Tent, A Monthly Action in my own neighbourhood hood, Oct 14 3-4

Tent, A Monthly Action
Across the street from my house.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
3:00-4:00 pm

Almost every month for the last seven years I've held a monthly action in public as a way to explore vulnerability, expand discourse, disrupt status quo, resist cultural lies, etc. 

For this month's action, I will pitch a tent in the field across from my house and hold a sign that says: WE COULD LET PEOPLE DO THIS.

I welcome supporters or reporters. Email me at tashadiamanthuman@gmail.com for my address.

Link to Facebook event

humanbodyproject.org

Thanks, Tasha

ps Last month's action was cancelled due to illness.

pps CBC: Homeless tent cities play life-saving role and should be embraced, not battled, expert says

Naked Ugly Dancing @fringeMtl + Handcuffed video

Upcoming Fringe Show! 
Tell your friends in Montreal!
#NUD
#fringefemmes

Naked Ugly Dancing
At the Montreal Fringe
June 7-17, 2018

Jun 07 Thu 7:45 pm
Jun 09 Sat 6:15 pm
Jun 12 Tue 11:00pm
Jun 13 Wed 6:00 pm
Jun 15 Fri 7:45 pm
Jun 17 Sun 2:30 pm

Montreal Fringe online program+tickets
Facebook event

Performance art
And ritual+improvisation+storytelling+dance

Venue 7
Montreal Improv Theatre A
3697 Blvd St-Laurent 
$10
nudity +16
en Anglais 75 minutes

Healer, feeler, revealer. Paradigm shifter. Heavy lifter of paradox+pain. Ageing, overweight, cancer schmancerous. Recovering academic. Suburban mommy lady. Powerful+vulnerable. Privilege-user+vagina-haver. PTSD+lover of trees. Tasha Diamant ugly dances naked+improvises conversations+connections. Because: business-as-usual brutality. On behalf of the collective. Participation optional.

Also, I made a mini-documentary after being handcuffed on the lawn of the BC Legislature during last week's Monthly Act of Disruption and Resistance

Monthly Action May 27 2-3pm BC Legislature "the SHAME of PAIN is still a thing"

Monthly Action
When: Sunday, May 27, 2018, 2-3 pm
Where: BC Legislature (obsolete colonial structure) grounds

What/Why/How:
Performance art/activism. Radical embarrassment.
I use my naked (or semi-naked) body/self in public to express pain, improvise connections+push back against business-as-usual brutality. On behalf of the collective. Participation encouraged.

Healer, feeler, revealer. Paradigm shifter. Heavy lifter of paradox+pain. Ageing, overweight, cancer schmancerous. Recovering academic. Suburban mommy lady. Powerful+vulnerable. Privilege-user+vagina-haver. PTSD+lover of trees.

PS I've only started using the words "pain" and "trauma." Twelve years ago I started using the concept of "vulnerability" (four years before before Brené Brown's viral TEDTalk) because people would look at me blankly when I said this work emerged from pain. Now Pink is on her Beautiful Trauma world tour. There's always a Lululemonization (ie, capitalist yoga) when concepts go mainstream. So... not sure what to think except, ya, people are in CRIPPLING and SHAME-HIDDEN pain and even though pop stars are singing about it, the SHAME of PAIN in a culture of INVISIBLE BRUTALITY is still a thing.

6th Anniversary of Vulnerability Actions+New Video

I'm not the highest functioning person since ye olde Stage 4 Kanker wake-up call... but I do get out and about once a month to disturb the masses.

Here's my latest YouTube video of last month's street action. By chance, I caught a lot of audio of police (even more than the month before). I like to think that I provided some education.

Also, on New Year's Eve Day, December 31, 2017, I'll do a 6th Anniversary Monthly Action (aka Vulnerability Vigil)
3-4 pm
BC Legislature Grounds (Victoria) or nearby
Everyone welcome. Dressed or not.
Link to Facebook Event

For this piece of shamanic street performance, I plan to cover my naked body with "HELLO my name is" labels.

As most of you know, I started monthly Vulnerability Vigils on January 1, 2012. I've held at least one public vigil monthly, except when I was very ill. Vigils have evolved.

But I continue to use my naked body as a medium to share vulnerability and as a cultural/political statement.

Loneliness+futility, I've found, are part of the art.

