medicine Confluence last week, I had the pleasure to spend Mother’s Day and the following day with an old friend who lives in Fort Collins and has two young children. I was so excited to see them, and happy it worked out that I got to be there for her to help her celebrate Mother’s Day when her husband was incidentally out of town for work.

Then two unwanted, unexpected things occurred on Monday: One was that I became incapacitated with what we think was altitude sickness, and the other is that her childcare called in sick too. So what would have been a normal work day for my friend (she has a full-time job), she actually spent taking care of her one-year-old while I lounged listlessly on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep and trying not to move or even turn my head.

I apologized that I was of so little help, and she shrugged, “It’s okay, I kinda signed up for this.”

Dear God, I thought. She really did. What a thing to sign up for...

Spending those two days and three nights with her and the girls, without her husband being there and her childcare falling through, was actually fine for me as a guest - I had fun with her and with both kids - but it gave me a deeper look into parenthood than I had before. Despite all the other times I spend with my friends and their kids, I hadn’t had a view quite this deep before.

The understanding of parenthood - and, let’s be real, especially motherhood - being a 24-hour/7-day a week commitment, and being oftentimes inconvenient, had been more of a conceptual understanding for me than a practical one.

Ditto the understanding of what “separation anxiety” in one-year-olds is, and how intense it is. And, how sweetly kids treat their cool, grown-up friends like me, compared to their parents, whom they continually attempt to manipulate and extort favors and treats from by any means they can find.

And so over the following two days, the understanding rose in me for the first time in my life that I do not want to be a parent. Or...I do a bit, but that I choose something else. And that saying “No” to parenthood is saying “Yes” to the things my soul desires most.

All the things that felt like obstacles - the lack of support, the lack of money, the fact that Cait and I would need a sperm donor in order to have a child - now felt no longer like obstacles but instead simply the facts of my life, which were as irrefutable as they were unproblematic. Because though having a child is objectively a blessing, even in less than ideal circumstances, I believe, the truth is that me wanting to have a child in this lifetime was like wanting to grow an orange tree in my yard here in Nebraska. And before I planted it worrying and wringing my hands about the winter snow and zero degree weather. There is nothing wrong with the orange tree or with the cold climate. They just don't go together.

I want to hang out with my friends’ kids and be a refuge to them when they need it! I want to play with them for hours, and then be off duty. I want to sing them to sleep with old folk songs, but not be there for all the nap boycotting and teething, day after day after day. I want to bring them gifts and treats, not be there for the daily treat extortions. As they grow older, I want to be available for them to ask me questions they would never ask their folks, but I do not want to find myself waiting up all night for them to come home, when they are teenagers and they snuck out/stayed out past curfew/stole the car/all the things teenagers do, and I don’t know where they are and wonder if they are dead. I don’t want that at all. I don’t want the heartache and I don’t want the sleep deprivation.

. . . . .

Durango, May 16, 2018

I lie down in my little dorm room bed I have rented for the duration of the Confluence, to take a midday rest. I am really tired. I have what is maybe a head cold or could be severe allergies, and am still recovering from what was maybe altitude sickness - basically I feel like dog shit - but I cannot sleep. I have not been able to speak with Cait yet, but based on our myriad conversations over the years, I know she is happy to have children or not have children. She has made that clear many times. So I know it’s my choice, and I lay there in my little dorm bed and I try on this wild, new identity. I keep thinking, I am not going to be a mother. I am not going to be a mother! I am choosing not to have children. I am going to remain intentionally childless. Intentionally childless, what an idea! I will never give birth, I will never breast feed. I will not see my children grow up and move away. A whole spectrum of deep human experience is closing to me, because I choose this.

This line of thinking brings on great, convulsing sobs. I am not normally one to say “No” to an experience. I want to experience everything! But as I sob, I also feel a joy bubbling up inside of me. Memories come to me:

The psychic who told me she saw children around me - they weren’t mine. They were not my own children, but those of my friends. I see this now.

My mom telling me many times, just to be mean, that I am too selfish to ever have children - and now realizing it is indeed true, exactly in the way she meant it: I want quiet and solitude far beyond what parenthood could ever allow. And that is a good thing, a beautiful thing, not reason for insult or hurt.

I feel these truths in my body, and laugh/cry even harder. Ugly crying, snot running down my face mixing with my tears.

I feel for the first time how I had been reserving energy for my future child. I feel it for the first time because it had been there since I was three and a half, and I knew no other way of being, and only now as I release that energy can I feel it, feel the space it occupied in me, now empty.

As I release that energy, in full clarity and knowing, I grieve the child I energetically carried inside my heart since age three and a half, I release her to take embodiment elsewhere. I talk to her, I feel the sadness and significance of what I am saying “No” to - and I also feel bliss.

There is no other way to say it, I feel absolute bliss! I feel light-hearted and free. Physically, I feel it in my womb itself and in my chest. My lower belly feels lit up with golden light, feels empty in the best way possible. Gleeful laughter interrupts my sobs. I have never felt so light and free. My womb empty, but it’s good, and my heart tender and cracked open.

Those physical sensations stayed with me for hours, then they faded. Yet all throughout the Confluence, I felt more tender, and the sweet intensity of life felt sharper.

. . . . .

I see now that I had been trying to do and be too many things. I wanted to devote myself fully to my plant healing work and my creative practices and grow those things into a career in time, and I wanted to be a lover and friend to my partner, and I wanted also to be a mother and devote myself fully to my children. Someone could do all of those things I believe, in their own way, but I see now that I cannot, not in the ways I really want to. I had to make a choice.

When I finally was able to get on the phone and talk with Cait about this, I was still in Durango and it was dusk. We talked as I walked along a dry, dusty ridge trail lined with sagebrush, the sunlight fading, the sky slowly turning to a velvety black as the stars came out, and I sobbed and laughed all over again. It still felt so raw and so tender.

We recalled some of our old neighbors, another lesbian couple who had two young kids. One of them, we often saw pushing a stroller with a baby in it and a young girl walking alongside, and oh man, that lesbian mom always looked miserable. Not just tired or grouchy, but absolutely in misery. Every. Single. Time.

As we spoke, I saw an image of Cait cleaning the crumbs out of the grubby creases of a child’s car seat. I saw an image of myself looking in the kitchen cupboard, intending to prepare a nice dinner and finding only boxes of Annie’s mac & cheese.

Do we have anything to drink around here?

Um, well, we have juice boxes. Want a juice box, babe? Grape or cherry?

And then…

How did this happen? I thought it would be different than this. I love our kid, but DAMN.

I know queer people and same sex couples have kids all the time, especially now, but I now see I am an old-fashioned queer. The 150-years-ago sort.

So, I will wear cotton dresses and sun hats, and walk out to the fields to paint watercolors of violets and crabgrass. Maybe I will take apprentices, young people as well as older people who want to work with plants. I will delight to spend time with my friends’ kids, and if I am lucky, they will ask me questions they cannot ask their parents, and they will look forward to our time together, and then maybe they will tell funny or sweet stories about me sometimes, once my spirit has long moved on and my bones are buried under an apple tree.

I will continue to make country wines and herbal potions. I will write letters to my friends with my fountain pen and I will write books and poems. I will make love with my dear, and the energy we raise will go toward creative and healing work.

We are not barren.

Now I feel energy zipping through my empty womb like I’ve never felt before. Our lovemaking just makes something else. And instead of creating human children, we give birth to ourselves and raise ourselves up. And possibly, maybe, my paintings and my writing will outlive me and be my children, in the way my cats never could.

. . . . .

People Food + Cat Food

Have you ever looked into feeding your animal friends anything but kibble? (Have you ever wondered what kibble actually is?) Have you looked through any of the myriad well-meaning books saying cats and dogs should eat mostly raw meat, or have you ever tried making them a pureed meat and vegetable stew, as I did years ago, per the directions of a certain book on cat nutrition? Have you, like me, ever found that your cat would have none of it, and only would eat "cat food", maybe even a certain brand of "cat food"?

