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essays tagged with {connection 🌹} are short snippet pieces about my actual thoughts and my actual life, before they become teachings or analysis. they’re for connection. just like it says on the tin. so glad you’re here. love you.
I've lived on the peripheries of healing worlds for all of my adult life, and most of my adolescence. always just on the peripheries though, because to move properly within those spaces feels like gently wrapping myself in layers of contempt and disdain.
for as long as I can remember, I’ve had a spiritual and energetic allergy to the concept of healing. at least, as its so often spoken about in the context of white-washed, westernised, commodified modernity. healing is a space that’s always felt like imagining yourself as wrong, broken, inadequate, unfinished, somehow less than in some real or symbolic way is the price of entry. at the threshold of that worldview is a salesman with a bottomless box of trinkets and amulets. “what is your Not Enoughness telling you today?” he says. “ah! I have the answer! take this potion. it will make you Enough. you can never be Enough without it. taking the potion is your obligation.”
to imagine yourself as whole and divine is to exit that conversation entirely. it holds nothing for you. the trinkets are useless.
connotations of brokenness are built into the word itself. heal comes from an old English word that meant to make whole. with my eighth house Pluto in Sagittarius squaring my moon, I am an unending experiment in the philosophy of Wholeness-making. I’ve landed now into an understanding that feels closest to the exhale into the lap of the Mother that I've been seeking. come into this worldview with me. even if it’s only for now. if it feels good to you too, please borrow it. play with it. make it yours.
to heal, or to make whole, is the process by which we call ourselves Home. the discarded and shamed aspects of the Self, the ones we tried to mutilate, amputate, and throw from ourselves, are in a constant process of attempting to return Home. they are ghosts that haunt us. these parts of us might be the characters we played in childhood that introduced us to what it felt like to be rejected. often, they’re the aspects that are least likely to be commodified or made useful by capitalism, so we inherit the mythology that they are wrong.
they’re the parts of us that hurt, the ones that mean we need care and attention, the ones that make us bigger and louder and more unique and noticeable. we amputate them. they don’t simply go away when this happens. they exist within us, but specifically and distinctly separated from the Whole. to heal then, is to bring them home. to integrate them back into the Self, so as to be one with them again.
sometimes, this integration looks like less physical pain. less suffering. more money! more friends! more happiness! more romance! better sex! all the other marketable and commodified things!!
sometimes, healing, or to make Whole, to call the Lost and mutilated and amputated parts Home, means more pain. more days in bed. more care received. longer recovery time. more hours spent in melancholy. but the mythology around it is different. Wholeness has returned, and with it, Aliveness - and a feeling of profound interconnectedness not just within, but also without. as above, so below, et cetera. this too, is healing.
my relationship with pain is nuanced, textured, educational, and life-long. I carry around a whole slew of emotional health-related diagnoses, getting some of the earliest ones when I was a super weird little seven-year-old, and building up a hefty collection through my teens. my very first menstrual bleed tore at my spine and had me vomiting all over the place (the endometriosis had already begun knitting away at my insides), and being hit by that truck when I was 16 shattered my body in ways I will feel forever.
I spent all my late teens and early twenties walking with a cane, my endo had reached stage 3 by that point, and it was subtly but brutally exacerbating the injuries the truck had done to my lower spine and my left hip. I couldn’t walk and breathe at the same time without agony, and even with the cane, I couldn’t really manage more than 15 or 20 minutes of movement at a time.
I “miraculously” cured my endometriosis when I was 23 - to the point where there was no evidence it was ever there in the first place (the how is a strange question. it was a combination of the mythwork and body mapping that I now teach and practice, radically divesting from internalised capitalism, and meeting the Spectre that was my gaping, oozing, spurting Mother Wound), and all of my physical pain left me. I could walk again. not just walk, but run. dance. fuck. breathe. there was a part of my still-colonised mind that glommed onto the before-and-after montage, hard. it attached itself firmly to the myth that pain meant failure, and being pain-free meant success.
