It's currently sunny in Denver...
Here it’s winter solstice, though outside it feels like April, and very dry. I feel more akin to fire and air these days than water and earth, the elements I associate with winter. I’m halfway through the program at Colorado School of Healing Arts—and moving close to completing my dissertation in the English and Literary Arts program. I am thinking about the move from “literary” to “healing,” and what even are “arts.”
I was trying to think of what to write here, knowing only that I wanted to say a few things about the massage program, and decided to draw a card from my tarot deck, the Tarot del Fuego by Ricardo Cavolo. I drew the nine of wands. In my life right now, this is about finishing the PhD despite academia and its bureaucracy; it’s about starting new work and feeling exhausted in new and startling ways; about making my way back to writing, eventually, with something in me rekindled; about the need for boundaries like never before.
I’ve thought a lot about self-care since starting the massage program. Bodywork is physical labor; it’s also caregiving. It can be physically and emotionally draining. Yet I’ve also been noticing the wonderful benefits of receiving regular bodywork. My nervous system is changing. I feel those changes when I’m talking to other people, when I’m eating, when I’m moving around in the world. I feel them when I’m alone and quiet. I feel them when I’m watering my plants. I’ve been thinking about how pain responds to the stories we tell about it. “Healing” includes a process of changing the story we’re telling. Our bodies’ narratives are not fixed.
I’m very excited to be doing work that I think can allow people space and encouragement to be with themselves, to go inside their own experience, inhabit their bodies more intuitively and connectedly than they otherwise might. I don’t think bodywork is often understood as permission, but it is, or can be, just that—permission to be with and experience yourself. You can check in on your story and how it’s changing.
I’ll be finishing the massage program in June, and then I’ll be giving bodywork in and around Denver. This newsletter is sure to be become bodywork-oriented, though from the body and mind of someone who loves to think associatively about narrative, and plants, and movement, and water, and... If that doesn’t appeal to you, please feel free to unsubscribe <3 If you think someone you know might be interested in this body-narrative connection, please send them here.
There’s a lot going on. I hope you’re doing well, or okay, or however you need to be doing. If you want to reach out, I’d love to hear from you.
-Evelyn