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@reauxsrecollection
Tell a friend to tell a friend:
GLOBAL, REMOTE VOLUNTEER APPLICATIONS ARE NOW OPEN!
Please be sure to read thoroughly through our “Volunteer Eligibility & Expectations” and “Committee & Role Descriptions” pages respectively.
See you soon!
Designed by baaba :)
Will be reposting this with the final two slides!
Read the rest via our linktr.ee!!
An accessible, global library, rooted in revolutionary, decolonial, and embodied wisdoms
SAVE THE DATE!
Global, remote volunteer applications for the Embodied Futures Collective (EFC) open April 6th, 2026 at 12:00 a.m. ET and close April 30th, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. ET. And yes, you heard that right! We are, in fact, Black-, queer-, woman-, disabled-, AND youth-run! We specifically choose to uplift those most impacted by the world as it is and most committed to the world as it could be. With that in mind, we hope that you will read our Volunteer Eligibility & Expectations page thoroughly (link attached)! Those who are accepted will participate in a FREE 12-week liberation school, complete with a certificate and a gift card to buy one radical book from any independent bookstore of their choosing. We hope to see you soon!
Happy Black History Month! Our new website is finally done, carefully crafted by Black femmes from around the world! We encourage you to explore our Liberation Library (affectionately called the LibLib) via EmbodiedFutures.xyz, and to share our work with those far and wide 🪷 [lotus emoji]
Volunteer applications will be opening up later in the season to help us re-organize everything in alignment with our ever-evolving beliefs. So, please, keep an eye out for more :) We need YOUR support to keep political education accessible to all! We need YOU! đź’— [beating heart emoji]
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Graphic design and animation by Baaba and Reaux
Music by Minnie Ripperton
Alt text written by Reaux
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EFC's mission is to intentionally cultivate an accessible, global library, rooted in revolutionary, decolonial, and embodied wisdoms.
An accessible, global library, rooted in revolutionary, decolonial, and embodied wisdoms
OUR DISCORD IS BACK!!!
After a much-needed season of rest, reflection, and rebuilding, we're opening our arms again! The EFC Discord server is officially back :)
In the past, this space held hundreds upon hundreds of people across the globe! This included organizers, students, artists, healers, thinkers, dreamers, and more. Each of these individuals showed up to learn together, exchange resources, and care for one another through deeply political times, like now! We're so excited to welcome new family members into the next iteration of this living ecosystem.
Our Discord, after all, is the beating heart of our global connections at EFC. It is a place for shared study, peer support, embodied dialogue, and collective imagination. We want to help you learn and connect globally while organizing locally! And because we value trust, vulnerability, and alignment, we're welcoming folks in with intention through a short invitation form.
CryptPad: end-to-end encrypted collaboration suite
If you feel called to grow alongside a global, Black-, queer-, disabled, woman-, AND youth-run collective rooted in decolonial, revolutionay, and embodied wisdoms, we'd love to meet you. Genuinely.
Remember: Take your time. Be yourself. We'll take care with your words!
See you soon :)
Sincerely,
Reaux Founding Executive Director since 2016 <3
Day 9: Paper
This wasn’t supposed to be an official update. But I couldn’t resist sharing.
Did you know we spent six months just… staring at paper?
Okay, yes, we were absolutely doing other things in-between. But still. From April to October, we sifted through hundreds of textured papers--crumpled, fibrous, torn, scanned, scanned again. We even went home and rummaged through old notebooks from our childhoods, just to find the right texture for our new website's background!
Why? Because we knew our aesthetic, what we’ve come to call "Archival Bloom," needed to feel like memory and blossoming all at once. Archival Bloom means combining the tactile and intimate beauty of archives with the lush, unfurling softness of growth. It honors memory, collage, and rebirth. Layered, storied, and slow, it resists linearity and uplifts collectivity!
So, our website, it needed to look like something kept, something treasured. Like a diary left open. Like a collage unfolding.
We were searching for the perfect paper background! The one whose folds and crinkles felt lived-in, but not overwhelming. The one whose fibers made you feel held. We debated shades, crumple depth, fold placement, even the hue of each shadow. Then spent hours editing it--softening the greys, warming the whites, and tinting the texture until it felt like home.
And that’s the part no one sees. But we see it. And you’ll feel it. Even if you don’t know why.
