October 2011 | effervescence

Monthly Archives: October 2011

over tea: body-listening with larisa

Written on October 31, 2011 by Kylie in on being highly sensitive, on feeling our feelings

As I’ve mentioned, I recently traveled to Portland, land of green roofs and putting birds on things (they really weren’t kidding about that one). The trip was peculiar and wonderful, and it allowed me to go places I’d known about for a long time and never been, and meet people I’d known online for a while but never met.

My first foray out of the Airbnb spot where I was staying was to meet up with Larisa for tea. We met at Townshend’s Tea, where they had at least three types of non-caffeinated chai, one of which had rosemary in it. (That’s what Larisa got. She let me try it, and it was pine-ey and warming.)

Larisa told me a bit about her ortho-bionomy practice, which fascinates me. (I had wanted to book a session with her for this trip, but my schedule filled up. Learning experience.) She talked about helping people to learn to listen to their bodies, and about using her expertise to help people access their own bodily wisdom (instead of her, as a professional, telling them what she thinks is best for them).

I love speaking with people who practice different healing modalities, because I often come away with concepts that can influence my own coaching and photography work. A little like Larisa, through coaching, I aim to guide people in accessing their own wisdom. Even more so because I’m particularly interested in empowerment and self esteem.

Larisa talked about how her work is subtler than, say, chiropractic work. People don’t always feel as if something big has happened during their sessions with her, but they’ll realize a few days later that they’re relating differently to pain.

I can draw from that, too. Often, in coaching, we go slowly. We delve beneath the surface of small stuff (like, say, a pile of paper that plagues us). A client will begin with filing one paper, or two. It’s hard to comprehend that moving one paper can shift the way someone’s living her life. It’s also hard to imagine that listening to your body differently could dissolve pain. But that’s what Larisa does. She’s seen it, and I believe it.

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i make the rules (but i tend to forget that)

Written on October 19, 2011 by Kylie in on liking yourself, on photography

Ever since I participated in Rally, things have been different. Not different on the surface. Different deep, deep down. Different in the most subtle ways, so probably nobody but me would recognize it if I didn’t say something.

I feel more patient (though Mary might disagree with that; I’m not sure). Meetings that generally drag on and on are less drag-ey. I’m becoming more adept at giving myself comfort, and realizing, daily, how gosh-darned important it is to me (really, really important). I’m questioning the rules more frequently and with more gusto. I’m also realizing that most of the rules that hold me back actually don’t come from outside. They’re self-imposed.

An example. It’s hard for me to be sitting at a desk all day at work, and to then go home and sit some more while I write, edit photos, or coach my stupendous coaching clients on the phone. I thought I didn’t have a choice but to sit in the same position all day, without a stretch in sight. But. I’m realizing that nobody ever said I couldn’t stretch at work. Nobody ever told me I wasn’t allowed to look up from my computer long enough to get some blood flowing again. That was my own rule. I was the one assuming that the sky would fall or I’d get fired on the spot if I removed my hands from the keyboard. As a result, I’m challenging myself to do stretches every once in a while inside my cubicle. And guess what? I’m still employed. I’ve also been doing really good work in the past few weeks, in case you were wondering.

Here’s another. When I’m editing photos, I often tend to keep things really basic. I don’t apply too many artsy filters or do much editing. This is usually ideal, because my mission is to help people recognize their beauty, and my opinion is that people are most beautiful when they’re un-retouched. Sometimes, I’m pulled to go in more of an artsy direction. Yet I don’t always go down that route, because I’m afraid my clients won’t be pleased. I’m imposing rigid rules again, when the whole point of owning my own business is to forge my own path. So I remember this, and I include two versions of a photo: the straight one, and the artsy one. Quite often, clients like the artsy one best.

One last one. Before Rally, my back had started to hurt after I began doing a daily seated meditation. Even the aforementioned stretching wasn’t relieving my discomfort, which had begun to spread from my meditation sessions into the rest of my life. Then Larisa shared with me over tea that seated meditation just doesn’t feel good to some people. After that, I switched to lying down for meditation. That, combined with a healthy dose of rolling around on the floor and lots of walking, seemed to ease the discomfort. As Larisa said, no need to force myself to do seated meditation if it was going to deter me from meditation itself.

For me, challenging one self-imposed rule is like tipping over a domino. It knocks down the next rule, then the next, and then the next. And eventually, you’re living life according to the coolest set of rules ever: your own. Lovingly designed by none other than you.

Comments: I’m interested to know what (if any) self-imposed rules you’ve noticed in your life, and what effect they’ve had on you. And while we’re at it, I’m entirely open to learning ways to do seated meditation without back discomfort, if you happen to know things about that.

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is this what it’s like to fall out of love?

Written on October 11, 2011 by Kylie in on being highly sensitive, on liking yourself

I recently auditioned for a choir. I got in, despite my abysmal sight-reading non-skills. I looked forward to it, nervously. I proudly announced to my friends and family that I was returning to singing, after a long hiatus. I missed the first three practices because I was in Portland and Seattle, but I stayed up-to-date on the choir happenings by reading all the emails. I was ready.

