What Are You Choosing to Embody?
The body found groundwater, the mind remembered the flesh, and my needs became a map
The soil refused water, the mind betrayed the flesh and my needs became a mystery.
For most of my 20s being in my body felt uncomfortable. It never seemed to be the endless well of productivity that I needed it to be, the infinite battery I dreamed of to supply the energy for all my striving. Over time I internalized my body’s disobedience in the face of capitalist demands to be a betrayal.
The soil refused water, the mind betrayed the flesh and my needs became a mystery. A list of prescriptions I carried with me everywhere I went but could never place.
That list of prescriptions lived in my flesh. I was already carrying the medicinal memory of how I wanted to work, the pace that felt sustainable, and who/what I wanted to be in relationship with. The whole time I was already carrying around a care manual1 for what I needed, for how I needed. I began tending to my disembodiment, mending severed connections with the hope of somatic healing. Through this process of tending and mending, I began to wonder how I lost access to this body tissue based wisdom that knew exactly how I needed to care for my life and the life around me. Did disembodiment begin with childhood trauma or did it stretch even further back in time? Was disembodiment my inheritance? Or is it the result of drinking from the water well of capitalist culture enacting spells that sing, your body is a liability to your productivity? Or did I learn the choreography for how to forget my body through falling in love with the internet — slipping and falling into different avatars in collaboration with gooey2 interfaces, gently sailing my imagination to places that are anywhere but here?
The soil refused water, the mind betrayed the flesh and my needs became a mystery.
Prentis Hemphill3: Hmm, I think I want to start that with you know, there's a couple of ways to think about embodiment, actually. And one way is to pay attention to what it is that we have made habit, in our own bodies, and in our own system. So in a way, there's always an embodiment, just what are you choosing to embody? And how do you sustain that in your own body and in the collective body also? So first…“Yes, we are disembodied”, but there's a way for us also to pay attention to what it is that we have embodied, what do we choose to do? And then what's the physicality and physiology of that embodiment too I think is important for us to notice.
It first showed up in college. Manifested itself as an inability to rest without shame. Leisure evolved from being a luxury to being irresponsible. A voice traveled from my head, through my bloodstream to the bottom of my feet, declaring “these projects, these goals, these dreams aren’t going to build themselves. Keep running.” Leisure, rest, stillness was always something I gave myself permission to experience after the to-do list was empty, but the list kept getting longer and I kept moving the finish line. Keep running.
Childhood trauma seeded in racial capitalism taught me safety lives in the attachment of my worthiness to external validation.
Once the high from the wave of validation wore off from the praise of parents, peers, and partners the hunt began again. Keep running. Meals are skipped, water becomes optional, vacations are for people who worked hard enough to deserve them. Keep running. I even convinced myself I wasn’t an “exercise person”. I knew people activated their body through cardio, stretching, and lifting weights but I was more committed to a different type of running.
An obsession with project deadlines, monthly goals, and quarterly milestones turned into missing a couple phone calls from friends, sitting out events to support community, and becoming emotionally unavailable to loved ones. What started out as perceived harmless measures of sharpening and maintaining focus turned into full blown self-isolation. I graduated from rest being a reward for completed work sprints to the feeling of belonging being a reward for completed projects. This seemed to work. I was able to sustain the food fuel that was external validation from here. The body began to perceive self isolation inspired by disembodiment as a safe place. The anxiety got worse in the face of self isolation, depression entered the chat but was muted — “I’m sorry, you’re not on today’s to-do list”. Days turned into weeks, which turned into months, which turned into years of running in circles while running on fumes. I became so familiar with the cycle of burnout it began to feel like home. “This isn’t so bad. If I could just figure out how to be happy here, I could live here”. This isn’t disembodiment. This is something else. What do they call it when your mind is reluctantly dragging your body around in circles?
The soil refused water, the mind betrayed the flesh and my needs became a mystery.
Prentis Hemphill: “...To your question around disembodiment, which the way that I hold that question is, that move away from paying attention to the signs and the language of the body kind of below our heads, what's happening in those spaces. It is ultimately a way of creating in our person a dynamic of domination, where the mind or the thinking self dominates over the flesh so to speak so that we are expected to do, we expect from ourselves and we expect from other people, that whatever the mind thinks is possible, the body should obey, and that split of keeping us out of a cycle of sustainability or relationship with ourselves also translates to our relationship to land, our relationship to each other, dynamics of gender dominance, of racial hierarchy, class systems, all of these things in some way I think are related to the ways that we have embodied dominance over even ourselves and our own feelings.
It took 10 years. It took 10 years of embodied dominance over my needs to finally step out of the cycle of body betraying burn out. When I stopped slipping into avatars for the screen projecting proud productivity in exchange for validation to carry me to the next deadline, my skin became an interface instead. Goosebumps from listening to bird song while forest bathing became braille, fingers traveled over the coded flesh and muscle memory recalled the downloaded stories.
Generational trauma and capitalist choreography didn’t inspire disembodiment, it simply made ignoring the body feel safer.
