Downward Dog

 This year, I have been using an Intuitive Writing deck that my friend, Three, gifted me. Each card has a word or shape on it, and you use that word or shape to prompt a piece of creative writing. I'm going to post a series of entries from my Intuitive Writing practice here, just for fun. 

The card has the word "DOWN" on it. Here is my response, which was just the first thing that came to my head when I say the card, which I randomly chose out of the deck:

Downward dog. 

Downward dog points my butt toward the sky. The posture is a way to lift the root chakra and loosen the neck and shoulders by hanging the head. "You don’t always have to be upright," it reminds me, "you can be in different ways." Downward dog gives the neck and shoulders a break from all that work they’re doing all the time to keep us upright. Walking upright on two feet is something that most other animals don’t know how to do. 

The downward dog posture reminds me of dogs. They are so good with their bodies; shaking when they get up, stretching when they can, jumping and running around just about whenever they feel like it. They are programmed to please and to serve humans. Unconditional love is their default mode. And yet... they still find ways to ask for and get their own needs met. They do not have a lot of needs, but still, dogs can be demanding. They need walks (for the bathroom and exploration), food, water, and play. It’s pretty basic, it’s pretty simple. 

And humans are not that different. We don’t need a lot. We don’t need to change the world, to be rich and famous, to be admired, to bring groundbreaking knowledge into the world. We just need to eat, sleep, exercise, and play. 

Life is pretty boring at the end of the day. And difficult. Suffering is inevitable. There isn’t some candy at the end of the rainbow, no promised land where everything will be fine. There’s no food that can make it better, no gadget, no relationship, no drug that can make everything feel better. There is not even an experience, like a vacation, that is the ticket to make things feel better, to fix your life or yourself. It’s just not how it works. 

Because whatever it is, it’s effect will wear off and you’ll be back to where you started. The ticket to a satisfying life is more about love and connection and creativity, but also recognizing and accepting the pain and boredom as an equally important and valuable part of life. 

It’s just not about you and your comfort. 

You are one drop in an ocean. Nothing you do will change anything drastically. Nothing you create will change any one person’s life or make huge waves in the ocean. And that’s not the point. The point of life is not to feel good, to experience pleasure, to accomplish, to be famous or rich. That’s not the point. 

We were given the gift of creativity, and if you can spend as much of your time connecting, flowing, and playing, then that’s great. But ultimately nothing you did, are doing, or will do is going to make one bit of a difference. It’s just not. You are too small and the world is too big. 

But, you can enjoy your life while you’re here. And that doesn’t mean blow your mind with experience and pleasure and accomplishments every single day. I mean, enjoying the boring and the mundane, the painful and the heartbreak, the grief and the stress, the joy and the excitement in equal measure. 

And sometimes what that means is just enjoying that moment in downward dog when your shoulders and neck don’t have to support that big old head of yours anymore, and you can relax into being instead of thinking and doing. 

2022 Birthday Post

 Okay, Okay, I know I'm a little late. I wrote this on March 30, 2022, and here it is: 

“You’re one year older, one year wiser. What is one thing that you learned this year?” 

Trust the process, enjoy the process, and surrender to the process. 

Over the past year, a lot has happened. I came out as trans and started hormones. I read Ken Wilbur's integral theory and practiced meditation. I went skiing in Colorado and helped move Brie to Phoenix. I got the COVID vaccine–thrice. I finished the first draft of my book. I lived a Bachelor lifestyle in Prague, enjoying my studio apartment and hanging out on my balcony on the cool summer nights, letting dirty dishes pile up in my sink, watching movies and eating ice cream, taking naps and practicing Czech, working on my writing and reading lots of books. I did an unstructured month and started working on an autobiographical book project. I did yoga daily and connected with my body. Baby Sam was born. I went to Kyrgyzstan for a month, trained jiujitsu, stayed at a hostel, hiked, and worked with the LGBT community. I proposed and got engaged. I got a tattoo in Berlin. I hung out with my sister and Jeff in Vienna. I presented my work at a conference in the UK. I realized that I didn’t want to be an academic anymore and started to reach the integral level. I went to Opio at Red Rocks in Colorado and backpacking in Arizona. I connected with the Schwandt siblings. I fell in love with Bruno, an 80 lb pit bull. I finished the second draft of my book. I went to my sister’s wedding in Spain and spent Christmas and New Year’s in Prague. I got COVID. I said goodbye to the community I had built and started building a new community in Phoenix. 