I got really into trying to feed my cats a natural diet....oh, about eleven years ago, when Ewen was still alive and Beatrice still a kitten. Beatrice took to it right away, at the time, but Ewen would only eat chicken liver (or kibble), nothing else. It was challenging to give one cat one food and the other cat something else, and the soup I had made for them, which the author said was ideally nutritious for cats, was its own weird process that didn't quite fit into my life. I never got the hang of batch cooking - making a large quantity of food ahead, freezing portions for later, and then thawing and heating up said portions when needed - and the thawing and warming up process was annoying.

Admittedly, I also have always questioned the healthfulness of freezing food, except perhaps if you live in a very cold climate and can freeze your food naturally by putting it in a snow pit, as my dad's family did when they lived in Hokkaido. But that is another story.

I had learned about how bad kibble really is through reading books on cat care from the health food store - how the ingredients that go into it can legally be just about anything - from sawdust to meat from diseased animals which didn't pass USDA inspection for human food, and just about any other nasty thing no one should ever eat, as the industry is very unregulated. So I wanted so badly for this natural diet thing to work for my cats, but it just didn't. So, I invested in the most expensive "natural" kibble, which really does seem much better than Meow Mix or what have you, and which my cats love/d.

Fast forward to a few months ago when we got a new kitten. A kitten named Simon who eats anything. Several times he has stolen buttered toast from my plate when I turned my head. In terms of inedible things, he ate two ear plugs, three or four olive pits, and two plastic bits, one from each end of my hoodie string. He sneaked a scone off the counter one day and ate most of it. He was never far from the butter dish when it was out. (If you are wondering, no we don't let the cats on the dinner table, it's just that we don't eat at the table that much - I always eat breakfast and often other meals, when I am home alone, in my study, on the ground where I also sit to write, or on the porch in nice weather.) 

Simon's obsessive search for food and willingness to eat non-foods, got me thinking once again about cat nutrition and pondering what is a natural diet for cats. The popular idea now, as far as I can tell, is similar to what is popular for humans: That cats ought to eat meat and fish (mostly raw) and some vegetables, and that's it. No milk, no grain. The idea of a super-specific diet for my cats, indeed a super-specific diet for my cats which would cost much more, ounce-per-ounce, than my own, seemed stupid and also completely impractical. 

Enter the book Cats Naturally by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. The book was published in 1991, but the author was an elder when she wrote it, and it reads like it is from a hundred years ago. Her ideas about how to feed and care for cats and other domestic animals are entirely different from what people are saying now - regarding lifestyle, reproduction, and nutrition. Really her whole perspective is different, and it was, to me as I read it, such a refreshing perspective.

I had heard of Juliette (we are on a first name basis now, in my mind) before, as the herbal teacher of Rosemary Gladstar and Susun Weed, but I didn't know much about her or her life, and hadn't read her books. Liz Migliorelli, one of my herbal teachers, recommended a documentary which was made about her called Juliette of the Herbs, so I watched it, and from there bought her book about cats. Juliette's initial training was as a vetrinarian, but after she graduated from vetrinary school in England where she had grown up, she felt she hadn't really learned anything about how to keep animals healthy and vital. So she went to the peasant farmers of southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Italy) and to the Romani/Gypsy people, who were all living in more traditional ways at that time, and according to her were very healthy and had very healthy animals. She studied with them and developed life-long friendships with them, living with them for periods of time off and on. So that is the context that her work, and any advice for cat nutrition, is coming from.

Now this was some cat nutrition I could get down with. Basically she just fed her cats whatever she was eating, but typically with proportionately more meat or fish. She suggests sweet corn, cooked oats and barley, fresh cheese, yogurt, black beans and lentils, chopped fresh herbs and vegetables, as well as the more predictable poultry, fish, rabbit, lamb, eggs, raw milk and raw bones for chewing after meals.

She says things like, "All cats and dogs love corn and will eat it fresh off the cob when it is very young and milky. They also love tinned corn." and "An occasional meal of spaghetti is a treat enjoyed by cats and is quite healthful. Sprinkle it generously with finely chopped herbs and some grated hard cheese."

That last suggestion made me laugh out loud! That was when I realized, though she never said so, that Juliette was simply giving her cats the foods she was eating.

I told several friends about these bizare ideas on cat nutrition, and one of my friends had some valuable information to add: She had lived in Russia for a year as an exchange student, and she said that all the Russians she knew there had a deep distrust of processed food and would never buy commercial cat food, and instead fed their cats in the traditional way: They fed them the same foods they themselves were eating, which often was cooked grains with fresh milk - and the cats appeared in excellent health. 

That was all I needed - someone with some personal experience with this stuff. 

So I started trying Simon (and Beatrice, who is now an elder cat) on pretty much anything I was eating as long as it was not spicy or sugary, and it turns out Simon loves polenta with butter or cheese, plain yogurt, raw milk, arugula and nettles as long as they are chopped finely, as well as any meat or fish. He loves raw eggs and baked potato with butter. He does not, however, like anything that is soupy or super mushy, including gravy. Within a few days, he slowed down his obsessive eating of anything in sight and even leaves food in his dish sometimes. Beatrice is old and more picky, and so I'm mostly giving her fancy kibble still, though it's been fun to give her little bits of eggs and fish, which she loves. Now that I'm not trying to do this stupid batch cooking soup thing, it is easy to just feed one cat food I am already making and eating, and give the other one kibble. 

Basically, I am loving this and I can honestly say, after a couple months, it is going great.

Have you tried giving your cats "people food"? Have you experimented with weird, unpopular ways of caring for your animal friends, which nevertheless work really well? Have you checked out any of Juliette's books? TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT!

The Feudal Lord and the Eunuch

Beloved young one,

I am sad to do this

But I am not sorry.

There are two paths.

I see them each stretch

Out in front of you:

One path is prowling, rangy,

Wandering, fearsome in its way,

Jowelly and ragged-eared,

Pissing, stinky,

Reminding us of another time -

Of sailors and mercenaries,

Highwaymen, drifters,

And even the patriarchs of long ago,

A scarred and flea-bitten

Abraham or Isaac.

The children of your body

Spreading out across this land,*

The shape of your nose

And the colors of your hair

Made visible for five generations at least,

The path of a warlord, a feudal king.

I feel the absence of this world here,

And a strange, uncomfortable longing for it too.

Some scottish tribesman not-so-long-ago ancestor in me

cries out for it in my blood and bone.

But there is little place for that here.

Instead there is another path,

One that much better suits this crowded but orderly,

And arguably

over-sanitized, world:

A sleep in the sunny garden,

Or on your favorite chair.

Climb the trellis.

Hunt for shadows.

Lay for hours in my lap,

Twitching in your sleep.

Minimal stink. Minimal prowelling.

Your face will narrow and lengthen,

Not broaden, as you age.

Your belly will grow soft as pudding.

Your long hair combed daily,

Fed tuna fish and yogurt.

Your life will be the pampered one

Of a palace eunuch,

Not the fearsome wildness

of a torn-eared patriarch.

Making up for lost freedoms and pleasures,

Perhaps, with a certain kind of safety and comfort.

Not just for others, but for yourself too.

This is the world I have to give you.

Beloved little one, this is all the world

I have to give you.

And yet still, when the thing is done,

This brutality which leads to gentleness,

Yet still I see in your eyes

A glimmer -

the fire and cunning

Of a feudal lord.

*from "Poet's Heart" by Kate Wolf

Decolonizing Ayurveda, i.e. Realness & Heartbreak

A number of people I follow online, in both the healing arts and in entrepreneurship, have gone through substantial cycles of personal growth where they have been called to question everything. Where they have wondered, “What the f*** am I doing with my life?!” and they have shared their process publicly as they went through it.

