Song of the Week

Listen to this song, May I Be Empty by Batya Levine, as you read to help open you up.

Updates:

I’ve been thinking a lot about leaving. When I left my job at the hospital due to poor working conditions created by the leadership from executive leadership team (ELT), my mentor told me “…we are invited to make hard decisions that take us away from some kind of structural safety towards a greater honesty. Thank you for modeling it and practicing it.” To this day, I have rarely received lessons that support me to leave. We need more support in leaving!

I was reading Macalester Today earlier this week and while I generally breeze through the articles looking for familiar faces, I slowed to a slimy snail’s pace reading Masami Kawazato’s words. In the last pages of the magazine, sitting with a tree behind her, she wrote about about leaving. “I believed for a long time that merit leads to promotion and recognition…some people know how to leave without being told. It took me a long time to develop that awareness and those skills.” That resonated.

Some questions I have for you today are: What are the beliefs that prevent you from leaving? What is the mental posture of leaving? Have you ever felt something so deep in your bones and fluids that it changed the way you felt inside your body forever? 

Knowing what liberation and strength feel like in the body help us to leave. It’s a somatic comparison. It’s where tingly feelings live. “Hey, I’ve felt good and powerful before, and this is not it. I’m going somewhere else where I can get that. Or, it’s more possible to get that.”

This is where neru or forging steel comes in for me. If you’ve seen the Blue Eyed Samurai, if you’re mixed-race, adopted, a transnational transplant, studied martial arts, blacksmithing, or the healing art of change, this will be familiar. If this isn’t familiar to you, then welcome!

“Neru”, in Japanese means at least three things— to forge steel by eliminating impurities in iron, to soften and weave fiber, and to bake in a fire. These concepts are applied to sword making and therefore martial arts. Thank you to my dojo for lifting this up in their self-published book. Using the sword as our analogy, if a sword contains the qualities of extreme hardness, then it can be SHARP. If it is soft, then it is UNBREAKABLE. Soft. Hard. Unbreakable. Sharp. This is the story of strength that we need to sever bonds that no longer serve us. When paired with intuition, this strength is a force to be reckoned with. The kind of strength we need right now.

Stick with me here. Everything is connected. In my weekly research into healing and relationships, I came across content from the Gottman Institute about the number one reason why couples break up. They say the answer is contempt. Contempt is built up over time. It makes us rigid. The oldest word root for “contempt” means to “undo”. Jeff Guenther, describes contempt as “When you treat your partner like they are beneath you. Mocking, sarcasm, it’s mean, with a sprinkle of superiority…It’s built up resentment.” Contempt wrecks relationships. When people are in relational ecosystems where judgement, superiority, and rigidity become constants, we either unravel, collapse, or become even more rigid. The sensation of rigidity and strength can feel similar at times, but they are SO different.

Almost there. Now we finally come back to my mentor, who when writing about about love shared that the root of the word “free” means “love”. The thing about feeling contempt is that it can lead us in four directions, to freedom by leaving, to freedom/love by repairing, to further contempt if we stay, or numbing out/disassociation if our bodies create new normals of tolerance. So we have to choose our way to freedom. We make choices that lead to places where we can be more honest. We make choices about people who make us feel warm, goey, hopeful, brave, and alive inside. We can support our bodies somatically to do this by facing our soft and hard edges.

Sometimes we do this by leaving structural safety (if it doesn’t leave us first) or by seeking out spaces that allow us to practice honesty and repair in an authentic way. Often we need to support to do this. I wish us all the support that we need on this day and that you can use some of these skills to leave when it is the right move for you. Thank you for reading.

QTBIPOC: 8 FREE Sessions With Eiko

Do you or any of your beloveds who are QTBIPOC want to work with me? I am not taking insurance for many reasons, so this fund, the Mental Health Fund, is a great way to work with me. Applications are due April 11th, so you have 2.5 weeks. These funds are for QTBIPOC only. You need my license type and number to apply. The application takes 5 minutes. We could use these funds for "integrative somatic and OT" work as long as it assists with your mental health. To apply, you need the following information. Feel free to forward this to beloveds who meet this criteria. 

My License type: OTR/L, Number: 106274, State: MN, Phone: 608-577-1385, Email: [email protected], Address: 310 East 38th st Minneapolis MN 55409, Fee: $150 

Next steps:

• If you’re accepted, you and I have two weeks to fill out their simple forms agreeing to their terms, and then you can receive 8 sessions at $25 if you can afford it, or if you can't afford that it can be free. 

• It might be a rolling admission, which if that is the case, applying sooner would increase your chances of receiving the funds.

• Forward this email to anyone you know who might want to work with me and they can reach out to me, ideally at least a few days before the deadline of April 11th to make sure I can offer what they are looking for.

Therapy Jeff on #1 Reason Couples Break Up

Jeff Guenther, I appreciate this guys hot takes on relationships. Check out his video on the number one reason couples break up. I have been seeing a few couples to help them with somatic coaching and I sometimes reference his stuff in sessions.

Campaign Against Racism (CAR) and Revolutionary Emerging Partners (REP) Event

I gave bodywork at the CAR and REP event on Saturday at Indigenous Roots and it gave me so much LIFE! There were so many amazing people there working to dismantle racism, especially in the medical industrial complex. I miss giving bodywork at collective bodywork days which have greatly reduced since 2020. I highly encourage people to pull together more spaces to receive and give collective bodywork. It’s so needed. Check out CAR and REP, they are two amazing local organizations.

Schedule With Me

OTR/L, BA, MHP, LMT,
she/they) Integrative Therapies

I offer trauma informed somatic informed therapeutic coaching, craniosacral therapy, Swedish massage, Thai bodywork, myofascial release, group workshops, and healing through art, play, and connecting to nature.

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Thanks for READING! xoxo Eiko