Category Archives: mindfulness

Healing Through Connection: 2024 in the Rearview

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Humans

Posted on by
4
Pietà, Michelangelo, Rome, Italy. Photo by Phara Blair

“Partnership with a good dog has millions of advantages over partnership with even the best human being.”
—Bride and Groom, Susan Conant

What would you write, given ten minutes with this prompt?

Below is my take, and then some reflections.
Thanks to friend Joan for choosing the prompt, and for hosting Sara and me for another Mallon Writers session the other evening. We’re coming up on a year as a group, and I am so grateful for these women.

Humans.

We are remarkable–remarkably creative, resourceful, intelligent, and SHITTY.
We are wired to connect; we crave it, require it. And yet we are terrible at it too often.

How can we reconcile this paradox?
Every day we can find myriad examples of both the immense kindness and altruism, and also the most unspeakably heinous violence and destruction–all visited by us on ourselves.

FASCINATING.

What determines our behavior?

Do we each believe ourselves capable of the highest and lowest that humans can do? I do.

I believe that under certain circumstances, any given person has the potential to behave in any given way. To me, this is the most realistic and humble way to approach human nature. We think we know so much; and yet the vast majority of our behaviors and relationships are driven by how we feel. And we are largely, I think willfully, blind to this reality. Most of us live our lives far from the extremes of human altruism and violence, but I think it’s our denial of the potential of both within all/each of us that facilitates the expression of the worst by some of us.

How would the world operate if we were just a lot (or even a little) more honest about our shadows? About our light?

How interesting that the best and worst of both aspects of our nature are so unsafe to share, to remotely acknowledge the possible existence of?

Humans. We are complex, emotional beings who delude ourselves into thinking we are rational, and we oversimplify to avoid discomfort.

Oh well, it is what it is; we are what we are. Amazing–and maybe not?–that we have survived as long as we have.

Altruistic and malevolent.
Collective and individualistic.
Fit in and stand out.
Masculine and feminine.

Readers of this blog know how I embrace and relish a good, integrative paradox. The older I get the more deeply I appreciate complexity, nuance, and the importance of context and circumstance. My mounting enthusiasm for it all seems to fly counter to prevailing cultural winds wherein overgeneralization, oversimplification, and refusal to recognize, let alone tolerate or engage with complexity seem to stymie our leaders and systems with alarmingly powerful force.

Where are the leaders who can not only dance gracefully with complexity, but also lead us by example doing it?

Some days I can’t decide if I’m a cynic or an optimist. I know I’m both, and I lean net optimist. I think we are all both; thankfully we don’t all lean cynic for too long at the same time. We all hold the tension within ourselves, swayed one way or another at any given time by myriad simultaneous variables. It is what it is; we are what we are. We have survived for thousands of years and yet, thousands–even hundreds–more are not guaranteed by any means. It all depends on how we–individually and collectively–decide to treat one another and our planet, both today and forever.

So, we shall see. Anything can happen.