to: a generation of self-tweakers.

dec. monthly musing: greeting the polypoetic self.

Note: this essay is cross-posted between Muse Writings and Kinspirit.

We must dare again to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor our kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape ourselves into visionaries with the artistry to revitalize our enchanted world.

Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind

I love how we humans are always revisioning our healing. We make ourselves into such projects. Everything fades and evolves into the abyss of our habits of conscious and subconscious repatterning. We’re always tweaking ourselves.

As a bonafide self-tweaker, I know a thing or two about picking myself apart. If only I could wake up just a little earlier, enjoy a little less gluten, and get a Notion system going for my annotations, I’ll be alright. And I think these thoughts so effortlessly. There’s a lot to tweak when you’re trying to be good enough to survive an ever-progressing society where you can never work on yourself too much. Praise self-help Youtube and Brene Brown study groups for being there for us in our times of need and self-tweaking.

Over the last two years or so, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of not tweaking – of taking intentional periods to pause and rest from my self-development. The idea of it was scandalous and hard to integrate at first. I had been trying to be better my whole life. Healing had been my full-time job. The idea of fully accepting anything about myself without needing to change it or develop it or work-on-it or grow it or fix it was a shock to my system.

Yet, through this experiment of pausing from self-development, I found out that I might be just a little bit prideful, a little less spiritual, and a little more entangled with the material world than I had hoped. I learned that the Reformed Christian early 20’s me who cried in public while reading Daring Greatly in 2017 – the me who tried a countless number of times to finally go through with the Seven Experiment – was just a little darker, a bit moodier, and quite a bit needier, lonelier, and dirtier (the sexy kind) than I thought.

And I had to ask myself over and over, was this okay?

Is it okay that I wanted a television? (I bought one.)

Is it okay that I wanted to make a million dollars sometimes?

Is it okay that I spent 18 months of Fenty x Savage subscription in one fell ovulatory swoop and without regrets?

self-tweaking as purity-of-spirit kudzu.

Turns out, this self-tweaking pursuit of purity-of-spirit was the kudzu of my life, coiling around my tenderest parts and gripping me in the slightly sweaty, anxiously perfect identity of the good christian careful black, not-visibly-gay girl with wild fantasies of the kind of spirituality that would allow me to just keep tweaking and adjusting and developing and healing myself forever and not actually be known in my most decrepit, human desires by anyone, not even myself.

In 2018, I stumbled upon the Wild Woman archetype, and it was my first introduction to the idea that I could be dealing with an aspect of myself – a ray of an expression of my core identity that may come out sometimes, but can’t necessarily hold my fullness in completion. It was the first time I was introduced to myself as a polyculture – an ecosystem of many aspects and identities that are multi-dimensional, multi-passionate, and layered with good ol’ complexity.

I liked the Wild Woman, but there was a part of her that the good-not-visibly-gay-girl part of me couldn’t fully relate to. I resisted the idea that I could be feral, in the Jungian sense of the word, and still be a grown up. I resisted sexiness, darkness, and untameability. I had a lot of conditioning that said, I couldn’t be good and an intuitive, sensual, medicine-carrying witch.

I felt relieved when I first heard the word polypoetic, a term coined by archetypal astrologer, Lawrence Hillman, in his work on the polypoetic psyche. The last year, I’ve been in a deep internal family systems and somatic parts work study and hearing the word polypoetic stripped the clinical psychology right out of it. Because what often happens with parts work (or any system where we’re in the danger zone of picking ourselves apart and deducing our complexity down to sun-sign astrology and ragey little protector parts) is that we pathologize our complexity. We get to problem-solving. We start talking about the needs of the inner-child as problems to solve on our way to bigger better lives, rather than as parts of ourselves that just need a little bit of nourishment, like the occasional awry organ asking “Can you please drink a little water, babe?”.

We start talking about “challenging” aspects as if they were bad things – things to avoid and shut down in us. We start talk about the ego like the pharisees were talking about Jesus – ready to crucify the one part of us that actually has the balls to get out there and start doing shit (like feeding the poor, raising the dead, and validating the humanness of divorcees and sex workers). The term Polypoetic paints the multi-dimensions of the psyche as something worthy of being engaged with over time. For example, we are evolutionary, like mult-layered wines. Give me three years and I’ll go from tasting like apricots, brass, and dirt to tasting like the inside of a smoked oak barrel, layered with toasted fennel, and the essence of stone fruit. We are like cheese. Give me ten years and I will evolve into the pungent $70/ounce kind that you can’t unthink. We are like charcuterie. Lay me out in all of my delicious salty salami parts. Respect me in all my swavory, smoky, chunky, olivey pieces with good crackers, please.

The term polypoetic makes parts work juicy and paints a powerful distinction between healing and wholing.

The Polypoetics of a Field of Flowers

The term polypoetic sounds so academic until you put it into a field of flowers or you bury it deep in a ponderosa forest. Polypoetic sounds so overwhelming until the soil starts talking and the field of asters you stumbled into start to kick up a breeze so thick it calls you in.

The polypoetic is a whorled leaf, a field-cluster of maximillians in the high desert, the feeling of a retrograde in your sternum, the overwhelm of the market at rushhour. It’s the way sunlight feels like a textbook lying open on your lap, and the way time grazes your skin lazily like the slow stretch of evening rain.

We don’t need to overthink it.  There’s nothing too deep about it.

We are the polypoetic in flesh and breath and consciousness leaking out all over the wild, wild west of an over-pathologized, cracked-down-the-middle-earth that is calling us home to dinner and sacred revivance.

