Issue #5: Wholeness
How are you attune to your aliveness?
Welcome to May! May is Mental Health Awareness Month and in celebration of that every week I theme my classes after a different emotion or mental health concept. This month you can expect weekly updates from me covering the different topics we will be exploring in class. As always, thanks for being here.
As I started drafting this week’s letter I looked up a feelings wheel, a dynamic tool that can help map our inner terrain. This was in effort to try to give names to emotions that I want to explore during Mental Health Awareness Month. Language is a curious thing. As I scanned the wheel, I noticed how many words exist for emotions we often label as negative (sadness, anger, fear), while the words for more positive emotions (joy, hope, wonder) seemed fewer, somehow thinner. Yet I know, and so many teachings remind us: there are no bad feelings, no bad parts. There is only the full, sacred spectrum. All of it belongs.
If you have taken my classes in May before you have probably heard me announce this inaugural week as “Saddie but a Baddie”, but writing that at the top of a newsletter felt a bit comical. Lately I have been conceptualizing this theme as ‘wholeness’. Both titles are accurate as they speak to the simple truth that we can be powerful, confident, and joyful, and at the same time carry sadness, fear, and grief. Sometimes within the same breath. One does not erase the other. Feeling the full range of emotion is what makes us human. One of the clearest memories I have of feeling all of it at once was the weekend before I moved to DC.
I was set to drive across the country from my home in Seattle, Washington to Washington, DC with my dear friend Nick on a Monday. The Saturday before we left, friends gathered at Lake Washington for a goodbye picnic. The day felt drenched in sweetness: my favorite elusive Seattle donuts appeared like a sacrament gingerly handed to me by a thoughtful friend. Another shock of gleeful surprise appeared as friends, unknowingly to me, made the three hour drive from Portland, Oregon to offer one last hug and a favorite croissant (I love a pastry, ok?). I felt overwhelmed by love.
The next day, I wandered the Olympic coast with two of my close friends from graduate school, Kayla and Meagan. I stared at the vast horizon line, hair blowing in the wind on a Washington State Ferry, trying and failing to swallow the magnitude of leaving a place —a life—I loved.
That evening, as I packed the last few boxes, my friend Kayla hugged me goodbye with a tight squeeze and a few tears, and headed to a late night work shift. Meagan stayed behind, helping me sort and fold what felt like the last bits of an era of my life. She asked, plainly,
“How are you feeling?”
The question cracked something open inside me. I had been trudging through a checklist the last few months; the life admin of turning in my master’s thesis, finding housing, planning a move. I involuntarily knelt, feeling like I could not physically support the sensation happening in my body. I laid down onto the soft carpeted floor, and managed to sob out one word:
"Terrified."
All the calm I had built up, all the scaffolding of "being fine," collapsed. I wept and gasped and stammered, "I don’t know what I’m doing," as if confessing a secret I had barely admitted to myself.
Meagan didn’t flinch. She lowered herself beside me, facing me on the floor, pressing her hand into mine, meeting my unraveling with a gaze so full of tenderness it anchored me. She said, so reverently, "That makes sense."
And somehow, in that simple sentence, she gave me permission to be exactly where I was: scared, open, wholly human. I sobbed harder, grasping for words, muttering fears about leaving behind a life I loved. Wondering out loud why I would make such a decision.
Meagan, with all the wisdom of someone who knows what it means to walk into the unknown, said, "Because you have to. You want to. And we will be here for you. I am right here."
It struck me then, and it strikes me still: we can be so many things at once. I was petrified of leaving, aching with sadness, and yet burning with excitement, trembling with anticipation, feeling such accomplishment over taking this next step. And none of these feelings canceled the others out. They layered together, like notes in a chord, creating something vast and deep and whole. I wasn’t just scared. I was also ready. I wasn’t just grieving. I was also grateful. This mosaic of emotion was and is not unique to that day. In fact, unsurprisingly it carried right into the next.
I remember the heavy sadness of driving my dad’s old car across the country without him physically on this earth to see such a moment. I remember the gratitude for my friend Nick, who not only agreed to make this trek with me six months into being friends, but also without prompting took over driving when my tears blurred the Idaho highway. I remember the buoyancy of reuniting with old friends in new cities across the country, welcoming me for an evening as I made my cross coast transition. Feeling tethered by love even as I moved deeper into the unknown of this new life. In every mile, every emotion, I was reminded: to be human is to hold multitudes. To feel it all— the terror and the wonder, the sorrow and the joy, without needing to fix it or edit it into something simpler.
