You are a time capsule. You are the Seed. You are the Art.
My science of healing
I think the moment I knew my ideas would change the world was when almost everything I wrote started to make me cry.
When every word that I channeled simultaneously felt like a time capsule laid by my past self and message in a bottle floating back from future me. When I felt old versions of me gasping for air like a drowned man coughing water from time-soaked lungs.
I healed myself with every thought I unwrapped from years spent living it.
I wandered in a desert of inner desolation for 27 years until I finally reached shore. And I boiled that water and carried it, gathering seeds wherever I could find them, and I poured and I poured. I pressed shaking palms into that disturbed earth and I prayed and I prayed. I tried and I tried—I ran hairbrained experiment after wild experiment—and I hoped that this strange science would one day cure me.
And it did.
I find myself regularly accompanying my advice to clients with my own testimony. I want them to understand that I don’t suggest the things I do because they’re easy or immediate. I recommend them because they work.
I used to work with people who were living with severe trauma, severe dysregulation, severe pain. Because that’s my own history. I have a complex trauma background—so complex that no therapist or psychiatrist could fix me.
I had to do what so many trauma sufferers have done before and discover my own science of healing.
I had to study every corner of every discipline of healing that exists and craft my own solution.
And then I had to keep running experiments over and over again until a breakthrough came.
I did what Chiron did (as Nairy Fstukh of Soft Moon Rising so lovingly puts it) and made my wound an altar.
My Chiron in Virgo lives in the darkest part of my chart. The 12th House. The place where those void and vaporous things struggle to be born. The place where we are forced to take ourselves apart and put ourselves back together. And due to the nature of the task, some of us are left with pieces and puzzles we can’t assemble.
How do you find two matching pieces in the dark?
You come to know them in the most intimate way possible. You run timid and uncertain fingers over jagged edges until a picture wafts into your mind. Until you could almost paint it.
Healing is an art form.
Healing requires imagination. Healing requires intimacy. Healing requires a deep reverence for those things that are beyond intellectual understanding. Things that can only be breached by our emotional intelligence, our aesthetic sensibilities, our somatic senses.
Healing requires that we come to know our wounds as erotic—as the site of profound beauty, of a painful ecstasy.
Some might call it Existential Kink.
But where Dr. Carolyn Lovewell, founder in chief of this practice, casts it as a process of getting off on our wounds the way we would a conventional erotic desire, I see it as a practice of coming to know the deep, toe-curling ecstasy in grief.
The point is not to transcend pain or contort it into our idea of pleasure.
The point is to widen our definition of pleasure.
Now, when I unleash a torrent of grief, when I run my fingers over a jagged edge, I feel the purest sense of ecstasy. It feels like a great gasp of relief from every pore. I feel the transmutation that occurs without having to rush to that eventual endpoint where the pain is transformed. Because to do so would be to forgo that alchemy altogether.
I feel my pain like it is The Point.
Like it is the greatest art I will ever get to experience.
Like there is nothing to do other than live it.
And then—only when I have been fully present to receive that art—do I create from it. And not a moment before.
It’s funny how the thing you most desire to manifest requires that you take time to fully appreciate the raw materials that will compose it. It’s funny how, in order to create anything, we have to relinquish our desire to create. Because what we’re really doing is myopically focusing on one part of the process, one form of creation, and neglecting the creation that is happening in every present moment when we are still and when are here, in the exact plot where our feet are planted.
You are the crop that you grow.
You are the art you create.
The seed contains everything that is needed to become the tree. But we fix our sight on that tree in our minds and miss out on the magic of that entire world in one tiny pod. Of the moment where it all exists inside us, waiting to be born.
What art lives inside you right now? What seed do you have on hand that contains an entire world you haven’t even met yet? Maybe you don’t know what that seed will be. But that unknowing is the lifeblood of the moment. Savor it. Ponder it. Puzzle at it.
And only once you’ve fully felt its contours and its crevices, then and only then, should you create art from it.
Plant that seed and watch it grow.
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Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333
Become a paid subscriber for $5 a month and keep an eye out for bi-monthly releases of my 5-part pamphlet.
