A warm hello from late summer here in Brooklyn. I hope you’re well, even if you have/had covid, or other challenges to the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual body. I wish that you are grounded in your wholeness and intactness.
I haven’t written for months. I was very blessed to have 3 generations of family visiting from 2 continents, and it was a time of great growth and learning and joy. I finally went to the New York Aquarium and saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. Lots of visits to Luna Park and beaches of course, and lots of time with puzzles and games, while also making chai, coffee, and other delicious things I love to feed people. I feel that the years of pandemic isolation had trained me out of being in community, and now my garden is blooming with vibrant and varied colors and forms of life. Life will never be the same again.
I’m welcoming new collaborations professionally too, and learning so much. I’m loving serving as a mentor to coaches in training at the Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation School. I’m supporting global intersectional activist-led grantmaking with wonderful colleagues, and empowering women and girls of color through narrative change and story-telling. More on all this later, but for now, I’ll just say that I feel supremely blessed to be here in my 7th year of freelancing as a consultant, facilitator and coach.
You may be pleased to learn that I’m also working on my vices! Yes of course I have many. In Sikhism (which is one of the guiding influences on my spiritual community of practice), the 5 big do-not’s are — kaam (lust), krodh (anger/wrath), lobh (greed), moh (attachment), and ahankar (ego/excess pride). My most challenging teacher these days is krodh.
To be honest, I have great love and respect for anger. Anger is the righteous rage that flares up in the face of injustice. Anger is a survivor’s great friend because it tells us when a line has been crossed, it shows us where our boundaries are. Anger propels us to fight for what is right, and to correct an imbalance in power. The many faces of anger have much to teach us about what is going on that needs attention, care or repair. And I much prefer it to the flattened life force of despair.
And, as a dear friend once told me, anger is also wounded love. Something about that always softens me. It shows me the tender underbelly of anger. Where there is hurt underneath, there can be hardening on top. That is how the scar tissue works, and how wounds close up so we don’t bleed to death. It can be easier for some of us (me!) to jump to the righteousness of anger (a more heady process), while not wanting to sit with painful feelings. What chronic illness has taught me, though, is that pain is not the problem. Pain is a flag, a helpful pointer towards what needs healing. So avoiding/numbing makes sense because large (emotional or physical) pain is difficult to bear, but ultimately, healing is through feeling, with gentle awareness and curiosity, asking — Where does it hurt? Why? How can it be soothed? What is needed for healing?
I sit with these questions in the energy of compassion, curiosity and courage — qualities that becoming a coach taught me. I am grateful to my teachers, both my coaching teachers as well as the life experiences that surface what I need to work on and with. So I am reminded that "Life is a blessing in all its fury!", to quote the wonderful Celiné Justice.