|
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about healing in terms of what I was trying to heal from. Old relationships. Old beliefs. Trauma. Grief. Ways of organizing myself around other people. Things my nervous system learned a long time ago that were once incredibly useful and eventually became pretty limiting. Lately I’ve been asking a different question: Healing for what? A couple of weeks ago I signed up for flamenco. I’ve also been looking for a voice teacher and thinking again about dance, music, art, and parts of myself that at various points in my life felt completely ordinary to me, and then somehow became peripheral. I don’t think I realized how much of healing I had organized around becoming less distressed, less activated, less stuck, less hurt. Those things matter, obviously. But I don’t want the ultimate goal of my life to be “less symptomatic.” I want something on the other side of all that. I want more pleasure. More expression. More intimacy. More creativity. More courage. More truth. More ridiculous beginner moments where I have no idea what my feet are supposed to be doing. I want to feel more like myself. And I wonder if we sometimes get so focused on the thing we are trying to stop doing that we forget to ask what we want all that newly available energy for. So I want to give you a few minutes to sit with that today. Think of something you have spent time trying to heal, change, understand, or recover from. Then ask yourself: If this took up less space in my life, what would I want to take up more? Not what should replace it. What do you actually miss? What are you curious about? What did you used to love? What part of you has been waiting around while so much energy went toward surviving, managing, healing, fixing, or figuring things out? And then one more question: What is one small way I could give that part of my life a little more room this week? It doesn’t need to be profound. Mine involved flamenco shoes. And castanets :) and a new Flamenco practice skirt. :) Yours might involve calling someone, making something, resting, swimming, flirting, reading fiction again, planting something, singing badly in your kitchen, taking yourself somewhere beautiful, or finally trying the thing you keep saying you want to try. We spend a lot of time asking what needs healing. I’m increasingly interested in what wants to live. If something came to you while reading this, hit reply and tell me. I’d genuinely love to know. With love, Tanya |
For women ready to stop shrinking. You’ll get somatic tools, honest reflections, and invitations to go deeper—circles, events, and practices that help you feel your boundaries, not just think them. Sent with intention, not noise.
Hi there, I’ve been thinking about something strange that can happen in families and relationships: you can know someone incredibly well and still not feel very known by them. I recently spent a lot of time with someone I love, and I kept noticing all these tiny things I knew about him. The particular things he does with his hands, the stories he tells, the little habits that have been exactly the same since I was a child. There was something sweet about it. There is a kind of intimacy in...
We are surrounded by information about ourselves now. We know our attachment style. We know our trauma responses. We know why we people-please, overwork, shut down, chase, avoid. We can often explain our patterns really, really well. But there’s a strange point where knowing more stops being the thing that helps. So today, rather than giving you more information, I want to give you something to actually sit with. Pick one thing you already understand about yourself. What do you already know...
I’ve been thinking about something since last week’s email. I wrote about realizing that, in trying to become more professional, I had edited out parts of myself that made me feel alive. And of course, I understood why I had done that. I could tell you where the beliefs came from, what they were protecting, and probably trace the whole thing back quite beautifully. Which is part of the problem. We can become very, very good at understanding ourselves. We know why we people-please, why we...