If You Can't Make Peace With Your Partner, How Can You Expect to Make Peace in the World? AMA with Annie Lalla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_5TMc--Or8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_5TMc--Or8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_5TMc--Or8
What are the most in-the-moment transformative life experiences you've had? Trainings you attended? Drug trips? The birth of your child?
I'm designing a transformative ritual for a client, and looking for inspiration to pull on.
Less "led to transformation in the long term" (like the moment I met my husband, unless it was a profound meet-cute) and more "felt transformative, was transformative"
Emotional Awareness leading to suffering or transcendence? 🫠. Many emotional awareness practices are self reifying. I think this leads to more suffering.
Does being more in touch with your emotional reality invite transcendence of who and what you think you are? Or does it confine you? Are you more open to surprise, or are you more controlling of how people are with you? Are you more responsible for your well-being now that you see what’s happening inside of you, or do you now feel entitled to others treating you a certain way?
I’ve done all of the above, probably today. My apologies to everyone who I’ve been holding responsible for me and my experience. I forget how powerful I am: how I get to choose the interpretations, my right to how I respond, what I show up for, and how I use my resources. I forget to respect the beauty and functionality of how you do things, and to let our differences be OK even if this means more space between us.
I like to think with relatefulness our emotional awareness training opens us up, allows us to be more self-responsible, and transcend the confines of what we limit our self-identity to. But we are flawed and multiple, so sometimes we use our best tools against ourselves. May we be gentle with ourselves and others when we slip into a disempowered assessment, “feelings reveal the truth of who I am,” and may we keep shifting toward an empowered inquiry, “feelings reveal new possibilities—am I free to choose?"
#TTT
Reading as Interaction, as Encounter. This is something I've been reflecting on, and which I wish had been shown/taught to me earlier.
I used to think of books as something like repositories. Of knowledge stuff, of stories, of experience.
And so reading was like a process of extraction. Extract entertainment, joy, information, knowledge. Get thee into the reading mines!
Note: this model of what reading is isn't wrong. It captures some important things, but it feels incomplete. And leads to bad pedagogy, I think.
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Now I see reading as interaction.
A book (or piece of media, or person, or world) is no longer a static repository. It's a potential.
What feels more important now is the reading itself, the whole process of encountering material and, well, meeting it.
This feels like it opens up more possibilities. There are certainly uncountably many kinds or modes of encounter, but here's one that has been very rewarding: treating reading as conversation. How do I respond to this idea, this turn of phrase? What does it make me think of and feel? How am I implicated by this? What is it missing? What does it point me toward?
This makes reading different. Slower, in many ways, but more rewarding. I'm more engaged, and putting more of myself into the reading, which seems to result in getting more out of it.
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This leads me to something I want. I want there to be recorded traces of readings (this is what notes/marginalia are, in a way), performances of reading.
The performance would not be like a poetry reading, restricted to just the text, but like a public performance of an individual's (or group's) live encounter – including thoughts/asides/etc.
I want this to exist for two reasons: (1) I wish I had learned about this way of reading much much earlier in my life. So having examples of this and venerating it might help more people encounter this way of reading sooner. (2) I want traces of past encounters, for historical reasons. I want to be able to see how my (or our) relationship to a text has changed over time.
When you take one path. When you take one path, all other paths die and are left behind.
Such is the weight of all our choices.
But I'm not good at letting things die. I keep going back and dragging half-alive corpses around. Abomination!
You stink of the dead. Mark your endings and grieve them, foul beast!
What are some of your uncertainties? Experiences of failure (that maybe you still haven't turned into learnings yet?) Obvious realizations? (eg: things that were maybe super obvious to others, or even obvious to you about others, but you just realized deeply apply to you?)
Will you share some here in the comments?
#quicktakes
Two sides to “codependency”: my taking on others + expecting others to take on me 🏗️. This was probably obvious to a lot of people; it’s all over the psychological literature but I missed it as it applies to my life, so I want to share it (and make it quick):
There are (at least) two sides to claiming more sovereignty—seeing through the belief that I’m responsible for other people’s well-being (savior), and seeing through the belief that other people are responsible for me and what I need (victim). Idk if it's just me and my projection, but I think we-space practices in general have some very sneaky ways and fancy language to demand that other people show up for them in a certain way.
#TTT
We need to stop shaming small dicks. OK this was meant to be anonymous cos I don't want to be slut shamed ...
But I can't create a second anon account right now, looks like that anon account is just going to the wait list. And I care about this topic and I like what I have to say about it so I'm going to go ahead and share even though I risk attracting condemnation (that relates to a whole other hot take that I'll set aside for now).
So here's my #deeptake on the hot take that we should stop shaming small dicks:
Am I the only one who winces with a vicarious ouch every time a woman casually insists that a big penis belongs on her list of essential criteria for a good man - like in this great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjqvY7Gdp1A)
That’s how I was going to begin this piece. Then I looked in the mirror and admitted that it would be more accurate (and more honest) to start with: I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I know this because of the talking-to a friend gave me a few years ago when I conspiratorially spilled on a perfect new love interest whose only flaw was that his dick was on the smallish side.
When she started to object, I pleaded for understanding. I can’t help my tastes and preferences! This was just how I was born! I’d had enough experience to know what I needed!
I am ashamed to admit that I went so far as to suggest that if we progressed in our relationship, I could at some point maybe ask him to wear a strap-on. I think that was the point at which my friend-worthiness was forever punctured in my her eyes. She was legitimately horrified, and confronted me with the possibility that it might just be me who was anatomically challenged!
And she was right - I was the one with the problem. I’m still smarting as I write this - not from my own body shame, but from reliving the moment where I had to face my callous and miscalibrated treatment of my would-be lover and of men collectively.
One of the things that hurts most is how I ignored the uneasy stab in my heart every time I indulged in this offhand mass-bullying. I always knew, in a palpable way, this was wrong. Every time I singled out penis size when celebrating one of my sexual adventures. Every time I laughed sympathetically when a friend proclaimed a preference for bigger penises or dismissed a smaller one. My inner voice always whispered to me - how do you think men feel about this? What’s it like to have your worthiness as a partner be diminished to a feature you are powerless to change? What’s it like to be the butt of an enduring in-joke, to risk silent ridicule every time you want to share the joy of sex with someone?
Even with my difficulty handling some bigger penises. Even experiencing the deep bliss of my encounters with average-sized penises. Even receiving the liberating possibilities that opened up with smaller penises. None of these facts penetrated my collusion with what now seems like an obvious and incredibly harmful mass psychosis.
HOW is this still normal?! The closest I have come to understanding the roots of my own behaviour is that I was under-developed, not confident and embodied enough yet in my own sexuality to really claim the truth of my own experience.
What’s true for me, actually, is that every penis I’ve been honoured to meet feels like a blessing.
As I have matured and found the capacity to recognise and cherish this, some of my most extraordinary and ecstatically transformative sexual experiences have in fact involved a pretty small penis! I think penis size was actually an irrelevant albeit happily coincidental feature in this case - a feature which finally crumbled any residue of the myth that small dicks are bad and bigger is better.
My prayer is that more and more of us are liberated from this myth. I’m pretty sure we don’t need it to fuel this kind of creative brilliance (which I opened with, but here it is again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjqvY7Gdp1A). And we’ll probably all have way more extraordinary and ecstatically transformative sex without it. That’s what I really want.