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Hello again, dear ones. Welcome back (or for the first time, for those who have recently joined) to the monthly Resourcing the Revolution newsletter.
And welcome, officially, to spring. We collectively crossed the threshold (finally) last Friday, with the contrast of shadowy patches of snow still holding on even as the spring bulbs started to “pop out” (as my kiddo likes to run around excitedly yelling).
The poor robins that returned to the Appalachians early this year appear to have survived one last Arctic blast, and the earth herself seems to finally be shaking off the last of winter.
I don’t know about you, but my body caught on to the shift before I did. The pull of the outdoors. The desire to move and shake and breathe deep, even through days of bone-deep tired. The growing light feeding something in my soul that didn’t even register the depletion until it started to regenerate.
Like the sugar water in the maple trees as the days grow longer, I feel life force slowly rising in my body, ready to be tapped.
That’s where we begin this month’s exploration: tapping into the body. Where last month’s edition (The Death of Nuance) held paradox as a cultural and intellectual problem, this month we’ll move that paradox somewhere different. Into the body, where the both/and already lives, and always has.
The mind wants and needs resolution. Clarity. Certainty.
But the body? Not so much.
Your nervous system is already primed to hold the complexity of everything life brings. The question is whether you trust it enough to follow.
The body becomes the place where we can metabolize the chaos and the paradox. Where both/and can live in harmony. (Yes, really.)
We follow the body's first yes. Not because we necessarily have any of it figured out — but because something in us is finally ready to move. That's enough to begin.
This month, we're not thinking our way through. We're feeling it.
Welcome to The Both/And Body.
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Quote of the Month: The First Knowing
No one has mapped the body's knowing quite like Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
From Women Who Run with the Wolves:
“The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.”
— Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
In the both/and body, the cells are the keepers of what the mind hasn’t had a chance to process yet.
The body knows before we do. And, apparently, the sky is no different.
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Astrology of the Month: First Fire
On the Equinox, the Sun entered Aries, the sign of ignition and forward motion.
And three weeks from now, between April 16th and 22nd, six more planets (the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, Neptune, and Chiron) will join the Sun, converging in Aries. Wizard’s Watchtower says this configuration, with that much cosmic fuel, is the catalyst for not just a new movement, but a new direction.
Here, he explains all of this better than I will:
"...The nervous system revolts before the mind can catch up. The old frequency [...] won't hold in the body anymore.
This is a wildfire moment. Destructive, yes, but only toward what's already dead. What catches fire is what can't move forward. What survives is what's already in motion.
What begins [in April] - decisions, declarations, systems, technologies - won't belong to April alone. This is the moment the trajectory sets. The arrow leaves the bow and the new era begins its flight."
The tenderness of spring and the fire of Aries. We carry both into what's next.
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Idea of the Month: First, the Brain
So how do we sit with both/and in the body?
Believe it or not, the body doesn't need a tutorial on this. It's been doing it all along. But there is one layer sitting between us and our biological capacity to hold nuance: the brain.
Our brains are rooted in a biology that still thinks it needs to watch out for sabertooth tigers around every corner. Back in prehistoric times, that vigilance kept us alive. But in modern times, with everything coming at us, what was a safety mechanism becomes the very thing that makes nuance feel like a threat.
On a basic level, the mind wants to know a few things:
Am I safe?
Am I healing or still hurting?
Is this grief or growth?
Am I ready for what’s next?
You might think of your mind as a sorting machine — it wants to put everything in the right drawer.
But that sorting machine isn’t the right tool for this month’s question. It’s the body itself that holds a native capacity for both/and.
Your nervous system is literally a both/and system. The sympathetic and parasympathetic sides of the system are in constant communication. The muscles and fascia in the body hold an ever-shifting interplay of tension and release — some muscles have to relax in order for their opposites to contract. Inhale follows exhale follows inhale.
If you’ve ever watched two dogs get into a tussle, you’ve seen the whole cycle in action. They can go from snarling and hackles raised to perfectly calm with a single, full shake of their bodies. They literally shake off the interaction in real time.
The human body holds the same capacity.
Back in December, I wrote about exactly this in the Lived Experiment.
Every time I remembered to stand up and shake it out, even for 30 seconds, something tangibly shifted.
My heart rate kicked up. Circulation followed. Lymph moved. And the fog in my brain lifted just enough to let some light back in.
