Post-nakedness (2): reverence and respect

Three days have passed since the Human Body Project 44 event. I'm still absorbing it. I knew people were hungry for an experience like this but I wasn't sure if they would get it. From my own experience of the event, and from feedback I've received since, I think most of the people there not only got it but engaged very deeply.

Let me backtrack for a moment: my intuitive healer friend told me I should ask for the number of people I wanted to attend, put it out to the universe, as it were. So I said: I want 60 people to come. But I was unattached to the number because I wasn't sure how many people would be ready for something like this. On Sunday I counted the number of waivers signed. There were 72. I had 12 people there helping me out (GREAT THANKS TO ALL OF YOU!). Do the math. Pretty amazing!

What I wanted to create happened in more ways than getting 60 people out. I wanted to use my own body to create an atmosphere of reverence and compassion for what we all are: flawed human beings in a body. That's why I'm reluctant to take on the heroine role. I'm still a messed up person in many ways. But I can use my own body and my own experience to represent that messed-upness in all of us. What happened is that there really was an atmosphere of respect, reverence and compassion.

This kind of feeling is missing in most of our lives. I'm not saying we don't have it, but we definitely don't have enough of it. I also feel like we, myself certainly included, don't know how to create it, how to deal with it, how to nurture it, how to engage with it. On Saturday, people were engaged with those profound human feelings that we all have access to and that make life meaningful. For creating an opportunity and space to do that, I'll give myself credit.

Now that Human Body Project 44 has happened it seems like it needs to keep happening and waiting a year doesn't make sense. So I'm putting this out to the universe: I want to create more of this and I'll need the right kind of help.

Illness

Over the last 11 years, I've been sick a lot. I don't have a diagnosable illness. I just get sick, like with a flu, a lot. Between 25-50% of the time. I've been feeling sick for almost two weeks. Today, I still feel sick.

It is very discouraging.

Since 1992, I've been working on healing myself. I was in a lot of emotional pain then and found a therapist in Toronto who worked with energy. 1995 was the year I really started to get physically ill.

One day I'll write about the many many doctors, healers, books, strategies, cleanses, etc. that I've consulted or worked with to feel better. I understood early on that medical science wasn't going to be a big help. I now have an energy healer, a colon hydrotherapist, a chiropractor, a naturopath/acupuncturist, a massage therapist and a gestalt therapist. I call them my team.

I find it difficult to talk about being ill. I feel like I sound whiny. I often feel very hopeless about it and feel guilty for not being perkier. I find it hard to explain because I can't give it a label like "diabetes" that everyone understands. Lately I am coming to believe that my illness has a spiritual base but I don't know what that means exactly. To be honest, I had hoped that doing the Human Body Project would be a healing experience. Maybe it is, but today I still feel shitty.

I have a very real sense of myself as a transformational being. A lot of what passes for bravery in me is that I am much more uncomfortable feeling stuck than I am about, say, quitting a job or taking off my clothes. And I am slowly (so slowly; not yet clearly) understanding that energetic/spiritual transformation makes me feel sick. So what I would like to do is say to myself: hey, this is great, I'm transforming again. Rather than: wah, I'm sick. But I'm not there yet.

Post-nakedness (1): support and embracing awkwardness

I want to acknowledge how powerful last night was for me. It was a very profound experience to feel so exposed and yet so supported. As I looked around the room I felt many feelings. There were many more people than I expected. I haven't counted yet, but I think about 60. And what transpired was that there was a ring around me. Me in the middle and most of the participants around the periphery of the room.

It was awkward looking. All these people looking at me, silent. Me standing there naked, not "doing" anything but feeling a range of emotions--I haven't seen the videotape yet, but I think they showed. Many people looked uncomfortable to me. My clothed, conversational self would have tried to help them feel better. I felt that need last night to make things smooth (whatever the hell that is, but I feel that irritating need a lot) but didn't do anything about it. I felt exposed and freaked out and awkward.

A lot of people looked like they were feeling that way too. But one of the strongest and most meaningful feelings I had was that despite all the awkwardness all those people were supporting me.

The awkwardness was beautiful. Because I realize that if we are going to learn to love ourselves and each other, if we are going to live honestly and be true to our hearts, we are going to have to let ourselves be awkward. My fiance, Dave, asked me if there is anything I would change about last night what would it be. My first answer was that I would have been more clever. When people spoke into the mike, I would have replied in a more articulate way. But I have changed my mind and want to embrace my awkwardness, my uncoolness, my inarticulacy, my inability in the moment to speak clearly because I just wasn't able to.

