desire as inception — the thing itself emerging
wanting more is the game { sbfr 3 }
wake up feeling heavy. breath and heart openers and ugh in my hips and my legs feel like bricks. i remember when this feeling surfaced a month ago, i turned on dubstep and shook my ass till it broke.
but that didn’t work today.
i notice my ass is numb.1 sit on the edge of the bed for some friction and do what i do best. grind it out. turn on red sex and swirl my hips and notice and feel and feel and notice and something shifts.
not to bore you but this process of breathing and shaking and grinding is what we call moving from dorsal (collapsed) energy in the nervous system through sympathetic energy (fight/flight/freeze/fawn) to ventral energy (connection, presence, openness, vitality). just thought you may wanna know the method to my, and perhaps your madness, if you find yourself intuitively grinding on the edge of the bed some morning and your entire day shifts.
which is exactly what happened.
that heavy sensation isn’t my favorite. but i don’t avoid it either. and that’s the practice. creating space for sensation without needing to give it a story or know what it means or where it came from.2 that’s what gets you into the head swirl. that’s you hitting the eject from experience button.
sometimes it’s just like god damn your hips ache and your heart is unfurling and you remember…
for the feminine (in everyone, but i’m not going there today), there is never enough. and it fucking aches. it just does.
the longing to be filled with love. connection. pleasure. eros. presence. art. beauty.
not a bad thing. just a thing.
and to that… it is the thing itself that matters.
the longing. the sensation of it.
opening to it, as its vessel.
letting desire emerge through you, into reality.
the thought swirl focusing on the lack of the thing isn’t going to help you. because actually, you already have it.
desire is within you. it can only become real when you let it expand through your body into physical reality. contemplate that for a moment. and when i say contemplate i mean feel it in your body. the truth that what you name as lack of a thing — your longing — is actually the opposite. longing is desire’s arrival. inception. emergence.
one of the reasons i take self portraits. to witness and be engaged with the whole process. to the subject and the object. to peer into the frame and feel what i feel and find the beautiful thing within the longing, no matter what’s happening.
the beautiful thing can be anything. the general composition. the space. the colors. the contrast. the mess. the emotion expressed.
there is always emotion in a good photo. of course what is considered “good” is all up to you. but for me? dirty is better. messy is realer. the “clean” aesthetic and the need for perfect staging of every little thing made popular by social media is just gross. i fucking hate it. why are they all living in the single family home equivalents of hospitals? confuses me.
anyway, back to our scene. heavy, dense body against soft blanket. hips aching. heart swelling. breathe the energy up and down my spine. flirt with the camera cause yes i’m recording it cause i like feeling like someone’s watching me. in other words i pretend my camera is very naughty jesus or else the man i’m flirting with. still not sure if he’s gonna get the video. thinking about it makes me tingle though.
and that’s really it. the whole point. energetic transmutation. heaviness into color and light. resistance into openness. annoyance into delicious friction. it’s the purpose of everything i do. it’s why i started snapping photos of myself when i was 13 — to see myself transforming.3
because for me — feeling is believing, and seeing is a reminder that beauty is always available and comes in many forms and shapes and ways, tangible and intangible. and choosing to transmit that beauty through your (my) body and SEE yourself in it is a deep act of love and service. just my take.
one time a teacher asked me if could feel my ass before i had this awareness and i was like duh of course i can? i’m sitting on it. but i was actually just thinking that i should while i was totally numb. i invite you to notice if you can really FEEL your ass. you might be surprised. a lot of people don’t actually FEEL below their waist. so there’s that.
even if you do have an idea of where it came from like for example wanting to connect with someone who is ahem very busy but also so present when he is present that it shakes and penetrates your whole system and oh, maybe that’s where all these feelings are coming from. but that’s not the point. the point is feeling. experiencing. opening. letting it through. letting it go. letting it shift.
not for my myspace boyfriend like i thought. ha!
That conversation between the head and the body. Sometime during my late 30's I might wake and place my feet on the floor and start humming. That always started my engine no matter how worn down I was and it slowly drowned out the aches. I would stretch while the water was dripping through the coffee filter. I would quickly run through the tricky brain parts of the day- a roof pitch or stairs- and the physical parts. After a few cups (and a liter of water) I would ask my body if he was ready and he'd say something like, "good enough" or "let's do it". I don't miss that conversation because now chat about poetry etc. and I never for a moment want to return to that warrior like existence even though I loved it.