Gaia Comes to the City

"I wake up to the gentle sway of my own breath. A breeze blowing with a consistent rhythm, filling my chest, my belly. There is a silence around me, aligned with the silence within me. If I have been dreaming, some faint scenes begin to intermingle with this silence, wordlessly. The night is giving way to the morning, my dreams are giving way to tangible voices on the street. I am aware of something deeper than feeling, bigger than the darkness of the room I am sitting in. " "Let there be no continuity. I feel mad with an aged rage. A surge of bile I can't quite describe. I wish I were sitting with tea in a neighbourhood cafe, but here I am looking at myself with a bit of pity. The anger knocks wildly against the back of my chest. It feels like the outback that hasn't had rain in a while. Moisture is clearly missing. I feel like a long cry." With these two examples, I shall spring into the topic of writing from the body. It certainly is a prelu

"If it wasn't for his continued bad behaviour, I would've been breathing more easily." K (a friend whose name I won't reveal here) and I sat over glasses of lemonade, giving each other company one unusually warm evening. K's five year old live-in relationship was over and a fight was now underway around who would parent Boomer, their year old Boxer. "We have been fighting incessantly for the last three nights. Wonder when this godawful phase will end. This is turning out to be more complicated than the breakup itself." Once back home, I kept mulling over the words we had exchanged. I had mostly been quiet, sometimes acknowledging how difficult it must be for K. Knowing T, K's ex-partner, I had a felt-sense he was hell-bent upon giving her a tough time. Because? Oh well, because she had decided to call it quits. Ego tussle. Blame game. Endless misery. They had all of it going against them.  However, what still didn't sit with

Now that you're here reading this piece, I am going to ask you a question. Did you hear the word "therapy" first or did you hear the word "healing"? Speaking for myself, I heard of "therapy" long before I heard of "healing". The context was of course far removed from how I mostly use the word now - a young neighbour had broken one arm and then another, after which people said he needed "therapy". I was about six at the time, hearing just another word floating around.  Fast forward to almost twenty years later and I was faced with a young woman with enough issues of her own, desperately wanting a "shift" to happen. Me, Myself. Caught up in familiar turbulent patterns, unable to stop the self-sabotage. It was at this time that I began to make sense of the word "healing" - given the way my life was going, having begun to read literature on mind-body connections. Eventually, "therapy" returned, a