A couple of people spoke hyperbolically about my courage and that made me uncomfortable. I do acknowledge that doing this took courage for me. But I felt like I was meant to do this in the sense of a calling and needed it for myself. I am very gratified that many people were moved by the experience but I feel embarrassed by being termed heroic. That was awkward for me. And, as anyone who has been in therapy knows, my embarrassment is about me (and my lingering, Canadian, female feelings of not wanting to be seen allowing myself to stand out; my false humility). I don't actually need, as my therapist would say, to take on what they said.

Another woman spoke about her "uncomfortability" and the "anxiety and tension in the room", which other people said they did not feel. I want to acknowledge all the speakers', myself included, and our imperfect ways of expressing ourselves. The people who spoke about my exceptional courage probably felt that they would need exceptional courage to take off their clothes in front of a lot of people. For me, I definitely felt brave but not exceptionally brave (I did have years of stewing this idea in my head and then months after I committed to doing it--a lot of panic got worn off). And the woman who spoke about the anxiety was probably feeling that herself.

I loved the (conversational) silence. And I loved that so many people came. And I loved that so many people stayed. And I loved that so many different types of people came. And I loved that there were men there. And it was so interesting that many people were people I didn't know. In the silence I was able to stay in what I was feeling for much of the time. I felt lucky to be--here's an awkward metaphor--the hub in the wheel of so many humans. I had the feeling of being the person who was connecting all these people. It helped me to feel supported by men and women both, and people whom I had never met. And it helped me to feel connected to and to feel like I was connecting people from many different backgrounds and ages. It was very moving.

And if there is something I regret or feel disappointed about, it is my imperfect ability to feel it all, to really take it in. I had to remind myself to breathe and remind myself to stay in my body. But, again, that is the awkwardness that I need to embrace. I'm a teacher. I know that people can only learn from where they are. I'm still learning how to feel what I feel, how to sit still in discomfort, how to connect with myself and others, how to let myself be vulnerable. I want to acknowledge how much I've worked on this and give myself credit for hanging in there. And I want to acknowledge the same for the people who were there.

The Menstrual Paradigm

Here's a question. If for a day or two out of every month the majority of men between the ages of 10-50 could expect to experience appendicitis-like symptoms, would this be a subject of conversation or would it be an embarrassing and somewhat shameful topic "politely" ignored?

I am menstruating today. Though it is 2006, this is considered a forward and confronting conversational opening. For over 30 years, except for the nine months when I was pregnant, I have had debilitating menstrual cramps, PMS and related fatigue for at least one to a few days every month. There are many women in my position but because menstruation is still considered an impolite subject, I wouldn't know it by way of my daily interactions. We do talk about menstruation, of course, but not much.

I'm not setting this up as an oh-those-crappy-men versus us-poor-women conversation. I point out what I consider to be the tip of the iceberg in what I call the menstrual paradigm, which serves as an excellent example of what it actually means to live in a masculine energy system. Fish swim in water, we swim in a worldwide culture that is based on masculine principles. It's very difficult to step out of the environment in which we are completely accustomed to living and examine it. But let's use the menstrual paradigm to give it a try.

Here's another question. What if menstruation was honored rather than ignored? I used the appendicitis analogy because for many women, menstruation is a curse. It is painful; it is messy; even for those women whose menstrual cycles are mild, it is inconvenient. Why should this be so?

Because we live in a 9-to-5, 5+-days-a-week, deadline-oriented, get things done, win win win, monetary bottom-line, never-stop-and-be-still world. So because the world is structured the way it is, a completely natural female bodily event that happens every month and signifies a woman's ability to create life is considered taboo (or, at least, below the level of polite conversation), cursed, painful, messy and inconvenient.

As a woman who has experienced the miracle of creating life in my body and now as a mother of another beautiful female who will also one day be able to create life, I deplore, I abhor, I scream in my heart at the sheer gross ignorance of our culture and its attitude to feminine power and energy. I can't even begin to tell you what a world based on a greater balance of feminine and masculine energy would look like because I live in what has been millennia of masculine-based systems.

I'm just guessing though that if we lived in a world where the bodily systems of the life-givers on the planet were honored; if menstruation, for instance, was a time of nurturing rather than shame, the world would be a more peaceful place. Just a wild guess.