I hope you enjoyed this mini behind-the-scenes update. Thank you for reading! :)
-- Reaux (she/they), Founding Executive Director
Reclaiming the sacred in an age obsessed with exposure - beyond, flesh, filters, and performance
Intimacy did not enter the world through declarations or treaties, but through gestures as old as breath. Before the invention of language, before we shaped syllables into tools of seduction or confession, there was a gaze held a second too long, the warmth of another body curled beside your own in the dark - wordless, primal, indispensable. Long before philosophers puzzled over the soul, the soul was already leaning, reaching, brushing against another in the dark of a cave, not out of lust, but of recognition. Intimacy began not as poetry, but as pulse: a subtle alignment of heartbeats in a moment when survival and tenderness became indistinguishable. It was not yet erotic, not yet romantic – it was the earliest form of “I know you”, uttered not through mouths, but through nearness, through the trust of sleeping side by side in a world still sharpened by danger.
...
The great confusion of the modern age is not that we lack intimacy, but that we have misidentified it – mistaking it for sex, proximity, or exposure. We have reduced intimacy to the mere friction of flesh, as though the soul does not demand its own form of nakedness. What passes for closeness in the era of endless sharing is often a façade, a mimicry of revelation that demands no real risk.
...
To be truly intimate is to be dangerously unarmed. It is to step into a space where your cleverness cannot protect you, where your prettiest metaphors fail, and you are asked not to perform, but to remain. Real intimacy is never slick. It is awkward, raw, and resists the script. It shows up in the unfinished sentences, the tear caught mid-smile, the silence that lingers because neither person wants to leave. It’s in the mundane, the ritual of ordinary things made extraordinary by who shares them with you: folding laundry together, cooking in parallel, falling asleep mid-conversation. Intimacy is not the plot twist, it is the slow-burn subplot you didn’t know you were invested in until the last page breaks your heart.
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Western individualism, shaped by scarcity logic, insists intimacy is a scarce resource, something to be hoarded. But intimacy multiplies. It expands as it is shared. The soul, unlike the ego, is generous in its capacity for closeness.
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I live with my senses unsheathed, collecting these micro-revelations like others collect souvenirs. I don’t want to conquer someone’s body or even their biography; I want to trace the emotional scar tissue with the reverence of an archivist and the awe of a lover.
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Because the truest intimacy, for me, is mutual recognition. Not the echo of my words, but the harmony of another soul who speaks the same dialect of depth.
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And yes, intimacy is also political. In a culture addicted to surveillance and curation, to be genuinely close with someone – offline, unmonetised, unmarketed – is nothing short of radical. To whisper something sacred and never post about it. To exist in a moment that will not be archived. In an age of algorithmic voyeurism, to protect intimacy is to rebel against the commodification of connection. It is to choose presence over proof, attention over analytics. Intimacy cannot be datafied. It is the last wild, uncaptured thing. And it must be defended like a dwindling ecosystem.
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The rituals of intimacy are often small, repetitive, and invisible, but they are the rituals that stitch two inner worlds into a shared reality. Intimacy is not a series of dramatic declarations, but the accumulation of undramatic devotion.
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Grief, too, is the shadow side of intimacy, the proof of how deeply we have been known and how difficult it is to be un-known. Every close connection we form is a gamble against absence. We grieve not just people, but the spaces they made sacred: the inside jokes that no longer land, the favourite seat at the table that now stings. But this grief is not a sign of failure. It’s proof that intimacy occurred. That something real, unreplicable, was created between two beings. That for a time, we stood outside the machinery of indifference and chose to matter to one another.
Children come into the world fluent in intimacy. They lean into their parents’ bodies, whisper to animals, reach for strangers with unfiltered longing. They are poets of presence, unburdened by irony. But we train them out of it. We tell them not to stare, not to cry, not to touch. We teach them to mask, to measure, to mute. Adulthood, then, becomes the art of forgetting and remembering: forgetting how we were taught to hide and remembering how we were born to connect.
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Ultimately, the most challenging intimacy is the one we cultivate with ourselves. To sit alone and meet our own eyes without flinching. To know our hunger, our contradictions, our unbearable tenderness, and respond with compassion rather than contempt. Self-intimacy is not navel-gazing; it’s the soil from which all other closeness grows. Without it, we are wanderers, seeking in others what we refuse to offer to ourselves. But with it, we become whole enough to offer – not need, not perform, but offer – our truth.
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To be intimate is to be implicated, to admit that we are porous, that we long to be known and to know in return.
