I’m fairly certain Dolly Parton was not greeted at the pearly gates by St. Peter. I think Whitney was there, and Kenny Rogers, and her mama and daddy. A choir of lovely gay men. Several drag queens who had been preparing for this moment their entire lives. Approximately six million butterflies. And enough rhinestones and glitter to constitute a genuine safety hazard.

Jolene was there too. Apparently they’re good now.

Nothing tasteful. Dolly would hate tasteful.

Standing barely over five feet tall, Dolly somehow managed to occupy considerably more space than her physical body should have allowed. Add the heels, the wigs, the breasts, the rhinestones and nails and lashes, and that unmistakable voice, and suddenly this tiny woman became enormous. Maybe that’s one of the things I loved most about her: she never seemed interested in making herself smaller so the rest of us could feel more comfortable.

While researching this essay, I discovered there is a website called Boobpedia. Of course there is. And of course Dolly Parton has an entry. I’m not going to tell you the measurements listed there, because truly, Dolly Parton’s breast size is none of our damn business. But I mention it because her body has been treated like public property for most of her life. People discussed it, measured it, speculated about it, joked about it, asked what was real and what wasn’t — asked her questions about her breasts and her plastic surgery that would be almost unimaginable to ask most male artists about their bodies.

And Dolly did something fascinating with all of it. She gloried in herself. Not because she thought everyone should look like Dolly Parton, but because she wanted to look like Dolly Parton. Her look was intentional — she talked openly about the cosmetic surgery, the wigs, the makeup, the fact that her particular version of glamour was exaggerated on purpose. People in the industry told her to tone herself down so she’d be taken more seriously. She didn’t. Instead, she seemed to decide that the work would eventually make them reckon with the woman underneath all that hair. And it did.

Maybe this is where Dolly Parton enters the realm of goddess for me. Because if we were going to place her among the archetypes, at first glance she seems obviously Aphrodite. Look at her — beauty, sensuality, pleasure, ornamentation, desire, magnetism. Aphrodite doesn’t ask permission to be beautiful. She doesn’t apologize for attracting attention. She understands that beauty can be power, and Dolly knew exactly how to wield it.

But Dolly Parton was never simply Aphrodite. That might have been the trick. Because underneath the wigs and breasts and pink and sparkle lived Athena. Dolly was smart — not cute-smart, not surprisingly smart, just smart. She understood business, ownership, people, storytelling, and exactly what happened when people underestimated a tiny blonde woman with enormous breasts. She learned how to let them.

There is something profoundly Athena about that. You don’t have to convince everyone that you are powerful. Sometimes you let them misunderstand you while you quietly keep the publishing rights. She famously refused to give Elvis Presley’s team half the publishing rights to “I Will Always Love You,” even though having Elvis record her song could have transformed her career at the time. Years later, Whitney Houston’s recording became one of the most famous songs in modern music. The woman knew what she owned. She knew what she was worth. And she knew how to wait. That is not just glamour. That is strategy.

But I think there was another goddess living inside Dolly too: Hestia, the keeper of the hearth. Because for all the enormity of Dolly Parton, there always seemed to be something wonderfully ordinary at her center — home, faith, food, family, stories, children, books. Her Imagination Library began as a tribute to her father, who couldn’t read or write, and grew into an enormous literacy program giving books to children around the world. Her philanthropy wasn’t separate from the little girl who grew up poor in the mountains of Tennessee. It seemed to grow directly from her. She became enormous without ever pretending she had not once been small. Maybe that’s why people trusted her — she could stand beneath a thousand lights covered in rhinestones and somehow still feel like somebody who might feed you.

And then there was the way she made room for people, especially people who had been told there wasn’t room for them. Dolly’s relationship with the LGBTQ+ community wasn’t simply a late-career branding decision. She publicly supported queer people long before doing so was culturally easy for a country music star. She supported marriage equality. She welcomed LGBTQ+ fans while remaining deeply rooted in her own Christian faith. There is something about that combination that moves me — not abandoning spirituality, not abandoning the people religion told you to abandon, but choosing a bigger table. Maybe that is another kind of body liberation.

Because when we talk about body image, we so often shrink the conversation down to whether we like what we see in the mirror. But bodies are also where the world meets us. Before someone knows our intelligence or humor or tenderness, they encounter skin. Size. Age. Gender expression. Clothing. Hair. Race. Disability. Breasts. Wrinkles. Whatever parts of us the culture has decided mean something. And people make stories from bodies — they certainly made stories from Dolly’s.

A woman who looked like that couldn’t possibly be serious. A woman who dressed like that couldn’t possibly be a brilliant businessperson. A woman that feminine couldn’t possibly be powerful. A Christian woman from Tennessee couldn’t possibly love gay people. A woman who had plastic surgery couldn’t possibly teach us anything about authenticity. And Dolly spent a lifetime cheerfully ruining the categories.

That’s what I keep returning to. Because body liberation cannot simply mean replacing one set of body rules with another. We don’t become liberated by deciding natural bodies are morally superior to altered ones. We don’t escape beauty culture by creating another hierarchy where women who wear makeup are somehow less evolved than women who don’t. We don’t dismantle patriarchy by insisting women age in the particular way we have now decided counts as “graceful.”

You can wear no makeup. You can wear enough eyeliner to be visible from Tennessee. You can stop shaving. You can love your Botox. You can wear flowing linen. You can have breasts that arrive in the room several minutes before the rest of you. The question isn’t whether your body or your presentation earns some imaginary certificate of authenticity. The question is simpler than that, and harder: does it belong to you?

That, to me, is where Dolly’s relationship with beauty becomes much more interesting than whether she had implants. She seemed to understand beauty as play. As creation. As costume. As pleasure. As authorship. Her look wasn’t simply an apology for an inadequate natural body — it was something she made. And maybe that is what I’ve been trying to understand in my own work around bodies, and maybe what you’ve been circling too, whatever shape your own body takes and whatever you’ve done or not done to it. There is a difference between changing yourself because the world has convinced you that you are unacceptable, and adorning yourself because something inside you says, oh honey, more glitter. From the outside, those two things might look exactly the same. Only the person living inside the body knows which one it is.

In Steel Magnolias, Dolly’s character, Truvy, gives us perhaps the most Dolly Parton line ever: “There is no such thing as natural beauty.” It’s funny, it’s campy, and I think there’s some wisdom tucked inside it too. Because maybe authenticity was never about looking natural. Maybe you don’t have to strip away everything decorative to discover your “real” self. Maybe sometimes the decoration is part of the realness — the lipstick and the linen, the bare face and the Botox, the sensible shoes and the six-inch heels. The question isn’t whether you have sufficiently escaped beauty standards. The question is whether you are still somewhere inside all of it. Whether you belong to yourself.

I don’t want to turn Dolly into some perfectly liberated feminist goddess. I’m sure being Dolly Parton was exhausting sometimes. Imagine spending decades asking the world to hear your words while it stared at your breasts. Imagine continually proving that softness wasn’t stupidity, that kindness wasn’t weakness, that femininity wasn’t frivolity, that a tiny body could hold enormous authority — and still choosing not to become hard. That may be the part I admire most.

She used her voice. She used her money. She used her power. She advocated for working women through 9 to 5. She built businesses and created jobs in the community she came from. She gave children books. She welcomed queer people. She held onto her faith without requiring everyone else to live inside it. She could laugh at herself without ever making herself the joke. This goddess used her power. And somehow, she also seemed to rest inside a kind of simplicity and gentleness. Strong back. Soft front. Big hair.

Maybe that’s the Dolly Parton archetype. Aphrodite reminds us: you are allowed to enjoy being seen. Athena reminds us: know what you bring to the table. Hestia reminds us: remember what all of this is for. And Dolly? Dolly seems to whisper something even simpler: be you.

There can be brains underneath the wig. There can be a heart underneath the boobs. There can be tremendous power inside gentleness, deep spirituality without judgment, artificial lashes with something profoundly authentic looking through them. You do not have to strip away everything decorative to discover your real self. Maybe sometimes the decoration is the realness. Maybe authenticity was never about looking natural. Maybe it is about becoming less willing to abandon yourself for the comfort of people who haven’t bothered to know you yet — whatever your body looks like, whatever you’ve added to it or taken away, whatever the world has decided your particular shape or softness or scar or wrinkle means. That part isn’t really about Dolly at all. It’s about the body you’re sitting in right now, reading this.

So today, when I imagine Dolly wherever she is, I hope somebody handed her a microphone. I hope Whitney is nearby. I hope the drag queens are furious because Dolly’s hair is somehow bigger than theirs. I hope there are butterflies and rhinestones and glitter everywhere.

But I also hope that after all those years of being Dolly Parton, she finally gets to put it all down. I hope there is a moment when she takes off the wig. When someone unzips the heavy dress. When she kicks those impossible heels across the room and wiggles toes that haven’t had enough room in sixty years. Because even when we choose the things we carry, they can still become heavy, and I imagine there must have been days when being Dolly Parton was very heavy indeed — the beauty standards, the scrutiny, the jokes about her body, the expectation to be gracious and funny and generous, the endless transformation of a small human body into an icon large enough for all of us to recognize from across a room.

I hope she knew how deeply we loved the woman underneath all of it. And I hope she knew she never owed us the performance.