Cancerversary Vulnerability Vigil

Cancerversary Vulnerability Vigil
Friday, August 26, 2016
5-6 pm
Government + Yates St.
Victoria, BC

Everybody welcome. Dressed or not.

Last year, on August 26, I was admitted to hospital because it looked like I had a malignant tumour in my left ovary or thereabouts. A few days later I learned I did indeed have stage 4 ovarian cancer. Dang. Bad prognosis.

I was due for a breakdown. The paradigm I believe in and try to live is about healing. But I had been working in an environment where healing is not part of the vocabulary and most of the words are pretty lies, like "community," "support," "transformative," etc.

I had made the mistake of being honest and caring too much. I didn't have the necessary boundaries. It hurt me. I found my job as a university instructor deeply rewarding and extremely painful.

Pain has been everpresent. I am extremely sensitive. For most of my life I had NO IDEA what it was or how to deal with it, except to feel ashamed.

I can honestly say I don't want to be here, living on this earth in the culture we have created. I don't have the necessary boundaries. I have suffered immense emotional pain. Unconsciously, which looked like boozery, promiscuity, irony, etc., and then consciously, caused by motherhood, mostly.

A great thing about my cancer is that I realized that if I was going to survive, and I do want to survive because I have 9- and 14-year-old kids, I needed to stop fantasizing about dying. So I took another stab at trusting Western pharmaceutical hooha and, what do you know?! I find Cymbalta very helpful. I never think hopeful thoughts about dying anymore. 

I would never have started the Human Body Project on Cymbalta, that's for sure!

Last month's Vulnerability Vigil in Toronto at Yonge and Bloor.

What is the Human Body Project? It's me intersecting my culture, a culture that really does not work for me... even though I am undeniably privileged. I have never felt safe here. 

So in this work, whether I do it on the streets or in performance, as my public self, or even private self, I am always working with my state of vulnerability, which, interestingly, mirrors the vulnerability of humanity at this unfortunate juncture.

Our culture does not understand or respect vulnerability. Our way of dealing with vulnerability is learned in a pre-verbal state. We don't have words to help us. By we, I mean especially us Western humans, who have created a weirdly visible situation: Syria! Yemen! Global climate change! Rape rape rape! Debt debt debt!

Which is also a weirdly invisible situation: far away or on a screen or she asked for it or, the worst, this is how it's all set up so what are ya gonna do?

IT'S A FUCKING DISASTER.

So anyway, at least once a month I do this thing I call a Vulnerability Vigil where I stand on the street naked. I hold a sign in front of my body because, God forbid the good people creating the 6th extinction should see a naked lady whose body is not selling something. This month I will probably hold the extinction symbol, as I have often done.

Back when I had more hair

My 54-year-old, baby-producing, cancer-surviving, naked female body is there to honour, share and express vulnerability. I work within the spacious form of performance art to present a non-violent, non-rhetorical, feminine, indigenist, healing response to an insane world. I am white and very privileged. This is also about showing up and using my privilege.

A Vulnerability Vigil is a ritual; it's about being the change; it's about being an ally; it's art. Holding vigils (and performing the Human Body Project) continues to be the only sane response I can come up with.

Please consider joining me this Friday. My friend and longtime Vigil partner, Keith Jenkins, will be out of town and I'll be extra-vulnerable without that dear man.

Cancerversary update: Chemo is done but it hurt my joints pretty bad, especially my knees, and either the chemo or the Cymbalta has caused my brain to process less sharply. I need a lot of sleep and rest. That bliss stage I went through for a while last year... I LOVED everyone! It was like being permanently in the early stages of a nice drunk... went away. 

My digestion is good, though. I taught a painting class. We had a great family trip to Ontario. I've been swimming in lakes almost every day this summer. I'm part of the group creating and performing the William Head on Stage play this year at William Head prison. And I'm happy to say my kids are driving me crazy. 

I don't think about the statistics.

Please, when you think of me, say: it's gone, Tasha, and it's not coming back.

humanbodyproject.org 
vulnerabilityvigils.org
Link to Facebook event

Vulnerability is the Key

As a yoga practitioner and yoga teacher, yogic concepts have been very powerful growing tools in my life. Two of those concepts, compassion and presence (i.e. the act of being present), are simple to understand but difficult to embody. I mean I, for one, have difficulty with my family of origin and my next-door neighbours compassion-wise. And, while I have not found the usual absentizing substances useful for me for a long time, I would happily take a holiday from myself and read detective novels and eat cookies and popcorn in bed for three weeks if I got the chance. I am no shining star.

