all needs can be met if they are acknowledged

Dreaming beyond power struggle

Hello Beloved Friends

Have you ever watched the show Sort of ?

Sort of is a Canadian television sitcom starring Sabi Mehboob, a non-binary millennial trying to balance their roles as a child of Pakistani immigrant parents, a bartender at an LGBTQ bookstore and café, and a caregiver to the young children of a professional couple. (Thank you Wikipedia for this succinct yet descriptive summary!)

The series is co-written by Bilal Baig who plays the role of Sabi. As a Punjabi trans person, I feel extremely grateful for the show. Many of the storylines mirror my own life, in a way that I have never before experienced. Watching the show allowed me to process stagnant emotions, feel more empathy for my family members, and view historical events of my life differently.

Seeing ourselves on screens is life changing. I feel inspired to pursue bringing my media dreams to life ( I have a few screenplay ideas…).

I also felt inspired to text everyone I know and ask if they’ve watched sort of. I spent last weekend with my mom and cousin, and requested that we watch at least one episode.

To my delight, my mom and cousin ended up watching the entire three seasons.

my mom watching sort of

Can you believe my mom watched Sort Of ???

I felt extremely grateful to my mom and cousin for going on the journey of this show with me. It felt like love to have them watch this piece of media that was so important to me.

If I went back in time and told my 22 year old self that I was watching Sort Of with my mom, they wouldn’t have believed me. For years my family was extremely unaccepting of my identity, and I spent several years in low contact, and two years in no contact.

It was painful for me, and sometimes I still feel the grief of time lost with my family. My family feels it too, but ultimately we make our way back to celebrating the intimacy we share today.

When my mom has shared with me about her process of accepting my identity, she has described as an evolution of her soul. It was a transformation, an opening, of her being.

I see it in her. When we were first re-connecting I noticed a huge shift in how she communicated with me, openly expressing her care and love. I have grown so used to this version of her: expressive, accepting, generous with her love, that I often forget how we were before.

I give thanks for my transness and the way it has helped to heal and evolve my family.

while my mom caught up on sort of , I made these

My mom is having to dramatically change her diet right now due to health reasons. My cousin invited my mom over so we could have things she could eat together. It was a really precious weekend.

I really appreciate my cousin for bringing us together, and bringing the energy of play and joy around a dietary change.

I also got to spend time with this precious creature

Have you ever heard of Andragogy?

This term developed by Malcolm Knowles in 1980 refers to adult learning. According to Knowles there are 5 pillars to adult learning:

1. The Need to Know or “What’s in it for me”- Why they are learning something

2. Leverage Expierence- Adult curriculum needs to utilize and build on pre-existing knowledge/expierences

3. Self Concept & Control- Adults need to feel responsible for their learning

4. Readiness/Reason to Learn - Adults need a reason to learn

5. Problem Orientation- Adults often want to learn to solve a problem

6. Intrinisic Motivation- Adults learn best when genuinely motivated.

As a chronically curious person, I feel some friction with these things! I’m glad all my learning isn’t problem oriented, but I do feel how that is a big motivator.

I am entering a season of learning

As many of you know, I’m getting ready to learn about how to be financially free, and I’m also in an EMDR certification course.

One thing that helps me learn is sharing what I learn with other people!!

So I have decided to go live twice a week to share what I am learning!!!

I hope you can join me!!!

On Monday, I will be reading some poetry aloud, taking deep breaths, and doing some somatic grounding exercises to prepare for the week! Maybe I will even pull a tarot card.

On Fridays, I will also be reading some poetry and taking deep breaths, AND I will be reflecting on everything I learned over the week.

In my last poll about what you all wanted to see more of, it was clear that folks are interested in some guided healing somatics and what I’m learning! I hope to include both in these two weekly live sessions.

I hope to see you all there! I’ll be streaming on multiple platforms, but I think youtube is probably the best place to catch me. Subscribe and turn on notifications for my youtube here.

I am enraged and grieving over the violence and cruelty that dominates our post colonial world.

I grieve for the victims of the violence, and the many tangible and intangible things that are being lost, which I feel strongly affects all of us, and I also grieve for the perpetrators of the violence.

Engaging in violence destroys our humanity, it harms our soul.

We can connect the dots between soliders, PTSD, substance use, and domestic violence.

There are alternatives to a culture of destructive violence. In this post colonial world, it can be easy to believe the myths sowed by violent white supremacy: that this is the natural right way.