this is where the hyper-individualist ableism of capitalism snakes its many tendrils around healing and wellness. because even inside of somatic-type conversations, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of if you just Do The Work™️ and heal all of your trauma then you won’t be in pain anymore. pain means you’ve fucked up. pain means you haven’t done the right things, and if only you hadn’t been so lazy and actually done those other practices you said you’d do then your chronic pain would magickally go away. if you’re in pain, then it’s here to Teach You Something™️. you get it. it’s toxic as fuck. I know that you too, beloved reader, are likely in recovery from spaces like that as well. I know that it’s likely you too have always had a kind of spiritual allergy to spaces like that, to conversations like that. but we have to be careful. our adorable little brains love to make meaning. and oh, how easy it is for capitalism to weaponise our propensity for myth-making against us.
because who the fuck is capitalist dogma to tell you what health “should” look like? what it means to recover? what your body is for, what it does, why it exists? who the fuck is capitalist dogma to teach you to feel ashamed and broken when your body experiences sensations of intensity or pain in response to a mass-extinction cataclysmic climate event, even if that capitalist dogma dresses itself up in oh-so-enlightened somatic teachings about regulating and healing? who the fuck is capitalist dogma to tell you what it’s supposed to feel like to have a body at all?
we have been sold the lie that pain is wrong, or a failure, or something to be hidden or avoided. we have been sold the lie that “health” means predictability, productivity, control. this lie comes in a million different disguises, but you’ll be able to recognise it for the weird sense of lack you feel when you hear it, because it’s asked you to mutilate or amputate a part of your Wholeness, your Aliveness. it is perfectionism, whiteness, puritanical christianity in new clothes.
there was a boy I used to know, back when I was 19 and still riddled with stage 3 endo. the last time he’d seen me, I'd still needed the cane, so of course when we caught up again the other week for the first time since then, he exclaimed in surprise and celebration to see me walking upright, unsupported. I told him about alchemising and eroticising the endo as best I could, and he said of course he was happy for me, if a little bewildered, but he also couldn’t stop giggling at the irony that I'd “gotten back all of my physical mobility just in time for it to start organically decaying”.
he was right. the pain is back, and it’s been slowly returning for a while. it’s different, the textures of it are softer, it has less edges now. more like a swelling wave than a lightning storm. transforming from the yang - the fire and air; to the yin - the water, and the earth. almost the second my Saturn return began, all of my old injuries were relevant again. different, because they no longer had their own little internal tango with the endometriosis and all the scar tissue it left behind, but present in ways I wasn’t expecting.
my lower spine has started pulling me back down again, slowing me up a little when I try to move too quickly or get too distracted. less like fire now, more like immovable mountain. my hip starts to sear and transfer down to my bad knee when it rains, and I have to walk more slowly, or not move at all for a while. and beloved reader, I was not prepared for how it was going to feel to meet this pain again. I was not prepared to face all of the ways I was still carrying so much ableism and productivity consciousness, because of how humiliating it feels to be harbouring a shadow worldview that goes so firmly against everything I thought I believed. one of my many ghosts lives here; waiting to be called Home.
over this past year or so, since the pain came back, I've been feeling into what it would mean to be healed, and how much weight I was unconsciously giving to a mythology that healed meant pain free and productive.
what if healed means creating an internal mythology that’s big enough and wild enough to hold pain lovingly, without shame, and certainly without pathology or apology?
what if healed means mapping the pain with as much celebratory curiosity as I would map my joy or my pleasure?
what if healed has nothing whatsoever to do with physical pain, and everything to do with our psycho-spiritual relationship to it?
what if healed means finally interrupting internalised ableist capitalism enough that pain stopped meaning less than?
may we all interrupt the before-and-after montage together.
love you so much, cheering for your creative and liberatory becoming always,
Leila xx
PS, I made you a thing, it’s a little booklet for working with the (totally re-written) 12 steps, re-imagined for your creative and liberatory becoming. it treats your individuation as recovery, which is is, and it holds you in the ongoing awakening that is interrupting internalised patriarchy and capitalism. read through it once a month and watch what moves within you. it costs zero dollars and you can download it here.
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