Maybe Aphrodite gets to remove her makeup. Maybe Athena gets to put down her armor. Maybe Hestia has already pulled a chair close to the fire. And maybe that is where I want to leave Dolly — not beneath the lights, not on a stage, not holding anything for us. Barefoot. Soft. Surrounded by everyone she loved. Her feet don’t hurt. Her head isn’t carrying the weight of all that glorious hair. Nothing needs lifting or cinching or painting or curling or sparkling, and for once, nobody needs anything from her. She doesn’t have to be clever. She doesn’t have to be beautiful. She doesn’t have to make us comfortable. She doesn’t even have to be Dolly Parton.

She can just rest.

Although, knowing Dolly, I give it about twenty minutes before she asks somebody where they put her rhinestones.

Okay, that’s too dramatic. I love leggings. I’ll wear them again — there will probably always be a few pairs in my closet, because they’re comfortable, they move with me, and they’re practical for the work

I do. I’ve historically bought the expensive ones, too, not because I needed a logo on my ass but because after teaching enough classes and doing enough loads of laundry, I got tired of leggings that pilled and stretched out and fell apart. Sometimes the expensive ones really are just better.

So this isn’t an essay about how leggings are bad and loose pants are good. It’s about something harder to see: the costumes we wear to play the roles we’ve been given, and what happens in our bodies when we put them on. Apparently a pair of pants is what got me thinking about all of it.

It started in pelvic floor PT

I’m post-op and currently in pelvic floor physical therapy, and at one point my PT suggested I start wearing looser-fitting pants. I remember thinking, okay, sure — of everything I was paying attention to in my body, my pants did not seem particularly profound.

But I started wearing looser ones. And something happened I wasn’t expecting: my body softened. Nothing dramatic, no nervous-system revelation with angels singing. I just noticed that when my pants weren’t gripping my middle, I wasn’t getting that same physical squeeze that seems to invite you to pull your belly in. There was room.

One day I realized I wasn’t fitting myself into my pants anymore. The pants were meeting me.

That sentence has stayed with me, because my body isn’t the same body every morning — none of ours are. Some days I’m bloated, some days tender, some days hurting. My belly is softer some days than others. My body changes when I eat, breathe, sit, menstruate, heal, move through stress, rest, and just exist inside a human body. The loose pants didn’t seem particularly concerned about any of that. They just met the body that showed up. And I started wondering why that felt so unfamiliar.

I know how to hold myself together

Doing this work in PT, I’ve become aware that I’m a little bit braced almost all the time — my belly, my pelvic floor, my jaw, my glutes, my shoulders, my breath. There are reasons my body learned readiness, and some of those stories belong elsewhere, including my years as a first responder. But the readiness I’m interested in here is tangled up with body image, because being ready and looking right have both offered me the same thing: safety. If I’m ready, I can respond to what happens. If I look right, I can prepare for how I’ll be perceived.

Somewhere in my dusty library of body stories is a whole shelf of books about what “right” looks like. A yoga teacher should look like this. A fit woman has that. A wellness professional should. If my belly is soft, people will think —

I don’t consciously believe most of that anymore. I’ve spent years questioning it, pulling it apart, building a different relationship with my body. But nobody came through and cleared out the library. The books are still there, and one of the oldest still says: soft belly equals fat belly.

What I’ve been discovering lately is almost embarrassingly simple. Sometimes a soft belly is just a relaxed belly.

Relaxation has a shape

I don’t think I understood that for a long time. When I relax my belly, it changes shape — of course it does. Leggings make that change very easy to observe, because they outline the body. I can see my stomach, feel the waistband around it, feel that little squeeze that invites me to suck it all in before I’ve even consciously decided to.

The pants aren’t causing me to brace, I want to be clear about that — my body brought that pattern to the pants. But I’m starting to wonder how much certain clothing reinforces a pattern that’s already there. When I put on the loose pants, there’s less information coming back at me about my silhouette. I’m not monitoring every change in my middle. The pants don’t care whether my stomach is flat after breakfast and round after dinner. And I’m realizing how much attention I’ve spent on this over the course of my life.

There’s a literal holding-in that happens in the body, but there’s something metaphorical about it too, and I can’t unsee it now. Hold your stomach in. Hold yourself together. Have it all together. Look like you have it all together. For women in fitness and wellness, that last one carries some weight, because we’ve built an entire visual language around what “wellness” is supposed to look like. I know that language intimately.

I used to want you to see my six-pack

There was a stretch, deeper in my orthorexia, when I’d worked very hard for my body and I wanted people to see the results. I called it motivation, and some of it probably was. But with distance, I can admit there was other stuff tangled up in there too. My body had become evidence. My six-pack proved I was disciplined, that I had self-control, that I knew what I was talking about, that the things I was doing “worked.” It also made me feel desirable and sexy, and I liked that.

Here’s the part that’s harder to admit: I felt superior. I’d worked hard enough to make my body look that way, and somewhere underneath all the wellness language was the belief that my body said something about the kind of person I was. Disciplined. Committed. Healthy. In control. I could package that as inspiration, but if my body was proof I was doing wellness correctly, what was I communicating to the woman whose body didn’t look like mine?

I don’t ask that to punish the woman I was. I understand her better now. I think she desperately wanted connection and control, and she was craving something she didn’t have a word for yet: embodiment. I knew how to manage my body — discipline it, evaluate it, improve it, display it, use it to say something about myself to the world. I wasn’t nearly as practiced at simply living inside it. That difference feels enormous to me now.

Apparently I also have a yoga uniform

The funny thing is I never thought I was dressing up to play the part of a yoga teacher. I thought I was wearing comfortable pants. Leggings stretch, they move, they’re practical, they work well for yoga. But looking backward, I can see that somewhere along the way they also became a uniform.

I started thinking about this while preparing my yoga teacher trainees for a visit to a local monastery — we were talking about how to enter the space respectfully, including what to wear, since we’d be guests in a place where other people were practicing and on retreat. As I was giving instructions about their clothing, I suddenly started thinking about my own. Huh. I have a yoga costume. I just hadn’t thought of it as one, because I’ve been surrounded by it for so long.

That’s made me think harder about my position as a white woman who’s spent years in Western yoga and wellness spaces. I’ve participated in and benefited from an aesthetic that disproportionately privileges bodies like mine. Western wellness culture has become very good at producing a particular picture of “yoga”: leggings, thinness, fitness, flexibility, whiteness, a certain kind of femininity, beautiful studios, expensive athletic clothing, bodies that visually communicate discipline. We’ve seen that image so many times it can start to feel like it belongs to yoga itself. But yoga has roots in India. Leggings do not.

I don’t say that because I think I’ve discovered the authentic yoga outfit, or because loose pants make me more spiritual — that would just be another costume. I’m interested in something simpler: how easily the culture around a practice can become indistinguishable from the practice itself in our minds. That’s especially worth sitting with when you’re a white woman who’s benefited from the version Western wellness culture built.

And if leggings didn’t come from yoga, where did they come from? Honestly, further back than I’d given them credit for. Before there was a yoga costume, there was an aerobics costume, and I was raised on it. I grew up doing Jane Fonda in the living room with my mom, the two of us grapevining across the carpet because that’s what you did in the 80s to “be healthy.” I had my own Aerobics Barbie — headband, shiny leotard, leg warmers stacked above high heels, because apparently even a plastic doll needed to look fit and done up while she did it. I had a “toy” Get In Shape Girl… that promised me to be like Mary Lou Retton.

Here’s the confusing part: those are dusty stories, and I love them and hate them at the same time. I’m not interested in resolving that. The love is real — that was my mom, that was play, that was a doll I actually adored. The hate, or at least the discomfort, is also real, because I can see now what she was quietly teaching me about what “healthy” was supposed to look like while she taught it. It didn’t feel like a costume back then. It felt like bonding. Maybe that’s exactly how a costume gets its grip — it doesn’t arrive looking like a costume. It arrives looking like love.

So this isn’t even a new costume. It’s the same one, restyled every decade or so. The leotard became the legging. The leg warmers went away, the yoga mat came in, but the underlying instruction never really changed: get your body into the right shape, put the right uniform on it, and then you’re allowed to call it health.

I’ve never shopped at Lululemon. Not out of some grand boycott — I just never liked what I knew about the company. The founder has said things about women’s bodies over the years that turned my stomach, the kind of comments that make it pretty clear whose body the brand was actually built around. He’s long gone from running things now, but by then I’d already made up my mind, and my money’s gone elsewhere ever since. What interests me more than the man, honestly, is how easily the company sold what it was selling. It wasn’t just pants. It was an image wellness culture already knew how to want, packaged and handed back to us at a markup.

I’ve also started asking a quieter question about athletic clothing — what’s actually in the material against my skin for hours at a time, week after week, class after class. I don’t fully know, and I’m not going to pretend I do. I’m not interested in another scare, another thing to be afraid of my clothes over — I’ve already lived inside that kind of fear once, and I’m not going back. I’m just curious now. There’s a difference between the two, and it’s taken me a while to find it.

What if our clothes don’t need to make our bodies look better?

This might be the question underneath all of it. Not: what if I finally learn to believe my body is beautiful anyway? I’ve lost interest in that version, because it still puts beauty at the center — my stomach looks bad, no, my stomach looks beautiful, we’re still standing in front of the same mirror having the same argument. What if I don’t have to win that argument at all?