Desire, disobedience and the art of becoming
Life starts with erotic decisions.
Life doesn’t begin at birth. Nor at conception. Nor at some abstract marker of consciousness or legality. It begins, in earnest, at the moment of trembling recognition. When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision. The moment that cracks open the script you have been given and offers you, terrifyingly, an alternative. Not necessarily better, certainly not safer…. but alive. And that is where life begins.
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Before language, before identity, there is yearning: the infant cries not only for sustenance but for touch, for warmth, for presence. In that primal reaching, there is already a choice, not a rational one, but a visceral alignment with life, with connection, with being with rather than apart. Eros, in its ancient, Platonic sense, is the force that binds the soul to the world, that moves us toward beauty, mystery, and becoming. It is not reducible to sex, though it may include it. It is a metaphysical orientation: the decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control. And that decision (sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar) is how life begins, and how it deepens.
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It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in. Consider the artist who gives herself over to a vision she cannot explain, or the thinker who risks intellectual exile to defend an idea no one else yet believes. These are not logical paths. They are not chosen for stability or acclaim. They are chosen because something inexplicable stirs… a vibration, a recognition, a hunger that refuses to be ignored. The erotic decision is the one that defies linearity and invites metamorphosis. Is it a transaction? Of course not, it is transfiguration. And while it may bring ecstasy, it also invites vulnerability, risk, and loss. That is its sacred cost.
...
...erotic desire is the ladder by which the soul ascends, from the love of one body to the love of all beauty, to the love of truth itself. Therefore, the erotic, in its original conception, is not confined to bodies. It is the fire that propels the soul out of dormancy. It is the throb of longing for something more.
...
Eroticism, then, is about gravity, not about gratification, the pull toward something that reorients the self. And this gravity manifests not only in romantic or sexual relationships, but in every domain where desire dares to disrupt duty. A woman leaves a secure career to pursue sculpture because it makes her pulse quicken, not because it makes sense. A man moves across the world for a language he barely speaks. A reader becomes a writer because a single sentence broke them open. These are erotic decisions: driven not by logic, but by the magnetic logic of the soul. They often look like madness to the outside world – irresponsible, inexplicable, dramatic – but they are the precise moments where life, real life, begins to throb. These are the moments where one’s biography is no longer dictated by inheritance, but by invocation.
To live erotically is to reclaim the authority of feeling as intelligence, not as whim – the intelligence of the body, the psyche, the imagination. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote, “We are never as naked as when we are in pursuit of our desires”. To make an erotic decision is to be willing to lose the self you were, for the self that might be born in the act of choosing.
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But what use is a life composed entirely of safe decisions, if none of them ever stir the soul? The tragedy of many lives is that they were never felt, not that they were too short. They were never chosen, only followed.
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Even theory, when it is most alive, is erotic: it seeks to seduce the mind into new shapes, to unravel certainties, to draw the thinker beyond the boundaries of what has already been thought. This is why true creativity always involves risk, not only the risk of failure, but of becoming someone unrecognisable to the self you were. The erotic decision changes your circumstances and rearranges your coordinates. It creates new desires, new questions, new problems worth having.
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Because something in it stirs you, it says: this is me or the me I’m becoming. The erotic is not decoration; it is design. It builds the architecture of the life we secretly want.
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...And that is the real measure of an erotic life: not how much you get, but how deeply you feel, how honestly you inhabit your own pulse.
To suppress the erotic is to forgo passion, but also to forfeit independence. For what else is autonomy, if not the freedom to choose according to one’s own rhythm, one’s own longing, one’s felt truth? Systems of control (political, religious, familial) have always sought to neutralise the erotic, because it cannot be domesticated. Eros threatens order. It whispers: you are more than this. You could leave. You could want something else.And that, to the status quo, is heresy.
Which is why reclaiming erotic decision-making is political, not personal. It is the refusal to live in ways that anaesthetise the soul. It is the revolt of wanting, not as consumption, but as awakening. To choose the erotic is to orient the compass of your life by what makes your soul turn toward the light, not by what is expected or endorsed. And that can be excruciating. Because the erotic does not offer guarantees. Sometimes it leads us to joy. Sometimes to heartbreak. Often to both, simultaneously. But it always leads us somewhere real.
...
Therefore, what does it mean to live erotically in a world designed to suppress the erotic? It means making decisions that align with your aliveness, even if they offend your ego, your upbringing, your pay check.
...