When they share their unfolding process with some grace and with personal responsibility - which is admittedly, not always easy or even doable, in the moment - it is a precious thing, a thing of great value, for those who are reading their blogs, instagram posts, listening to their interview, etc.

It can seem like other people have it all together in a way that you don’t - because you know your own messy bullshit - and you probably don’t know their messy bullshit much, if at all. So when people share vulnerably about their process, especially while it is still in process, it shatters that illusion. It rips off the veil. And we see our own humanness in them, and that we are all in this thing together.
 

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So...without further ado, let me share my recent messy bullshit with you, hopefully with some grace and personal responsibility:

To cut to the chase, Ayurveda is not what I thought it was. And if I knew then what I knew now, I would never, ever (ever) have gone to school to study it or shared it with others in the way that I have.

In a nutshell, I was under the impression that Ayurveda was a traditional healing system with universal application, which was shared in unbroken lineage from antiquity, and that it is and was being actively shared by the Indian people who stewarded that lineage and was some sort of ‘gift to humanity’. And that by studying and practicing it, I would be spreading the love and the light, I would be in integrity.

These things are not true.

The truth, as I understand it now, is that Ayurveda was an indigenous, pluralistic medicine from India which has a history about as long and convoluted as India itself, deeply tied up with the land and the people, deeply affected by British colonization and now, globalization and spiritual / medical tourism. Ayurveda became popular in the West (Europe, Australia, the US, Costa Rica, Brazil, and also Indonesia) among yoga aficionados and those seeking holistic health care that treats the whole person, seeking medicine which feels spiritual, seeking answers.

It’s a long story. One I don’t fully know but which I’m trying to learn. The upshot though, as I can see it, is that the Ayurveda being taught here in the West is the result of an attempt to turn an indigenous, land-based, pluralistic medicine into a system that can be picked up and placed anywhere on the Earth - and made to fit in with the beliefs and lifestyles of modern, new age-y white people like myself.

Scholars I am reading call it “Western New Age Ayurveda”, and it is really not much a part of that unbroken lineage in India, which actually does exist. I am learning that the lineage-holding Ayurvedic doctors in India receive little to no benefit from the global popularity of Ayurveda, and this “Western New Age Ayurveda” has been re-imported and sold to Indian people as their own medicine. So, to describe this situation, you could use that turn of phrase which I hear a lot these days: Ayurveda, as we know it, is pure cultural appropriation.

Its proponents claim to be a part of a lineage which they really aren’t a part of. They took a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of Ayurveda, and created their own thing - which is fine, I think, really - if they said that openly. But they don’t say that openly. They claim to be a part of a lineage they are not really in.

I’m going to write and speak about this more - I’m offering a free online class / conversation on Thursday, to start with - but I need to take a detour first and tell you why I came to Ayurveda, because none of this really makes sense until you know that piece:

I leapt whole-heartedly into Ayurveda to escape my own cultural wounding and lack of connection to a healing lineage.

It was a ten year detour in some ways. It didn’t work, could never work, because Ayurveda (and anything else from India) wasn’t mine. It wasn’t the thing which was missing. This wonderful medicine from India has graciously helped me with my digestion, my skin, my sleep, lots of things, and I feel quite grateful for all of that. BUT because it was not of my own culture, it never quite fit, and I came to know that more and more as I went deeper into its study and practice. Ayurveda could not heal the gaping wound in my heart from the loss of my own indigeneity. It could not help me recover from the very real loss of my own deep, land-based culture.

As a woman living on the land we now call America (on Otoe territory specifically, for much of my life), with ancestry primarily from Scotland and the surrounding island countries, my ancestors lives for a long time, back to the Roman Empire at least, were stories of forced migrations off of ancestral lands and out of tribal and village life, stories of the loss of our own medicine traditions, of language, of ceremony, of a reciprocal relationship with the Earth, and assimilation into capitalism and whiteness, of shifting identities of oppressed and oppressor.

My land and my culture gets stolen from me, so I steal your land and do what I want with your culture. A kill-or-be-killed land grab. Intergenerational trauma which has left us absolutely ravaged, to the point that I have heard people say, “But I don’t have a culture...I’m just white.”

That statement is so sad and weird and makes no sense at all, but I so get it. I have felt that lost and empty too. I write this knowing that some people reading this know a lot of this European and American history already. Many of the people closest to me always have been people of color, and since I have been having these conversations with you lately, you’ve been like, “Yes. Thank you for your awareness. I love you.” I am very humbled by this, by the knowledge that others close to me knew things about me which I did not know about myself, and you loved me anyway.

I realized why I had fallen in love with Ayurveda, and that it could never do for me what I wanted and needed, last Christmas. (So, 10 months ago as of this writing.) I realized it as I was sleeplessly writing one night, a lot on my heart and mind.

That night, I felt my heart break open. I let it happen. I felt like I split down the middle - like the pain of death, the pain of birth, or maybe the sensation of a sprout breaking through what was, a few days earlier, a dry bean.

With the heartbreak came the crystal clarity that I needed to put my energies into connecting with the land where I live, with her medicine plants and her waters (and stop importing herbs from India) and also beginning to learn my own ancestral medicine, history, and culture. So I have been. There are lots of resources for this actually. Many other people are doing this work, and I haven’t been alone at all. It hasn’t been all heaviness and sadness. Some of this has been a joyful reconnection and rebirth.

Until a couple months ago though, I still had the mistaken belief that Ayurveda was not appropriative and not systemically unjust. The way I learned I was mistaken was through my administrative assistant Alla.

Alla is a medical anthropology student and activist who knew all this all along. She tried to get me to read books on the history of Ayurveda, on modern and global Ayurveda, but the truth is, they looked kinda boring. I do not consider myself a scholar. I barely got through school in many ways. She didn’t tell me, “These books are really important and if you care at all about social justice and truth-telling, they will change your whole life and your business.” (It’s not her job to say that, I know, but if she would have done so, I would have read the books earlier!) Well anyway, I trust the timing of the Universe.

After two years of her working for me, I finally asked her for more information, and she told me. She was perhaps tired and worn-out from school and working several jobs, and she didn’t sugarcoat anything, she just gave it to me straight-up. Which is how I usually take my medicine anyway.

So I let my heart break open again. I did not push away any of the pain, shame, guilt, sorrow, or rage which I felt. I made myself a channel and I felt it all, again. And what I found inside this time was compassion for myself and others who, in our confusion and our wounding, steal from others in an attempt to make ourselves whole. From the most egregious examples of this, such as white people wearing Native American headdresses at festivals, to more nuanced or confusing situations such as the state of Ayurveda (and Chinese Medicine) in the West, which really are so complex and so filled with lies, that’s it’s hard to even know what is going on, this is a really pervasive, widespread issue.

I also found a rage I hadn’t felt in awhile, a rage that pushes me to action. In my life, I have tended more towards incapacitating sorrow, but not now. Now all I feel is this mix of compassion and rage.

I do not have all the answers. I’m willing to make mistakes.

I do not know what I am doing. I’m willing to do it anyway.

I want to change the narrative about Ayurveda in this country. I feel that, as someone in the profession, I am in a unique and actually rather powerful position to get people talking and thinking about this. This is what I’m planning:

1. First, a Free Class & Conversation: Decolonizing Ayurveda & Ourselves This Thursday, October 19 2:00 - 3:30 pmcentral / 12:00 - 1:30 pacific. (Click the link to register.) I will tell more of the history of Ayurveda as I understand it now (knowing my understanding is a work in progress) and then open it up for a facilitated discussion. I will likely share this as a recording later, but it depends on the content of what people bring forward and the way the conversation evolves. If you want to be a part of this conversation live, this week, please come. Everyone is welcome, and I think it will be really valuable for people in the healing arts and who are Ayurveda aficionados.