In Phoenix in 2022, I joined the Like-Minded jiujitsu community. I did a dopamine fast by doing intermittent fasting and giving up sugar, ALL media (including Netflix, YouTube, podcasts and audiobooks), and alcohol for 30 days. I competed four times as a male in jiujitsu. I went skiing in Arizona and Colorado. I connected with my cousin, Bella. I started rock climbing. I wrote in my blog. I started planning our wedding. I lost contact with my mother and one of my best friends, both of whom ghosted me without giving me a reason. I read a lot of books about sex, transness, developmental psychology, spirituality, being true to yourself, and academic writing. I published a few articles about Uyghurs, as well as a few articles about jiujitsu and transness. I quit my job.

It was kind of intense–all the traveling, moving, meeting new people, coming out, transitioning, getting engaged, writing, competing in jiujitsu. It was all very chaotic and dramatic, and yet at the same time, I was more grounded this year than I’d been in most previous years of my life. 

A few of the things that stand out as the biggest milestones/changes/growth points of the last year are: 

-coming out as trans and changing my name and pronouns

-getting engaged and moving to Phoenix

-quitting my job and saying goodbye to academia 

These were the moments where I felt a lot of grief for the loss and passing of an old life and an old self–the moments where I felt like a breakdown was happening in my life and my self, where everything was dissolving and falling apart before my eyes and I knew that it was going to be a lot of hard work to pick up the pieces and start to build anew from the ashes (I guess “Phoenix” is a good place to do that then!). It was saying goodbye to Sarah, saying goodbye to singledom and bachelorhood and Prague, and saying goodbye to academia and the ego trip of power and fame that it was inducing on me. 

There was a lot of grief in saying goodbye to those things. Sometimes it felt like everything was falling apart and breaking down. But they were also the biggest points of growth, the moments where I was fully present and able to be mindful about looking at myself and my life objectively, from a third eye or third person perspective, seeing myself from outside and inside of myself all at the same time, and able to make decisions that felt authentic to my heart, spirit and body. 

Those were the moments when I really felt like I was taking back agency over my life and sovereignty over my own body, the moments when I felt like I was starting to design and create my own life, being the architect of my own life and my own experience, lucid dreaming instead of watching the show, lucid dreaming instead of sleeping, driving the car instead of being in the passenger seat. In this way, it was incredibly empowering but also incredibly scary. It was not only about driving the car, but it was also about driving the car and learning to explore and trust where the road was taking me, rather than constantly looking at Google maps. Instead of constantly worrying about where I was going, or constantly trying to build a new road or drive off the road, I also let the road take me where I was meant to be. 

Slowly, I have been embracing and actively trying to surrender to that which is larger than myself–the Universe, jiujitsu, partnerships, friendships, and even the larger academic and writing community, reminding myself that it’s not all about me, it’s not all about my pleasure and my fulfillment and what I want or need or what I’m doing with my life and if I’m happy and satisfied. It’s more about surrendering to the will of the higher power, whether that be marriage, jiujitsu, academia, Spirit, Universe, God, community, friendship, or even just my Higher Self. 

It’s not about me anymore. It’s about being part of something greater, something that I could never build or do on my own. I think maybe, ultimately, that is what I learned the most this year in terms of trusting the process. Rather than trying to control the process and attaching to the outcome, in the end I learned to surrender to a higher will for me and myself, and only then could I become who I was always meant to be, become who I was born to be, become who the world needs me to be, which is not the next Judith Butler or Michele Foucault, but perhaps just a drop in the ocean, the petal on a flower, a leaf on the tree branch. One more particle, one more atom, one more molecule that fits together with the larger cell to eventually create a living, breathing and functioning organism. It’s still important even if it’s invisible to the naked eye. It all comes together in the end to form beings of value and worth. 

I feel like the traveling back and forth from Prague, the traveling to Kyrgyzstan and Germany and Spain, the drama of the book and my coming out, the drama of my relationship with Brie, it was all very difficult and dramatic. At the time it felt like too much, like my heart was going to overflow with emotions. But in the end, looking back on it, it was really fun. The drama itself was a kind of fun, a kind of play. 

Life is hard, but in the suffering, there is joy to be found in the ups and downs of life. The drama of life itself is a kind of play, a kind of exploration, an ocean to explore and play around in. The waves will knock you over sometimes but otherwise it's the waves that make it kind of fun. 

Scarcity

Cracked teeth

A red jersey

Orange pulp stuck in her teeth,

Juice dripping down her chin

Orange peels on the seat. 

“Don’t ever drink,” she says to me. 

“My brother was murdered and I can’t stop drinking.”

I gave her some chocolate that I was going to throw out. 

She said it was her birthday

And asked God to bless me. 

