Sh*t To Help You Show Up November 15, 2024

Still dancing

Welcome! Especially to our new folks. I’m so glad you’re all here, and I’m wondering if you can help me with something.

January 4, 2025 (seven weeks from now) is the FOURTH anniversary of the start of this newsletter. It’s also the day after my 53rd birthday. As of this morning, we are 907 subscribers strong in this beautifully earnest corner of the internet. Would you help me get to 1000 subscribers by our collective birthday?

That would be the best present ever.

How can you do that? Share the newsletter. Restack it to Notes, share it to your other social media feeds, email it to your friends. Heck, you can shout about it on the street corner, old school, if you want. You do you.

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Hey, y’all. It’s been a week over here. How about where you are?

In the wake of last week’s election I swung into defiant thinking and action because coping mechanisms are a thing. By Sunday I had run through all my to-do’s and defiance, so then I spent most of the day curled up with a YA fantasy book trying to pretend the world didn’t exist.

I’ve spent the ensuing days climbing back out of that hole, leaning into the love in my life. I wrote about my new daily love practice, inspired by my Grandma Mary’s daily prayer practice, over on Notes. It’s kind of long for a Note (much longer than what you see here. Click through for all of it.) but what can I say? My heart has never tended toward brevity.

I also went trawling through old newsletters and wanted to share some passages with you that I hope speak to the moment as well.

And so we wind our way back around to the notion of integrity as it relates to wholeness. The practice of integrity is an integration of discernment, beliefs, and actions— or thinking, feelings, and behavior— into a cohesive whole. Are beliefs and feelings exactly equivalent? Not at all. But they are interrelated. Beliefs are the scaffolding we build to support and surround our feelings, giving our emotions greater meaning, or a means to manage them when they become, like our bodies, wild and unruly.

Through our integrity practice we are, like the spider in its web, listening for the ways that the wider world affects us— tugging on our minds here, poking holes in our beliefs over there, bringing into our sphere people and experiences that get tangled up in us, prompting so many feelings. We are in an ever-evolving relational conversation with our environment, its ideas, objects, plants, animals, and people, striving for our own wholeness within the greater whole of which we are only a part.

Our primary practice is our own integrity, but our integrity is always affecting and being affected by the integrity of the systems in which we live— economic, ecological, social, and political. Based on Strand’s words, I would argue that our integrity, in fact, is interstitial. It exists in the constant ebb and flow between us and our world. And so any work we do in the world towards greater wholeness, towards justice and reconciliation, towards caring for that which is uncared for and lifting up that which is unseen, enhances the integrity of the world around us and our own at the same time. The vibrations ripple in and out simultaneously.

We are not separate from the world, nor is our integrity. Hermes Trismegistus wrote, “As above, so below” to describe the fractal nature of the world. Through our integrity practice, we place ourselves within that fractal web, growing peace within and without.

As you perch delicately in the shimmering framework of your life, my friends, I have to ask:

How goes it with your peace?

The title of this newsletter is Let Your Life Speak, which partly has to do with my Quaker background. I grew up being taught that the way to spread our faith was to live it— openly, honestly, and without equivocation, in every aspect of our lives. That integrity would spread the Good News, so to speak, more than any words ever could.

But the title of this newsletter is also Let Your Life Speak because I believe that discerning the central, archetypal stories our souls have chosen to tell on this go ’round lets us participate actively and intentionally in the telling, rather than feeling like an unwitting victim of it all. There are infinite ways to tell the same story if you understand that the story is not at the surface, but at its heart. It is the thing underneath the many things, the thru-line that runs from beginning to end.

For me, one of the central stories is about the balance between my will and Divine Will. You can language that any way you like, and it makes no nevermind to me. As long as the words boil down to the question, “Who’s really in charge here?”

The more tightly I have held to my own ideas of how things were supposed to go in my life on the surface the more firmly Life has shaken me to force me to release my hold. I’ve learned it’s not that I’m never in charge of my life, that I have no agency or free will. It’s more like Life and I are dancing, and the more lightly and flexibly I hold my ideas about myself and my life the more responsive and graceful of a partner to Life I become.

To dance like this in mundane life takes what dancers call core strength— building up the power at the center while releasing rigidity everywhere else so that any movement is possible. To dance like this with Life takes similar core strength. Always seeking clarity about what the center actually is and working to fortify it, while releasing attachment to how that actually manifests.

If we focus on the surface of the notion of integrity it can seem like a rigid, endless game of Duck, Duck, Goose. Life sets the circle and we march around, “Wrong, Wrong, Right! Wrong, Wrong, Right!” over and over again until we die. But if we focus on the core of who we are and what we believe, releasing attachment to what it all has to look like or how it all has to play out, then wherever Life leads we can dance.

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Let’s all keep dancing together no matter what comes, okay?

Meet you back here next week.

XO,

Asha