What if the pants’ only job is to accommodate the body inside them — bloated today, they fit; softer today, they fit; folded over while I’m sitting, they fit; tender or hurting, they make room? My body doesn’t need to be beautiful to deserve room. It doesn’t need to be motivational, or advertise my discipline, or prove I’m good at my job, or demonstrate that I practice what I teach. It can just be the body I live inside.

So no, I’m not coming for your leggings

I’m not even really coming for mine. I’ll wear them again. And I’m not proposing loose, flowy pants as the new uniform of the enlightened wellness woman — please, God, no, we don’t need another costume to prove we’re doing embodiment correctly.

I’m more interested in getting curious about the costumes we don’t realize are costumes. Because these systems don’t only run through policy and advertising and corporate decisions — they become stories about what kinds of bodies are desirable, credible, disciplined, healthy, worthy of being seen. Eventually the stories get so ordinary they start to feel like our own thoughts. And then we dress for them. We learn what the fit woman looks like, what the disciplined woman looks like, what the wellness professional looks like, what the woman who has it all together looks like.

I’ve played those roles. I’ve benefited from some of them. There was a time I used my body on purpose to prove I belonged in them. So this isn’t me standing outside the system pointing a finger at it — I’m standing inside it, wearing really good leggings, asking myself some questions. What happens in my body when I put on the costume? What gets held, what gets compressed, what gets monitored? What am I communicating before I’ve said a word — and who taught me the role I’m about to play?

Sometimes the systems shaping our relationships with our bodies are obvious. And sometimes they look like a really great pair of leggings.

These days, when I pull on my loose pants, my belly releases a little. I’m noticing that softness feels good. That’s new. There are still old stories that read softness as vulnerability, laziness, danger, fatness — a body less desirable than the one I learned to create. Those books are still in my dusty library. I just don’t have to keep checking them out.

Maybe that’s what this shift is actually about. Not leggings. Not loose pants. Not finding the right costume. It’s noticing the moment I start holding myself together, and getting curious about what might happen if I don’t.

Because something surprising has happened as I’ve stopped asking my body to fit the pants: the pants have started meeting me. And little by little, I think I’m learning how to meet my body there, too. Oh, and I’m going to try to not suck it all in.

I’ve been looking for glimmers lately.

Not because I think positive thinking will save us or because I believe we should ignore what’s happening in the world. Quite the opposite. Every time I open my phone, there seems to be another disaster, another fire, another heartbreaking headline, another reminder that we’re living through one of those moments in history that future generations will read about and wonder, How did they keep going?

I’ve spent most of this summer writing about gardens and reciprocity and the healing intelligence of water. Those things still feel deeply true to me. Maybe even more true because of everything happening around us.

But today...

Today I’m climbing into a time machine.

I know.

The moment you start talking about “the good old days” is probably the moment you officially become middle-aged.

Before we get there though, let me paint the picture.

I have very few vices these days. I hardly drink anymore. I’m California sober. I’ve done enough therapy and enough soul-searching that my sneaky little self-sabotaging demons don’t get quite as much microphone time as they used to. I’ve eliminated a lot of toxicity and drama from my life. I eat a suspicious amount of vegetables and an equally suspicious amount of cupcakes because I’ve finally learned that life is too short to make enemies out of frosting.

But...

I do have one weakness.

Alani energy drinks.

They’re colorful and bubbly and somehow every seasonal flavor convinces me that this one is going to change my life.

The other day I stopped at the store because I’d heard my beloved Alani drinks were on sale. As I was checking out, the cashier leaned over conspiratorially and said, “Have you heard of this new drink? It’s called Jolt Cola. It’s supposed to have, like... a ton of caffeine.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh honey,” I said. “Jolt Cola isn’t new.”

She looked at me completely puzzled.

“No... it’s a new product.”

That’s when I realized we were living in two different timelines (or planets).

To her, Jolt Cola was making its grand debut. To me, it was a caffeinated icon from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Before energy drinks took over entire aisles of the grocery store. Before pre-workout powders came in tubs the size of paint buckets. Before we all walked around with 300 milligrams of caffeine in our water bottles.

So naturally, I became the old lady telling stories from the nineteen hundreds.

I told her that Jolt wasn’t a new idea at all. Back then, it was the drink everyone talked about because it had an outrageous amount of caffeine. It felt rebellious. Slightly dangerous. In fact, I believe it was actually illegal in my home state at one point? Exactly the kind of thing your parents hoped you wouldn’t buy.

She listened intently for a minute before asking, completely sincerely,

“So... what did you use for pre-workout?”

I laughed even harder.

“We... didn’t.”

She blinked.

“You just... worked out?”

Apparently we did. On our own energy. Maybe a banana. Maybeeeeeeee a burned CD blasting through a Discman.

And, if we’re being completely honest... a healthy amount of unresolved emotional baggage and body shame.

She just stared at me.

I drove home laughing, but somewhere between the store and my driveway I realized the conversation wasn’t really about caffeine at all.

It was about remembering.

One unexpected question had opened a little door, and suddenly I found myself wandering back through pieces of my younger self that I hadn’t visited in years.

A few days later Madonna showed up at the Women’s World Cup Final, and suddenly I was seventeen again.

Back to listening to Ray of Light on repeat.

Back to dancing around the living room with my Spanish exchange student like we had absolutely nowhere else to be. Maybe even a disco (as she would say in her beautiful accent).

Technically, I wasn’t really allowed to listen to Madonna. My parents weren’t huge fans of the pointy bra era, which of course made me want to listen even more. I can still remember closing my bedroom door, turning up the volume just enough, and feeling like dancing was its own kind of freedom.

Then Lauryn Hill resurfaced.

My goodness.

If you were there in 1998, you know. She wasn’t just making music.

She carried herself with this unmistakable presence that made you stop what you were doing and pay attention. She didn’t ask for permission to take up space. She simply did.

I kept thinking about her reminder: “Don’t be a hard rock, baby girl, when you really are a gem.”

Maybe that’s what so many of us are being asked to remember right now. The world will always offer reasons to harden. To become cynical. To stop dancing. To stop believing in people.

But a gem isn’t valuable because it’s hard. It’s valuable because it catches the light.

Watching her now felt strangely comforting. She hasn’t become smaller with age. If anything, she’s become more herself.

Even Little House on the Prairie has found its way back into the conversation. I know there are plenty of complicated conversations to have about that show, and there should be. Nostalgia doesn’t erase harm, and I don’t want it to.

But memory is funny.

It has a way of handing you back the parts worth keeping while inviting you to do better with everything else.

The eighties and nineties weren’t perfect. They left plenty of scars.

And yet...

I’m realizing they also gave many of us something that feels unexpectedly useful right now.

We learned how to be bored.

We disappeared outside for hours and came home when the streetlights came on.

We made up games instead of downloading them. Or… played them on a board?!

We learned friendship before algorithms and conflict before comment sections.

We remember card catalogs, cassette tapes, pay phones, folding paper maps, and life before every answer lived in our pocket.

We remember life before the internet, and we’ve somehow learned to live inside the world that came after it.

Lately, here in Michigan, we’ve even had what the internet has affectionately dubbed the “diarrhea lettuce” outbreak. Between the memes and the public health announcements, I couldn’t help but laugh because apparently we’ve reached the point in history where romaine has become a villain.

And yet...

Somewhere deep in my nervous system, I felt oddly prepared.

Maybe it’s because I belong to the generation that spent entirely too much time playing The Oregon Trail on those glorious Apple IIe computers. You know, the ones your school had... or the one your friend’s family had if they were really fancy.

Those little pixelated pioneers died of dysentery so often that an entire generation of us developed an irrational respect for questionable water, foodborne illness, and the importance of carrying extra supplies.

I’m not saying the game prepared us for modern life...

I’m just saying that when everyone started joking about “diarrhea lettuce,” a whole generation collectively shrugged and thought,

“Well... at least it isn’t dysentery while trying to ford the river.”

Sometimes I wonder if Gen X’s greatest superpower isn’t resilience.

It’s context.

We’ve watched the world reinvent itself over and over again. We’ve watched the Berlin Wall fall, the internet appear, the challenger explode in front of us at school and we just … went back to normal class, music become streaming, maps become phones, encyclopedias become search engines, and now artificial intelligence is asking us to rethink everything all over again.

We’ve lived in an analog world and a digital one.

Now so many of us are stepping into another threshold—menopause, changing bodies, aging parents, adult children, shifting identities—and somehow it feels familiar.

Not because it’s easy.

Because we’ve had practice becoming new people without completely losing ourselves.

And maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking about disco balls.

A disco ball doesn’t create light.

It simply catches whatever light is already there.

Hundreds of tiny mirrors, each reflecting a little piece toward the next, until an ordinary room is transformed into something magical.

I’ve spent months writing about reciprocity—about gardens, about water, about the ways nature survives through relationship rather than competition. Maybe this is another version of that same lesson.

None of those tiny mirrors can light a room by themselves.

But together? They create something beautiful.

Maybe that’s what we’re being asked to do. Not deny the darkness. Not pretend this isn’t hard. Not wait for someone else to fix everything.