The destitute camped out underneath the overhang of the building. 

An old man 

A young woman. 

Plastic tarps set up for privacy. 

Stringy white hair. 

Tan, crusted skin. 

Pink gums and missing teeth. 

A toddler crying on the bus. 

A tattooed man offers his orange and granola bar. 

It’s rejected. 

Four kids. 

Utter chaos. 

This is Phoenix. 

There’s nothing glamorous here. 

It’s not about money, it’s not about rednecks. 

It’s about survival in the desert. 

Cold at night, 

Hot in summer. 

There is no such thing as a nicer place to be homeless. 

That day.

I felt right at home. 

I felt so comfortable. 

I felt so free. 

I felt so authentic. 

I was out of my bubble

My bubble of patio furniture, Mac computers, and organic food. 

I was out of my bubble of biking and climbing, 

I was in my bubble of pain and fear, poverty and vulnerability. 

This is humanity. 

This is real life. 

This is survival. 

This is what I have known in my life and research. 

Pain, poverty, survival, fear, hope. 

It’s not about material possessions or money. 

It’s about being real. 

Being real is

Accepting illness and insanity, 

Accepting difference and struggle, 

Accepting precarity and knowing death. 

Trans

Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

A poem by Andrea Gibson

"Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

...

Means: 

You lived five times harder than you should have had to 

To still have a body when you graduated high school. 

…

Means: 

When your mother asked what was wrong, 

You were five times more likely to believe you’d lose 

Her if you spoke the truth. 

Means: 

You were told five times more often 

You’d go to hell when you died. 

…

Means: 

You were five times more inclined 

To triple-padlock your diary. 

Means:

You were five times more likely

To stop writing your story down."

Write a poem or essay that raises awareness for a cause you support: Trans rights. 

Trapped.

Suffocating

Living

Breathing

Dying. 

A pebble in the shoe. 

I don't know what to do.

Hiding behind a mask. 

My hands are tied behind my back. 

Dysphoria. 

Discomfort in the body. 

Disassociation during sex. 

If you don’t know, now you know. 

You can’t unsee what you just saw. 

Liberation. 

Truth. 

Beauty. 

Re-birth. 

Empathy might be impossible. 

The say, If you’re not trans, you just can’t know what it’s like. 

Or, can you? 

Has anyone made assumptions about your identity without asking you? 

Has anyone put you into a box? 

Has someone ever mistaken you for a different ethnicity? 

Has someone ever made assumptions about you based on what they could see?

Do you have an invisible disability?

Do you have an invisible truth? 

Coming out 

Caterpillar to butterfly

Baby to adolescent to adult. 

Teenager to grown up. 

Expansion. 

New me. 

Old me. 

Trauma. 

You lose friends.

You lose family. 

You lose community.

You lose social support. 

You experience rejection. 

You feel confused. 

You feel out of your body. 

You’re scared. 

You’re at risk. 

You’re a target. 

Every pronoun.

Every name. 

Every event. 

Every interaction. 

Is laced with fear and rejection. 

Trauma.

Sometimes it feels like de-transition is the only option. 

To just turn back the clock. 

To pretend that it never happened. 

To go back to the way things were. 

Nostalgia at its most toxic. 

Memory at its most warped. 

Wishing, hoping, wanting, desiring. 

Feeling like everything is just too hard. 

The only other option is suicide. 

To end it all in one stroke. 

Why not?

Life is meaningless anyway. 

Life is pointless anyway. 

Nothing means anything. 

There is no point. 

This moment? It means nothing. 

You’re going to die anyway. 

Why does it matter if it’s now or later? 

You are being invited to participate. 

It’s your choice to say yes or no. 

You are consenting to it. 

Trans kids. Trans people. 

Maybe we’re all crazy. 

Maybe we’re all brainwashed. 

Maybe we’re all just trying to get attention. 

Maybe we’re all just trying to be cool. 

Who cares what the reason is? 

Why does it matter? 

Maybe we are all just trying to be cool. Then, let us try to be cool. Accept and love us for that. We’re not hurting anyone. 

Nobody is asking you to understand. 

We are just asking to exist. 

Please don’t murder us. 

Just allow us to live. 

What is precarity?

Precarity is a concept developed by Judith Butler. Precarity means unstable employment and uncertain living conditions, which are entrenched in broader systemic frameworks built on inequality and exploitation. 