Suppressing my capacity to feel, felt safer. The longer I spent in the cycles of body betrayal, the more I became terrified of what might happen if I stopped. Who might be revealed if I stopped. The stories I might have to abandon if I stopped. The people I might have to leave behind if I stopped. The courage that might be demanded if I stopped to remember my body. This level of change is existential so embodying dominance for just a little while longer became an act of self preservation. An act of preserving the self I knew. An act of preserving the self that had kept me safe all this time.
When my desire to be in right relationship with my body, my loved ones, and our ecosystem outweighed my desire to hide, vulnerability became a portal. Outside the door of abundance, the cover charge was the steep price of giving myself permission to unravel. I consented to falling apart and allowed myself to do the most terrifying thing, I stopped running. I grieved my old stories and safe habits. I left my job and relationship to practice becoming undone and to spend time putting the pieces back together again. I grieved the old skin. While shedding, I sat with the lessons this flesh had to offer.
Never truly disembodied, just embodying stories that weren’t my own, habits that stopped serving my needs, and powering ways of working that couldn’t support my breath. Memories of paths toward care and belonging arose from my feet, boiled up through my legs, thrashing with desire in my belly. Its fumes finally reached my nose and I was able to remember…
To forget the body is to lose the map. Forgetting the body is the quickest route to losing your way.
Prentis Hemphill: And I think that that serves, ultimately, whoever steals, really whoever is interested in taking from people who aren't able to feel their own lives, taking through the method of forced labor, taking people's land, taking the time that people have taking people's attention, to profit off of it, it serves people who take and don't give back. And that's why for me, it's so important that we start to recover practices and really create practices of centering our feeling selves, our bodies, our relationships, really, because it starts to illuminate what we really need, what's important, what's possible, between us what it really feels like to create intimacy with one another. So that to me, is the kind of embodiment that I'm working towards.
This fragile vessel finally allowed itself to fall to the floor and trust the ground. After 10 years of embodying dominance over my needs I allowed myself to stop running and finally fall apart.
In that trust fall I found groundwater filling the spaces between the soil particles and fractured rock beneath the topsoil of my skin.
Instead of suffering as a billion broken pieces, this clay body found groundwater and was introduced to an erotic softness whose malleable form holds infinite possibilities. For some plant species, groundwater is the only source of water year round4. To become groundwater, rain must fall, and seep through the cracks of your soil. In this way, falling apart becomes an invitation for nourishment. Your breaking open allows the water in. Your breaking open makes your courage an offering — inviting us into the abundance, softness, and belonging in the emergent ecosystem that is your creative curiosity, pleasure, and wild imagination. In this way, renewed access to vulnerability becomes a collective water table we can all drink from when we show up in ways that honor our body’s needs and wisdom.
The world I’m dreaming of and practicing towards creates safety for all of us to fall apart and offers collective care when we do. Asking for help and support from family and friends is the only way I was able to receive the groundwater. While I am still learning what it means to practice embodiment rooted in radical self love5, there is one thing I am sure of: remaining whole while unraveling requires community. Leaving a job with a savings to live off of and moving to land with a home owned by your family, in the woods, surrounded by trees is not an option everyone has but it was an option that saved my life. It was an option that existed for most of my life but I was too busy practicing embodied dominance over my needs to see it. It’s caused me to ask myself…
What options and opportunities for care-full embodiment am I not allowing myself to see or imagine?
And once I imagine these possibilities toward pleasure, what body-honoring practices do I need to implement to align with that vision? The soil soaked up the water, the mind remembered the flesh as a source of wisdom, and my needs became a map.
if…else
Statements in JavaScript
I’m walking around with a watered awareness of my care instructions. My careWork()
function takes in the value of my feeling first to decided what actions to invoke next. Now, my work is always based on the conditions of my feeling.
function careWork(feeling) {
if (feeling == grief) {
askForHelp()
rest()
mourn()
drinkWater()
forestBathe()
} else {
beOfService()
}
}
The if
statement executes a statement if a specified condition is truthy. If the condition is falsy, another statement can be executed. To learn more about if…else
statements in JavaScript, check out this MDN doc.
The use of “care manual” here as a set of prescriptions/instructions/recipes/spells toward belonging is inspired by kamra sadia hakim’s Care Manual: Dreaming Care into Being available for pre-order over at Flower Press
The language of referring to Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) as “gooey” is inspired by American Artist’s essay, Black Gooey Universe, published on unbag.net. I’ve been thinking a lot about Black feminist embodiment/performance, the internet, and the interfaces for accessing both — will save for a future newsletter.
Here I am experimenting with writing alongside and being in conversation with Prentis Hemphill by weaving their words from the For The Wild podcast interview with Ayana Young into the body of this essay. The quotes are pulled from the episode’s transcript.
I used this PDF by the USDA titled Water & Forests: The Role Trees Play in Water Quality to inform my thinking around groundwater as it relates to the body.
"Radical Self Love” is language borrowed from Sonya Renee Taylor’s ground watering work, The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love