2. A Class. Alla and I are going to collaborate and create a class on the above topic, with a thoroughly-researched curriculum we can stand behind. You can imagine this is a bigger project, so that’s why I want to simply share what I am learning and begin the conversation this week. It will help us in creating the class too, to know where folks are at, what comes up for you and what you want to learn.

3. A Zine. A dear friend and I are collaborating to create a zine which will be a collection of personal essays from people about their cultural wounding, reconnecting with their culture and the Earth. We are in the beginning phases of this, and you’ll hear more when there is more to share. We are thinking of doing a crowd-sourced funding campaign to fund the initial costs and pay contributors. I will also send out a call for contributions when we are ready!

4. Writing. I’m working on a piece about some of this deeper history of Ayurveda relating to colonization, globalization, and where we are now, where I actually, you know, cite my sources and stuff.

5. Perhaps most importantly, I want to connect with, and help expand the platform for, Indian people who are doing decolonization work themselves and/or who are Ayurvedic lineage holders. Who are not pandering to tourists, and doing the deep medicine work they do. I want to do my part to help amplify their voices here in the West. This is inherently collaborative, so I do not know what this will look like. (This is the most important piece, because otherwise I am actually not doing anything different. I'd be simply continuing white supremacy culture in a slightly modified way.)

6. The final piece, which is vague and blurry still, is essentially to build on the work we are wanting to do with the zine, the work of cultural re-membering. I am reading and taking classes to educate myself on my own history. I’ve been doing this for 10 months now. I don’t know what will come of it, because as yet I feel I still know almost nothing! I feel 18 again in some ways. But things WILL come of it, whatever they are, and I know I’ll be sharing them all and inviting others into it, because that’s what I do.

>>>

If you made it this far, wow! Thank you. I appreciate it.

If you want to reach out to me about any of this, please feel free. My email is mollie@molliemoorhead.com. I know this is an emotionally heated topic, so I do invite you to write whatever you want, let it flow, but then if it feels really raw or you are pissed off at me for any reason, don’t send it right away. Let your writing sit until you feel more settled, then re-read and edit accordingly, then send, so that we can be in deeper dialogue. I am willing to offend or upset people, no way around it, AND I have experienced a lot of verbal abuse in my life, and it feels really bad, so I do invite you to modulate your response and meet me with the compassion you would like to be met with.

Share this with anyone and everyone you think might be interested, and once again, if you would like to join me in conversation and learn more, please sign up for the online class here.

Resources for Resilience, Health + Your Soul Journey

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by life generally, and right now, with so much tension and upheaval, overwhelm is almost inevitable for many of us. I am getting more comfortable with discomfort, and humbling myself and forgiving myself every day for ways in which I see I have been ignorant, have pushed certain uncomfortable or threatening (to my ego) situations and realities away, for times I have insulated myself with spiritual bypassing.

I humble myself and I forgive myself as I welcome all the ways that I am being stripped of my identities, insulation, and superficial comfort. There is a certain thrill to that, to metaphorically standing naked in the wind and the burning sun.

I welcome the ways in which the collective and personal Shadow are showing up to be witnessed and potentially, to be healed.

(Do you feel how, in order to move forward and show up with integrity, you must forgive yourself? How you must be both fierce and gentle??!)

This is deep work. This is soul work.

+   +   +

I wanted to put together a short list for you of some resources that feel meaningful and supportive right now, so I asked my (super brainy, reads all the really smart books) assistant Alla to help me. Some of these recommendations are from her, some are from me. Here you go:

Workshop Series

Roots Deeper than Whiteness is an online workshop series I recently registered for which starts Sept. 10. It is a workshop series for white people who want to deal with the guilt, shame, and fragility they feel when dismantling their privilege and transform those feelings into productive allyship to people of color (instead of, you know, just telling themselves, “I’m a good white person” and pushing this hard stuff away.) I am excited about it because this is inner work I’ve been engaged in for a long time, but kinda quietly, and I want to explore it more fully and in a more outward way. And because we are in intense times which I feel are asking us to collectively step up in many different ways.

Healing from Marginalization through Love and Justice by Everyday Feminism 

As individuals, we bear the traumatic weight of being personally targeted by systemic oppression and the impact of our internalized oppression and our unconscious privilege. This often means the trauma from our personal life and professional work build on each other, leading to burnout, depression, fatigue, and at times, even suicide. 

To address this pervasive issue of burnout and unsustainability in our social movements, the course supports people in healing from their experiences with systemic oppression and building their capacity to respond to everyday situations of injustice from a sense of peace and relatedness. Instead of reinforcing our traumas, our activism becomes a vehicle for our own healing and reconnection to those who unconsciously perpetuate systemic oppression.

Healing From Toxic Whiteness by Everyday Feminism is an online class series influenced by Buddhist mindfulness practices that teaches: The underlying reasons for the emotional resistance many white people have to addressing white supremacy and get the tools to begin releasing it; Why it is of the utmost importance that white people acknowledge the racism in themselves before they will be able to fight the forces of racism around them; A framework to understand how white supremacy has actually harmed white people while also materially and socially benefiting them; A powerful tool for getting in touch with the pain of having internalized racism so that you don't unnecessarily prolong feeling that pain or put the burden of that pain on others, particularly on people of color.

Books

The Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron. Okay, so hardly anyone knows this book. I stumbled across it at a used book store years ago and by now have read it three or four times, and it remains one of the most meaningful books for me personally. Each time I read it, it hits me differently. The last time I read it, I saw that it is a guidebook of sorts, and a candle in the dark, for the person who feels culturally orphaned. What it is literally, is a collection of stories from the Nootka people of Western Canada - a mix of mythology, history, and personal stories which are presented all as fiction. I turn to this book for a weird kind of comfort - not the comfort of easy answers, but for a sense of beauty in the struggle, and depth and universality of experience.

Living in the Tension by Shelly Tochluk:

For many, spiritual and racial justice principles go hand in hand. Yet, although seemingly compatible, tensions often arise when people try to live out their associated values and strategies. Further, there are those who sit solidly on one side of either spirituality or advocacy and fail to see the connection between the two. Spiritually-oriented people often say, “People focused on politics and social justice activism are angry, wounded, unhealthy individuals who sabotage their own efforts by using antagonistic and divisive language, including terms like oppression, privilege, and supremacy.”

On the other hand, racial justice advocates often say, “People focused on their spirituality as part of their personal growth are trying to escape into transcendence or a false "kumbaya" experience and deny their ongoing role in continuing personal and institutional racism, privilege, and the reinforcement of an unjust status quo that operates through interlocking systems of oppression.”

Why do these tensions matter?

There is a vast potential of untapped transformative power waiting to be released if activists and spiritual people of various racial backgrounds build and strengthen bridges between their differing principles and expectations.

How can this book help?

Each chapter tackles one tension-filled theme and asks: What happens if one side of the tension is ignored? How can a both/and approach allow spirituality and racial justice efforts to support one another?

Websites

Decolonizing Yoga, in their own words: “Was created to provide news, resources and support following the efforts to protest the 2013 Yoga Journal Conference held at the Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco. Hotel Workers, community organizations and unions had been participating in an ongoing boycott against Hyatt to protest working conditions. [...] After the Yoga Journal Conference the Decolonizing Yoga Facebook Page and website has highlighted the voices of queer people, people of color, disability activists and more in relationship to yoga, spirituality and social justice.”

It’s true, I really don’t love all the articles on their website, but if you are seeking a different and more critical perspective on yoga, spirituality, and other things in that realm, which are often not looked at critically, this is a good place to look and learn more. My assistant Alla adores this website!

White Awake: Waking ourselves for the benefit of all is a website tailored for spiritual people socialized and identified as racially “white” who wish to merge their spiritual awakening with critical thinking, feeling, and action towards the real and actualized liberation of all beings through intersectional justice work.