Precarity refers to lacking stable work and steady income, and the resulting harm, such as health risks due to malnutrition or inadequate health care, that accompany unreliable employment. In the precarity framework, lack of work is not due to laziness or ineptitude, but by political decisions or economic systems beyond one’s immediate control that create a situation of disadvantage for the purpose of exploitation. Precarity is not just any disadvantage, but specifically danger to one’s life due to lack of access to basic needs. While in other times and places, people with the least amount of economic resources are the most cared for. But not in the Western world, where our economy is instead built on exploitation of the most vulnerable. 

Informal, temporary, or contingent work is the predominant livelihood in the contemporary world, where examples of precarity are familiar: garbage picking (e.g., selling scrap metal or collecting plastic bottles for recycling), the gig economy (e.g., Uber driving), and selling petty commodities (e.g., street vendors selling USB cords, or small tourism trinkets). 

The modern world is no stranger to precarity, but minorities carry an unequal burden for precarious life. Our political-economic and social systems create this increased vulnerability based on the way bodies are characterized, especially along race and gender. In Butler’s (2009) words, precarity denotes a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (p. 25). In other words, exploitative political-economic systems calculate certain bodies as more valuable to the community than others, with poor and disenfranchised minorities on the lowest priority for life and highest likelihood for precarity. They are seen as a burden and cast aside as extra bodies that are unnecessary and de-valued, all the while being exploited for their cheap labor. 

Precarity is not just about employment status, but also about one’s increased likelihood of sickness, harm or death. In my research, the Uyghurs found themselves in situations of precarity due to political-economic systemic violence that denoted them as "uncivilized terrorists" and restricted access to the resources—namely, jobs and housing—of the city. The precarious conditions of life in the city where I lived devalued Uyghur bodies and lives. Precarity set the stage for the dehumanization that allowed their mass internment in 2017. Precarity meant they were always at risk. 

The Uyghurs are of course not the only ones experiencing poverty of urban life, as well as the exhaustion, stress, and alienation familiar to so many. Around the world, rural migrants as well as urbanites are no stranger to hard times in the city, especially economic dispossession and precarious living conditions. While people everywhere face uncertain, or non-existent, job situations, precarity is often based on value placed on certain bodies, especially those with minority race and gender markers. The most vulnerable in our current global political-economic system are those with the least amount of economic resources. 

Consent or Coercion? What is true freedom?

I wrote in a previous post: "Gaining consent over our lives is the first step towards liberation and true freedom." 

We all love that intoxicating feeling of “this is MY life, this is MY time. I get to do what I want, nobody can tell me what to do.” But this idea of freedom is an illusion. Thinking this way is like driving on a highway at whatever speed because it’s MY car. No, that is not TRUE freedom. That is an illusion of freedom because that is your ego feeling free. And that illusion of freedom is how you end up hurting other people and violating consent. That is not true freedom. 

So what do I mean by “true freedom”? 

True freedom is when you can agree with other drivers on some rules of the road and drive in harmony with them. It is only then that we and everyone around us will experience true freedom. As long as we think, “I can do what I want,” you will be driven by an intoxicating power trip that affects other people, taking away their freedom without consent in both small and big ways. 

The freedom to be yourself doesn’t mean "fuck everyone." 

As long as you keep thinking that true freedom is just “doing whatever I want,” then you will keep getting into accidents because you’re not recognizing the other cars on the road.

True freedom means, “I have agreed to the rules of the road and I’ve learned the roads so I don’t need to check the map, and now I get to choose where I’m going.” You work with the other drivers to create a give and take, while also choosing the place you want to go and getting to the place you want to go the way you want to. That is true freedom. The freedom comes not in gripping the wheel and staring at Google maps telling you where to go. Freedom comes in letting go and singing along to the radio instead of focusing on the road and the map all the time.

True freedom is asking yourself, “Do I want to drive fast or slow? Take the interstate or a more scenic route?”

Maybe how you act doesn’t matter to you. Maybe you drive like an asshole, speeding and endangering everyone else on the road. Maybe you are a grumpy person, bitter and resentful and ungrateful. Maybe you are rude, and none of it matters to you because it just comes out of your mouth and through your body and goes into the universe and you don’t have to sit with that energy anymore. In fact, you might even feel better because you have expelled that negative energy. 

Maybe you don’t mean anything to yourself. This is perhaps the saddest part of it all. It’s not only that you don’t respect others. It’s that you don’t respect yourself. 

But you do mean something to other people. In this way, HOW YOU MOVE MATTERS. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. But it does matter to other people. 

We are not aware of the ways that we live in unfreedom so much by cultural expectations and cultural hegemony, whether that be capitalism, patriarchy, or just other unspoken rules and expectations, including the unfreedom of individualism, consumerism and materialism, then we haven’t actually given consent to live these lives. 