There is nothing to overthink about it. This is prayer. This is the ritual of laying ourselves out and saying “I see what I see. I’m here for the life-long journey of deeply knowing myself – of deeply knowing my story from the inside out”.

healing vs. wholing.

I don't feel that the point of healing is perfection, or that the point of wholeness is a clean and severely sacred execution of the human life.

I don't feel that the point of internal work is to be good and grounded, or that grounding is about being good.

I've learned (and I am always learning) that being fully human invites us to be deeply stretched by both ends of life – the joyous and darkness, the sacred and the profane.

There is no arrival point. The question is: can you hold yourself?

There's a sort of placid depth we chat about in wellness spaces. We cry pretty. We don't talk about the deep, deep aches for fear of being too messy.

The moment darkness gets too dark, something is wrong. The moment tension gets too tense, something is off. The moment hardship gets too hard, we stop the performance. We exit the ceremony because many of us never learned how to really hold ourselves through the ragged edges of existing in this strange and lonely matrix where pain is oh so poetically avoided.

For a long time, I've been pretty done with this bleached out execution of healing. I'm done. I'm more interested in engaging the deep, the dark, the textured spaces of wholings. These places where birth and life and regeneration happen. Where the skins of our souls burble under the pressure of transformation.

I have to admit, I don't care as much about what psychedelic plant medicine journies folks have taken, or what sect of New Age dogma they're inhaling, or in whether or not they've confessed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Have you ever touched your own bleeding, pulsing heart? Have you ever touched the frayed edges of your own egoic, wild-eyed shadow and thought in surrender, "You know, I still love her. I love her. I love her."

I don't care about how many mushrooms you know the name of or what side of spiritual ecology you have found yourself on. I don't care about how many books you've read or how many traditions you've studied under.

Can you hold yourself?

Can you hold the depths of your own swayed intentions? Can you hold your raucus textures and your voicelessness? Can you hold your deepest, deepest, deepest desires? Can you descend just as well as you ascend? Can you see yourself in the mirror as your most orphaned, most abandoned self and still find your way back into an of-the-earthness kind of belonging?

This is the difference, I believe, in healing and wholing.

In my view, the task of healing asks us to see that we are broken so that we can be fixed. Wholing affirms that there is no way that we could ever truly be broken – that we were born whole humans and we can find our way back.

In Western culture, we treat healing like the final boss we have to beat. We treat it like a corporate ladder we climb, piling on all the certifications, and therapies, and treatments, and spaces we can possibly find. And I have to name that speaking to this isn’t about invalidating any part of the thrill and deep celebration of forward motion, development, growth, and improvement. It’s just that healing is not a destination. There are no land coordinates for healing. There is no address. We treat healing like the drive from New York to California – a linear journey with physical buildings, a community we might finally not be too weird, and a coast with water.

But healing is not linear. There is no arrival point. And the only linear thing about life that we have to look forward to is the certainty that if we were born, then at some point we will die. And this is why I love the word wholing, in contrast.

Wholing says, “Well if I am going to die, then I might as well enjoy this cheesecake and learn to love my tummy as I digest.”

Wholing says, “Well if I am going to die, then I might as well honor that my inner child hates hanging around these people. And that I might be a little bit pretentious and specific about my tastes, and that’s all right.”

Wholing says, “Well if I am going to die, I might as well accept that I may not be a wellness guru. I might make a clean $12.50 an hour. I might live in a tiny house (trailer), but damn it I love my dog. And I love these mountains. And I love my people. And that’s all right.”

greeting the polypoetic self.

Wholing is like Alice stepping through the door of Wonderland and finding out that the inner realms of her psyche is complex in a somewhat-scary, but nice-if-you-think-about-it kind of way. There are so many colors, and flavors, and nooks and realms to the Self. There are so many extensions, pretenses, invitations, characters and forests to get lost in. Wholing is the work of saying yes to the landscape of our inner realms and staying curious about the phenomena we find there.

One of my favorite teachers, Maryam Hasnaa, calls this, “Saying Hello.”

Instead of pushing away or trying to desperately fix the parts of ourselves we encounter in our inward realms, we can just say, “hello.”

There is no need to rush our love for these parts of us that show. There is no need to rush making sure they feel at home. Sometimes, rushing is the very thing that puts us back in the vicious cycle of trying to be healed enough. Instead, wholing invites us to notice and grow to accept what arises from the inner realms. Wholing invites us to tend to what needs to be tended to and invite these parts of us that are crying out for care back home into safe arms that aren’t rushing to love-bomb. There is a certain safety and trust we cultivate with ourselves when we can learn to pause and just say, “hello” to the polypoetic self.

december’s offering.

Greeting the Polypoetic Self is an invitation into learning how to say “hello” to our humanness and the complexity of inner worlds. It’s an invitation to configure from our complexity new potentials, new possibilities, and new ways of orienting in the world that don’t require us to do surgery on our most interesting textures. It’s an invitation to quit our full-time jobs of self-tweaking and begin to weave a new relationship with Self.

Greeting the Polypoetic Self is a two-hour workshop and an invitation to hold a vision for our wholeness in a fractured, fractured world. It’s an invitation to explore how we might cultivate a nourished, relational, and ecosystemic existence with the Earth and all parts of ourselves.

Join us and other strange, beautiful folk.

December 22 • 10:00 a.m. MST

Learn more here: https://www.kinspirit.org/greeting-the-polypoetic-self