A Community

Spark! For Humanity is the passion project of Rachel Rosen, a client/friend of mine. Her blog is a goldmine of timely resources and compassionate and insightful writing on how to have conversations across difference and be a changemaker and support for racial justice. I love reading what she shares and I always learn a lot. You can sign up for her newsletter too, which I highly recommend. She also hosts leadership courses, created a card game to facilitate deep conversations across difference, holds community events, and has a Facebook page and group virtual community space!

Note: Many (not all) of these social justice-focused resources are for white people who want to show up in a more real way for racial and social justice. This is because I'm white - Duh -  and so is my assistant Alla, who helped me put this together. In terms of resources specifically for POC, there is a lot out there and I am not in a position to make strong recommendations or be the best resource in this way

 

On Health

...Because looking at and getting support with our own stuff helps us SHOW UP fully and authentically in every other area of our life.

If you want holistic support with your health, especially around healing your gut and your relationship with food and your body, I have two main ways you can dive into doing that work with me right now.

For folks local to SE Nebraska, I am now available to see in-person clients at Lincoln Yoga Center on most Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is a really lovely and community-oriented yoga studio and I am honored to be a part of what they are creating here. To kick this off, I am offering a generous Wild Wellness Package, which includes:

- 1  80-min Healthy Life Deep Dive Session +

- 2  50-min Integration Sessions (at your own pace) with email support in between.

We can work with nutrition, custom herbal medicine, and the deeper lifestyle and emotional work which can support your wellness now.

Until November 30, this package is available for a special rate of $320 ($100 off regular price).

I have online scheduling, but please email me  to confirm your spot. (just respond to this email; mollie@molliemoorhead.com) I’m also happy to answer any questions over email or the phone.

For folks near, far, and everywhere in between, I am available either in-person or over the phone for customized healing packages as well as my Heal Your Belly, Love Your Body Program. This is a 4-month 1:1 coaching + mentorship program for folks who want to do the deeper work of creating a satisfying and happy relationship with food and their bodies as well as address any physical imbalance/challenges with their gut. These two challenges are so so interrelated. I rarely meet someone who struggles with one but not the other. These have been some of my big health challenges too, and I kid you not, I’ve spent the last 19 years working with, unpacking, and healing this stuff for myself. It feels so good to help shorten the learning curve for others and to provide support in ways that are so needed and appreciated.

You can find all the details of this program on my website. Do consider sharing this with a friend or loved one who you think would be interested.

Love and Strength,

Mollie

How we do one thing...

I had a different blog post created and scheduled for today. We put it together before the recent tragedy in Virginia, and now it feels irrelevant. 

Yes let's still focus on self-care, on good food and meals with loved ones, on gardening, on meditation (we need all that good stuff more than ever), but...we've clearly got some other work to do. 

A few days ago, a friend of mine shared an article called "White Supremacy Culture" by Tema Okun from http://collectiveliberation.org. I read it immediately, and haven't stopped thinking about it ever since. The author identifies, explains, and offers antidotes to certain characteristics which she sees as creating "white supremacy culture" - and they are not what you might think. They are things like "perfectionism", "defensiveness" and "only one right way." 

As I read and reflected on this, I felt how clearly these different characteristics showed up in my education at all levels, many jobs I have had, and inside myself just as much. Indeed, I've spent the past five years since starting my own business, observing, unraveling and healing my own tendencies for overwork, perfectionism, and all the rest. 

Because how we do one thing is how we do most other things in our lives, it feels really important to introspect and spend time feeling into and healing these insidious, subtle and not so subtle ways that we support the top-down power structure that is in place in our society that allows genocide and racism (and all the other -isms) to exist at all. 

My advice: Please do any activism you do, or are wanting to start doing, and do this inner work at the same time. 

You can read the article here: 

White Supremacy Culture
by Tema Okun

 

And please consider taking time to:

1.) Reflect how this plays out in your own life and in your own tendencies
2.) Share the article and share your stories
3.) Tell me your thoughts also. Let this be a conversation.


Aaaaand one more thing: I don't really agree with the name "white supremacy culture" because these characteristics show up in cultures and societies which are not white (I mean....been to Asia much?) I would be more apt to call it "Toxic Masculinity Culture", but the article itself is pretty brilliant. 


Alright. Blessings to you and the sacred work you are doing now.



All Love,
Mollie  

Meditations on Place: Great Salt Lake, Snow, and Trees // an atmospheric travelogue from my actual journal

May 19, 2017. Rock Springs, Wyoming

As of this writing, I am waiting out a snowstorm in a motel 6 in a small town in western Wyoming. Interstate 80 Eastbound is closed across the entire state of Wyoming due to the blizzard. I did not know they had weather like this in Wyoming in late May, but according to a local I met, snowstorms are common in May and even June.

The ironic part is that I’ve made this drive twice before, once in November and once in January, with clear skies and no weather to speak of. Both times, I breezed right through the state without stopping except for gas, and once, to pick up a hitchhiker who kept me company for the day. (He was very kind, loved Jesus Christ, and turned out to be nearly totally crazy, but in what felt like a harmless way.)

Cait and I encountered snow first on Donner Pass, on our first day of driving. We were skittish and unprepared, driving a moving van on that winding highway in less than ideal conditions, but we persevered, believing the snow would soon be behind us. We made it to Winnemucca, NV where we began our tour of Motel 6s (“The original pet friendly motel”) across the western United States, with our 11-year old tabby cat in tow. The next day took us to Salt Lake City, surely one of my favorite places to visit, due to my love of mountains and salt flats, and a particular fondness I have for the Great Salt Lake.

When I came here the first time and visited the Great Salt Lake, it was weird and desolate with a thick fog hanging over it. From the road, I couldn’t distinguish between salt, snow, sand, and fog. They all blended together in an indistinct white blur. I pulled over at the lake itself, and walked out to the shore where salt flats met the briny lake, where flies buzzed and the air smelled like low tide. There were no other people there besides myself and my travel companion, who was taking a phone call. As I walked along the shore, on the snow-dusted salt crust, I said hello to the lake.

My mom had died only two months earlier and the veils were extra thin for me then. It was not uncommon for me to have full conversations with trees, with ancestors, with deities. Not one-sided conversations either, but actual two-sided conversations, sometimes with words, but often without.

Anyway, I introduced myself to the Great Salt Lake, and I told her how impressed I was with her ancient majesty, with how she had once been a great ocean and was now a mineral-rich, briny lake in the desert.

I felt an immediate sense of being welcomed. It was so palpable, this sense of being welcomed. What followed is hard to explain, but I’ll try: The Great Salt Lake asked me if I wanted to be friends.

No, not in words. I haven’t found that any beings other than humans communicate in words. Think of how dogs welcome their people when they come in the door, and how palpable their happiness is, and how their people feel it. It was kind of like that. I just felt it in my heart, that the lake reached out to me in friendship, and what she wanted was simply that, no strings attached. Also that we were different but kindred somehow, and that a person and a lake could be friends, something I had never thought of before.

Definitely I wanted to be friends with the Great Salt Lake.

So we hung out together for a just a while longer that day, both of us just happy to be together.

It came time for me to leave, but I was back just two months later for another visit, doing the same drive (from Nebraska to California) in reverse. This time, I went to the marina instead of just the shallow, salty shore where I was the first time. The feeling I felt was the same, the joy of being with a friend.

I met an old Native man who lived on his boat there, and he invited me aboard and gave me a cup of Swiss Miss to drink. He loved the lake too, and though he referred to himself as a “crazy old Indian”, he was not crazy. Or we both were, bobbing gently on the salty lake, happy to just sit together.

I wanted to come back again and again. It felt so possible then. Anything felt possible. I was 23 and moving to California. But years passed and I did not visit. I did not think the lake minded much, if at all, but I missed her.