And so, life begins, not once, but again and again, in the moment we allow ourselves to want what might ruin us, to risk what might remake us, to trust what we cannot name but must follow. The erotic decision is never tidy.
Why commitment begins where romance ends
Love is a feeling, but commitment is a choice. The first is involuntary, a coup of the senses, a poetic trespass. It hijacks the nervous system before the intellect can formulate a theory. Love pulses with metaphor: a spark, a flame, a tide, a madness. It invites surrender, not logic. Commitment, by contrast, is sober, measured, and architectural. It is not the kiss under the rain, but the decision to be there when the storm hits. Love writes you sonnets; commitment signs the lease. And while love is often portrayed as the peak of human experience, it is commitment that reveals our deeper character. Is it about what lifts you off the ground? No, it’s what holds you up when gravity resumes.
...
It was no longer enough to find a spouse, one had to find a soulmate. Commitment was no longer a duty, now it had to be poetic, redemptive, symphonic. But the myth came with a cost. If love had to feel eternal to justify commitment, what happened when the feeling ebbed? As Stendhal warned, what we call love may merely be “crystallization” … a projection of beauty onto something that may not, in fact, sustain us.
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Love becomes performance before it becomes presence. We advertise desire before we experience it. And beneath it all, the market hums: monetising longing, gamifying compatibility, turning solitude into a sales funnel. The tyranny of infinite choice seduces and exhausts us. We are urged to keep our options open, our hearts slightly ajar, just in case something better pings.
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Just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s trustworthy. Love can be delusional. It can be a trauma bond. It can be a performance of your own ideal self. Commitment, conversely, must stop being seen as the death of romance. Done well, it’s the scaffold love climbs. It’s the difference between a spark and a fire that keeps you warm. But this requires work – on ourselves, first. Not just learning how to love, but how to be loved without controlling the terms of the exchange. Not just staying, but staying without resentment, without passive-aggression, without the unspoken ledger of emotional debts.
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To commit is to engage in a kind of narrative: not the story you tell others, but the evolving truth you co-write with another person. It is the willingness to see and be seen in your most unflattering light, and to choose, still, to stand beside each other.
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In this way, commitment becomes the deepest manifestation of freedom, not its enemy. To stay, not because you must, not because you fear the alternative, but because you want to, is an act of liberation. It is not submission; it is autonomy in duet.
When love and commitment meet as equals, not as hostage and jailer, not as child and parent, they generate something rare: intimacy. And intimacy is vulnerability and also attunement over time. It is erotic, yes, but also spiritual. Think of Rilke, who said that a good marriage is one in which two people protect each other’s solitude. Think of Baldwin, who warned that love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. Or Barthes, who suggested that to say I love you is always an anticipatory mourning, a gesture toward loss.
To love and commit, then, is to live in full awareness of impermanence, and to stay, anyway. It is to wake up to yourself, and then to another, again and again, in all your unfinishedness. It is the discipline of continuing to find, not the thrill of being found.
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Love is not a destination; commitment is not a prison. When rightly understood, they are co-conspirators in our becoming. They demand rigour, imagination, forgiveness, and faith, not the religious kind, but the kind that says: even when I do not feel it, I will honour it. Even when it is hard, I will stay curious. Even when we are both changing, I will try to learn you again.
And to me that is the truest form of love, not the feeling that precedes the choice, but the choice that dignifies the feeling. Not the chemistry of recognition, but the courage of continuation. Not the passion of possession, but the poetry of presence.
the Coyolxauhqui imperative — from Anzaldùa: named after the Aztec goddess of the moon Coyolxauhqui, the ongoing and lifelong process of healing from events which fragment, dismember, or deeply wound the self physically, psychically, culturally, and/or spiritually. the need to look at these wounds, understand how the self has been fragmented, and then reconstruct or remake the self in a new way.
autoethnography — a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. lived experience as data, as a lens for understanding the wider context of a time, of a moment, of a culture. requires deep and careful self-reflection, called “reflexivity,” to interrogate the intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political.
Vladimir Nabokov and the importance of rereading novels. Why aren't there more rereaders?
In his lecture notes, Vladimir Nabokov famously denied the existence of readers, noting that a person can only reread books. A first reading is insufficient.
When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.
To describe the barrier as physical might come as a surprise, but Nabokov takes painting—and the initial glimpse of a painting—as his contrast.
When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.
The claim is that rereading removes those physical barriers; until you’re able to digest the entire book, you’re merely skimming across the surface.