Just notice the light that still exists and reflect it toward one another.

Sometimes the light looks like a garden. Sometimes it’s a swim in Lake Michigan after a brutally hot day.

Sometimes it’s a neighbor who brings over tomatoes. Sometimes it’s Madonna reminding us she still has it.

Sometimes it’s Lauryn Hill reminding us that wisdom only gets richer with age.

Sometimes it’s a twenty-year-old cashier who accidentally sends you home thinking about Jolt Cola and burned CDs and all the versions of yourself that still live somewhere inside you.

The world may still feel like a dumpster fire.

But even fires throw sparks. Maybe our work isn’t to ignore the flames. Maybe it’s to gather around the sparks.

To remember that human beings have always danced through difficult times.

We’ve always sung around fires. We’ve always told stories. We’ve always found ways to laugh in the grocery store aisle.

Maybe that’s why disco balls are making a comeback.

Not because we need another party. Because we need a reminder that even the smallest pieces of light are meant to be shared.

And maybe that’s all hope has ever been.

One conversation.

One old song.

One garden.

One dance in the kitchen.

One tiny mirror catching the light and passing it to another.

So these days, when I find a glimmer, I don’t rush past it.

I let it linger.

I let it remind me that the world has always been messy. Humanity has always been complicated. And somehow, generation after generation, we’ve continued to find one another anyway.

Maybe nostalgia isn’t asking us to go backward.

Maybe it’s inviting us to remember the parts of ourselves worth carrying forward.

The ones that know how to laugh.

How to adapt. How to tell stories. How to dance when the world feels heavy.

If you happen to find your glimmer in a disco ball...

I’ll see you on the dance floor.

I’ll be the one packing my Caboodle with snacks, my estrogen, an Alani, and the pair of readers I keep insisting I don’t need yet. I’ll lace up my Reeboks—or maybe my roller skates if my knees are feeling generous—and dance like the world is still worth falling in love with.

Don’t worry...

We’ll still be home and in bed by 10.

“I know where beauty lives,
I've seen it once, I know the warmth she gives.
The light that you could never see,
It shines inside, you can't take that from me.”

Madonna, Live to Tell, 1986

The smoke from Canadian wildfires has drifted across the lakes to Michigan, turning the morning hazy. The forecast promised another day of oppressive heat. News headlines continued warning about food recalls, reminding us how quickly something as ordinary as eating can become a source of uncertainty.

It struck me that my nervous system wasn’t simply responding to my own life.

It was responding to the life around me. Perhaps yours is too?

For a long time, I believed resilience meant becoming less affected by the world. I thought healing meant learning to carry more without feeling it.

But the older I get—and the more I study both Ayurveda and the natural world—the more I wonder if resilience has been misunderstood. Maybe the goal isn’t to become unaffected. Maybe the goal is to remain connected without becoming consumed.

One of the greatest gifts Ayurveda has offered me isn’t simply herbs, recipes, or morning routines.

It has given me a different way of seeing. It reminds us that we are not separate from nature.

We are nature.

We are constantly exchanging ourselves with the world around us.

Every breath reminds us of this. The trees offer oxygen and we offer carbon dioxide. We are in a reciprocal relationship at all times.

The sun helps our bodies create vitamin D.

The rain fills the rivers that eventually become our drinking water.

The food we eat becomes our muscles, our bones, our skin.

There is no moment in which we are truly independent.

Life has always been an ongoing conversation between our bodies and the living world.

Our lungs respond to smoke because they belong to the same atmosphere as the forests. Our skin responds to the sun because we evolved beneath it. Our nervous systems respond to uncertainty because we were never meant to live outside relationship.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten this.

We’ve learned to think of ourselves as independent individuals, managing our own health, productivity, happiness, and success.

Nature tells a different story: Nothing survives alone.

There is an old story I like to imagine.

One summer, all the flowers gathered to discuss the sun.

The roses admired their own beauty.

The vines stretched higher and higher, convinced that if they climbed just a little farther they might catch more light than anyone else.

Even the oak tree wondered if its branches had reached high enough.

Only the sunflower remained quiet.

Finally someone asked, “Why haven’t you said anything?”

The sunflower smiled.

“Because I’ve never believed the sun belonged to me.”

The others looked puzzled.

“I don’t chase it,” the sunflower continued. “I don’t compete for it. I don’t worry whether there will be enough light tomorrow.”

“Every morning I simply turn toward it.”

“And every evening…”

The sunflower looked toward the western horizon where the day’s light had begun to soften.

“Every evening I let it go.”

This story has stayed with me and dances in my heart because it echoes something remarkable about the real sunflower.

Young sunflowers practice heliotropism, a word that literally means turning toward the sun. Throughout the day, they slowly follow its path across the sky.

As they mature, something changes. They stop turning!!!!

Instead, they settle facing east, quietly waiting for the morning light.

Researchers believe this helps warm the flower earlier in the day, making it more attractive to pollinators.

I love this!!!! It blows my mind and makes me want to camp out under the flowers in my garden to witness this subtle and powerful wisdom!

The mature sunflower no longer spends its life chasing the light.

It simply knows where morning begins. I wonder if wisdom looks like that?

Not endlessly adjusting ourselves to every expectation. Not chasing every opportunity. Not proving our worth through constant motion.

But learning where nourishment comes from—and returning there again and again.

I’ve come to believe something that has quietly become the philosophy beneath all of my work.

Everything living flourishes through relationship, not extraction.

The sun doesn’t extract from the earth, it offers warmth.

The earth receives and gives. The moon doesn’t compete with the sun.

Each has its own rhythm.

Ayurveda has a name for this: the medicine of opposites.

Like increases like.

Heat calls forth more heat. Restlessness feeds more restlessness. Fire, left unanswered, simply burns hotter. So when the body carries too much fire, wisdom doesn’t reach for more fire. (An important note here is that it also doesn’t require extinguishing the fire.) It reaches for what the fire is missing.

Coolness. Stillness. Reflection.

This is why the moon has always been medicine, not just metaphor. The sun teaches us to rise, to reach, to burn brightly. The moon teaches us to soften, to wane, to be visible without needing to blaze.

We are not meant to choose between them.

We are meant to remember which one the moment is asking for.

The river doesn’t apologize when it slows into a wide bend. The forest doesn’t ask every tree to bloom at the same time.

And our bodies... our bodies were never meant to earn belonging.

Yet we ask ourselves to live in ways that nothing else in nature is expected to live.

Always productive.

Always improving.

Always available.

Always becoming.

We’ve confused constant growth with health.

Nature never has.

One of my favorite teachings in Ayurveda is the idea of sweetness.

Not sweetness as dessert.

Sweetness as a quality of experience.

A ripe peach from the farmers market.

The smell of basil growing beside tomatoes.

Swimming in cool lake water after a hot afternoon.

A porch conversation that lingers until the fireflies appear.

The first cool breeze after sunset.

Sweetness is nourishment that doesn’t ask us to perform before we receive it. A peach doesn’t become sweet by trying harder. It ripens because it remains in relationship with the sun, the rain, the soil, and time.

Perhaps we do too.

This summer I’ve found myself returning to Lake Michigan again and again, not to swim laps or accomplish anything, but just to let the water hold me.

This week with the heat still relentless and my nervous system carrying more than I realized, I walked in until the waves reached my shoulders. And then she called me deeper. I let my crown be washed in her cool water, and it felt almost like she was refreshing my thoughts—I swear you could see a sizzle come off my head. My friend and I spent the day giggling and sharing ridiculous things. As we landed I said a silly prayer - dear gods of the beach cool my moody ass down and kiss my skin. Hold me big mama Michigame!!! I spent the rest of the day toes in the sand and left with a passionately kissed sunburn that reminds me that I am in relationship.

Ayurveda teaches that when fire becomes excessive, we don’t fight it with more fire. We offer coolness, sweetness, water, rest, perspective. Standing there, letting the waves rise and fall around me, I realized I wasn’t simply cooling my skin. I was cooling my attitude, my urgency, my need to solve everything. I remembered that healing sometimes looks less like fixing and more like allowing ourselves to be held.

As July begins its slow turn toward August, I’ve been thinking about another teacher.

The sun.

Every morning it rises faithfully. Every afternoon it reaches its fullest expression.

And every evening... it softens.

Its radiance isn’t diminished by setting. It is completed by it.

Perhaps our lives are meant to move this way too. Perhaps rest is not the opposite of vitality. Perhaps receiving is not the opposite of giving.

July asks something unique of our bodies.

More than any other season, we’re invited—or perhaps expected—to be seen.

Shorts.

Bathing suits.

Family vacations.

Weddings.

Photos.

Reunions.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that being visible meant being criticized.

Or worse... that being visible meant becoming responsible for how comfortable other people felt looking at us.

But what if we’ve confused being seen with being judged? What if our bodies have never wanted to be evaluated? What if they simply long to be witnessed?

Witnessed with the same quiet appreciation we offer a sunflower, an old maple tree, or the shoreline of Lake Michigan.

We don’t stand beside a lake asking how it could become more beautiful.

We simply let it be itself.

I wonder what would change if we practiced offering our own bodies the same kind of attention.

Perhaps enough isn’t something we achieve. Perhaps it is something we remember.

Before you read another article...

