Dear Body December
2021
— Day 1 —
Dear body,
It’s December now, and I want to tell you a secret, but I don’t keep them inside of you. I know you don’t like them. I know you remember our heart that watched Tony Leung whisper secrets about unrequited love in the side of a ruined wall in Angkor Wat and want to do the same, but you have always let me know we don’t have secrets. And so, I’ll tell you something else, something more beautiful, more lingering, more urgent, more inviting, instead: __________.
But nothing comes.
I wake up with you on this sunny afternoon in California, my cat sleeping between our legs, the slow echo of closing doors and truck tires on the street, the thought of a cold foam mocha on its way to us and the leftover kitfo from last night in the fridge, and I realize I just want to fill you up with yumminess for you, my body, are my unrequited love.
I put on a pot of Magnum Mackinac Island Fudge coffee for later, and I breathe in the scent of a clean counter and new coffee grounds. I nourish you and refresh you, and you come alive and alert.
A fire grows between your shoulder blades and turns into a blazing gold ball that glows and becomes brighter, turning into a dragon.
And once the dragon is born outside of our spine, we sigh and calm and cool down again staring into the eyes of our fire starter until he flies away. And as I watch him become bigger and bigger, eventually dissolving in the sky, I imagine this is our relationship: you and me : prickly skin and strong energy that dissolves and becomes softer and more alert. It’s no longer a secret.
Hands
— Day 2 —
— Day 3 —
For many years the strangling expressed itself in an abstract longing for death and suicidal ideation. I bought a poster of Picasso’s Guernica when I was eighteen and stared at it hanging above my bed at night and in the mornings that I found myself unable to get out of bed to go to class my first year of college. I imagined myself trampled and distorted like the images in the painting or killing myself with a samurai sword from my sword collection. I thought there was no beauty left in the world, and I didn’t want to exist in a world without beauty.
I now recognize my depression and feeling of a lack of beauty in the world were brought on by being separated from my adoptive mother for the first time. Even though it was just an hour’s drive between us, it triggered my fear of abandonment and the original wound of losing my birth mother in the first moment I drew breath. Because I couldn’t feel the pain of separation and grief over the loss of my mothers, I expressed it in a detached and fragmented way I could understand.
It’s a pattern I repeated when I fell in love with a string of older women I idolized, who filled my desert with beauty, vitality, water and a lot of drama! I accepted their verbal and emotional abuse because I wanted that life force and beauty to keep filling me and to one day make me whole. I was full of longing and so hungry for something to fill it that after two years of sexual abuse, when I did lose them all, it almost overpowered my will to live again. But, I knew beauty still existed in the world this time because I was having profound spiritual visions and awakenings in my body.
Throughout my 20’s, I had heard from several adoptees somatic therapy has been the most healing for pre-verbal and preconscious adoption trauma, but my personality had been oriented towards the mind and thinking, not feeling and certainly not the body, so I was really skeptical. Despite my skepticism, I had an equally intense hunger to heal the fragmentations and separations in myself and become more whole. I found a Somatic Experiencing® (SE) practitioner and conscious dance teacher who has helped me become aware of my body: its sensations, rhythms and ways of knowing. Within a year of working with her, I felt like a whole person.
I also began working with a psychodynamic crisis specialist shortly after and about a year and a half into our therapy, I asked if I had borderline personality disorder (BPD), and she said she hadn’t ruled it out. She believes I do have borderline tendencies from the emotional dysregulation of being surrendered at birth and sexually abused the first few months of my life in Korean foster care. Even though she still goes back and forth on a diagnosis, she revealed in her 30 years of experience, people who ask if they have a personality disorder generally do.