The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
...
If I walk the same streets consistently, I’ll discern new details with each walk, but I won’t assume that those new details were simply missed in earlier walks. Each walk changes my perception. What I notice during one walk affects what I notice later. New sights creep to the surface of my attention partly because I’m reexamining old ground.
Nothing has changed about the walk itself, but I’m able to see the street differently, which is similar to the old trope about novels: the text waits while you change. ...
Day 8: Our Volunteer Application
How do we invite people into something sacred and make sure they’re truly ready to hold it with care?
This was the question we asked ourselves while developing the new volunteer application process for the Embodied Futures Collective (EFC). After years of doing things differently through Better Future Program (BFP), we knew this next chapter needed to feel more intentional, more relational, and more aligned.
In BFP, almost everyone who applied was accepted. There was no interview. No cohort. Just an open door and a lot of trust. And while that openness made space for some incredible people, it also welcomed others who didn’t truly resonate with our values. While there was an onboarding process in BFP—with pre-recorded trainings and systems in place for volunteers to complete asynchronously—it often meant that people could move through it in isolation, without opportunities for deeper connection. Without communal entry points, volunteers were dropped straight into the work. Burnout was common, connection decreased over time, and cohesion suffered.
So for EFC, we chose a slower, more thoughtful path.
We began by revisiting the original BFP application. Many of the questions still held value, but we knew we wanted more than just reflections on identity or political theory. We wanted to understand people’s intentions. Why are they coming here? How do they hope to show up? What does this space mean to them?
This focus on intention is not arbitrary. One thing that has remained true in every iteration of our work is our unwavering commitment to uplifting the leadership of those most vulnerable. Most of our youth, if not all, are multiply marginalized. Black, disabled, trans, chronically ill, caste-oppressed, neurodivergent. This is not a space for theory alone; it is a space that holds real people with real histories of being harmed. And so, when someone steps into EFC, they are stepping into a space already shaped by survival and care. We must be careful. We must be discerning. Because anything less risks retraumatizing the very people this space was built to protect.
As Baaba (she/her) noted, “Intentions within the collective space are important, especially for those who are not marginalized.”
Rojan (she/they) agreed, suggesting we include a question about why someone is applying to EFC in the first place, an entry point into deeper discernment. Persie (they/it/any) built upon that, asking what applicants think EFC actually is, reflecting on past confusion from folks who misunderstood our purpose altogether.
And Caspian (he/him) reminded us that vulnerability should be welcomed. Rather than pressuring people to have all the “right” answers, we want to invite transparency. As he shared, “I’d prefer that someone say they haven’t heard of or practiced transformative justice, than feel like they need to be an expert... That’s just another chance to offer them a resource.”
These conversations helped shape our updated EFC written application, which asks about alignment with our collective values, clarity of intention, skills and gifts, and what someone hopes to both offer and learn. We also made sure that every question could be answered in writing or through a video submission, honoring different communication needs.
But we didn’t stop there. We added a new stage: the interview.
As AMW (any pronouns) said, the written application is just a “taste test”—a first impression. The interview is where we meet the full person: their voice, their tone, their presence, their questions. It’s a deeper, more conversational space to explore alignment, clarify unclear answers, and begin building a relationship.
The goal of the interview is not perfection. It’s presence. We want to know who you are, not just what you’ve read. How you listen. How you reflect. How you dream.
Finally, we’ve structured the overall process to unfold in four steps:
Written or Video Application – A snapshot of your values, intentions, and interests
Live Interview – Text or video format, your choice; a deeper exploration of who you are
Onboarding Cohort – A multi-month orientation into the collective, built around relationship and learning (more to come soon!)
Final Cohort Gathering – A welcoming session to transition from cohort member to fully fledged volunteer, with space to reflect and celebrate
This new process is slower by design, as we’re not just building a volunteer program. We’re building a Collective. A home. A place to dream, to contribute, and to heal.
And it all begins with a single question: Why do you want to be here?
"life goes on" is not an ending; it's the beginning of everything you haven't lived yet.
