Defrosting my Freeze Response

Join me live to talk about how I thawed out from a lifetime stuck in a perpetual freeze

Hello beloved friends

I’ve been trying to hold a fire in my yard for months! I finally lit it up on Tuesday. I had been postponing the fire because I wanted to enjoy it with friends, but when I committed to a solofire, a bunch of my homies ended up coming through unexpectedly…like moth to a flame

My home is surrounded by woods, and sitting with the fire and the trees as the sun went down revealed to me that my home is home to many.

I heard what sounded like a pack of monkeys ( I know what this sounds like because of my time in Delhi),

Throwback to the monkeys I met in India

but I think it was actually a pack of coyotes!

Today I went on a walk around the neighborhood around sunset, and I heard them again.

My first reaction was fear, and my second reaction was to challenge the fear. While I should treat wildlife with reverence and humility, I also want to manage my fear and stay present with the gratitude for our presence.

It’s so easy to become disconnected from our wild ancestors, and to get caught up in our desires for self preservation, but we as humans have so much power over our animal relatives, and our fear can drive us into cruelty.

Ultimately I am grateful to be in community with coyotes, and I am glad they are my neighbors.

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If you are a newsletter reader, you know I have been exceptionally tired recently. The reason for this exhaustion is probably rooted in the anniversary of the pandemic and trauma responses related to an ongoing genocide, but it is also because I am writing two newsletters a week now, and I am going live twice a week!

I know that I am probably doing too much, providing you with more content than you need or can consume, but I also know that for some people, my content is a lifetime.

I know, because I center my past self

I try and be a person that could’ve prevented suffering for my past self. This perspective guides me in my work.

I encourage you to engage with my content imperfectly: Catch what feels right, take what resonates, trust that you are meant to see what you are meant to see.

By subscribing, you allow me to sustain this work

I believe my work is critical for liberation. That’s why I do it. Much of the work I do is unpaid. I am privileged to afford to work for free, and I am also committed to honoring my purpose.

I’m really out here, as the kids on tik tok say, popping my pussy

I’m putting my whole back into this having a purpose thing.

Really grateful to Tassili’s raw reality cafe for this sexy vegan wrap that has been helping me SUSTAIN my momentum

I would say I’m still unfolding

I aspire to be so….open, like an unfolded map

thanks for being on the journey with me.

This poem by Vinay Krishnan is really speaking to me.

We have to stay hopeful, stay engaged, and stay talking about violence and oppression.

I don’t have much else to say, except that I think rumors are true, and that Tik Tok is being neutralized because our voices and information sharing are so powerful. We have to keep uplifting stories and supporting each other in meaningful ways.

When I think about being frozen, I think about being a princess

When I say frozen, I’m talking about being stuck in a trauma response

We are meant to expand and contract

think about our lungs and breath, inhaling and exhalng. Think about our hands, opening and closing into fists.

Our nervous system is the same.

We are meant to expand and contract, and somewhere inbetween the two extremes is our resiliant baseline.

Sometimes, due to trauma or stress we can find ourselves stuck in an expanded — or contracted — state.

There is a Jungian link between being stuck in the “freeze” state and the archetypal sleeping beauty

If being a princess is about being frozen, what does it mean to want to kill the princess?

In this symbolic story, we can understand the princess and her killer as two aspects of one person

and the desire to kill can be understood as the desire to heal

In healing, there is unexpected grief as we let ourselves die, and then be born again

It sounds like a leap, but think about the use of mirrors and reflection

We will talk about this and more on the live!

Let me know what you think of the newsletter by responding to this email! As always, if you love it tell your people about it!!!

see u next week!! love u!!