Palpable tenderness
“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” ~ Alan Watts
Dear beloved reader,
My intuition and my integrity are at an all time high.
This piece will be about that. It will not be about moralizing you, or promoting any particular lifestyle. Each to their own. Follow your bliss. I am following mine, and my internal compass, whose magnetized needle has lodged itself deep within my chest, is pulling me along. I know topics such as what I’m about to cover can be wrought with contentious opinions, so if you happen to have one of those - maybe take that energy elsewhere. The comments for this one will be turned off regardless - if you really feel compelled, you can email me!
Back in October, I stopped eating meat. It wasn’t the first time: I’d had periods of veganism or vegetarianism before. First and foremost it was about the animals and the ethics therein. Secondarily, it was about pursuing some kind of health goal. But the health bit was not nearly as important, despite the fact that I take my wellbeing and vitality very seriously - especially since starting to develop chronic illness symptoms about ten years ago.
As a result of chasing diagnoses and stable wellness, I have tried all kinds of diets - paleo being the most successful of them all. As you may imagine, paleo is very meat-heavy - especially autoimmune paleo, which cuts out things like nuts, seeds and nightshades. Meat protein (and getting a lot of protein in general) is pushed incessantly in peri/menopause circles - and while I don’t doubt that higher protein is good for our aging/ailing bodies, I began to evaluate how I wanted to go about meeting this quota daily for the foreseeable future. I realized in one fell swoop, as I took a duck breast from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw, that this plan did not include eating animals. I gave the breast to a friend, and went to the store to buy a block of tofu.
My previous forays into veganism were when I was younger and had more ‘bounce-back’ in general - if a diet wasn’t ideal for my body, my body could more easily adapt. Not so in perimenopause. Countless women in peri find that their guts simply don’t fuck with certain foods or food groups anymore. To my unending chagrin that has included all grains, dairy and sugary anything. Dairy and sugar are a culprit for a lot of folks, but grains was really a sad one for me. I love bread! However, I’ve adapted because my gut cannot anymore. In the back of my mind, however, I always assumed that I’d find my way back to a carnivore lifestyle eventually. After all, aside from the aforementioned forays, I’d been eating meat all my life. But no - this time, something has completely shifted in me, and I know I can never go back.
Two years ago, I could not laugh or cry. I mean it - I physically could not. Anytime the impulse would rise in my central system, all of the pulleys and levers would set into motion but nothing would bubble up. When I found something funny, I logged it intellectually, and I would go through the motions of laughing but I didn’t actually feel it. The same with tears. The deep and blanketing bloom deep within the diaphragm and other viscera did not resound. You know the one. It’s so pleasurable! I felt like a big faker. Like a child who escapes out through her bedroom window at night, I had lost this most vital, precious, pure pendulum of joy and weeping. I was in full shutdown, also known as autistic burnout. I suppose my system, in backup generator mode, considered these emotions superfluous, unnecessary to the pure basic functioning I was spread across (to quote Bilbo Baggins, like butter scraped across too much bread) - but I was unmoored without them. I’d always been able to laugh and cry at the drop of a pin. People knew me for my unmistakable squeal, and I knew myself to shed many tears over countless things - especially tenderness towards animals. Either my own or those I met in the forest…I’d bawl at the sight of an adorable duckling, kitten or chipmunk.
Animals were always my kin - I felt understood by them more than humans any day. Animals never required me to mask, or be anything other than what I naturally am. Animals never judge, they only remain present, holding space for what is. What a gift. At parties I’d always gravitate towards them, not-so-secretly wishing the raucousness would stop so that they would be more at ease. Their sensory sensitivities were mine. I’d be on the floor with them, down on their level, never mauling, never allowing cute aggression to take over. For this reason they always felt safe with me. People would often remark on how their cat or dog ‘never likes anybody’ but would take a shining to me. I never felt it was rocket science - it was simply tapping into a frequency (that typically I was already on anyway, by virtue of being autistic). Animals are supremely intelligent and they are always communicating with us, we just need to learn how to listen. If you’re curious to learn more, a book that I adored on this subject is called Kinship With All Life by J. Allen Boone.
Sometimes you can feel the tides turn in your body. Sometimes it’s like tectonic plates rubbing together, creating an earthquake, or rapidly tearing apart. A tsunami of inner revolution happens, and you know you are forever whisked away.
This has happened to me a number of times. Each time it has felt like the call coming from inside the house, an often aggressive pull towards deeper levels of sensitivity that were inherent to my soul but I was actively ignoring, or masking. Each example of this occurred at a nexus of my life where I knew I could no longer, in good conscience, go on as I was. It was like this when I quit drugs and cigs at age 22. It fell right on the shed skin of a life and ego-shattering Kundalini awakening a couple of months earlier. My then drug and alcohol-addled body, waif-like and evidently craving the life force I was slowly killing, was filled to the brim with prana. I was…obliterated by it. One cannot simply house that much life force. It burst within my sacrum like a dam straight from the latest supernova. The habits I had been clinging to like a fraying rope no longer belonged. I tried to smoke weed and my head would suddenly feel as heavy as ten bowling balls, dragging me down to the centre of the earth. I’d smoke a cigarette and a variation on that theme would happen. I got the message: the prana was light, effervescent, clean, uplifting, and would move me in the right direction. The drugs and cigs were dark, heavy, dirty, polluting and would move me into some kind of personal hades. It was a no-brainer. I stopped and I never once looked over my shoulder.
