Is there still time to matter?
One more day until Asian Pacific Heritage x Mental Health Awareness Month is Over!
Hurry, Coke! You have just one more day until this one month that uplifts both Asian heritage and Mental health go POOF! Wait Reader, Wait! Come back!! It’s still Asian Mental Pacific Awareness Health Heritage Month! Just one more month to feel real!
Phew. I just woke up from that walking nightmare. And, some days I do wonder if I’m sleepwalking in a time-deprivation reality that has barely a nanomoment for someone like me to appear, to be heard, before moving on to someone or something bigger, louder, sexier, clever-er-er. You know that film, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (the one you may have either totally loved or totally hated)? There was a whole lotta’ externalizing happening there, yeah? A portion of me felt relief about this because at the place in my life where third-gen Asian American meets Mental Health, a whole lot gets internalized. Throw in the fact that I’m somehow a Sensitive, and well. If my life were a book, it might be bursting at the bindings, entitled Notes from the Middle. Being neither white nor Black in our falsely manmade American binary, I am often backgrounded where I notice a lot, am overlooked/overspoken a lot, and am projected upon a whole, whole lot. Suddenly this intersectional month makes some meaningful sense to me.
But I digress. Or, thanks to ADD, I meander! Three sites to pause at on this Body Memoir pilgrimage today ~
1.
I’d like to describe where I’ve been since my last post on (gasp!) March 5th. After that post, “The Muscle Within the Muscle,” my body somehow knew I was ready to teach again after taking a much-needed break. I’d been praying about what is mine to do in these times of the extreme yet (un)natural consequences of toxic patriarchy and evil. She Is Here was what I felt and heard over and over again. For the first time in my life, it felt both safe and indescribably aligned to obey.
To begin: I felt called to co-generate teaching/healing/liberative She Is Here spaces for women, femmes and nonbinary siblings of the Asian diaspora, four weeks at a time. We’re now winding down our second series.
We now have an Evening Edition and a Morning Edition of She Is Here: Body & Soul for Asian Women, Femmes and Nonbinary Siblings. These occur on Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings. Thirty people have attended at least one session since March 17th. A good third of these have returned multiple times. I say this at seven weeks into these offerings. This remains an unfolding Mystery to me, one I feel so thankful, whole and sound to participate in.
Yes. I do sense inner nudges to open future such spaces to Asian men, to all women/femmes/nonbinary sibs, and to all people. But for now, I’m appreciating InterPlay’s body wisdom tools of Incrementality and Inner Authority (thank you forever, Phil Porter & Cynthia Winton-Henry!). To center what is perenially on the margins of varied collective imaginations. To do so in small steps then notice what emerges.
If you are, or have Asian beloveds in your life whom you’d sense might benefit from personal movement meditation, centering/affirmation of their lives as Asian bodyspirits, and gentle community connection in Her love, do send them my way, dearcoke@gmail.com.
2.
I have also responded to a nudge, both inner and outer, to offer a creative writing space for the voices of Asian diasporic women, femmes and nonbinary kin. I’ve noticed growing worn from the use of the English language only to sell or criticize or report or editorialize or preach or analyze or pathologize. My body knows the cumulative impact of these is a form of violence.
Language is poised to give us so much more! Language can (re)humanize and (re)divinize. Language can restore, repair, strengthen and inspire. Language can spaciously love you.
I’ve benefitted deeply from Poetic Medicine circles (thank you forever Redwing Judith Keyssar and Gayle Kojimoto!) and from BIPOC and other poets. It felt like time to step into this teacher-facilitator lineage. She Is Here: River of Words for Asian Women, Femmes and Nonbinary Siblings has been meeting weekly and at times we have participants from across five time zones. Just as it feels holy to me to see Asian bodies moving freely for themselves while in community, it has also felt holy to play the chime marking the end of a dedicated writing period, then be met onscreen with heads looking downward, participants still listening and transmitting language to page, and not wanting to stop! She helps us hear ourselves back into being.
Again, if you are, or know of those who may appreciate a creative writing space like this, send them to me, dearcoke@gmail.com.
*
To return to sensation and instinct; to be free in space.
To receive and reclaim intuitive voice; to dedicate it to a page.
Thanks to those who have come to these unlikely spaces of Devotion. This is where I have been since my last post, dear Reader!
3.
Asian Pacific Heritage x Mental Health Awareness Month: In retrospect, I hope the springtime She Is Here offerings for Asian diasporic participants have been of service/liberation not only in our felt cultural milieu, but for the sake of our mental health too.
Through my bodyspirit as a third gen Asian American bodyspirit of Okinawan + Japanese + apparently a tiny fraction Korean descent, over twenty years ago, I began to reimagine and reconstruct the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—as a space of poetry. Here are two of the pieces that came through my body.
PANIC DISORDER, Hidden Subtype A wind from a poison pit snakes through you, laughing. Death seems easier but you don’t want to be noticeable, definitely not messy. You reach for a railing that’s gone, think just breathe, but cannot, feel all eyes upon you. Your own eyes float in the air socketless, hover above your ears too small for the buzz grating in your cranial vortex. You sweat what you cannot cry double over fade into a drain wane against its suction. Even with your sole companion you fear your plea could kill. Rather than scream, your murmur honey, I have that feeling again, hope it’s not inconvenient for him, her, or anyone caught in your wake. Treading the current, you long to raise your arms, lift your gaze, catch theirs, beg for a flotation device for the mass of pulsing shame that you are: a mouth that cannot say help a silent movie— the empty helmet/the foot with the black-buckled shoe/the spinning bicycle wheel/the lips of a child turning blue.
POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, Transdimensional Subtype A discreet blast— you become a living minefield. Suspect beneath your own feet wind laughing at your back hands dangling keys behind a veil. Here is what dangles. 1. nightmares 2. flashbacks 3. startles 4. voices 5. muscle groups 6. reproduction 7. relationships 8. cravings 9. body integrity 10. intuition. But the veil Biopsy. Busted tube. Sensurround sound. Wind in the valley. Perfect scores. Always, the veil. They get in you, across dimensions. When your vigil sinks to velvet when the world grows bright again they get in you. They restitch the code on your seed like this: love leads to death soft is sliceable taking glee in your implosion. They force sensations erasing names, rubric, rules then time it—flash you know, that shift you feel, doubt, almost forget like encrypted déjà vu. They replay the dismantling until you see with your body but not with your eyes until your soul is suspended pendent on a crumbling wall an open page upon which to inscribe their indefatigable lie— that you are gone. Drained by promises of salvation you close your eyes draw into your fetal form descend to your beginning. A flicker. A shimmer. Deep natal breaths. Little do they realize even as you dream of annihilation the soft star beneath your diaphragm bears the code, strikes all locks open. 11. You.
You matter. I matter. Every month of every year. Every day of every month. Every hour of everyday.
So many, many hours to love,
Coke
PS: Paid subscriptions free up more time for me to write both my book project and freestanding pieces for lit publication. Thank you!
Drinking it in like cool water-
Such rich work/play you are immersed in, Coke! Yes, yes, yes.