Before you answer another email...

Before you rush into whatever comes next...

Take one slow breath. Notice where it came from. Air that moments ago belonged to trees. Air warmed by the same sun that ripened peaches and turned the faces of sunflowers. Air that reminds us, with every inhale and every exhale, that life has never been an individual achievement.

It has always been relationship.

Maybe that’s what enough has been trying to teach us all along.

So today I’m wondering...

What are you orienting toward?

Not what are you chasing.

Not what are you trying to become.

What is nourishing you?

Because maybe the sunflower’s greatest lesson was never how to bloom.

Maybe it was simply this:

You do not have to create the light.

You only have to remember how to turn toward it.

“Could someone pass the hummus?”

It’s such an ordinary sentence. No one at the table pauses to debate it. The bowl simply begins its journey from one set of hands to another. A child reaches before they’re tall enough to see over the table. Someone tears another piece of pita. Someone refills a glass. Someone laughs so hard they snort. Someone quietly wipes away a tear they hope no one noticed. Someone with an accent. Someone who forgot the hummus. Someone vegan. Someone eating lamb. Someone wearing a hijab. Someone with tattoos up both arms. Someone who voted differently than you did. Someone who has never left this town. Someone who has crossed oceans to be here.

For a little while, none of us are categories. We’re simply people sharing a meal.

I wonder if we’ve forgotten how sacred that is. Perhaps this is why shared meals have always been sacred.

Long before they became restaurants, holidays, or dinner parties, they were acts of communion.

Communion isn’t simply a religious ritual.

At its heart, communion is the practice of sharing life together.

Bread.

Wine.

An altar. Yes.

But long before communion became something practiced in sanctuaries, it was something practiced around tables.

The word itself speaks of sharing, participation, fellowship—a life held in common.

Communion is what happens when nourishment becomes more than calories.

When a meal becomes relationship. When strangers become neighbors.

When passing the bowl says, There is enough for you, too.

Perhaps communion has never been about bread alone.

Perhaps it has always been about remembering that none of us were meant to eat—or live—alone.

It is participation.

Relationship.

The willingness to receive nourishment from the same table while recognizing that none of us arrived there alone.

Every loaf of bread carries a farmer, rain, soil, seed, sunlight, miller, baker, and countless unseen hands.

Every bowl of hummus holds chickpeas, olive trees, garlic, lemon, earthworms, fungi, pollinators, harvesters, cooks, and the generosity of the earth itself.

To eat together is to remember that our lives have always depended upon one another.

Perhaps communion has never only been about what is on the table.

Perhaps it is about who we become when we gather around it.

Why is it so much easier to share food than to share humanity?

That question has been sitting in my chest for weeks, because I think I know the answer, and I don’t like it. Somewhere underneath every genocide, every system of slavery, every colonial project, every forced removal, every segregation law, every quietly dehumanizing policy, there is a single decision, made and remade by someone in power: this group is less human than that one. Not fully worthy. Not fully kin. Not really at the table.

Every age has found new ways to divide it. This race. That religion. Those borders. These politics. This body. That gender. This language. That passport. As though humanity could be portioned into deserving and undeserving. As though belonging were ours to grant.

I don’t think I need to list the historical examples. You already know them. You’re probably running through a few right now.

The older I get, the less interested I become in deciding who belongs and who doesn’t.

But here’s what I keep circling back to instead — the word itself.

Human. Humus. Hummus. Home.

I’ll be honest: these words aren’t actually cousins. I checked. Etymologically, they don’t share a root, so I won’t pretend this is a lesson in linguistics. But say them out loud, one after another, and tell me they don’t feel related. There’s a poetry here that doesn’t need a shared Latin ancestor to be true.

Humus is rich soil — the dark layer built from countless small lives finished and returned, nourishing the ones that come next. Nothing wasted. Everything transformed.

Humility does have real roots, and they go the same direction: from humilis, close to the ground. Not thinking less of yourself. Staying close enough to the earth to remember where you came from.

So maybe being human was never about standing above the earth. Maybe it has always meant remembering we belong to it.

Which brings the table back. Not as metaphor this time — literally. There is no pita without wheat, no wheat without soil, no chickpeas, no olive oil, no garlic, no lemon, without the same dark ground underneath all of it. No soil, no table. No table, no civilization. We are, every one of us, eating dirt’s leftovers and calling it dinner.

Eleanor Roosevelt was once asked where universal human rights actually begin. Not in the halls of the UN, not in a signed declaration. Her answer was smaller than that. Human rights, she said, begin ”In small places, close to home.”

Maybe they begin around dinner tables. Where we learn to pass instead of possess. Listen instead of label. Feed instead of fear.

Tears for Fears told us everybody wants to rule the world.

What if she doesn’t want to be ruled?

Personally, I’d rather pass the hummus.

There’s a difference between empire and relationship, and I think it’s the difference this whole essay is circling. Empire asks how much can we own. Relationship asks who belongs. Empire builds walls. Ecology builds mycelium. Empire draws borders on a map. Seeds ignore them. Roots definitely ignore them. Birds don’t carry passports. Rain doesn’t check citizenship. Fungi don’t care whose name is on the deed to the forest.

The wall of life cannot be walled in.

Even our own cells know this. A healthy membrane isn’t a wall — it’s selective. Permeable. It knows what to welcome in and what to release. What nourishes, what harms? Relationship without dissolution. Boundaries without isolation. Not everything belongs inside every cell. But every healthy cell belongs to a body. Perhaps healthy communities work the same way. Perhaps healthy people do too.

The older I get, the less I believe the opposite of conflict is agreement. I think the opposite of conflict might be curiosity — the willingness to ask another question before making another assumption. The willingness to learn someone’s name before deciding their story. The willingness to sit beside someone long enough for them to become a neighbor instead of a headline. An earth sibling instead of a stranger.

That phrase has become dear to me. Earth sibling. It reminds me that before we belonged to countries, careers, political parties, or algorithms, we belonged here. To this remarkable living planet. We breathe the same air. Drink from the same water cycle. Eat food grown from the same soil. Return, eventually, to the same earth. The yogis called our physical form the Annamaya Kosha—the food body. We are, quite literally, earth arranged into human form for a little while: nourished by soil, sustained by sunlight captured in plants, and destined to return as nourishment ourselves.

There is something wonderfully humbling about realizing that all of us are, in one way or another, compost in the making. Oddly enough, I find that comforting. It means the earth is constantly practicing what we so often resist — transformation. Nothing wasted. Nothing outside the possibility of becoming nourishment again.

I don’t think this essay ends with politics. I think it ends with dinner.

Everyone standing up eventually. Empty bowls carried back to the kitchen. Someone washing dishes. Someone wrapping leftovers in foil for later. The kids still running around outside, unaware that anything important just happened. One last scoop of hummus in the bottom of the bowl and licking the spoon in a very satisfying way.

Someone says, pass it this way.

Maybe that’s what being human has always meant. Not ruling the table. Not owning the table. Just making sure everyone sitting around it has enough.

Maybe the question was never who deserves a place at the table. Maybe the better question is how do we become the kind of people who keep passing the bowl — because every time we do, we practice something older than empire, older than borders, older than fear. We practice belonging.

So — could someone please pass the hummus?

There is a question that has followed me for years.

It has appeared in gardens and forests.

In my own body.

In moments of healing.

In moments of heartbreak.

Standing beneath ancient trees.

Watching seeds emerge from dark soil.

Listening to women rediscover trust in themselves after years of disconnection.

Recently, it followed me through Oak Creek Canyon and Montezuma Castle.

It visits me each summer as I watch the beans in my garden find their trellis.

Again and again, in a thousand different settings and a thousand different forms, I find myself asking the same thing:

How?

How does the vine know where to reach?

How does the acorn know it is an oak tree in another state of being?

How does a seed know when winter has passed and it is time to emerge?

How do roots find water through stone?

How do forests learn to thrive together?

How did communities survive and flourish in landscapes that seem impossible?

How does the body continue reaching toward healing after everything it has endured?

How does life know?

Every summer, I watch my beans find the trellis.

No one teaches them.

No one points the way.

The vines simply begin their slow spiraling dance, reaching through space until they encounter a string, a branch, a pole. Then they wrap themselves around it and climb.

Scientists call this thigmotropism—a plant’s growth response to touch. Before they find support, many climbing plants engage in circumnutation, tracing slow circles through the air, exploring their surroundings until they encounter something that can hold them.

The science is fascinating.

And yet, knowing the mechanism does not diminish the wonder.

If anything, it deepens it.

The vine reaches.

The vine finds support.

The vine grows stronger because of what it can lean into.

And every year I find myself standing in the garden, watching this happen, asking:

How does it know?

This question followed me recently through Oak Creek Canyon and Montezuma Castle.

Standing beneath dwellings carved into cliff walls, I found myself wondering how human beings survived there at all. The conditions seemed harsh. The landscape felt unforgiving.

And yet they did more than survive.

They adapted.

They belonged

.

Generation after generation, people learned the rhythms of that place until their lives fit within it. The national park ranger shared that the ceilings were built at 5’0 ft. Eventually these communities never grew over 4’9.” Their communities evolved alongside the landscape. Their ways of living became inseparable from the conditions surrounding them.

The same thing was happening all around them.