You get the message. You have to listen to it. It’s deep call from within. You will die a slow death if you don’t obey.
Perimenopause is a doozy, friends. If you know, you know. Many of you here do, thankfully - talking into a void about this is no fun. All of the books and all of the podcasts, all of the blogs and all of the facebook posts I’ve encountered, all of them - say that peri fully changes you. Even as you’re first thinking you’re in peri, or learning about it, you see this repeating message of: CHANGECHANGECHANGECHANGECHANGECHANGECHANGECHANGE and you go, yeah…okay, so? You don’t believe it. Or at least you think, fine - it’ll change my boobs and my butt and my stomach won’t be as flat, I may have hot flashes, and eventually I’ll lose my period. But that’s quite enough. And you’d be right to think that’s quite enough, because it’s a lot.
But, as I wrote in The Spirituality of Perimenopause, it’s way, way, way more than that. The Change has a capital “C” for a reason. Women going through this era should be given a medal, a clean home (forever), endless massages, the option to never see or talk to anyone, money enough to retire immediately and never have to work again (unless they want to), an endless expanse of fucking quiet, cold temperatures and lots and lots of delicious food (cooked by other people). Just…permanently and post-haste, ok? To need to endure normal life (which isn’t feeling very normal anymore, is it?) plus peri/menopausal symptoms is a cruel joke. But again - it’s not just physical. It’s the spiritual, psychological and emotional landscape that really ushers in a new self.
A much more tender self. A soft self. A sensitive self.
Which then ushers in:
A much more aligned self. Embodied self. Intuitive self. Full of integrity self.
Which then ushers in:
I am no longer a people-pleasing, do what others do, self. I do not give a fuck.
Something that often takes such a long time to move towards - if we do at all. Things like intuition are decimated by not being embodied and living for the pleasure of other people, not our own.
Speaking of tenderness, I listened to this song today and it reminded me of when I was a young girl.
Here are some of the lyrics:
First row of the classroom
A gold star right next to my name
I walked home from school all four feet of me
Glowing with praise.
Checked my report card
With sweaty hands stained pencil black
I’m a grade-school class certified
Pleasure to have in class.
I’ve always been this way
These harmless tendencies I find them hard to shake
I’ll jump through hoops
And I’ll swim against the tides
And I’ll take off my clothes if yours didn’t fit right
I guess sometimes I lie when I say that it’s fine
But it’s whatever
If you lost your speak
I’d turn every stone
I’m a big people pleaser till I’m alone
Yeah I meet all your needs to distract from my own
But it’s my pleasure.
Yeah, ouch. My heart goes out to that little girl, and that younger woman.
My autistic burnout was the zenith moment of people-pleasing, my body’s ultimate revolt against it. I was filled with everyone else except for myself, and had no vitality of my own. I could not hear myself. It took all of my energy and all of my emotionality to be snatched from me in order to hear the gentle and sonorous soul horn in the thick fog, calling me back to myself. Ever since slowly emerging from that realm, I find myself in tighter and tighter circles with myself: a continuous act of refinement.
My emotions, when they returned, did so with a flood. With the emotions, came back the intuition. With the intuition, my internal compass was reoriented. I was able to tap into even deeper levels of sensitivity and tenderness than even I had as a child, sobbing hot tears over soft baby animals. It was then that I realized I could not hug one creature and consume another. It made no fucking sense.
I have done countless hours of research on our human ancestors…where we came from, how we evolved into homo sapiens. I know that nature eats nature in order to survive. In another life, I most certainly was a hunter.
But now? I live in a time when animals designated for consumption make up 80% of our global animal population. That fact alone was enough to stop me. I am only one person - but I cannot in my right conscience contribute to this. I also cannot fathom being a creature with sentience and consciousness, desiring (and deserving) to live just as much as you or I, being brought into this world simply to be eaten by someone with whom that animal never had any direct contact, shipped in a plastic-and-styrofoam container. There is no honour, no reverence. The process is the antithesis to how Indigenous cultures honoured and respected the animal.
All sentience is sacred. I sense that palpably now, as the world grows hotter and more violent. Symbiosis is needed. This is one of the ways that I can be less harmful. Yes, I realize that the tagline of our times is, “There is no true ethical consumption under capitalism.” While that is certainly true, I’m allowing the increased sensitivity and integrity that The Change is ushering in me to move my body towards as ethical as possible. Not perfection, but alignment. Because as the Alan Watts quote says at the beginning of this piece, we cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. The world’s pain is palpable. I am fully and completely sensitive to it. But this refinement is also opening me up to greater joys…I belly laugh, squealing with the best of them again because I’m overflowing with the tenderness of my own voice, and no one else’s. It’s wonderful.
But don’t worry - I’m not going to become one of those annoying evangelical vegans who wag their finger at anyone else, I promise. We all have our own path, this is mine.
And I wonder…what other changes are in store during The Change? Only time will tell.
Until next time,
Love and wolves.
D xx
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