Category Archives: love

Healing Through Connection: 2024 in the Rearview

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When we find our people, we can truly be ourselves.

How are we, my friends?

What are we looking/thinking/listening through from 2024? What catches our attention, stands out? How do we feel in mind, body, spirit, and soul from/for it all?

What emerges for me:
Community. Belonging. Liberation. Sharing. Healing with Help.

Readers of this blog know about Ethos, my gym. Tim and Victoria named it aptly, and now Tim and Cory operate it with integrity and vision: “Train. Recover. Connect.” What other gym prioritizes relationship in its mission and tagline? These are my people! I worried that moving from a small garden unit in River North to a space almost three times larger in Roscoe Village would somehow alter the culture–the ethos–one never knows what can happen with such transitions. Happily, I think it has only grown stronger, and now there is space for more of us to benefit. It doesn’t matter who you are, how much you lift, your age, or whatever. If you bring your full self and engage, you’re one of us–because we all make it so. It’s amazing. Of note, making friends in their 20s and 30s and outside of medicine has broadened my perspective and improved my life more than I knew I needed, and I could not be more grateful. We never know who our people may include until we meet them.

So go the leaders, so go the led.

In any domain, culture is influenced most strongly by the designated leaders, the ones with authority and power. This year I found AJ: Musician, composer, Quinn creator, animal lover, motorbike enthusiast, filmmaker, amateur home DIY engineer, and all around beautiful human. His fans call ourselves Angels, a fast growing community drawn together principally in admiration for AJ, and bonded in various other ways. Watch any of AJ’s videos on TikTok or read his Instagram posts to see this humble, curious, funny, loving, and nerdy man connect with his fan group in the most wholesome, extemporaneous, and unassuming ways. Listen to his Quinn audios to experience soft and strong, dominant and submissive, gentle and powerful, masculine and feminine humanity in all our complexity, brought to life with voice only, and know why we hit play over 250,000 times since he started creating them in June. By December 16 we had listened a total of over 1.7 million minutes–almost 3.5 years.

During the 4+ hour holiday live stream today when he shared and then responded to messages from Angels around the world, I was floored by the power and energy of mutual uplift between AJ and us. Yes, he has amassed a following that lifts and amplifies him and his work. He has also gathered and cultivated, just by being himself, a tribe of women who lift one another in empathic, present, compassionate, and utterly humane love. Listeners comment on how his content and community create the safety to be fully ourselves that we experience no place else. That is profound. It’s all him, and also not–it’s all of us, together, amplifying one another. By the end of the live stream AJ himself reflected on how desperately this reciprocally loving and accepting energy is needed in the world. So now it’s his and the Angels’ mission to spread it. He leads by dynamic and responsive example. And while he’s most visible as a strong male ally of women in this space, I am sure that his example will also reach, move, and support men–those ready to more fully integrate their emotional selves and connect more deeply and meaningfully with women, other men, and non-binary people alike.

Be a candle. Use your light to light others. Your light diminishes not at all for the effort, and there is only more light in the world.

In case you wonder, yes, I am still immersed in the romance audio universe and loving every moment. The friends I have made around the world from Colorado to Oregon to the UK and Australia form yet another community of mutual uplift, with its own unique and loving vibe. This tribe introduced me to Quinn, the app for audio erotica. This new immersion has taken my sexual education to the next level, and sharing my learning has benefited more than just myself. I know I am far from alone in this expansion, and as AJ’s Angels express repeatedly, the Quinn messages of self- and other-acceptance, love, and uplift heal and save us all.

Communities like Ethos, Angels, and romance audio gather, enfold, champion, and strengthen parts of ourselves that we may otherwise minimize, repress, or even reject. Such loving and uplifting communities help make us whole. Enveloped in such ardent belonging, we are liberated to truly be and express our real, unmitigated selves, no matter how quirky, weird, or previously outcast.

Looking ahead to 2025, I will work to continue forging Community everywhere I am. I will point out shared humanity across difference and divergence whenever, wherever, and with whomever I see and hear it. Our people inhabit more diverse spaces than we know or admit. My conversations since the American presidential election continue to teach me this. I could not have known 9.7 years ago how aptly I named this blog.

Healing Through Connection.

That pretty much says it all.

Continuity

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I know you.

It has taken time.
Our initial meeting may or may not have facilitated it.
You may or may not have made it easy.
I persisted.
And now we have been through things together.
It has been well worth the effort and energy.

You know me.
This is easy, as I wear my heart on my sleeve–always have.
It doesn’t take much to know me; but I don’t let just anybody in.
I give the benefit of the doubt; I also trust my protective instincts.

