Hello you,
I had every intention of sending a long, well-considered piece today. I had every intention of letting it brew and unfold slowly, writing drafts and honing my words with dedication, paring them back to the cleanest truth.
It didn’t happen that way. Life has a tendency to get complicated, doesn’t it? Instead, I come to you with two vignettes from my life right now and an invitation. No tidy conclusions or morals of the story or even big learning ‘a-ha!’ moments, just a life being lived and noticed.
1.
Endings are funny. Leaving a city that has been home for fifteen years is strange. I can feel an urgency and scarcity rising up in me. Like I need to get it all done before the deadline of the moving van. See every person I’ve loved here and soak the pleasure of their company deep into my marrow. As though the gates of the city walls will close behind me and I’ll never be allowed back. And similarly, I feel a rising urge, teetering on desperation, to run around the city saying goodbye to my favourite places.
Goodbye to the sandy shore where the banks of the Thames are littered with old cow bones, tumbled clean by the river’s dirty water.
Goodbye to that one specific spot where I could sit in the brutalist urban embrace of The Barbican and still be surrounded by wildflowers.
Goodbye to my favourite loop around Victoria Park, the one I walked everyday last year until we could greet each other like old friends. The route which brought me parakeet feathers and herbal medicines, and held me as relationships ended and began.
And even more esoteric, goodbye to the feeling of a metropolis mapped in my body. I know that this palimpsest of a city will keep shifting and my internal maps, so carefully walked into existence over the years, will become as outdated as the A-Z I bought when I first moved here in 2003.
I want to gather it all into me. I feel the greed and the grasping. As though I could protect myself from the pain of change if I could just hold tight to everything this city has meant to me. But it’s impossible. Or rather everything this city has meant is already in me. There’s nothing to grab.
This city has been my home and, for better or worse, it’s made me. The doors won’t be locked as I leave, my loved ones aren’t going anywhere. All I can do is sit in the cacophony of feelings – joy, sadness, gratitude, love, excitement, fear – and be with it all in present tense.
2.
I’m lying on the floor of my office. When I first lay down I could feel the chill of the not-quite-Spring-yet February day creeping in at the edges of my blanket, but I barely notice it now. I’m breathing, strong and deep. Inhale into the belly, into the chest, and out. Over and over.
My body is lit up with sensation, like I’m filled with rushing pin pricks of light. Each breath intensifies it. The buzz grows and grows, at first it’s a tingle, then a hum, then it feels like I’ve got white noise in every cell in my body. My arms and hands are full of it, they’ve grown tight with tetany, and a little piece of me is freaking out even though I know this is totally normal.
I’m standing at a threshold. I can spend the remaining minutes of my practice (maybe two or three songs) fighting the experience or I can surrender to it. My ego and thinking mind want me to back off. To slow my breath and retreat to the safety of the known. But there’s a quiet counter argument from my intuition. I can sense that there’s some magic to be found if I stay with this intensity.
As if she can read my internal experience, my teacher quietly invites me to breathe more fully into my chest. My heart. I let my rib cage grow fuller with each inhale. It amazes me, even after six months of breathwork training, that my body has capacity for such spaciousness. As the breath moves through me I feel something being washed away. Some energetic stickiness shifting in me. Like waves carrying away a sand castle piece by piece until nothing remains to block their flow.
And just like that it’s over. I let go of the rhythm and let my breathing settle to something quieter. Let the new space cleared within me settle as well.
3.
And now the invitation. I’m coming towards the end of my breathwork facilitator training and I'm running a series of donation-based breathwork group practices. Do you want to come breathe with me?
Breathwork is an active meditation practice. We bring attention and intention to our breath, which brings us into deeper connection with our experience of life. Breathing in this way brings us into present-time relationship with our body, makes space for us to express what needs to be expressed, and brings awareness to the energy that moves within each of us.
It’s a practice that can offer mental clarity, connection to creativity, clearing of old patterns, a sense of aliveness, and so much more. I would love to share it with you.
Other Things
My love Joeli Caparco has been carefully and joyfully creating Charting You, a course to rediscover the lost parts of yourself. It’s one part data nerd, and one part witchy cycle charting magic, and honestly if I could join without making it weird by staring at her with loveheart eyes the whole time I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I’m obsessed with Worlds Beyond Number. Like listen to 8 hours of content in a day kind of obsessed. You like impeccable storytelling, improvisation, and developing some serious parasocial relationships? I can highly recommend it.
Leila Sadeghee has a magical mystery train of esoteric workshops on the go. Up this weekend is Stability Town - all about steadying your energy. If the last workshop is anything to go by you can expect practical mystical tools and lots of train jokes. What’s not to love?
Okay, normally I have a bigger list of things that have been filling my world with sparkles but, y’all, I’m moving house and redecorating and I don’t think you’re that excited by paint colour choices and furniture considerations. Let me know if I’m wrong? I can tell you all about my love for Tobacconist.