We are just living while sleeping. We are asleep at the wheel. But the freedom comes not in gripping the wheel, it comes in letting go and singing along to the radio instead of focusing on the road and the map all the time. 

Consent or Coercion? Is it consent if you didn’t know there was a choice? How do we take back consent once we have been given the choice?

I wrote in my previous post: "The problem is that sometimes we give consent without knowing it. People think we've given consent when we have not, or we are unaware that the consent process is being assumed. Sometimes we give other entities permission to determine what we do with our bodies without knowing that we had a choice in the first place. We think we have no choice, or we don't know that there are other options." 

How do we cede sovereignty of our bodies without realizing it? How do we seem to allow people or institutions or social norms to obtain sovereignty over our bodies and lives? 

The movie the Matrix portrays the conflict between individuals who are ignorantly asleep and exploitative systems that are greedily eating on their energy. The question posed to Neo is: do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill? The two pills represent a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. Until this question is posed, consent has not been obtained. 

As in the movie, is it fully consensual to be in a tube being fed a simulation if you never chose it and didn’t know there was a choice? Once you are given the choice of red pill versus blue pill, and you understand the choice, then it is consensual. But if you don’t even know that the Matrix exists, are you truly giving your consent to be in a simulation? The answer is, I think: No, it's not consensual until the choice is presented.

The obtaining of consent without their knowledge is what happened with Indigenous land in North America. According to legend that is taught in schools as fact, Native Americans signed over their rights to the land to the white settlers. According to some historians, they, not knowing how to write or what a signature was, simply put an x-mark on some paper contracts and agreements that effectively ceded all of their land over to white settlers. In this way, some people argue that the Native Americans willingly consented to giving their land away. But is it really consent if you don’t have all the information you need to understand what that agreement was really about, and more importantly, if you don’t even have the epistemological framework to understand territory, private property and land ownership? 

Land is a type of territory, and bodies are also a type of territory. In politics, we often fight over the territory of the body.

COVID. Mask mandates. Vaccine requirements. Social distancing regulations.

Abortions in Texas.

Trans rights to use the bathroom and access health care.

MY BODY, MY CHOICE, yell the slogans. 

Our political climate is riddled with examples of the fight over bodily sovereignty. But what does it all really mean on the micro-scale, the scale of everyday life, the scale of the individual body? 

I also wrote in my previous post: "Gaining back consent over our bodies is the first step towards gaining back consent over our lives."

How can we start to go about doing that? Beauty is about exercising bodily sovereignty. Think about tattoos or body piercings, plastic surgery or hair dye, fashion choices or make-up. It’s about turning our bodies into art but also about self-expression. But it’s also a way of saying, “it’s my body and I’ll change it if I want to.” 

Doing what you want with your body is your choice alone–what kind of clothes you want to wear, what kind of haircut, what kind of facial hair, what kind of piercings and tattoos. You get to own your body, nobody else gets to determine who you are or your body for what it is. 

At the end of the day, we can never win if we are trying to mold to society’s expectations. Instead, we can take back sovereignty over our own bodies, which is about choosing how to adorn and present our bodies as a temple and as a celebration of our soul. You (yes, you!) have such a beautiful soul and it deserves to be honored in whatever physical manifestation you have and want to share. 

I know what it feels like to have a body that just doesn’t fit; a body that doesn’t fit right into clothes and doesn’t fit right into people’s expectations. No matter what happens, I will always have a female body and I will always feel wrong in it and it will never fit into what society expects or wants or glorifies. Many of us have bodies that don’t fit into what society wants or expects. But it’s not our fault that capitalism makes clothes only fit to certain body types. It's not our fault that patriarchy worships certain bodies and certain genders. Society polices our bodies as much as the government does. But it is our right to re-claim our bodies. 

Your body is yours. For whatever reason, God gave you the body you have, or your soul chose your body, or your genetics paired up exactly right to give you the body that you have. No matter how you look at it, your body is yours. 

If there’s one thing I hope for everyone, it would be for everyone to cultivate love for their body. It can be through sports or sex, of course. Those are two common ways. But it could also mean getting a piercing or a tattoo, or just buying some more nice clothes for yourself, or wearing a bracelet or chain, or cooking yourself some delicious food. It could mean doing your nails or getting a haircut or growing some facial hair or giving yourself a massage or doing some yoga. But your body is the one thing in this world that you can and do truly own, and it’s the one thing that will be with you for the rest of your life. You get to reclaim it for yourself, and nobody gets to take that away from you. We can take back consent over our own bodies in creative ways outside of the system.