Time.
There is no substitute.
And it’s not enough.
Knowing requires engagement, intentional and volitional.
Time helps, providing opportunity, enabling continuity.

With enough time and encounters, knowing emerges organically.
Over years and decades it becomes intuitive, if we pay attention.

I see you. I think of you when I see things you like.
I hear you–not just when you speak, but when you cross my mind.
I anticipate your words and expressions in response to ideas and opinions.
I know you.

Knowing and feeling known nourish us.
No matter the context.
We are wired to connect–to one another, our fellow humans.
Meeting over and again, small and big moments alike, each building on the last.
Memories accumulating, recollections shared.

Life unfolds.
We are who we are at our core, and continue to be so.
We also learn, grow, and evolve.
Change and stay the same.
Those who know us see no contradiction here.
Rather, known in our wholeness over time, in continuity, we all make sense.

This season, may we reflect on and consider how we know and are known.
May we find the courage and resolution to express and connect in depth and meaning.
May we practice openness, curiosity, non-judgment, and acceptance more than other things.
May our relationships strengthen and tighten in the best ways.

In this life, our relationships save us.
Continuity of connection, if we have the fortune, is a priceless gift.
Let us not take it for granted.

Holding Love

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from Instagram, 11/20/2024

I’m tired tonight, friends.

Husband says he sees November as stressful for me every year (for the tenth year in a row now), referring to the 30 days of daily blogging. I don’t want to admit it, but it’s at least partially true. It shows in my eating habits, I didn’t quite have my edge in the gym yesterday, and there are likely other consequences. I’m not losing sleep these last couple years, which is a drastic improvement from before. And I’m still cooking regularly now, which is also better! So it’s not bad news at all; this is good stress. It’s probably a 95% challenge, 5% threat sensation, and 10/10 meaning. It’s already two-thirds over, and I think these posts could be some of my best writing yet. Win-win-win!

One of the biggest challenges the last 20 days (starting 10/31) has been fully articulating an idea that may have only occurred to me within 12 hours of posting. I feel I have met that challenge well, and I’m proud of the output so far as it is honest and offered wholeheartedly.

My first solid idea for tonight’s post came to me while eating dinner and listening to What Is Health? by Peter Sterling. It was so exciting and also quite complex, so I procrastinated. It needs to marinate a bit more. Then the universe sent me the Instagram story in the photo above from my friend James. It reads:

Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.” –Ram Daas

My immediate response to James: “OMG YAAAASS!!! What if we all tapped into this deep well of Agape just a little more every day!?!? [Home Alone face emoji, smiley surrounded by hearts emoji]
James replied, “Yes, what if?? What’s stopping us?”
We agreed that conversation is best saved for our next in person communion.
I shared the story on my own account with a similar admonishing question, feeling a full body rush of joy, optimism, and possibility.

We tend to think of love as an emotion. We probably experience it as such at least some of the time–a limbic sensation that comes over us and then dissipates–a signal of something to pay attention to, something that matters to us. But I learned recently that love is more of a drive, like hunger or thirst; it manifests consistently, if in waves, impelling us to behave and relate in ways that advance our own survival. Romantic love drives us to partner and procreate. Pair bonding and parental love drives us to tend to our progeny so our genes may live on for another generation. So if we think of it this way and apply it to relationships in nested scale (family unit, village, state, nation, all of humanity), how does that alter our perspective?

To me, it all suddenly feels so simple. We are all here to love one another, to help us all survive and thrive. We are all someone’s child. Many of us are someone’s sibling, someone’s parent. I hope we are all someone’s good friend. We all share this planet, this lifetime. We are all here. Now. Living. Doing our Best. So when I’m tired, I can relax and rest in this one simple idea: Love.

What if we accept Ram Daas’s premise? What if unconditional love really is part of our deep inner being? And what if we fully accepted, acknowledged, and manifested this just a little more every day? How would that feel? What would we do as a result? How would we be?
I feel at peace. I feel confident that we can figure it all out, whatever it is, ODOMOBaaT–one day, one moment, one breath at a time. I smile more. I approach people with ease and friendliness, as if any person I meet could be my next new good friend. I am my favorite self.

So I Hold Love for Us tonight, friends. It took 20 days for it to emerge this month. I wondered when and how it would come up; it was #6 on my pre-NaBlo prep list of 30 things to Hold. How does it feel when you Hold Love? Where and when is it easy and difficult? How and what do you do when it’s really hard?

What if …?