Plants adapted to the elevation, climate, and soil. Seeds learned the timing of rain. Roots found impossible pathways through rock. Life shaped itself to the conditions it encountered.

Again, the question arose.

How?

Not merely how does adaptation work.

But how does life keep choosing life?

How does it continue reaching toward wholeness, even in conditions that seem impossible?

Perhaps because I spend so much of my work helping women rebuild trust in their bodies, I cannot separate these questions from our own lives.

Many of us have been taught to distrust ourselves.

To override hunger.

To suppress rest.

To ignore pain.

To silence intuition.

To believe that wisdom comes from outside us rather than within us.

And yet the body continues its patient work.

The heart beats.

The lungs breathe.

Wounds close.

Bones knit.

The nervous system continually searches for safety, connection, and regulation.

Like a vine reaching for a trellis, some part of us keeps orienting toward what supports life.

Even after years of disconnection.

Even after trauma.

Even after we have forgotten how to listen.

There is an intelligence within us that precedes thought.

Not the intelligence of achievement.

Not the intelligence of productivity.

Not even the intelligence of reason.

Something older.

Something cellular.

Something that knows how to heal a cut, digest a meal, grieve a loss, grow a baby, and reach for connection.

I think about the Three Sisters in my garden.

Corn.

Beans.

Squash.

A teaching gifted through Indigenous wisdom and relationship with the land.

Each year I plant them not only for what they produce, but for what they teach.

The corn grows tall and offers structure.

The beans climb the corn and return nitrogen to the soil.

The squash spreads wide, shading the earth, conserving moisture, and protecting roots.

Each contributes something the others need.

None thrive in quite the same way alone.

Together, they create the conditions for one another’s flourishing.

The older I get, the more this feels like a lesson for humans, too.

We live in a culture that worships independence.

The garden teaches interdependence.

The bean does not fail because it needs the corn.

The squash does not apologize for taking up space.

The corn does not compete with the bean for sunlight.

Each becomes more fully itself because the others are present.

Then there are the trees.

For much of my life, I imagined a forest as a collection of individual trees standing side by side.

Science tells a different story.

Beneath the soil, vast fungal networks connect roots across entire ecosystems. Through these mycorrhizal networks, trees exchange nutrients and chemical signals. Older trees can support younger saplings growing in shade. Trees under stress can signal neighboring trees to prepare their defenses.

A forest is not merely a gathering of individuals.

It is a living conversation.

A community.

A web of relationship.

Of course, trees are not talking in the way humans talk. Yet something remarkable is happening beneath our feet: sensing, responding, adapting, supporting.

Life helping life.

When I first learned about these underground networks, something in me softened.

Perhaps because they contradicted the story so many of us have been told—that strength means standing alone.

The forest suggests otherwise.

Connection is not the opposite of strength.

Connection is how strength grows.

What if healing works this way, too?

We often imagine resilience as a solitary achievement. We think we should be able to figure it out ourselves. Heal ourselves. Carry everything ourselves.

But perhaps the body is more like a forest than a machine.

We regulate through connection.

We heal through relationship.

We borrow strength from safe people until we can feel our own.

We find our way back to ourselves through being seen, supported, and held.

Like roots linked beneath the soil, we were never meant to do this alone.

The more I pay attention, the more I see this intelligence everywhere.

In a vine finding its support.

In a seed waiting for the right season.

In an oak tree hidden inside an acorn.

In roots splitting stone.

In communities adapting to landscapes that seem impossible.

In forests sharing resources.

In gardens practicing reciprocity.

In bodies finding their way back to trust.

Perhaps we spend so much of our lives trying to become something that we forget what the acorn already knows.

The acorn is not striving to become an oak.

It already is one.

The unfolding simply takes time.

Perhaps healing is less about becoming someone new and more about remembering what has always been there.

What if intuition is not a special gift granted to a select few?

What if it is a birthright?

What if body trust is not something we manufacture, but something we uncover?

What if beneath the layers of conditioning, fear, perfectionism, and self-doubt, there remains a quiet intelligence that has never stopped reaching toward life?

The vine still reaches.

The seed still waits.

The forest still shares.

The acorn still remembers.

And somewhere beneath everything we have learned to doubt, our bodies are still carrying the wisdom of becoming.

Perhaps beneath the noise, beneath the fear, beneath all the ways we have learned to mistrust ourselves, there remains a deeper knowing.

Patient.

Steady.

Waiting.

Like the seed beneath winter soil.

Like roots beneath the forest floor.

Like the vine searching for its trellis.

A wisdom that remembers how to grow.

A wisdom that remembers how to belong.

A wisdom that remembers how to thrive.

And perhaps that leaves us with a different question.

Not:

How do I become someone else?

Not:

How do I fix myself?

But:

What wisdom within me is already trying to emerge?

Where in your life are you being invited to trust the intelligence that is already there?

Not to force.

Not to strive.

Not to figure it all out.

Simply to listen. A remembering of our deepest wisdom, belonging and sacredness.

To notice what reaches toward life.

To notice what softens in the presence of support.

To notice what grows when conditions are safe enough.

The vine does not climb by trying harder.

The acorn does not become an oak through self-improvement.

The forest does not flourish through isolation.

Life unfolds through relationship, adaptation, reciprocity, and trust.

Perhaps we are not so different.

And still, after all these years, I find myself returning to the same question.

Standing in gardens.

Walking among trees.

Watching women come home to themselves.

Looking at a tiny acorn and seeing a future oak.

Looking at a vine and watching it find support.

Looking at life and witnessing its relentless movement toward life. If it's alive... it is healing, changing and re-patterning.

I don’t know that I have found the answer.

But perhaps wonder was never asking for one.

So I will leave you with the same question that keeps finding me.

How does life know, dear one?

Into Lake Michigan sunsets and dirt beneath my fingernails. Into long evenings in the garden and the sweetness of fruit eaten standing barefoot in the kitchen. Into humidity and softness and the way green seems to spill from every corner of the landscape.

The summers here feel lush and overflowing.

Then I spent a week in the Southwest and for an entire week, all I saw was red.

Red rock. Red dust. Red cliffs rising out of heat and silence.

Sedona. Zion. Vastness that made me quiet.

And somewhere between the desert heat and the towering canyon walls, I remembered another kind of belonging.

Sensing the size of my body — and finding the truth about my body — has always been something I’ve struggled with. I have spent more moments in my life attempting to shrink my physical body than truly inhabit it.

Shrink its hunger.
Shrink its softness.
Shrink its needs.
Shrink its visibility.

But standing beside the mountains of Sedona and Zion, something shifted in me.

The land did not ask me to become smaller.

It reminded me that I already am small.

Not in the punishing way I learned through diet culture or purity culture or the endless self-surveillance so many women are taught. But in the honest, humbling way that mountains remind us:

You are a small piece of an interconnected whole.

Not separate.
Not failing.
Not meant to dominate nature.
Not meant to perfect yourself into worthiness.

Just one living thing inside another living system.

I had many teachers on this trip.

The land itself, of course. But also the people who have belonged to this land long before it became a destination for tourism and spiritual consumption. I noticed how land is named and acknowledged in some places in our country and ignored in others, even where Indigenous presence is still deeply woven into the landscape.

I could see with my own eyes the wisdom of Indigenous peoples who survived and thrived here for thousands of years.

And honestly, the plants taught me too.

How does a tree grow from the side of a rock and thrive?

How does life emerge from what appears dry, harsh, impossible?

Every ecosystem adapts to what immediately surrounds it. The intelligence of the desert is not separate from survival. It is survival.

My “Three Sisters” garden took on entirely new meaning while climbing ladders into cliff dwellings carved into caves fifty feet above the ground. Corn, beans, and squash suddenly stopped feeling symbolic and became profoundly practical. Sacred because they were relational. Sacred because people listened deeply to the land and understood cycles:

When the rains came.
When things grew.
When to gather.
When to rest.

The natural intelligence of both the land and the people amazed me.

And if I’m honest, I struggled physically at times in the desert.

I love heat. Deeply. My body craves sun and warmth.

But I also live in West Michigan, surrounded by water and green abundance for a reason. I hold a lot of vata dosha. I’m moving through peri-menopause. Dryness is not my friend.

The desert exposed that immediately.

My lips cracked.
My skin tightened.
I became aware of thirst in a new way.

And still, somehow, the desert soothed me.

Being humbled into perspective. Being reminded that I am one small piece of a much larger intelligence. Watching life survive in impossible conditions. Seeing roots cling to stone and trees emerge from canyon walls and red dust coat every inch of skin.

Something about constantly asking how is this possible? touched a part of me that needed healing.

And then there was the white buffalo calf.

Two days old.

We were able to witness her from a distance — small and impossibly soft against the earth. Her mother stood nearby, enormous and majestic, her size both intimidating and breathtaking all at once. She moved with a kind of fierce tenderness I haven’t stopped thinking about since. Protective and raging one moment, then immediately softening to nurse her baby the next.

Again, I was silenced.

There was no separation between strength and nurture.
No performance.
No confusion about instinct.

Just devotion.

Two years ago, during a reading, I pulled the oracle card of White Buffalo Calf Woman. The same week, there had been a white buffalo calf born elsewhere in the country — an event people gathered to celebrate because of the deep spiritual symbolism it carries.