It’s such a uniquely beautiful (and traumatized) way of understanding the world, we can often recognize it in ourselves if we’re self-aware. When I realized I might be borderline, which has more recently come to be called emotionally dysregulated, I felt relief. A weight released for me. My friends and some of my mentors rushed to reassure me I wasn’t borderline when I began speaking about it because I don’t exhibit the volatile emotional dysregulation they associate with it in my relationships with them. Each time they tried to comfort me, I felt my breath and body tighten, the freedom and relief beginning to disappear. And that’s when I began to pay attention to what I’d been learning in SE: to listen to those sensations and rhythms in my body, to trust myself rather than other people, and go towards what feels good in my body.
And that’s when my true healing began. I moved towards all the things that felt good, and what felt good was more self-inquiry, more embodiment and more soul-based work. I began training with The Academy for Soul-based Coaching in Clean Language and Holding Space, Tamalpa Institute in the Life/Art Process®, and in Reiki energy work to go deeper into my psyche and body mythology, learn its metaphors, rebalance and reconnect to my own life force, and fully embody and express these metaphors in my life.
I want myself to be submerged in the deep waters of my belly, and I’m experiencing excitement, adventure, and the possibilities bubbling there inside of me. I have integrated my 3-5 year old little girl, and I’m less self-conscious and concerned with what and how other people are receiving me. I split a fire burning outside of my solar plexus into three balls, two in my hands, and the third ingested into my core so that my little girl could go inside of it and grow in the echo chamber of my womb. The fire in my core digested and became a sun shining from inside of me outwards, and I was able to dance with my resistance, touch upon my grief, dance with freedom, dance with the person I love most in the world, and with myself.
And even though it’s been a couple of years since my first trainings in Soul-based Coaching and the Life/Art Process, I am still not fully submerged in my deep waters. But, I have waded into the vast ocean of my heart. I have opened to the grief, and I feel much more sensations and emotions, rather than being cutoff and numb to what has happened to my body. The water is now about up to my knees, and its waves and wetness have replaced the desert. And, since stepping into the water, I am no longer hungry. I have been nourished by the metaphors that connected me to my birth mother, ancestral line and even to my motherland of Korea, and the embodiment of these metaphors provided me a rootedness, solidness and way of walking through the world that is finally tangible and concrete. I am here. I am embodied and in my body. And, I am finally full.
Wrinkles
— Day 4 —
— Day 5 —
My spine is a rainbow of sinew and tissue and muscles moving together, a “finely tuned instrument breathing.” I gel, glide, slide and jive like a jazz man playing my body. I “move in close,” feel the rhythm, fall out of the beat, feel the jungle, find it again, let it move me, surrender, lose my ground, and get caught in the swirl. There’s a sea of blue and green, purple, pink and orange. Then purple and aqua overtake the scene, my heart enfolded in their ribbons. I just want to dance unburdened, so I drop the two threads and feel free to just move how my body wants to move. Primal. Freaky, like the strange music that takes me to strange places. I know the strange. My body likes it smooth and weird and pulsing.
Note: This was written after Stacey Butcher’s amazing Open Floor International Non-Profit dance this morning.
— Day 6 —
— Day 9 —
— Day 12 —
Dear face,
I see years in your structure, deeply embedded yet becoming more and more defined. I have always loved that about older women, and I get to see you becoming exactly what I have always loved in others. I knew it would happen, but it feels like a surprise. I used to think I would die before it would happen. And here we are, face, alive and being hit on by the younger women who see in our clarity, our beauty, our chaos that stronger definition that they want to hold onto and not let go of. They want to get lost in you, face, like I used to get lost in you, and now I thank whatever god will listen that I can just sit back and admire you like a book I’ve already read every page of before. And still, every time I look at you, there’s something more.
