moonwork missive: full moon 🌕

today we are practicing slow mornings with toddler snuggles, keeping things low-demand & unpressed, eating as well as we can. in one of my embodied practice lineages of ashtanga yoga you do not practice on the full moon. in my more current practice home near the iyengar neighbourhood, we often do restorative or back-to-basics grounded standing poses around the full moon. there is wisdom about "the nervous system" & its relationship in balance with weather & season & time of day that is much more deeply developed in the sister vedic sciences of yoga & ayurveda than it is in today's white somatics^ that over-individualizes the work, collaborates with the erasure of the divine & demands/teaches "regulation": staying within a "tolerable" range of experience, largely pathologizing the spectrums of anger/rage, overwhelm/shutdown, and avoidance/flight, though all of these are part of us.

in asana practice, my own practice lineage does not teach to do whatever keeps us comfortable enough to stay within that range of "regulation". we are attentive to our range because we want to tend ourselves towards stability, not build excessive heat/irritation/pitta or cold/immobility/kapha, while also intentionally activating the body through sympathetic (edge) & parasympathetic (recovery) states. this kind of cycle is repeated through many technologies of folk healing. this cycle of activating towards an edge & retreating towards rest/integration grows the soma (body/self) towards sustained change rather than staying stuck in a cycle of overextension/crash/overextension.

to give a concrete example from 18 years of personal asana practice: if we are working prasarita padottanasana, our hamstrings lengthen through consistency within our current full capacity, but as soon as we get aesthetic- or ego-driven & try to just get as low as possible as fast as possible, we blow over our edge. we will sacrifice the stability of our sacroiliac joints, roll our ankles, hyperextend our knees, overextend our hamstring insertion & strain or pull connective tissue that does not rehab so fast! this is not growing capacity. this is self-harm through uninformed &/or unrooted &/or unprincipled practice. it is wasteful!

the thing about oscillation towards more possibility is it is also very efficient, not in the billionaire bro way, but in the respect for life way. the way that also says, why the fuck do we have to work for wages to live!? what a waste! what would it look like if people were more free to follow desire, care & purpose, structuring their energy & time in ways that actually serve them & their families/communities rather than extraction? boom & bust cycles of overextension & crash are the motherfucking white supremacist settler colonial industrial revolution's logic, a direct ancestor of today's technocratic oligarchic capitalist global empire's culture.

this full moon i was intending to be resting out of town on the edge of a frozen lake, but mishaps ensued & yesterday ended up an exhausting, demoralizing round trip for nothing. my kid is tired but chill; they got to play with some novel trucks & a stethoscope! but parents are bummed as fuck at missing out on a rare chance to get into the woods & rest somewhere other than home. it's a recovery day for everyone, following a planned stretch day for driving out yesterday, which became a juuust at the edge day. no one fully melted down. everyone was a hair away from it by the time we got all the way back home.

two or three things i know for sure*, & one is that leatherqueers taught me how to oscillate a binary to make a third way to make a multiplicity (what we're doing in BE YR OWN & also MOONWORK OPENS this season). leatherqueers also taught me how to walk the edge.

these two practices are interrelated; such is the natural law of the binary which is that it does not exist. binaries are a fiction of oppression. dualities are inherent to nature & they are fluid, oscillating, poles of reference through contrast, not absolutes to taxonomize & control us.

edgewalking~ is to identify what is enticing about Beyond where we are currently able to live/practice/love & then to translate desire into play or protocol; that is to say, practice, that incites embodying that desire. it is a practical technology; it is a distinctly pervert & queer technology; it is also an effective technology.
& walking the edge, playing with an edge, growing towards & expanding an edge, this all does the opposite of white somatics, in that we intentionally embody extremes within a clear container that allows us to move in & out of the intensity with partner/s but also explicitly within the collective body of community, since public erotic life is a core element of leather culture. this is one of the places it is specific & distinct from kink, in my view & experience––if you only spank in the bedroom, you are probably kinky whether you identify that way or not, but you're certainly not leather.

& so, above is a peek into some of how i am practicing & guiding practice lately. & so, all the way below is a photo of one of my primary solo D/s & somatics practice schemas for embodying duality, tending duality & becoming deeper into the delicious extremes of duality, presented with pretty much zero explanation.

& so, here we are, at the full moon, which in my personal somatics schemas is where we root in power & the All beyond our personal knowing/relating & also in lineage, infinite through time: those who came before & opened the way for us, made us who & what we are at our backs & those we open the way for to become themselves in our wake ahead. here we are, at the full moon, where rest illuminates integration. & here we are at the full moon eclipse, which requires yet another integration of dualities as the face of lunar brightness is obscured & changed.

FOOTNOTES
^i use "white somatics" as shorthand for the genre of somatics that in my current canada/USA context has gained the most visibility & power through its appropriation & assimilation into the Academy & professional orders ruled by the state. many of these lineages emerged from less institutional & more politicized lineages that predated them, that may or may not have claimed the title of "somatics". white somatics can be practiced & perpetrated by people of any race, though certainly in these lineages, power is most readily used, exploited, centralized & proliferated by white people & white-dominated institutions, where we understand whiteness/white supremacy obviously to be intertwined with colonization, capitalism, imperialism, ableism, transphobia, transmisogyny & misogyny. in contrast, "cultural somatics" could refer to lineages of somatics that share similar roots in place & time, but are accounting for 1) their origins in the intact Indigenous traditions of many peoples of the world & local cultural/knowledge creation by & for the people, and 2) the workings of culture & power in shaping the body (& being shaped by our bodies, choices & lives) as well as the approach to practice.
*h/t dorothy allison
~NB edgeplay in leather culture specifically refers to a) knife play, b) play with taboo, or c) play that is psychologically/emotionally risky for the player/s. this is related to what i'm talking about here & falls under the general umbrella of edgewalking, but i'm talking about the much more broad sky of edgewalking that is not leather-specific & under which many different practices & lineages of practice live.

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come practice live together on fridays, 12:30 pm ET for 30-45 minutes––practice loves company; practice loves repetition! video off or on as suits you, participation by silent presence or voice or chat as suits you <3