Aloha Beloveds of many stripes and interweaving communities!
We are wanting to stay in closer touch and so we are putting together this newsletter as a way of sharing some of our process and journey with ya’ll, and inviting you to write back. This is it’s inaugural run, and OMG I’m doing tech things! Probably far too many words, but with 5 planets in Gemini between Alan and I, it’s only to be expected! I’m taking the first pass with the following:
I remember my daughter complaining to me when she was about 7, in a plaintive voice saying, “Mom, I never want to grow up. Being grown up seems so boring. All you guys ever do is talk on the phone, drive around, and work. Where is the fun, where is the adventure?” She had a point didn’t she?
One of the things we used to do together was listen to audiobooks of fantasies, tales of portals to distant realms where magic and magical beings exist, and sure, danger was there too, but there was vividness and creative strangeness everywhere, talking animals, and singing dwarves and at any moment a flying boy in green with pointy ears might sweep you up into a mad-cap adventure to another world where you could practically taste the bright colors on your tongue.
My daughter is big now and a responsible adult. I don’t want either of us to lose touch with that child-like wonder at the possibility of magic in the world, and yet I notice within me a great dimming or flattening when I spend to much time reading news or focusing on my to-do list. Soon even the bright landscape of Kauai bleaches to grey and I find myself snapping at my beloveds instead of loving them. The solutions offered by the internet wellness industrial complex of more or better “self care” add more things to my list which threaten that camel’s back, always ready to break in these times.
How do I restore dimensionality in a world that has been homogenized into nihilistic blandness? How do I bring back color and magic? How do I receive nourishment when all of my strategies of giving to receive have left me feeling so hollowed out?
These are some of the big questions I am sitting with these days and they don’t have easy answers, but which big questions ever do? That’s probably the point of a big question, in that it asks you to sit with it without knowing the answer, and in the not knowing, some new capacity starts to grow.
Some of the seeds beginning to sprout in that dark and uncomfortable place have to do with a new relationship to my body as a sensing and image making organ. Not jumping to figure things out with my analytical mind, instead staying with my embodied sensing capacity and feeling my way through, is a different way of being for me.
As my body doesn’t often communicate in English, its been a juicy growth edge to listen to other inputs, and develop a vocabulary around sensation - fullness, choking, buzzing, fuzziness, stabbing, dullness, ouch! I let myself be cued by them into a greater awareness of what is wanting to happen than my mind could otherwise figure. It feels like recovering my mother tongue, and with it varied inner landscapes are revealing themselves, with their own terrain, purpose and figures inhabiting them that I’m getting to know.
It is kind of like those fantasy stories where you access another realm that feels more real than this world. It’s not so much that color is restored but dimensions of feeling and permission structures giving rise to hidden aspects of myself that are finally getting some air time. Yay!! And…it’s a journey…often confusing and not easy but fascinating and illuminating. Dreams and symbols unfold along intuitive feeling pathways, along with unconscious patterns and beliefs. It’s not quite Narnia but almost as good as, and in some ways better, and when it comes to dreams, populated by just as much magical strangeness and fantastic figures and scenarios!
Please write in, if you feel so inspired, and share your sprouting seeds. I’d love to hear what is alive and unfolding within you!
Elana
Upcoming events
Here we are at the opening celebration of Colibri Alchemy in Anahola in June, where we did a rare gig of jazz standards and originals. It was so fun, and we’re going to do it again. We will keep you posted!
Song Circles - None currently scheduled. It’s hard to keep track of all of our diverse interests and projects. If one or some of you want to put out the call, or better yet host one, we’d say yes! Just get in touch.
Interested in our work? Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy is our current and enduring great love, and we love sharing it and doing sessions, separately and together. Follow this link to learn more or to schedule a short conversation with Elana or Alan.