When in fact, colonialism is simply the result of rapid industrialization, that was only possible due to exploitation.

This way of life, which is the only life I know , is recent. This quote always helps me understand the bigger picture:

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
If we scale that to 46 years. We have been here for 4 hours, and the industrial revolution began 1 minute ago.
In that time, we have destroyed 50% of the world's forests.

People believe that humans first started walking on Earth approximately 6 million years ago

Side note: I received a public school education in South Carolina and almost all my teachers graduated from Bob Jones University, an extremely fundamental Christian Cult (my analysis, not theres). So I did not learn about this in school ! Please take anything I share with a grain of salt as I am doing my best to research/fact check on the internet.

There is so much knowledge, history and ways of being that are different from what we consider to be the obvious or only way.

One of my favorite professors, Cara Delay, once encouraged us to think about human truth as something that occurs in every culture throughout history and time.

Using this tool allowed me to root in the truth that rape and sexual violence is not an inevitable phenomenon. It is not present in every culture that has existed through space and time. I worry that younger generations will consider gun violence and mass shootings inevitable, but we know that before the first mass shooting in 1966, mass shootings did not exist.

You know what has existed in almost every culture through space and time? Gender variant people. Sexual pleasure. Birth. Family structures of interdependent care. Plants. These are the things I root in.

Anyways I am going to leave you all with this amazing grass roots resource for Palestine that I learned about on tiktok. It is called #OperationOliveBranch (you can find on tiktok using that hashtag, but not on google), and it is a spreadsheet that is tracking the needs of different families in Palestine. Please share widely.

You can click here to access.

I have also really appreciated this video that is making the rounds:

All needs can be met if they are Acknowledged

This is the title of my care plan creation guide.

The guide is truly a work of art! A printer friendly black and white/coloring book style version is also available.

When I say all needs can be met if they are acknowledged, I mean it

I have been working as a conflict navigator for about 3 years now, and I have come to learn that as humans we are often disconnected from our needs.

We may feel a need arise, and then we jump three steps ahead, manipulating situations and compromising, before we even understand what our needs are.

It can be difficult to slow down and acknowledge our needs, to breathe into them, and fully understand the what and the why.

I think it’s difficult because many of us are scared to have needs, scared to have needs that can’t be met, and these fears are rooted in real experiences where we had very important needs, often as children or young adults, that weren’t met. So as adults, I think when a need comes up, its understandable that we might automatically dismiss, or minimize our needs while simultaneous seek to meet our needs through manipulation.

But I think if we do slow down, acknowledge needs, and share them, without manipulation, we create an opportunity for our full needs to be met, either by ourselves or others.

We create clarity by making the subconscious conscious

Everyone loves direct communication, but none of us are 100% direct communicators.

This is what it means to be human. We often have feelings that we don’t understand or feelings outside of our awareness.

Sometimes we may be responding to a feeling without understanding why, and it can be very confusing for ourselves and others.

Asking myself what I need can cut through the confusion.

When I’m in a murky situation, I like to take a breath and feel into my body and name the emotions that I’m feeling. Often its not clear, and the words that come up are things like “constrained" or “crazy”

Asking myself what I need can help me orient towards self regulation as I unpack the roots of my emotion.

Often the immediate things I turn towards are coping skills that I have developed over time: going on a walk, talking to a friend, deep breaths, dancing, creative expression through paint or journaling.

So often, I notice that we try and solve feelings of discomfort through big actions, like texting ex lovers, but I encourage all of us to ride the waves of discomfort in service of revealing the true roots of our emotions. To find the things that make the unknown more bearable, and to see what emerges.

a quick note on resisting power struggle

we can be in struggle with others or with ourselves.

In American culture, we are taught to dominate and exert force as a way to resolve struggle, but as anyone who has interacted with a toddler knows, sometimes this approach can activate deep resistance, escalating the struggle.

I invite you all to instead think about how you might lean towards your own or another’s resistance, turning towards their position instead of digging your heels in your own position.

To use this strategy, it is important to be anchored in your truth. Like a kite, that can fly because of the human that anchors it to the ground, being anchored in our values and our truth allows us to explore other positions and ideas without feeling threatened.

When we can engage other people’s perspectives without feeling threatened, when we can value their truth without invalidating our own, a new world of collaboration opens to us.

my favorite collaborator… he’s anchored in something but I’m not always sure what!!!

THANK YOU ALL FOR READING I LOVE U XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

Please share with your people! I thrive on your support <3