— Day 13 —
I have always been a feminist, I suppose. A precocious girl who became an arrogant teenager who became an innocent woman-girl and a ferocious woman. At least, the very insides of me feel ferocious. Waves of pain turn to waves of sorrow and waves of fury but instead of tossing and turning, I grind my teeth at night. It’s all I can do. Their constant motion a badge of my own force of will, for they, too, will not stay in their place. My teeth move, grind, cut and reinforce a youthful battle cry. A hard fought war against my arrogant orthodontist, whose arrogance could only match my own as a teenager. And because his arrogance was the only one that could match mine, he became the symbol I could rage against. This arrogant man who would not listen to my voice, who ignored my wants and needs (as did my parents in forcing me to get the metal braces I begged not to have). My teeth are a reminder of early life betrayal, a memorial of disempowerment and loss. I liked my natural teeth and natural smile. I didn’t want to change a thing about my body, but now, I do. I hate my teeth, and they consistently cause me pain, for they have no roots and cannot stay in one place. Refusing to do what I was supposed to now means rotting, ever restless teeth and a smile I no longer enjoy from one side. The only remaining part of me that is rootless and unnatural, but still ferocious.
— Days 14 and 16 —
Dancing around my California Christmas Tree to LOVA’s Dance for the Hell Of It. This song made it to my top songs in 2021 according to Spotify, and I’ve been feeling these vibes this week, particularly in my ongoing love/hate relationship with California. I hope it inspires others to dance for the hell of it, and not just this day, but every day!
My own Life/Art Process in action
I’m feeling torn, pulled into the polarities within my own existence, struggling to stay connected and present. I find my self to be facing a dichotomy within my own design. The conscious 6 line wanting to detach and be on the roof, lingering in the sensations of oneness and being. And my unconscious 3 line wanting to live life again and connect at the basic human level; to create and achieve things now and feel them with my two hands: wild, unleashed, courageous, compassionate, nourishing and connected.
And so, I close out this year with an old metaphor returning: my inner warrior with a blade of truth and now also, a blade of beauty — the beauty of my 19 year old self who loved knives of all kinds in one hand; and my inner romantic in the other — the one grounded in love, acceptance, compassion and trust. These hands hold my power to resist, to offer my gifts, to express my inner world outwards.
And this heart is full of spirit, of divine wisdom, of trust in my design and its own unique timing. It creates a bubble around me, isolating me from others, and my hands break through, reconnecting me to the world and the minutiae of these stories playing out — my stories — today.
— Day 18 —
A message from my mother:
I see in you a gentle, wise, calming, credible presence. Even when you understandably become angry at me, you’re able to bring upon the calm. And last year when I was rejected for the appointment you were just perfect. You let me know that how I was feeling was legitimate instead of telling me it wasn’t a big deal, then you helped me put it in perspective and move forward.
A message from my ancestral tribe:
In you there is a dance of cherry blossoms and winter stillness. I know your strength and sense of sight can move through generations of ice with the grace and ease you embody in your soul and physical body. I see in you the transmutative hope of our generations.
In you is the dragon’s breath, our chance for a more powerful voice in this world. Even if you feel alone, we are here beside you, behind you and within you. In you, I see our gifts live on and will reach more than we could realize in our homeland. Stay strong. Stay true. And call on us. We are here for you.
A message from my therapist:
Intelligent, intellectual, depth, seeking self knowledge, seeker, observing, ambitious, determined, flow, introspective, multi-perspective, self directed, dancer, seeking embodiment and groundedness, thoughtful, self conscious yet not self conscious; concerned and attached to what people think, yet rebellious and don’t give a damn.
A message from R:
I see in you a colleague, a friend, a mentor and spiritual guide. I see a woman warrior dancing with a sword with long flowing red wings. I see the Red Frame. I see the wide, sweeping expanse of my metaphor landscape we explored through Soul-Based Coaching. I see the walk we took around Virginia Lake in Reno when you talked to me about where trauma resides in the body. I see the pink sparkly cowboy boots you bought in Virginia City and the framed “Carpe that Fuckin’ Diem” poster on the wall in my office. I see the essays we wrote to each other like letters, lives and compliments, contrasts, sometimes running parallel. The skyscraper in a cornfield, the star over the desert.