Two days ago I finally made it back for a brief visit. Cait was stressed-out, driving our moving van through salt lake city traffic, gripping the steering wheel with sweaty hands. We had just stopped at a rest stop in Bonneville Salt Flats, where we were surprised by a sudden hail storm, then snow. It had been clear and cold up to then. When we pulled into Great Salt Lake State Park the sky looked like pure fire and brimstone. I could see why this place was settled by a bunch of religious fanatics. There were several wild, dark cloud formations to one side with what looked like snow pouring out of them. It was easy to see where the snow storm started and where it ended. To the other side, there was beautiful blue sky with puffy clouds shot through with streaming sunlight. High in the sky, from one of the storm clouds, what looked like a small funnel cloud slowly swirled.

Our moving truck at a rest stop near Wendover, Utah

The water had receded greatly since the last time I was there seven years ago, and the salt flats had spread. There were several small groups of foreign tourists taking photos and walking on the flats, some adventurous souls trekking down to the water, which was far off. There was a large, abandoned building there that looks like a temple of some kind. It loomed over the whole scene ominously.

It was a strange apocolyptic-looking sight, with the storm clouds, the weird sunlight, a Chinese family taking photos and laughing, the seemingly endless salt flats, and the abandoned temple. Snow-capped peaks in the opposite direction.

I was there in a red sundress, rubber flip-flops, and two sweaters, doing my best to keep out the bitter cold and wind, with all my warm clothes packed away and hard to reach in the bowels of the moving van. I was cold and a little nervous about the weather, but oddly I felt a sense of deep peace as soon as my feet touched the salt flats.

I never made it to the water. It was so ominous, I could not bring myself to make the trek down there. But I walked on the flats, feeling happy to be with my friend again, before I got too chilled and went back to the truck. I felt a sense of heavy sadness to be leaving so soon, but almost as soon as i climbed in, there was a clap of thunder, followed by rain and snow in alternation.

An accident on the 15 sent us north of the city where we stayed for the night. The next morning when we headed out, it was clear and beautiful. We drove through country of breathtaking beauty, following a winding river and old railroad tracks nestled between rocky cliffs and grassy hills and lowlands dotted with grazing cattle and horses.

Then the snow started, slowly and dryly at first, and then in earnest. Soon it was nearly a white out, and the 18 wheelers headed from the opposite direction were coated in snow and looked to me like old men walking in cloaks, leaning into a powerful headwind as they made their slow way through the storm.

I was getting continuous text message updates from Whitney about the blizzard in Fort Collins. Somehow I just thought it would clear, and we’d make it through Wyoming that day, but Rock Springs was as far East as we have gotten.

So I’m reflecting on Place, and Weather, and Water, and how some of my dear friends have not been human or animal, but instead have been water sources, trees, and plants. My friendship with the Great Salt Lake opened my awareness to a new kind of friendship. Since then, I have been good friends with a creek, a buckeye tree, and a eucalyptus. Looking back on my life even before then, a certain bush of Red Russian kale was a sweet friend to me one summer (I still feel all warm and fuzzy when I think of that kale bush) and I had what could only be called a crush on a certain lily.

May 28, 2017. Lincoln, Nebraska.

I sobbed in my dream early this morning. My heart felt like it was cracking down the middle.

In my dream I saw a Manzanita with its slender, red branches. I felt how far away I was from any Manzanitas at all, and I felt indescribable sadness at the separation, and how as a human I am mobile or even migratory, but as a tree, a Manzanita spends most or all of her life in one spot. I sobbed and sobbed.

Then, still dreaming, I saw the tall, slender third-growth Redwoods I knew so well in Oakland, and then the beautiful Buckeye with her spreading canopy.

When I woke, my eyes were wet but no tears flowed. I felt a leaden feeling in my chest. Other than a particular Buckeye and a particular Eucalyptus, I hadn’t realized how close I felt to the trees.

I brushed off my dreaming state. There is nothing to be done, I told myself, except to get to know the trees here. Linden is blooming now, and the air is filled with her intoxicating sweetness. I’ll get to know Linden now.

Platte River State Park, Nebraska

June 26, 2017. Lincoln, Nebraska.

Rain today, and thunder. I remember now how thunderstorms are so common here, but I had forgotten. Nebraska feels like a playground for weather spirits of all kinds. They tear around freely and the weather is always changing.

I’m reflecting that perhaps I have appeared to create a stylish, mobile lifestyle for myself, seeing clients on my laptop from different locations. I want to set the record straight that it isn’t really like that. I see many people online (coaches, consultants, and various people who can work remotely) presenting a sleek image of themselves doing their work from anywhere, and saying how great it is to do so.

The truth is that this journey of moving and re-rooting has been a SHIT TON of work, has been expensive, has involved gas station food and other strange culinary choices, and that when it comes down to it, I really don’t even like to travel. There was one oppressively hot day that I felt the heaviness of all the miles and all the furniture I had moved, and I stayed in bed resting and reading for the entire day.

It isn’t stylish, or picturesque, or sustainable, though parts have been heart-warming, and rich in soul - and staying with my dad for a month had a sweetness to it beyond anything I could have imagined. And most days I still feel sorrow and a stab of longing when I think of the trees, waters, land, and people of California which I left behind.

I’ve been very happy to continue seeing some regular clients during this life transition of mine, but I couldn’t possibly accept a new client until I am rooted again. I don’t have the capacity.

I still have not fully unpacked my apothecary!

We just got the oven working and hot water heater turned on!

I haven't even hooked up internet in our house!

I wander around from room to room, searching for my keys or my glasses, because I don’t yet have a specific place where I keep them and they could be in 17 different spots!

I feel myself rooting slowly, developing new routines, and totally accepting that I might spend an entire day getting one part of one room in our new house put together, functional, looking how I want it to look. (This is progress.) It feels like all the hard work and the sorrow I have felt are an inevitable part of being engaged in life and not skating by on the surface.

I want to be in Place like I am in Time. Fully and totally embedded in this sacred Earth in this holy moment. Sometimes there is sorrow in there, sometimes joy.

Here I am back in my personal homeland.

May I be fully here.

May I be fully here.

*All photos were taken by me on my recent travels

All About Hydration

I mostly love hot weather...but my partner Cait isn’t quite used to it. Last week she had a wicked case of what we think was heat exhaustion and electrolyte depletion. For two days, she was too exhausted and weak to even spend much time out of bed, and nearly passed out when she tried.

This was surprising and scary, and it got me really interested in learning about hydration and electrolytes. What I am learning is a lot different than I expected - and a little scary. There is so much I did not know, and I want to share it with you, as well as ALL my best recipes for cooling summer drinks to help you stay nourished and hydrated, and keep your pitta in check this summer.

Healthy, homemade, hydrating drinks are something I am serious about for my own self-care - even in the Bay Area summer - because otherwise, by October, I get really dried out - my skin, my hair, even my mind feels dried out. I find these drinks work much better than plain water and have none of the artificial ingredients of commercial sports drinks.  In this post, I'll share:

• How to REALLY Hydrate

• About Filtered Water + The Scary Truth About Reverse Osmosis Water

• My 7 Best Homemade Hydration Drinks

 

<< All About Hydration >>

People talk a lot about hydration, but most of what is said could be summed up as: “The more water you drink, the better, and the more purified your water is, the better.”

Yet in my experience, neither of these statements are true.

Your body has to digest water to integrate it into your tissues (to hydrate your cells and flush waste products), so drinking when you are not thirsty is not only unhelpful, it is akin to eating when you are not hungry. Drinking when you are not thirsty ignores your body’s wisdom and causes harm. The excess water will either simply be excreted through the urinary system without circulating through your body, which puts a strain on your kidneys, or it will accumulate, undigested, as water retention.

So, how much water should I drink?

It depends on your body size, activity level, and how much you are sweating, as well as your food choices today and what else is happening in your body. There is no set amount of water you should drink, but if you pay attention to your body’s cues, it will tell you when when it is thirsty just like it tells you when it is hungry. Do not concern yourself with drinking a certain amount of water, but instead with paying attention to your body's cues.  