And afterward, I reveled in that post-shake hum — the tingles sparkling through my arms and legs, the unmistakable feel of energy actually moving again.
Whatever I was trying to figure out in between my ears, whatever tension was sitting unresolved somewhere in my body… it all moved. Became more livable.
The tension didn't resolve. The body just made room for all of it.
You can be healing and hurting. Exhausted and hopeful.
Or, like my teacher Britt says: calmly active and actively calm.
And in this season, the earth herself mirrors it back to us.
Winter didn’t just magically disappear when we crossed the spring threshold. The sap starts to rise in the trees as the days lengthen. Crocuses and daffodils start to push up through soil that still holds frost and snow.
Our bodies offer us the capacity to do the same.
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Photo of the Month: First Shoots
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Short Practice of the Month: Movement First
This in-between moment offers you an invitation to find out what your body wants. Not what you think it should want, but what it’s aching for.
The beautiful part is, you don’t have to “figure it out.” You just have to let your body lead.
How to do it:
- Start in stillness, either lying down or seated.
- Observe the breath for a few rounds.
- Take three deeper breaths, inhaling and exhaling through the nose.
- Then allow yourself to notice. Where there’s tension or softness. Where there’s discomfort or pleasure.
- Shift your noticing to any impulses. Do any body parts want to move? Fingers wiggle, breathe a little deeper, a shoulder that wants to relax?
- Continue to move, as you feel like it, before wrapping up your practice.
These first small “yeses” are the most honest thing you can do. You’re not moving this way because you should or because someone told you it was good for you.
You move because your body said yes.
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Post of the Month: First, Get In
I’ve been writing about getting back into the body for a long time.
This month’s pull from the archives is from 2017, back when I was teaching a class series centered on innovation and the mind-body-business connection.
From the post:
"It may sound totally counterintuitive, but what if I told you that you need to reconnect, before you can disconnect?
Get in to get out.
You need to get back into your body, to reconnect with your muscles and joints. To embody the physical vessel your brain resides in, so that you can start to tap into the full power of your mind."
The language of my work has gotten more somatic since then. But the core of it — that the body is the way through, not the thing to get past — hasn't changed.
Get in to get out. That’s the both/and body in a nutshell.
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Song of the Month: Take the First Step |
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This month’s song doesn’t ask you to be okay before you begin. You just take the first step. And If You Can’t Find Hope, there’s always hope you can borrow.
From Able Heart:
Every scar tells me I survived
Not everything broken is asking to be fixed
There’s strength in saying you’re not okay
And still choosing to stand up anyway
Some medicine sounds like this.
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Mindset of the Month: The Nervous System First
Most of us exist in some erratic dance between being stuck between our ears and finding our way back into the body, rinse and repeat. And, frankly, it can be exhausting.
The mind constantly asks you to choose:
Hurting or healing. Ready or not. Hopeful or exhausted. Present or down the rabbit hole…
And the “solution” most of the wellness world offers is to force the pendulum to swing all the way back. Withdrawal from the mind, total presence, living inside the practices without giving yourself room to surface.
But the both/and isn’t a total rejection of either one. You can live in a world where the mind supports the body, and the body gives you space to process.
It’s also not a compromise between two things. No weird muddy middle ground where everyone gives something up and comes away resentful.
The both/and is holding the full weight of both, at the same time. And guess what? Your nervous system has been holding both — without your conscious permission — this whole time.
Your body was never asking you to choose.
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Your First Yes
The relief you're seeking lives in the permission to stop reaching for resolution and just live in the both/and.
Spring is already underway, and the body is waking alongside it.
And the both/and is already in you.
I’ll leave you with three questions to feel into:
What do I want to feel again?
What part of me is ready to move?
What is the first yes I can offer?
Until next time: rest, then rise.
P.S. If one of those questions is still sitting with you — if some part of you felt a yes beginning to form and you want a container for that first yes — I have one coming up in May.
May 1st through 3rd, I’m hosting Revolutionary Reset Live: a three-day virtual weekend for the strong one. The capable one. The one who's been holding it together for everyone else and could use, frankly, a minute.
A container — virtual, intimate, yours — where your nervous system gets to stop bracing long enough to actually hear yourself again.
You arrive. You put down everything you’ve been holding for everyone else. And you begin to breathe. (Not just metaphorically.)
Details + registration →
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