A slight reworking of the words of wisdom from my ancestral tribe, the Ochi Ona.
— Day 19 —
The story in my throat. . .
My December altar redesigned to invoke and honor my ancestors in Dohee Lee’s Grief and Gratitude Ritual in Korean shamanism and the Life/Art Process on Saturday, December 18.
The Ochi Ona lives within me — my fierce heart and bold voice. They come to this place within me when invited. I need to clear the channel, remove the charring and debris to speak their wisdom more fully and reawaken this connection.
Your roots ground me in my belly, your songs rise through my heart, and your wisdom is spoken in my voice. I am rooted here inside the columns that hold each life force to continue proudly with love.
Dear Ochi Ona, Robert and Julia Smith, and Elizabeth Rothert —
You are in the light that illumines my path behind as well as forward. I see you in my waking dreams along a beach, the sand and the water uniting all my worlds together and all my words.
What stories can I continue to see in myself that might lead me back to you?
Summer days at the cottage now also gone, me hiding in the footstool I found again in California. Your imprint lives within my chest, pulsing and beating. These images echoing here: going and returning, going and returning, going and returning, going and returning. And the stories, too, go and return.
I thank you and honor you. The paths you’ve walked have shaped my own; the paths of my Korean ancestors in my Ochi Ona tribal coven, and the paths of my adopted grandparents. All of you give shape and voice to my path. You are in the low tones and the soft hums: awakened, dancing, holding space for my own tones and shapes to form and also take root. I remember you, still, as you remember me.
— Day 25 —
Snapshots of the past and snapshots of the future orient me to the present. A week and a half ago, I had a conversation with my wise sage self—the oldest part of me who was feeling bitter and burned out on humanity. I felt her bitterness throughout my body and as it was spreading, my present day self told her what gives us purpose and makes us who we are is our passion for humanity, and that has been a defining feature of my soul throughout my lifetimes. I’ve seen several past lives in which it has been the case, and I urged her not to lose sight of that. I could see her being inspired by my words, and as the bitterness left my body, my present self was also affected. I learned older people can also learn from the young.
And now, as I look at a picture of my 5 and a half year old kindergarten self posing on her swing, I remember how much I loved posing for these pictures and how comfortable I was in my body as a child. I dragged my best friend into the back room of my house and kissed him that year. And two years later, when I heard he was telling everyone at school I was his girlfriend, I shouted at him from across the playground that we were not going out and he was not my boyfriend while everyone looked on and laughed.
My younger selves had a boldness I tend to romanticize. Even so, I don’t know if I have anything to teach this kindergartner. Her face dares me to be as steadfast as she in being who we are. She tells me she thinks she would win, and she’s probably right because she has the inexperience of youth to think that she is right about everything.
— Day 29 —
Thank you, body, for all that I contain within and without:
my blood, my bones, my tongue, my wisdom and my mystery, my dry and parched skin, my fists, my fingers and their fine lines and fine prints, my hair and my roots, my other roots, the half-chewed food I swallowed too quickly, my delicious coffee, my saliva, my cells, my being, my pain, my memories, my unspoken words, my muscles, my throat, my hands, my sleepless nights and sleepless mornings, my eyes and all their blurry images, my daily contacts and their clarity of vision, all the unshed tears, my terrible posture, our ability to be corrected, all the things I’ll forget to list, my expanded capacity to feel, sparkling water, deep belly breaths, all the laughter, my full chapped lips and all the parts of you I peel off, the caves within our heart, the desert and the water, the tension, the spaciousness, my personality, the history in my hips, broken toenails, all my vital organs, and the unvital ones too, my back body, all my personas, all my vertebrae, all my cravings, my small ears with their wax and attentive listening, my nose and sense of smell, my soft features and lack of definition, my inner forests and outward mountains, my wide legs and small feet, all the dances we’ve had, thousands of lifetimes, and all these words we’ve spoken.
