shaping story

portals and practices

I’m trying to figure out where to begin. How to begin. Where to enter. And this song popped in my head:

We gonna play for you our first tune tonight
It's gonna be about four tunes
And the first tune is called
O l'oun t'awa se n'yara
Je k'abere
Now, which means
Let's start what we have come into the room to do

- Fela Kuti (feat. Ginger Baker), “Let’s Start”

A little introduction, a little context for this newsletter, and a wish.

My name is Antonia. I am a 48 year old cisgender, mixed-heritage (Puerto Rican and Northern European) mother of 3, educator, wife and adoptee. I grew up at the crossroads of the analog past and the digital future, Madonna and Weird Al, and movies like ‘Valley Girl.’ I remember being called a spic for the first time when I was 11. I didn’t even know I wasn’t White until then.

Apparently my name means “priceless and praiseworthy.” Aside from physical features and trauma, it’s the only thing I know my mother gave me. I have no memories of her. My mother died when I was 3 and I never knew who my father was. I still don’t. Hours and hours of scouring 23andme and Ancestry have only revealed a couple of second cousins who would communicate with me. It confirmed what I always knew but didn’t have proof of - I’m not Mexican! In fact, if I ever write a memoir it might be called ‘I Never Felt Mexican.’ (Exploring my Puerto Rican lineage is something new and a little big scary, a little like having imposter syndrome except I don’t even know what that would even look like. It’s a tender spot for me, one I hope to explore a little in this space in the future.)

Between kindergarten and high school, I lived in four houses and attended eight different schools. I was brown and chubby, I had a slightly lazy eye that I wore glasses for, I was smart in school, and I had a weird sense of humor. I could connect easily - it was a wise strategy - but I struggled to maintain friendships.

I was not raised within any religious sect (is that what you call it?) but went to Catholic school for one year and attended Episcopalian mass for a couple of years as a child. In my early teens, when the true seeking started, I recall visiting friends’ churches and synagogues and feeling each one. It was like a living-out of the children’s book ‘Are You My Mother?’ Instead of a hippo, it was Mormanism or a Young Life group. The answer always came back “no”, sometimes more loudly than others. By the end of high school I claimed to be an atheist but I now know I was agnostic. I wanted, have always wanted, to believe in something greater than me, an ever present force of love and compassion and possibility, proof that I was worthy and belonged.

Belonging. There it is. The through-line. Growing up, I wanted to belong but I often just ended up fitting in. Or not. It was a felt sense when it did or didn’t happen. It really struck me when I read Brené Brown’s definition of belonging versus fitting in. She writes, “Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn't require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.” Exactly. I was a chameleon, and an unhappy one at that. That yearning sent me looking all over the place for it, like it could be picked up in a store. I had a teacher who talked about looking for ourselves where we are not. That was me, most of the time. I yearned to just be who I was, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Being myself didn’t feel safe or possible most of the time, but something inside me kept going.

From the yearning emerged an ongoing quest, one that will continue probably until I die. I guess I’ve been working on my Self seriously since my mid twenties. To be the “fully realized being” I envisioned myself as so long ago. That’s almost half my life. When I say work on myself, it makes me chuckle a little. Because honestly much of it has felt like a job over the years. I mean, a couple of them I did actually get paid for. There’s my day job, and oh hi! I’m also a full time parent and a full time Healed Human in Training. Do you need my services? I’ll make some room (sweeps arm across vast horizon)!

In retrospect, I can now see more portal moments (not exactly in this order) that helped transport me to who/where I am right now:

• Became a parent. Entered into the school of mothering. Did it two more times. Found a deep practice in (no particular order and certainly not an exhaustive list) around: unconditional love; cultivating joy; processing pain; having patience; handling frustration; fostering deep connection and mutuality; setting healthy boundaries; working to dismantle harmful power dynamics; exploring gender norms; and healing intergenerational trauma. Still practicing.*

• Got married. Got divorced. Got married again. Almost got divorced again. This could be a whole book. Recommitted and stay married. All the above practices plus those to move towards: real intimacy; vulnerability and satisfaction; accountability; forgiveness; shedding body shame; identifying and processing othering as as ethnically ambiguous couple. Yep. Still practicing.