In many Indigenous traditions, White Buffalo Calf Woman represents hope, renewal, sacred relationship, and the promise of restoration.

And standing there in the desert, covered in red dust, watching this tiny new life being fiercely protected beneath the vast sky, something inside me softened.

Not because I suddenly “figured life out.”

But because I remembered that renewal is already woven into the fabric of the world.

The land knows how to begin again.

Bodies know how to begin again too.

Maybe healing is not about escaping our humanity, but returning to it.

Returning to the intelligence that already exists underneath all the noise.
Returning to the cycles.
Returning to awe.
Returning to relationship.

The desert reminded me that survival is not sterile.

It is messy and mineral-rich and sun-soaked and interconnected.

And maybe healing is less about becoming optimized and more about becoming inhabitable again.

What if trusting that I am already within a cycle that is within another cycle can hold me?

What if shrinking is not the answer?

What if the deep desire to let my skin show, to be covered in red dust, to be kissed by the heat of the sun, is not vanity or rebellion or something inappropriate for my age — but wisdom?

What if wild belonging means returning to the body as ecosystem?

Not as ornament.
Not as project.
Not as problem to solve.

But as living land.

A body that asks for tending, yes. But one that also knows how to survive. One that continues adapting even during seasons when I cannot perfectly care for it. One that holds intelligence beyond my control.

The body mirrors nature this way.

The heat, the thirst, the rest, the vast sky, the minerals, the peaks — they teach us as much as they hold us.

I came home to Michigan and everything felt impossibly green.

Rain-covered leaves.
Wet soil.
Overgrown gardens.
The fullness of early summer.

And suddenly I could feel more clearly that these landscapes are not opposites. The desert and the lakeshore belong to the same earth. Dryness and lushness both carry medicine.

So maybe this is what I wish for all of us this summer:

Slowness.

The contagiousness of being fully alive.

Bodies that are allowed to exist without apology.

A heaping dose of pleasure.

And the courage to belong wildly to ourselves.

(medicine wheel at Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park, Sedona)

To the East,
where the sun rises and reminds us
that life returns again and again,
may we welcome new beginnings with open hearts.
Om Mani Padme Hum — (the jewel within the lotus, the reminder that what we seek is already within us).

To the South,
where heat, passion, and growth live,
may we trust the aliveness moving through us.
Om Mani Padme Hum.

To the West,
where water softens and shadows stretch long,
may we honor rest, grief, and transformation.
Om Mani Padme Hum.

To the North,
where wisdom is carried quietly through stone, wind, and ancestor,
may we remember we belong to something larger than ourselves.
Om Mani Padme Hum.

To the Earth below,
holding every step, every season, every body,
may we live with reverence for what sustains us.
Om Mani Padme Hum.

To the Sky above,
vast enough to hold both longing and renewal,
may we stay open to wonder.
Om Mani Padme Hum.

And to the center —
the place within us where body, spirit, and land meet —
may we become inhabitable to ourselves again.

May pride soften.
May jealousy loosen.
May attachment untangle.
May ignorance give way to wisdom.
May greed become generosity.
May anger dissolve into compassion.

Om Mani Padme Hum

With love,

Jen

There’s a question I keep coming back to as I build this event:

What does it actually feel like to be in a space where you don’t have to perform?

Not just intellectually. But in your body.

Because so many of us are used to bracing. Bracing to be seen. Bracing to be evaluated. Bracing to get it right. Bracing in ways we don’t even always realize.

And I keep thinking — what would it feel like to walk into a room and not have to do that?

To not be watched… not be measured… not be quietly comparing or adjusting yourself…

But instead — to be seen.

Not in a way that makes you shrink. But in a way that allows you to expand. To soften. To exhale. To arrive as you are.

To Invoke. To Evoke. To Witness.

I want to pause here, because these two words matter to how I think about this work.

To invoke is to call something in — to actively summon a quality, a presence, a way of being. When we enter a space with intention, we invoke safety. We invoke honesty. We invoke the part of ourselves that is willing to be present without armor.

To evoke is to call something forth — to draw out what is already there. A compassionate space doesn’t create your story. It evokes it. It creates the conditions for what’s been carried quietly — sometimes for years — to surface, to breathe, to be acknowledged.

Together, they point to something I think of as the compassionate witness.

The compassionate witness isn’t a therapist, a fixer, or a judge. It’s a quality of presence — one that can sit with complexity without needing to resolve it. That can hear a story without needing to minimize it, explain it, or make it more comfortable.

It’s the part of us that knows how to be with something, rather than do something to it.

And here’s what I believe: that capacity lives in every room. In every person. It just needs the right conditions to be invoked — and the right atmosphere to be evoked.

The Whole Body Experience was created to be that kind of space.

What This Space Is Built to Hold

This event was created from that question — and from a deeper knowing that we need spaces that can hold more.

More honesty. More complexity. More humanity.

Spaces where we can ask the hard and uncomfortable questions: Where did our beliefs about bodies come from? Who do those beliefs serve? What have we been taught to ignore?

Spaces that invite curiosity instead of judgment. That challenge what we think we know — without shaming us for having believed it.

Spaces where stories can exist without needing to be explained, defended, or fixed.

Because the truth is — every body holds a story. Stories of identity. Of change. Of pain and resilience. Of being seen — and not being seen.

We will never be able to fully understand all of them. But we can learn to hold them. With presence. With care. With the quality of a compassionate witness — one we invoke in ourselves, and evoke in each other.

This is what I mean when I say a boldly compassionate space.

Not passive. Not surface-level. But willing to be with what’s real. Willing to stay in the conversation. Willing to make room for something different.

You Don’t Have to Be Ready

I don’t want people to walk into this event and feel like they have to be ready. Or healed. Or confident.

I want them to feel like:

• they don’t have to prove anything

• they don’t have to perform

• they don’t have to be anything other than human

That they are already enough to be in the room.

How Spaces Like This Spread

If I’m honest — this kind of space doesn’t spread because of algorithms.

It spreads because someone reads this and thinks: “this made me think of you.”

So if this resonates — share it. Send it to someone who might need a space like this.

Because the people who are meant to be in this room will find it through connection.

And I would be honored to hold that space with you.

It blooms anyway.

Not because conditions are perfect. Not because winter fully released its grip. Not because the ground declared itself ready. The seed moves toward light because that is its nature — unhurried, unapologetic, certain in its becoming.

And yet most of us have spent a lifetime learning to do the opposite.

The apology you never agreed to make

From the time we were small, we absorbed a set of unspoken rules about bodies. Which ones were acceptable. Which ones took up too much space. Which ones were too loud, too hungry, too soft, too dark, too different, too much.

We learned — through media, through medicine, through the casual cruelty of locker rooms and family dinner tables — to manage ourselves into something more palatable. To shrink. To apologize. To exist as quietly as possible so as not to disturb anyone with the inconvenience of our humanness.

Sonya Renee Taylor names this with a clarity that has never left me. She writes that systems of oppression thrive on our inability to make peace with the body — and that body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it. This is not an accident. The self-doubt, the constant measuring, the exhausting project of self-improvement — these are not personal failures. They are the intended outcome of a system designed to keep us small and spending.

As she puts it: “Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.”

This is systemic. And it is also deeply personal.

The stories we carry to stay safe

Here is the tender part that often gets missed in body liberation conversations: many of us didn’t just absorb shame from the outside world. We built our own internal architecture around it — a set of stories about our bodies that, at some point, helped us survive.

If I make myself smaller, I won’t be a target. If I control my hunger, I have control over something. If I apologize for my body first, no one else can hurt me with it.

These are not weaknesses. They are intelligence. Adaptive strategies that made sense in the environments that shaped us — families, schools, relationships, communities where our bodies were commented on, controlled, or conditionally accepted.

The work of this season is not to shame ourselves for these stories. It is to notice them with curiosity. To ask: does this story still need to run my life? To gently, slowly, begin to distinguish between the systems that imposed shame and the self that is learning to lay it down.

You were not born apologizing for your body. That was learned. And what was learned can, in time and in community, be unlearned.

What April is asking

April doesn’t force its blooming. It responds to conditions — warmth, light, moisture, time. It follows impulse. It trusts rhythm.

This month inside Rest + Reflect, that is exactly what we are practicing.

We are not trying to become new. We are not setting spring goals or optimizing our wellness routines. We are listening for what is already quietly beginning within us — and giving it a little more room.

This month’s theme is Renewal and Blooming Without Apology — and here is what we’re moving through together:

🌕 Full Moon Reflection — April 1 We open with the Pink (Seed) Moon — a time of fullness, growth, and remembering what is already here. A guided reflection weaving Western astrology, Vedic insight, and Ayurvedic wisdom to support a sense of wholeness and possibility.

🌿 Somatic Practice: Thawing and Following Impulse A guided movement and nervous system practice to help you reconnect with your body’s natural rhythms. We’ll explore felt sense, safety, pendulation, and the quiet impulses that help your system release and reorganize — gently and without force.

🤲 Somatic Exercise: Containment with Safe Touch A grounding self-touch practice to support regulation and a sense of internal holding. Simple, gentle, and deeply supportive for everyday life.