Do I have to drink plain water?

No! Absolutely not! Most beverages are hydrating - just not those containing caffeine or alcohol, though I find small amounts of either of those substances fine in terms of hydration/dehydration.

Additionally, many different herbs can be steeped in water to make a weak infusion that actually helps your body digest the water (two of my favorite recipes are available below). Adding a squeeze of lemon juice and a splash of maple syrup provides beneficial electrolytes and nourishment. The truth is, I find that my body processes water much better as a weak herbal tea than when the water is plain.  

What’s the deal with purified water?

This has always been a confusing subject for me. There is  a lot of conflicting information out there - much of it sales-driven. Normally, I have used a basic water filter, mostly to remove chlorine, which I find extremely drying to my tissues if I’m drinking too much of it. I had not tried reverse osmosis water, except by coincidence at others’ homes perhaps, but in my mind I thought reverse osmosis was a good thing because it is said to remove more unwanted chemicals than other processes, including flouride. My partner Cait gets a stomach ache from drinking tap water unless it’s been filtered, so she was drinking reverse osmosis water from the food coop, since our water filter is still packed.  

When Cait was in bed recovering from heat exhaustion (and sipping gatorade and reverse osmosis water alternately), I met up with a friend, and we had a lengthy discussion on water. She has done a lot of research on drinking water generally and reverse osmosis water specifically. She told me that, yes, RO water has none of the harmful chlorine or flouride, but it also has none of the dissolved minerals found in natural water. Our bodies depend on those dissolved minerals for even basic functioning, and drinking water that’s been stripped of those needed minerals messes up our blood chemistry pretty damn quick and can cause an array of health problems, including muscle cramping, fatigue, bone fractures, problems in childbirth, and heart problems.  

I started doing my own research, and I quickly learned that the World Health Organization has a pretty strong stance against “demineralized water”, which includes reverse osmosis water, distilled water, and also just water that is naturally very low in minerals like magnesium and calcium.

Get this: RO water actually pulls minerals from our bones, contributing to bone loss over time and cannot be used in pipes because it pulls minerals from the pipes, causing the pipes to crack and crumble.

Purity Above All Else?

Water in nature is NEVER pure, right? It always has other substances dissolved in it, even rain water and other lower-mineral waters are not PURE.

The focus on purity is interesting. The common belief is, "If something is Pure then it must be the best. It must be healthy. Purity at all costs!" I can see why some people have not even questioned this belief, and why I didn’t question it regarding water until now.

We can see that purifying water to the extent that it becomes harmful to the body is not different than “purifying” sugar cane so that it becomes white sugar, or coca leaves so they become cocaine, or poppy resin so it becomes heroine.

It isn’t different than isolating one constituent out of hundreds in a medicinal herb and then using that one constituent as a drug - like curcumin from turmeric, or salicin from willow (as the active ingredient in aspirin) - and losing much of the medicinal benefits of the plant in the process. (Aspirin doesn't even begin to compare to willow bark in terms of range of effectiveness, safety, or sustainability!)

We live in a world that seeks purity and bumps into purity’s shadow side at every turn. So, we are figuring it out, together.

Learn More

To learn more, read HEALTH RISKS FROM DRINKING DEMINERALISED WATER by Frantisek Kozisek. This is a great scholarly article, the best I was able to find. And this is cool: The author even mentions what Ayurveda says about which sort of water to drink!

I also found a company called AquaLiv that claims to have a water filtration system which removes chlorine, flouride, and other harmful chemicals, but doesn’t strip the water of minerals and instead adds some. I haven’t tried their system or even tasted their water so I cannot vouch for it, but if you have I’d love to hear about it! Please drop me a line and tell me about it. They have a lot of educational writing on their site, and I read a lot of it. Consider reading Reverse Osmosis Water Exposed because it is clear and well-written, but keep it mind it is marketing related. 

 Conclusion (In Progress) 

I am in a place now where the tap water comes from the Ogallala Aquaphor and is fabulous. Cait started drinking the tap water and started feeling better quickly. As of yet, I haven’t figured out what sort of filter we will end up using to remove the added chlorine without removing the minerals, but in the mean time tap water definitely seems to be the way to go! If you live in a place where you must filter your water to drink it at all, I highly recommend looking into the type of filter you are using and find one which does not remove significant mineral content from your water. Additionally, consider looking into natural springs in your area as a source of drinking water. 

Now. On to the fun part...because you should only have to drink Gatorade in weird circumstances:

<< My 7 Best Homemade Hydration Drinks (in no particular order) >>

1. Chrysanthemum Nectar. Steep dried chrysanthemum blossoms 10-20 minutes in just-boiled water, adding sugar (rapadura or sucanat are my favorites) or maple syrup to taste. You don’t need much, but a little bit is necessary to bring out the flavor. Let it cool and drink room temperature or slightly chilled. (I usually make the day ahead.)

2. Cucumber Water. Slice some cucumber in some water. Easy Peasy. The flavor and nutrition will begin to seep into the water almost immediately.

3. Summer Herbal Tonic. Use Red clover, lemon balm, skullcap, nettles, oatstraw, fennel and chrysanthemum. Any combination of these herbs, or all of them, steeped overnight, or at least 20 minutes. Drink room temperature. Add some water if it is too strong for your taste, and consider adding a blob of food grade aloe gel once the infusion has cooled. Give it a good shake. I often make a half gallon of this in the evening for use the following day. This is a drink that is helpful for hydration and electrolytes, but also helps prevent rashes or any other skin problem, and generally pacifies pitta dosha. I drink it all day in place of plain water.

4. Linden, Violet leaf, and Raspberry Leaf Infusion. This is a recipe from my friend Alex Svoboda of Arise Botanicals, and it is as DELICIOUS at it is nourishing. Use equal parts of these herbs and follow steeping instructions above. Serve room temp or slightly chilled.

5. Homemade Lemonade. So fun and simple if you have a lemon tree! Squeeze a bunch of lemons, and add water and maple syrup to taste. Alternately, you can use rapadura or similar minimally-processed sugar and make a simple syrup and use that as your sweetener. Serve chilled.

6. Green Veggie Juice or Puree. ‘Tis the season for this cooling and energizing treat. Green juice doesn’t work for everyone’s tummy though - so if it makes you super gassy, just don’t even go there. But otherwise, you can make either a puree with a vitamix/other high-powered blender, or a juice with a juicer, depending on what you desire and what equipment you have. Use leafy greens and cucumber, and add a little bit of ginger for digestion. Many other veggies are fine to add, like carrot, beet, and celery, but I would avoid crucifers (broccoli and cabbage) and most fruits (citrus is fine). Keep it simple for easiest digestion.

7. Hibiscus Elixir. Steep hibiscus flowers and a little minced fresh ginger in just-boiled water for 10-20 minutes. Add maple syrup or sugar to taste. Serve room temp or slightly chilled, and consider adding a squeeze of lemon before serving.

Now...I'd love to hear from you. Do you know something I don't on the topic of water filtration? Do you have a recipe for a hydrating summer drink you'd like to share?

And if you try any of these recipes, I'd love to hear your experience with it! Consider posting a photo and tagging me in it (@molliemoorheadwellness on IG) so others can benefit as well. These recipes have enriched my life and health so much and I hope they do the same for you and your loved ones. 

Get a Rush from Life Instead of Rushing Through Life

What does it mean to be behind?

For many years I lived by the To-Do List, which I never seemed to finish, so I often felt behind. You know what I’m talking about. (Make the soup, call the bank, do my notes, pay the car insurance, call the guy about the thing….) So imagine my bewilderment one winter evening as I sat talking with some friends by the fire, and one of my friends relayed this anecdote. She said,  “When I first moved here to the Bay Area, it seemed like everyone was rushing around from place to place, thing to thing, all the time. It really stood out. So I started asking people, ‘Do you feel like you are behind?’ And most people said, ‘Yes, all the time.’” [Read whole post on Positively Positive]

Peace Pilgrim//Resistance//Early Spring Self-Care

I sent this out as a newsletter yesterday and I wanted to share it here as well:

PEACE PILGRIM

Last night I watched a documentary about Peace Pilgrim, the American woman renowned for walking over 25,000 miles for world peace, with no money and only the clothes on her back. (She didn't even carry a water bottle, or a bag of any kind.) 