In my day-to-day life I also watch myself and my social discomfort. I often feel like I don't belong and that people are judging me. I have various ways I try to defend myself against this discomfort. My defences put people off. I'm just human. What I'm trying to point out is that we all have these kinds of difficulties and they hold us back. Much of our social interaction is about avoiding vulnerability.

When we are overcompensating, when we are not present, when we are not able to feel compassion, we make the wrong choices. This applies on a macro- and micro-level. This applies to the current mess in my own head and the current mess in the world.

Many people are working on their difficulties these days. We want to feel better. We want to be more compassionate. That's why TV shows like Oprah and Dr. Phil are so popular. People want clues. Oprah and Dr. Phil tell people what to do. I suggest this works only to a point. Many spiritual advisers and religions also offer less than practical advice.

For those of us who are ready, there is a deeper place that Dr. Phil and Oprah and Deepak Chopra and many pastors don't seem eager to go to. There is a key to working on these individual icky places and our collective fucked-upness. That key is learning to experience vulnerability. This has to be experiential and visceral, i.e. felt.

In this project, i.e. my particular choice for exposing myself and others to a shared experience of vulnerability,  I'm saying that by dealing with nakedness (mine and those who join me; this self-exposing blog) you are going to feel vulnerable. I'm not saying this makes sense for everyone, but the people who are drawn to this project are looking for that kind of experience. I created this project because I need this kind of experience.

Another yogic concept is the idea of practice. The more practice we have feeling vulnerable, the easier it gets until, who knows, we may get better at being present and compassionate. This will aid us individually and globally.

Private vs Public

A naked body is a potent signifier. Naked=sexual. Naked woman (usually)=sexual object. Naked=sexual=shameful/sinful. Naked pregnant woman=naked nonvirgin. Naked=beautiful/sexy or not so beautiful/sexy=judgment about beauty/sexiness. Etc.

I'd guess there is almost no human being on earth over the age of 6 who is completely comfortable about nakedness. Weird, really.

I'm not. For me, being naked in front of people is very uncomfortable. Before I did the first Human Body Project event I had experience in family life, with lovers and in locker rooms. Reactions I've had to these experiences ranged from closed-off feigned indifference to deep embarrassment. I do not feel comfortable walking around naked in front of my husband even though he professes fondness for my body. I do not and have never felt attractive enough. When I worked at the Omega Institute, a new-agey, holistic studies facility in upstate New York, I never even considered using the co-ed sauna. There may have been a time when I revelled in my naked body as my daughter does sometimes after a bath, but I don't remember it.

No wonder nakedness is associated with sex. The only time most of us are naked and kind of having a good time is when we're under 6 or having sex.

It's way out of my comfort zone to stand in front of an audience naked--especially as just that, a naked person. I.e. I'm not doing a job as a professional artist's model or someone who is posing or a stripper. I'm also not an exhibitionist. In terms of how I feel about my body, I'd say I'm a typical, 45-year-old, Canadian woman. The first Human Body Project event was overwhelming for me.
For many people the idea of doing what I'm doing is way too out there. Some things should remain private, right? What I write in these blog entries is way too out there, too. Again, I am out of my comfort zone in sharing what I share in many of these entries. I am a relatively open person but many of my blog entries are not confidences I would so publicly share.

It seems like routine obviousness that my life would be easier if I had not embarked on this public project (I offer this to my detractors). My body and my struggles would continue to be private.
But I'm going to make an argument here for rethinking these issues. What is so shameful about nakedness? What is so shameful about struggling? Who is not naked under their clothing? Who does not have struggles in their life? While I find it very difficult to expose my naked body and my ugly struggles with sanity and health, I also find it very difficult not to be seen as I really am. It's my own battle, for sure. And the Human Body Project is one of the ways I'm waging it.

But the Human Body Project is bigger than my own probably pathetic little quest for authenticity. As I mention in my artist statement, WE ALL KNOW that we live in a world that is unprecedentedly precarious. We know it but we don't know what to do. We want to do something but we don't know what. I'll say it again: until we viscerally understand our own vulnerability--starting with our own discomfort about being human and being in a body--and the way we share that condition with every other human being, we will not figure it out.

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.