Because as much as it hurts to know that life does not stop for our sorrow, it is also the only reason any of us survive it. If time truly paused for every heartbreak, if the world truly honored every loss by falling silent and still, we would never get unstuck; we would never be able to leave the broken places behind us; we would never arrive at the mornings when the weight is lighter, the laughter comes easier, the hope begins to stir again in our chests. Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment. It is the mechanism of our healing. It doesn’t ask you to be ready. It doesn’t demand you be okay. It simply carries you forward, inch by stubborn inch, until one day you wake up and realize you are not quite the same person who broke apart all those lifetimes ago. You are something new, something softer perhaps, but also stronger, wiser, shaped by your losses but not defined by them. So yes, grieve. Fall apart. Feel everything, every jagged, searing, impossible thing, because it matters and it deserves to be honored. Mourn the version of your life that didn’t survive. Mourn the dreams you had to bury. Mourn the people who are not coming back. But do not, please do not, confuse mourning with living. Do not build a permanent home inside your grief. Because the truth is, the living is still happening — quietly, stubbornly, relentlessly — all around you, even when you cannot yet feel it stirring under your skin. The living is waiting for you. Not demanding, not rushing, not judging; just waiting, patiently, like a tide that knows it will eventually pull you back into its rhythm.
On the Fine Art of Avoiding Your Feelings by Narrating Them Beautifully
What has the biggest impact on you in an apology?
my favorite form of entertainment is downloading PDFs ✦ plus favorite Fluxus artists and early programs
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
When everything feels embarrassing, sometimes it's just a sign that you're prioritizing joy, maybe for the first time ever.
The best and worst things in life can make everything feel embarrassing. Because for many of us, feeling a lot is the biggest embarrassment of all. We don’t want to feel the things a person feels when they’re in love or they’re going through a breakup or they’re promoting a new book or they’re recovering from the flu or they just moved to Paris or they’re spending all day with a new baby. We don’t want all of those unpredictable, fragile feelings that always come at the start of a great adventure or in the middle of a huge loss.
We want to be in control. We live inside the illusion that everyone else is in control. We want to be like them. We want to be BETTER THAN OUR FEELINGS. We want to rise above our vulnerability, our excitement, our sadness. We think it’s selfish to feel pride, and greedy to notice everything you have. We think it’s better to approach every success with talk of how it’s not that great, it’s no big deal, we’re still struggling.
Somehow that’s control: never surrendering to passion, never letting our delight show, never even acknowledging joy. Better to sound serious and nonchalant. Better to pretend that nothing is that big of a deal, so no one sees you as naïve or pathetic. Better to feel less and SEEM better.
This is why my best advice to most people is EMBARRASS YOURSELF AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.
Because you shouldn’t use shame as a guide in life.
When shame is your navigational system, you cut yourself off from everything and everyone you love.
When embarrassment steers you, you avoid joy.
When how you seem is more important to you than how you feel, you grow numb.
These choices are subterranean. We subconsciously steer ourselves toward safety, even when it doesn’t serve our bodies, minds, or hearts. We unknowingly avoid challenges that scare us or threaten our sense of ourselves, even when those are the struggles that will transform us and reignite our lust for life. We ingest the ambient shame and fear in our environments and slowly our cells conform to those limited expectations and fiercely guarded boundaries.
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When everything is embarrassing, that’s a sign that your passion is waking up, and it wants more. Your desire is a tender sprout that wants more water, more sunshine. It wants you to give up on SEEMING happy and in control and to start FEELING joy instead, even when it feels a little too big, even when it makes you cry, even when it forces you to question where you are and why.
Passion and desire and shame and sadness don’t signal that you have to change everything immediately, though. These are sensations that don’t require solutions. Your primary job, in the face of renewed lust for life, is to tolerate the shame of joy.
Because embarrassment is sometimes just a sign that you’ve never lived out in the open before, you’ve never cared more about a feeling than you care about how you’re coming across, you’ve never prioritized happiness over control.
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When everything is embarrassing, your job is to notice that feeling. Your job is to relish your own shame, to savor the jittery sickness you feel. These are signs that you still know what joy is, and you can still feel grief, and you are still alert to your own desires. You might think your cells are hungry for joy when you feel that way. But what your cells are trying to tell you is that
HUNGER IS JOY.
Once you recognize that hunger and longing and desire are permanent, and your job isn’t to escape these sensations but to recognize them as signs that you’re fully alive, your days take a different shape. And slowly, you become emancipated from this oppressive notion that you’re incomplete, that you’re missing something, that you need to fix what you are.
So feel your shame and your hunger. You’re wide awake now. Notice how good that feels. This world is big and sad and broken and so dangerously beautiful, so frighteningly delicious, so bright and full and magnificent, and it belongs to you. Feel everything.