She walked as a pilgrim, not a missionary. She was cultivating her own inner peace as she walked, and her message was that creating world peace depended on people creating peace within themselves.

She said “In order to help usher in the golden age we must see the good in people. We must know it is there, no matter how deeply it may be buried. Yes, apathy is there and selfishness is there – but good is there also. It is not through judgment that the good can be reached, but through love and faith.” 

Watching this documentary, I was brought to tears many times by the humility and wisdom of this great woman. If you are yet unfamiliar with her story, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Connecting with the messages and indeed, the living energies, of luminaries like Peace Pilgrim feels so nourishing and relevant right now, so I offer this to you in that spirit.

RESISTANCE 

What does “Resistance” mean to you personally? Right now, we know #resist is being used as a unifying term to describe any activities or beliefs around not accepting Donald Trump and his administration. I see the practical value of the term “resistance” for this purpose, but I don’t love it.

Someone told me, “I am trying to find a way to feel truly peaceful while resisting” and I said, “It’s not going to happen.”

“Peace” in its true sense, and “Resistance” in its true sense, do not go together. When we resist, we push something away, and can never be peaceful while doing so. We push something away, saying, I do not accept this thing, I have no love for this thing. The act of resistance is exhausting, but more importantly it is futile, because it defines itself by the thing it does not want. Andodea Judith states, "Resistance to control is not the same as freedom from it. As long as we resist, we remain shaped and determined by the force we oppose."* 

To resist is better than to comply. But there is something beyond resistance. I don’t know if I can sum it up in a single word, but for me it is a feeling of:

I accept all that is. There is space in my heart for all that is. And I take action from a place of love. I push nothing and no one away. I define myself and my actions on my own terms. 

There is also a direct correlation between how you view and treat the not-beautiful parts of yourself with how you view and treat the not-beautiful people in the world. A number of times I've encountered parts of myself in ordinary life and in shamanic journeying that are completely hideous. So hideous that I thought, this cannot be a part of me, it's too awful. But it was a part of me. No denying and no resisting would change that. It was through witnessing, loving, and creating space for these hideous parts of myself that they transformed - sometimes very quickly - and became my allies. Each time I have done this, I haven't simply lost an enemy (an internal saboteur), I have gained vitality and wisdom. 

I don't think this so different within one person as within a country. My challenge for you, should you choose to accept, is:
 

Love the unlovable.

Love the unlovable in yourself and in the Other.

What can you do today to begin to love more than you ever thought possible?

EARLY SPRING SELF-CARE

Caring for ourselves is the foundation of caring for the collective

February 2nd (Imbolc/Candlemas) marks the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and in Chinese medicine, the beginning of spring. Here in the Bay, I feel that so strongly every year. (In colder climates, maybe not so much.) It’s still rainy and cool out, but not cold, and the early spring flowers are starting.

Movement
In early February, there is a sense of energy rising up and needing to move. It is the time to begin to emerge from our winter cocoon, our winter hibernation, and move our bodies. Do you feel it?! Many people do. I discontinued my gym membership and instead have been dancing my ass off at home almost every morning. I couldn’t be still if I tried. Dancing is a powerful way to move energy that is ready to move, connect with the body and a sense of being held by the Earth, and cultivate love and joy in the heart.

Maybe for you dancing feels right too, or maybe jogging or biking down these drizzly streets is what’s needed, or maybe you’d enjoy joining a gym. Movement that honors your body is the key.

Sweets
This is the time of year to avoid desserts and sweets, as well as milk and other dairy products, cold foods, and other rich creamy foods, in order emerge from winter in tune with the seasons, feeling light and energized, not having seasonal allergies and sluggishness.

Appetite
You may find that your appetite on rainy days is a little low. Do your best to honor this and don’t force yourself to eat, and do not eat only out of habit or for comfort. This is a great time to enjoy hot, brothy soups, hot lemon water in the morning, and ginger tea.

Mood
If you feel melancholy, low-energy, or have a dull headache on overcast days, green tea can be really helpful. I’m currently experimenting with cacao for this purpose too: A heaping tablespoon of raw organic cacao powder mixed with just-boiled water, a pinch of cinnamon, a teaspoon or so of ghee (or butter or coconut oil) and once it has cooled a bit, a touch of honey. A stimulant for sure, but still not on the level of coffee.

Nasya
Additionally, one Ayurvedic treatment for this melancholy~low energy~dull headache situation is nasya: Herbalized oil dripped in the nose. In this case, medicated with stimulating herbs (calamus is my favorite) and/or herbs that promote mental clarity (like gotu kola). Warm the oil bottle in a dish of hot water, then tilt your head back and drop a couple drops in each nostril, then massage your sinuses and head as you receive the oil. Excess will drip out when you tilt your head back to neutral, and you can dab off the excess with some tissue. Do this in the morning for more mental alertness and clarity.

I don’t have a strong recommendation for sources to buy nasya oil. One tiny bottle lasts forever, and I used to make it, so I haven’t explored much to see what’s out there or which local stores offer it. They have some for sale at LifeSpa here and it looks really good, but I haven’t tried it.

I'll just be over here dancing. 

All my love,

Mollie

How and Why I Gave Up Caffeine

Are your rituals honoring your body’s innate wisdom? Or are your habits overriding the body’s calls for rest?

Caffeinated tea was the one thing I never gave up, even when I did a cleanse. I justified it many different ways, and all the justifications seemed true. Justifications like these: “Tea has so many health benefits,” or “as far as stimulants go, tea is a mild one... and I love the little boost it gives me” and “well, I don’t drink coffee and I can go long periods of time without alcohol or sugar and not mind. Tea is my one thing so I’m holding onto it.” [Read More]

An Ayurvedic Health Coach Gets Real About Comfort Food

Health food starves the soul. It can starve the body too, depending on what it is, but that’s another conversation. If you want to feel truly alive, nourished and satisfied, you must take care of the needs of your soul as well as those of your body. If you don’t, you’ll begin to feel brittle and hollow, and wonder what’s missing. [Read More]

The Missing Piece

Having tea with friends the other day, I shared that I felt like I’d been hammering away at the same challenge for too long. Every week or so, I would have a new breakthrough about it, which felt real and good, and I would see progress, but the basic situation still hadn’t changed that much. I wasn’t gaining momentum.

One friend responded, very kindly but directly: So you’ve been attacking this problem with everything you’ve got? You’ve been taking it on as a challenge? I get it because I do that too. But at a certain point, you have to just sit back (She relaxed back in her chair and spread her arms) and RECEIVE it.

This is true for anything, any problem. For the woman who wants to get pregnant. For the woman who wants to find the love of her life and settle down. For the woman who is trying to heal her skin from acne. For the money to show up. For the Dream Job to show up.

Two things are needed: Action and Receptivity. You have to ask for what you want and often take some actions to get it.

Then you have to sit back and let it come to you.

Stop trying so hard and hammering away at it. Let it come to you. This is the missing piece.

Feel the softening in your heart and

Let

It

Come.

It’s easier to see this when it’s someone else’s problem, not your own. I needed a friend to hold up the mirror for me. Maybe that was my weekly breakthrough and maybe it was the Big Breakthrough. I can’t know yet, and at the moment I really don’t care because I feel greater ease and trust. I feel lighter. I feel aligned.

Is there a situation you have been trying desperately to fix and getting nowhere?

What does receptivity feel like to you?

Are you now willing to shed some sense of your identity in order to truly receive?