A Longer Version of the Artist Statement

One of the main themes of my life has been about coming to terms with existing in the physical form; i.e. coming to terms with being in my body. To me, this is the fundamental difficulty of human existence.

Body = pain / difficulty. No body = not here / death. It’s an age-old theme, of course, Human Body Project being my own personal take on it.

When I was in my early 30s I was visiting my hometown and ran into the mother of one of my old school friends. I told her that I was now an artist and had been selling my paintings. In a deeply condescending tone—a tone she might have used to say, if not for the impositions of appearing polite, “You always were disgusting, weren’t you?”—she said, “You always were a free spirit, weren’t you?”

That encounter sums up my perception of the environment I grew up in. I wasn’t always an artist but I definitely understood from a very young age that I was a freak. “Free spirit” is not how I would have described myself. Tormented spirit would be more like it. Before I even knew the words, I knew that who I was was offensive.

I grew up in a time and a place (Calgary) where emotions and self-expression clearly belonged only in the internal world. I learned not to express or even acknowledge what I was feeling, especially if those feelings were “negative” such as sadness and anger or just over the top.

But one of the main issues I deal with as a human being is feeling so much. I didn’t understand or give it a term until my 30s. That is, I can now say that “I have a vast emotional range.” As gay people have practically no role models to help them grow up, neither did I.

So I was a really messed up adolescent, teen-ager and twenty-something. I had some cliché issues: desperate desire for male approval, attachment to academic and professional status, deep self-loathing of my non-perfect body and deep self-loathing period, to name a few. I began drinking and smoking and binge eating and used those excellent pain mediators in one combination or another for the good part of two decades.

By my early 30s I had started painting, I started doing yoga, I had some painful relationships, and alcohol stopped being fun. In my 30s, very little was fun, actually. By opening myself up to self-expression through art, yoga and relationships while not abusing substances, my sensitivity and emotional life became more external. I went through some severe depressions and began what has continued for more than a decade now of sometimes seriously fragile physical health.

At the age of 44, I have figured a few things out: How I feel is real. My body is where I feel how I feel. When it comes to being in this world, my body is where I dwell. No matter how I have wished or still wish to get out of feeling like I do, I cannot escape the physical limitations of being in a body.

But also, at the age of 44, I am the mother of a beloved daughter. I am the happy partner of a loving man. And I am done with hating the way that I look. For much of my day, along with the ailments, crabbiness and whatever else, I feel profound feelings of love, joy and gratitude. The reason I feel those beautiful feelings is because I have finally allowed myself to inch toward accepting the freak that I am.

What’s all this got to do with standing naked in a room, you may be asking?

It feels important to me to use my body as a representative human body. I cannot say how you will feel if you decide to participate in this project. What I hope for is that by witnessing another fragile, imperfect, mortal human being in a state of some vulnerability, that you will realize, if only briefly, that you too are a fragile, imperfect, mortal human being. What I hope for is that we all see how beautiful we are within this human framework.

Also, it is impossible to escape the fact that as a non-nubile but very real 44-year-old, I am standing in for women. Part of what I am saying here is: This is a real body. (And: I am angry about porn, models, Photoshop and plastic surgery.) As well, I think my out-there sensitivity and emotional range can be seen as a very female experience of living in the world.

Understanding that you are mortal, fragile and imperfect is a difficult idea to accept—as a culture and race we are nowhere near absorbing that concept. But much of my own pain has come from not being acknowledged and not acknowledging myself as that fragile, imperfect, mortal and beautiful freak.

That lack of common acknowledgement and its corresponding lack of care (for ourselves, for the Earth) seem to me to be more painful than the actual knowledge of our physicality and its limitations.

The non-verbal nature of Human Body Project 44 is important. What we feel is so watered down by social convention. To quote playwright Harold Pinter: “One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” But the self-expression activities (drawing, painting, writing, speaking into the microphone, photography) are there for you to mediate your raw experience in some way. Like me, what you feel may be something that is not immediately obvious. By giving yourself the opportunity to take part in creative self-expression, you may find you are allowing yourself to feel. To me, self-expression is one of the strongest forms of self-love.

By providing the experience of being with a fellow human being who is very much exposed and defenseless, and by giving you tools for creative self-expression, I am hoping to provoke a serious consideration of vulnerability—our own, as humans in a body, and, by extension, the troubled planet’s. The only way we will ever find ourselves living in a world of peace and compassion is by learning to love the flawed freak that is our own human self.