Wholeness is not something we achieve. It is what we are, always. Even, and especially, when we are a mess of feelings sprawled out on a carpet, terrified and alive and entirely ourselves.
Lately, I have had the privilege of witnessing others live this same wholeness, like Meagan and so many others have and did for me. Friends mourning the loss of a familiar community while feeling the thrill of stepping into a new move and adventure. Others holding both the excitement and the uncertainty of welcoming a new baby into the world. Friends grieving job loss or a breakup and still finding laughter and light in the spaces between. Again and again, whether I like it or not, life reminds me: we are not meant to feel just one thing. We are made to hold it all. And no one feeling is ever final. Yoga reminds me of this daily.
Sanskrit, the main language used in formative yoga texts, is a classical language of the Indian subcontinent belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Sanskrit often does not perfectly translate into English, leaving room for various interpretations. In Sanskrit the word yoga is sometimes translated to ‘yoke’ or ‘bring together’, other times as 'oneness' or 'wholeness'. All translations are true. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a foundational yogic text, the concept of yoga is phrased as practice for remembering wholeness. The sutras can also have various interpretations but these one’s feel particularly apt for this week’s theme:
Sutra I.1. atha yoga nausanam (In this moment, in the now, yoga, oneness; wholeness is present.)
Sutra I.2. yoga citta vritti nirodhah (We experience this Oneness, or remember wholeness, when we let the thoughts arise and subside, when we quietly notice even the way we observe, just noticing it All.)
My mat invites me to witness it All every day. It reminds me that to choose to connect to myself is a brave and powerful act. It reminds me to feel everything is to be human.
How are you feeling? What emotions are coming up for you lately? How are you making space for those emotions to be seen, heard, and felt?
What practices remind you of your inherent wholeness? Worth? Humanity?
In your body where do you feel alive? Where do other emotions place themselves when they pop up?
What spaces and people allow you to be your whole self?
I look forward to asking, and perhaps answering, some of these questions with you in class or conversation. You’ll find my schedule, playlists, and week one of May’s featured poems, bits, and clips below.
With love (and my whole self!),
Tori
P.S. Over on Instagram I am soliciting song suggestions for each week’s playlist. You can find all the recommendations for ‘Wholeness’ (aka Saddie but a Baddie) here.
Poems/Bits/Clips
If any of these excerpts speak to you I recommend clicking through to enjoy the full work.
“This being human is a guest house./Every morning a new arrival./A joy, a/ depression, a meanness,/ some momentary awareness comes/ as an unexpected visitor./ Welcome and entertain them all!/ Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,/ who violently sweep your house/ empty of its furniture,/ still, treat each guest honorably./ He may be clearing you out/ for some new delight….Be grateful for whoever comes,/ because each has been sent/ as a guide from beyond.” - Rumi, Guesthouse
“May all that is unforgiven in you,/ Be released./ May your fears yield/ Their deepest tranquilities./ May all that is unlived in you,/ Blossom into a future,/ Graced with love.” - John O’Donohue, To Come Home to Yourself
“...I love you because you’ve never had a mirror face./Because the truth is the last thing/you would ever try to fake./ So sometimes you like a human/ scribble, like a two-year-old/ has colored you in./ like you have too many feelings/ to stay inside the lines/ of your own skin. But that, my friend,/ is a masterpiece. I love you/ because we have both showed up/ to kindness tryouts/ with notes from the school nurse/ that said we were too hurt to participate./ But we learned how wrong we were,/ and weren’t those the best days?/ The days we learned how wrong we were/ and so got to grow/ into our goodness, throwing/ the peach pits of our old selves/ into gardens to grow sweetness..” - Andrea Gibson, The Year of No Grudges or Instead of Writing a Furious Text, I Try a Poem
“Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know/ what despair is; then/ winter should have meaning for you./ I did not expect to survive,/ earth suppressing me. I didn't expect/ to waken/ again, to feel/ in damp earth my body/ able to respond again, remembering/ after so long how to open again/ in the cold light/ of earliest spring--/ afraid, yes, but among you again/ crying yes risk joy/ in the raw wind of the new world.” - Louise Glück, Snowdrops