Until a few days beforehand, when I started getting scared. Judging from the group emails, this time commitment was going to be heftier than I’d expected. I wondered if I shouldn’t just bow out before it began. I didn’t want to start and quit. I didn’t want to explode from overwhelm. My first rehearsal, with a sectional for the sopranos, would last three hours, and that seemed like a lot. Plus, there was a great big ball of fear and pain that surfaced every time I thought about music.

From here on out, this is a story about Me-From-Then. Her name is K.

. . .

K was always a singer. She found a paper years ago where she had written, in crayon, what she wanted to be when she grew up. A writer or a singer. From the age of five to eighteen, she sang in the choir at the Presbyterian church where she was baptized. Her religious peers were praising god with their singing. As an atheist, she was just praising music itself.

Late in high school, K became known as the very quiet girl with the very big singing voice. On stage, she shared the passion within her that she usually hid from everyone else. She wanted to study music in college, but was too scared to commit. She made a watery compromise, and enrolled in NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, but planned to major in music.

Adrift in New York City

Her first years in New York were spirit-crushing. One of her roommates had the most stunning voice. K could have listened to her, through the plaster wall of their suite, all day. The roommate grew to dislike her (no one ever knew why), and said harsh things about her, loudly enough for her to hear, to the other roommate.

K resided on the music floor of a themed dorm. Several of her fellow residents would sit in the hall at all hours of the night, strumming out Radiohead songs on their guitars. She tried to learn the guitar a bit and was unsuccessful. She looked in on them from the outside, so close but so separate. Unlike them, she was paying for her own college education. In her internal narrative, everything was at stake, including the money she hadn’t even earned yet.

K joined a choir where she inhabited a bubble, separate from the chatty musical theater majors who leaned around her to gossip with one another. She auditioned for a jazz choir, where she was instructed to scat. Nobody had ever taught her how. This resulted in burning cheeks and a rejection.

One day, she went to the student center to audition for an a cappella group, walked past the gregarious, brightly-dressed performers in the group, and turned right back around and walked out before she even got to the signup sheet. She felt so poignantly separate from any semblance of a support network that she imagined she would break under the weight of another “no”. In retrospect, this was probably a very wise decision. Her fear cushioned her.

The end, for K and music, came in the form of two different music professors. Both were older, and both scowled constantly, like pale-skinned versions of the villains in Monsters, Inc. Coincidentally, both classes were taught in the same desk-crammed room, on different days. One teacher read test grades aloud before passing them back, complete with disapproving tut-tuts. The other called K to her office to admonish her after a poor midterm exam. K held it together for the meeting, trying, with fast-blinking eyes, to explain why so many of her answers had been incorrect. (If she had told the truth, the answer would have been that she felt all alone in the city, and she had very few resources and was very depressed and didn’t know how to ask for help, and she had too many jobs and got too little sleep, and that made it very hard to learn things.) Safely outside the professor’s door, K crumbled into her girlfriend’s arms, a puddle of heaving tears. The professor exited a back door to her office, one K didn’t know existed, to see her at her very, very worst.

The Trauma that Didn’t Look Like Trauma

This time became K’s most recent period of trauma. The first came as a kid, from when she was five-ish to eight-ish. The second arrived at twelve. Both of those periods looked like what we regularly characterize as trauma: divorce, abuse, complete and total rejection by a parent. The third was most of college, but especially the first couple years. The time when her peers were making the friends they would carry through the rest of their lives.

K switched majors, still unaware that what she was experiencing was trauma. She blamed herself for her unhappiness. Mostly by chance, glimmers of light began to surface in her life. The LGBT Center. Feminism. Queerness. Social justice. Visits to Princeton and Boston. Food blogging. A kind-hearted roommate. A committed partner.

On visits home, friends would ask if she ever sang anymore. The answer was usually a sheepish “no”. Inside, she reminded herself of the choir rejections. And anyway, she was too busy. Too much going on, what with the crazy job and the commute and the trying to stay sane and alive in New York City. Maybe she would sing again someday when she exited Crisis Mode.

A Hesitant Return, and the Unexpected

Four years after her first weeks of college, the time came. She auditioned. She prepared to sing. She was nervous, but she went. And somehow, choir was not the homecoming she had expected it to be. It sounded stunning, no doubt. The harmonies and quarter notes were like familiar faces, long forgotten. The people were kinder than she had thought possible. So welcoming. So friendly. So interested.

And yet, it just wasn’t right. The world of intricately notated scores and eager music theorists wasn’t hers anymore. She knew she needed to be heard, but this wasn’t the way to do it. As excited as her friends and family had been about her joining a choir, she didn’t feel the electricity. As important as their opinions were, hers was more important. She needed adequate rest, and the time commitment wouldn’t allow that. She needed to celebrate the errors, and this wasn’t the place. Above all, she needed to nourish herself, and this didn’t feed her anymore.

She walked out of rehearsal and into an October Greenwich Village that smelled of fireplaces and leaves. She walked past the store where she had bought junk food, all alone, as a college freshman. She swiped her MetroCard and trundled home to a tidy, warm apartment, wondering: Is this what it’s like to fall out of love?

. . .

Comments and thanks: Today, I request acceptance and heartfelt sighs. I welcome your own personal experiences of healing from trauma that may or may not have looked like trauma. And thanks to Havi for introducing a distancing technique which helped me to be able to share this here.

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