🕯 Householder’s Flow (Inspired by Tracee Stanley) An invitation to bring sacredness into ordinary moments. Practice doesn’t have to be perfect or separate from life — it can live right inside it.

🌱 Seasonal Support for April (Ayurveda-inspired) Guidance for supporting your body through spring — nourishing foods, energizing movement, and small daily check-ins that help clear heaviness and invite vitality.

🎨 Creative Offering: “April Unfolding” Body-Led Art A tactile, expressive practice using tearing, layering, or blending materials. Not about making art — about letting your body express what’s breaking through.

💛 A Gentle Space for Grief and Reimagining Ritual For those navigating distance from organized religion or traditional spaces, we’ll hold room for the grief, the longing, and the possibility of creating new, body-led ways of connecting to meaning, rhythm, and belonging.

For those of you for whom this season carries weight

I want to gently name that this time of year can hold a lot.

For some it’s filled with tradition, ritual, and gathering. For others it can bring a sense of distance or grief — especially if your relationship with religion, family, or belonging has shifted or broken. If that’s you, I want you to know: you are still invited.

There is space here to create meaning in ways that feel true to you now. To honor the season through your body, your breath, your own quiet rituals. Nothing has to look a certain way to be sacred.

A note on your energy

If you close your eyes for a moment and gently notice where your attention is — is it here with you? Or is it pulled into the past, looping and analyzing? Caught in something unfinished? Reaching forward into what’s next?

When your attention is scattered across timelines and worries, your energy becomes diffuse. You’re not just tired — your energy is leaking into all the places your attention is caught.

The medicine is this: you have the capacity to gather yourself. To gently summon your attention back. To welcome it home.

When you do — even for a moment — something shifts. Your breath deepens. The loops begin to quiet. Your body softens into presence. You return to something sacred within yourself.

This is what Rest + Reflect is for. Not consuming more content. Not self-improving. Just practicing, together, the art of coming home.

Rest + Reflect is a monthly sanctuary — away from the noise.

A quieter space where you can actually hear yourself again. Each month we move together through the seasons and cycles of life with intention and care — through the body, the nervous system, and the inner world.

$28 / month. Cancel any time.

→ [Join Rest + Reflect here] https://www.risingstrongwellness.com/bundles/rest-reflect-your-monthly-body-mind-sanctuary

If you’re not ready to join yet — you’re still welcome here. Stay, read, share this with someone who needs it. The blooming doesn’t require your permission. Neither does your belonging.

They’re standing in front of a mirror, or sitting down to eat, or trying to rest — and they realize they have absolutely no idea what they actually feel. Not emotionally. Physically. They can’t tell if they’re hungry or full. Tired or wired. Tense or okay. It’s like the line went dead somewhere between their mind and their body, and they didn’t even notice it happening.

If that sounds familiar, I want you to know: this isn’t a personal failing. It’s not weakness, or laziness, or being “too in your head.” It’s a very intelligent, very human response to a world that has been telling you not to trust your body for a very long time.

Your disconnection was a survival strategy

From the time most of us were small, we received messages — subtle and not so subtle — that our bodies were problems. Too loud, too big, too hungry, too much. We learned to override discomfort to get through the school day. We learned to ignore hunger cues because a diet said so. We learned to push through exhaustion because rest felt indulgent. We learned to perform wellness rather than actually feel it.

Over time, the body learns to go quiet. Not because something is wrong with it — but because it stopped feeling safe to speak.

This is what we mean when we talk about disconnection. It isn’t a gap in your awareness. It’s a protective adaptation. Your nervous system learned to turn the volume down.

What reconnection actually looks like

Here’s what I’ve seen in my work, and what I’ve lived myself: coming back to your body isn’t a dramatic moment. It isn’t a yoga class that changes everything or a meditation that suddenly makes you feel at peace with your reflection.

It’s quieter than that.

It’s noticing that your shoulders are up around your ears — and consciously letting them drop.

It’s pausing before a meal and asking, genuinely, what does my body want right now? Even if the answer doesn’t come clearly yet.

It’s recognizing that the restlessness you feel at 3pm isn’t a character flaw — it’s a signal. Your body communicating, in the only language it has.

Reconnection is the practice of learning that language again. Slowly. Without forcing it.

Why this matters beyond “body image”

When we talk about healing our relationship with our body, people often think we mean learning to love what you see in the mirror. And while that’s part of it — it’s so much bigger than that.

When you’re disconnected from your body, you’re also disconnected from your intuition. From your hunger — physical and otherwise. From knowing when you need rest, when you need to move, when something is wrong, when something feels right. The body is the seat of your inner knowing. Disconnection from it is disconnection from yourself.

This is why the work isn’t about fixing your body. It’s about coming home to it.

A place to do this work — together

If you’re reading this and feeling something stir — a recognition, a longing, a quiet yes, that’s me — I want to invite you into a space where this is exactly what we’re doing together.

My membership community, Rest + Reflect, is a small, intentional gathering of people who are done outsourcing their body wisdom to diet culture, wellness trends, and the noise of a world that profits from their self-doubt. Each month we go deeper — into somatic practices, cyclical living, Ayurvedic wisdom, and the real conversations about bodies that most spaces won’t have.

It’s not a program. It’s not a fix. It’s a place to practice returning to yourself, in community, at a pace that honors your nervous system.

$28 / month. Cancel any time.

If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, I’d love to have you.

→ Join Rest + Reflect here : https://www.risingstrongwellness.com/bundles/rest-reflect-your-monthly-body-mind-sanctuary

And if you’re not ready for that yet — that’s okay too. You’re welcome here either way. Just reading this is an act of turning back toward yourself. That counts.

I am here. I feel so at ease and my voice feels smooth and rich, like it’s moving from an authentic place deep in me. From this also place I sense clarity, a clarity that comes with compassion upon compassion. From this very same place comes a sharp and crisp - I have no more room for the bullshit of the past and how it is being recycled into today’s culture.

I’ve spent decades healing the relationship I have with my own body. I cannot remember the day that I started hating my body… but I know that it must exist in time somewhere. 

I do know the day when it became more serious and that I began to alter it. 

From as early as I can remember, I was told to be pleasing. I was asked to look the part. Be a lady. Put on some makeup and a smile. Be quiet and look pretty. It doesn’t matter what you’re experiencing on the inside. It doesn’t need to match the outside. I've struggled for many years with health disguised as disordered eating, a tough and tricky relationship with exercise and how I live in my body. 

There are times when my body doesn’t feel my own. There are times when I feel 800 lbs and other times I feel 50 lbs. I have exercised compulsively, restricted myself through food and experiences and I have kept myself from truly loving ME! 

Diet culture is sneaky. It is disguised as many things including health and wellness. It truly shrinks diversity and stems from much deeper places than most realize. Diet culture says… only one body is the right body. The truth is that the system is broken and driven by capitalism and racism. All bodies are worthy. All bodies are beautiful pieces of art to be cherished as they are

Be thin, tan and toned. Be sexy. But also don’t. 

I remember feeling sexualized, but also shamed for it. 

I remember being called a blonde bimbo by important people in my family. When I was 10.  As an 80’s baby I did Jane Fonda with my mom, slathered myself in baby oil  to tan and learned how to look appealing because getting a man was the name of the game. 

All of these experiences showed up later in life after I began to feel deeply disconnected from myself and my physical body. Living a life of constantly trying to change, fix or be a certain way leaves you feeling not only weary, but confused about what, who and how you really are. 

I began my battle with body image and disordered eating when I was in the 7th grade. This wasn’t working for me for long as I was heavily involved in athletics and just needed more to sustain myself. 

So it shifted to “just being really healthy.” If it wasn’t healthy I would not allow it for myself. This distorted image of health in my brain has a lot of different looks. 

Enter purity culture… My family became heavily involved in the evangelical church. I was introduced to more ways to obtain “perfection.” This included  the “purity” of my body and the choices that it could make. It also included the repercussions of what would happen if you did make those choices. 

Pledging to remain pure and saving yourself for the perfect man was indoctrinated into my body. So be free and beautiful and healthy, but also, don’t.  Don’t show your body, don’t use your body, don’t connect with your body - it will lead you and your male counterparts into the undesirable. 

As my body has grown and aged it has held so many different experiences. It’s become a woman, wife and mother. It has remained an athlete and a lover of movement.  It’s healed and then fallen back into the diet culture world about one million times. the version of me that protects my hurting places through control and restriction. 

I’ve had the most sacred of boundaries destroyed and been disrespected in my physical being more times than I can count. It was all just playing the part for me, if I let this happen or do ____ then I will be loved and accepted. I will be noticed. I will be at peace with my body and Self. 

When my brain frames diet culture as health and wellness I fall into a trap. I tell myself that it’s right and true. That changing, fixing or attempting to be a certain way will fix the dark places. Instead, I fall into shame. 

Through bodily experience and learning how to slow down and to connect have I begun to heal. I am daily shifting my relationship with my body, food and movement. I now work with women who have struggled with this sacred bodily relationship, trauma and diet culture. We walk together in community to heal ourselves but also the collective. 

I hope that you’ll stay tuned to this space as I use the voice within me that doesn’t want to stay quiet. The voice that is bubbling from frustration that says, “are we still fucking talking about bodies?!” The voice that wants to be balm for your journey.

See you in session,

xJen