• In between becoming a parent and getting married for the second time, got a BA in comparative literature to study - deeply and in two languages- the human condition. Recognized books as a potential portal to healing. This was a new revelation from an embodied understanding that stories matter. In the darkness of my marital separation, my roommate at the time handed me a copy of ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ by Cheryl Strayed, and I felt witnessed. T and I got back together. In 2015 I was leafing through a magazine and read that Cheryl Strayed has a writers camp at Esalen. Another portal. I found a community of storytellers, some of whom I have become close with and consider good friends. All the reading of other people’s stories gave me courage to start to share my own. My friend Meredith introduced me to somatics. I am still in practice around shaping new worlds through words and aligned action.

• Started substituting. Decided to start teaching high school English. Then nine years of teaching high school English. More practice. Self-expression. Adolescence. Listened and mentored young people. Got in the practice of learning about learning and growth, starting to understand the science behind growth mindsets and self-efficacy. Learned and taught about the importance of practice for competency. Often failed to apply it to myself. Played. Learned ages and stages of development. Read Paolo Freire and learned the term “praxis.” Started working with BIPOC folks who opened the portal to seeing systemic othering and its impact on us and our children. Started to examine myself within said system. Began the shaky work of orienting myself away from Whiteness, and learning how I could work to build equitable educational systems. Felt system and personal pressures. Quickly burned out.

• Left teaching for a bit. Completed a life coaching program at 27, still in the early stages of “awakening.” There were some true moments of sheer spiritual bypassing here, not gonna lie. The 48 year old self inserts the meme that says “God please give me the confidence of a 25 year old life coach” . Ended up doing next to nothing with it except I did learn two more important body-based practices: feeling into the core of the feeling (Gangaji) and got an introduction to transcendental meditation. Learned the terms “containers” and “capacity” and started to understand that my emotional container was the size of a toddler’s. Realizing now that I did a lot with this, given the 27 year old container. Started the slow and messy mostly intentional practice of accessing sensation and feeling in my body. Returned to teaching with a new sense of purpose and possibility.

• Participated in a variety of body-based/spiritual healing modalities over the years - this is not an exhaustive list: yoga in the studio and at an ashram; meditation; reiki; craniosacral therapy; osteopathy; sound healing; ecstatic dance; somatic bodywork. Experienced a wide range of sensations and feelings, from deep discomfort to ecstasy. Started to recognize numbness and the fight and flight responses. A somatic opening at an ecstatic dance class at Esalen when we are invited to make eye contact with a man I did not know at the time. Thank you Stephen, for seeing me and letting me see you. I started to come to the deep realization my head always felt safer, because I experienced my body as unpredictable. A problem to be solved. I wanted connection but it scared the shit out of me. This felt as important then as when I am writing this now. I returned to therapy, but this time body-based. Things were starting to come together. I continue to dabble in everything except meditation and somatic bodywork, which have become regular practices.

• Read A LOT of self-help and spiritual books, some of which were questionable. Got into astrology and tarot. Started following the moon. Still into astrology, tarot and the moon. I remember reading a profile of Bessel van der Kolk in the NYT back in 2014 and this one sentence awakened something in me: “The way to treat psychological trauma was not through the mind but through the body.” This thread picked up from where the “feeling into the core of the feeling” one left off, and I started to read more about trauma and its impact. I also started to identify as someone who had experienced trauma that needed tending to if I wanted to live a fully-realized life.

• Got a masters degree in educational leadership to be prepared to lead a school community. Learned quickly there is no preparation. Worked on just showing up daily for kids and adults as a vice principal and principal. Cried. Laughed. Learned. Unlearned. Deepened practice in equity work and pushed for restorative practices and social emotional learning. Felt inadequate a lot of the time. Brought yoga and mindfulness to elementary school. Took a mindfulness for educators training. In year 8, it became apparent that I don’t want to and can no longer police bodies. Left the site for the department of family and community engagement. Felt my body relax.

