Fiercely Me
** Please note a portion of this content may be triggering to those who have experienced sexual violence and mental health struggles.**
Belly and Pelvis Fire Drawings from Inspire Your Fire Retreat in Point Reyes Station, CA, July 22-23, 2022
My fire is all aglow. A feminine burning of multitudes of stories all turned on—orgasmic—soft and persistent. The hottest part of the flame, the fire point, is fiercely alive. Ignited. I am ignited. I am ignited with blue flames rising to my throat unleashing, releasing, blossoming, freeing the last cages. . .and then what?
A couple of weeks after teaching my first 2-Day In-Person Retreat on the element of fire, I have answered my own question and then some: What happens after slitting open with the hottest part of the fire? What happens after becoming my full self: embodied, expressive, sensual, fabulous? What has happened 6 months into living my inquiry into fierce hope? What happens after becoming a woman and embracing my growth? Then what?
Well, then I am fiercely and unapologetically me. Then I can do the things that I used to feel too ashamed or too cautious to do. I can dance with sensual abandon in the middle of 30 other people and not care about what they think when they’re looking at me. I feel pleasure in my body simply for me. I become the person I’ve always wanted to be: fierce, bold, wild and free.
When I was 11, Shania Twain’s belly button changed my world. Every morning while my mom blow dried and curled my hair, I would sit in front of the television watching MTV, Vh1 and CMT music videos like most kids of my older Millennial generation. I always had crushes on beautiful women, but there was something different about Shania. Her music videos went beyond that for me. She was the epitome of sensuality, female power, confidence and softness. I imagined that when I was in my late thirties and early forties, I would be that way too. And, as I approach 38, I am. I am in my power.
Posing after the Tamalpa Institute Level 1 Online Training on Legs and Feet that I’m apprenticing for, July 2022
Power Drawing with two of my spirit animal guides from Tamalpa Institute Level 2 Online Training on Embodied Leadership of the Life/Art Process with Dohee Lee, September 2020
I’ve taken the lessons from my mentors and teachers to heart, and this year I’ve become my own teacher alongside my clients in my s(e)oul expressions fieldwork study and in my Inspire Your Fire Retreat. And just like I’ve fallen in love with all of my teachers before me, I have embodied all of those qualities I find so attractive in other older women.
The lesson I’ve taught myself at the present moment is a message contained within my old drawings—my power is in my legs and feet. My power animal may have first appeared to me by bursting forth from my chest, but she walks with my legs and feet. And when I’m connecting to them, she comes to me. Right now, I’m connected, but I wasn’t always. I spent 32 years being dissociated and disconnected from my whole body. My legs and feet were the last body part I was able to feel. I used to complain to one of mentors and teachers that I couldn’t feel my legs and feet, and by that point, I could feel everything else. Around this time of mid-August six years ago in 2016, I was molested by a woman I used to love, admire, and think of as a kind of teacher, and through the Fall, I was dramatically dropped by another woman I loved who was my teacher, and then I removed myself from the entire friend group and community I belonged to. Every year, I feel it. It was around this time in 2017, I began to start getting some feeling in my legs and feet.
Legs and Feet Drawing from Tamalpa Institute Level 1 Weekend Training, October 2019
By 2019, I could communicate and start having a relationship with them in my Tamalpa Institute Level 1 Weekend Training on Personal Embodiment of the Life/Art Process. My final drawing from the weekend showed the first appearance of my power animal—the snow leopard—in any of my drawings.
I wrote: My legs and feet are holding the dream of embodying softness. I carry this line with me as my own personal lesson from our first week of training. Of all the things written, it resonates deeply inside my very being. Like the other parts of my body, my hands, for example, my legs and feet dream too. They dream of my own embodiment. They dream with the softness in which they tread.
I often walk on my toes—small, quiet steps, afraid to make noise or bother my neighbors. My toes holding the fears of the girl who doesn’t want to burden anyone by being present, or more precisely, by being born.
And yet, I was born.
Standing on my toes, I am also ready to pounce, to spring forth from my pink and indigo center—radiating, pulsating, and powerful—with all the assuredness of the snow leopard.
My feet are so small, and yet, they are weathered and callused. I used to see them only in terms of pain. The pain shooting up from the side of my crooked right toe to my right hip, a blood red lineage of all the burdens I carried within.
And now, I have learned to begin counter-balancing the weight I bear on my right side. I have released much of the pain, many of the stories I used to hold so tightly there. I have found the ground within the storm sometimes kicked up in my dance to the beating center of stillness. These legs and feet are soft and fierce holding—carrying—quietly becoming my refuge.
This week as the trauma anniversary approaches, I have been in my feelings again. But, I’ve also remained in my power. I’ve remained connected to my roots, connected to my lower body, and connected to my feelings. And, I’m even now fully connected to my sensuality. I can dance for me. I can do a Shania Twain cover, and most importantly, I can love fiercely me.