• Started studying and practicing somatics. The term seems like it’s everywhere now, and I feel like it’s in the collective for good reason. We are at the yes, and period. During the pandemic, like many folks I started digging deep for what I really cared about and how I wanted to move in the world as a human. Yes, the world is burning, and I am also here to continue imagining and taking action towards new futures. It led me to taking an Embodied Leadership class at Strozzi Institute last spring, outside and masked, and can honestly say it changed my life. There’s so much here that I’ll just say I now have some tools to be with and move through the world as the alive, tender, creative and wholehearted person that’s lived inside me all this time.

I’ll cut to the punchline. The big reveal. Through all this work, my life’s work - really- I am now realizing, what did this all do?

It helped me realize that the body is the instrument of liberation.*

As they said on The Simpsons, that’s it. That’s the joke. And the * on the punchline is that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. I can’t do this alone, nor do I want to anymore. So, in short, this is a hopefully regular newsletter on practicing. Whatever form that takes. Why? For the sake of healing (or at least mending) and liberation. I call this newsletter origin stories because I have always loved a good origin story. It conjures up for me the backstory, when the lines between villain and hero start to blur, where a being’s humanity starts to come into focus. It’s the shaping and worlds that emerge. Tender and messy.

And I guess this first edition was my origin story. I am here as an agent of change and possibility, traveling through the galaxy in search of cultures of care and radical belonging. I hope you’ll join me on the last Sunday of each month.

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You don’t need to read this, but here’s a footnote:

* Things started to emerge and shift when I became a parent in 1995. I was pretty young, 21, when Noah was born. I was responsible in some areas of my life and grossly negligent in others. Anybody who knows me from that time would probably tell you the same. I was in and out of college, I was in and out of jobs, I was in and out of relationships, including with the parent of my first child. Tons to explore here. Let’s pin that for future discussions. What I couldn’t be in and out of, and what would turn out to be my first and most important commitment, was to be called into mothering.

(I would later understand giving birth was a major opening, a portal into my spiritual growth and the Me that I consider to be me that has always been here. I don’t want you to think this is all about mothering, because it’s not. This is one major way I was forced to acknowledge the trauma that was living in my body and I felt there was no other way forward than to start taking action or risk recreating my childhood.)

What came glaringly apparent about a year into my motherhood was that whatever concept I had of who a loving mother was, who I thought I was because I loved my child, could be brutally interrupted by all the practices that had shaped me - many from before I was born. I kept running into this patterning over and over again, which led to me saying and doing things that felt completely out of line with my own beliefs around what a good mother was and the mother I knew I could be. Nurturing. Patient. Supportive. Kind. And not to say I wasn’t those things, but my capacity got smaller under the pressure of living.

I also became acutely aware of how challenging it can be to change when you haven’t had much experience of it yourself. I say it regularly now, but I am an unmothered mother in a lineage of unmothered mothers. My great grandmother left my grandmother in a home for girls to build a business on the Barbary Coast, my grandmother remarried quickly after my biological grandfather’s death and inadvertently let a predator into their home, and my own mother, drunk and on barbiturates, died in a car accident in the desert days before a court date to (hopefully) get back custody of me. I was adopted within my own family. Survival runs through my veins.

But something else does too, and I believe it’s what has carried me forward all this time. In the absence of nurture, I turned to nature. I often hear the term “resilience” as maybe a survival strategy and I definitely understand folks seeing it tied to our survival, but I am starting to understand it as the thrum of the universe that lives inside of me, activated by my connections to other people, my creativity - writing and painting, movement, especially dancing, animals (a big one for me, especially birds)…the experience of awe when I’m in the mountains or at the ocean. It’s those activations that help me return to the Me that is always here. The person that felt like I could just be myself. I’d like to stick another pin here for future discussion.