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I believe in self-determination.
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I believe in personal sovereignty.
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I believe relationships and connection are the only things that ultimately matter on this plane.
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I believe that we are social animals and that our need for connection is greater than our vice of power.
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I believe the god(s) we serve the most in the West is counter to connection, compassion, empathy, connection.
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I believe in the mind, the heart, and the gut—all three make best decisions when operating together.
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I believe in understanding and embodiment, or cognition and downloading that into an integrated experience between what the mind knows and the body connects to.
I believe most social problems are rooted in a separation from connection, which is why we have defunded mental health, welfare support for women, children, vets, and the mentally or physically disabled. When we do this, we take away what little structure and stability some individuals and families might have to show up in the world with a little more hope, and that negatively affects the labour market now and in the future. When we do not support families by acknowledging and promoting an ideology that accesses to basic needs is a human right followed by the action of providing these, we are out of balance with Other, Self, Nature, and All. It invests in darkness. When we invest in wellness for All by promoting and providing basic needs as a human right, we invest in Brightness and Light that supports and promotes wellness in the larger circuitry of society. Personal sovereignty doesn’t work without the others, and without the self.
Wellness for all
By suppressing wellness for all, we suppress wellness in ourselves, in One, in “Self,” in the ways we move within and without ourselves. It promotes widespread fear and panic—for those who do not have their basic human rights respected and attended to, and for those whose guilt, superiority, entitlement, willful ignorance or dismissiveness require them to eschew their fellow human as though we are on a tiered system. This “Othering” has created a caste system in the United States and lost sight of personal sovereignty. It has created an opioid crisis. It has created fragility in family systems, which leads to boys who become men out of balance in their masculinity because they had mothers who had to compensate in masculine traits or who did not compensate. It leads to girls becoming women out of feminine balance from attempts to operate counter to their inner knowing in a masculine paradigm, trying to achieve masculine goals. It leads to an imbalance within and between the sexes (on the gender binary).
Money is a masculine goal, even when it is a subsistence level pursuit. When we have family systems with parents out of balance, either because they lack skills, have learned to cope with violence or drugs, or because they have one absent through incarceration, hopelessness, mental health, crime, or expressive individualism, we have at least one parent who is carrying a load out of balance, and that will always net children out of balance, even when they have other high-resilience factors
We live in an ecological model—there is not another way to live—and when we put ourselves in the center and think there is no cause-effect, no ripple, to our actions, that there is no bidirectional influence to every single choice we make, we are out of balance with Self, Other, and Nature.
This is the broad spectrum, the macro level, that I think on, and since children are my wheelhouse and I have always been a grassroots mover, I overlay that model on the microsystem of the family, the micro version of any society, and there I concentrate my efforts, passion, and attention. It is fine to look at Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, but it is really helpful to look at it from the framework of Ken Wilber’s Individual/Collective, Subjective/Objective Integral Framework and overlay both onto the LIFE (Layered Integrated Framework Example) to see how these microsystems play out in terms of quadrants, all with bidirectional influence. Personal sovereignty can’t be achieved without balance.
The research shows that families that have strong connections to one another and have ritual around pro-social family behaviors (such as eating together, meal preparation, and open communication) have higher reports of subjective well-being (SWB), or what we might call happiness. But families concerned about physical safety, including health care and access to it, illness, housing, and food have lower levels of SWB. That means that the same information about children needing only a “good enough” parent fits a model for housing and needs: we can adapt at “good-enough” living standards, but these need to be clean, safe, and accessible to the resources that a family would need like schools, food/groceries, health care, work. It must also include that low baseline of “good enough” parenting. I can’t talk a lot about caregiving, attachment, conflict, and sex to an individual or family who has more immediate needs and lacks basic necessities. Lack of basic human rights puts a person in a trauma response always (k), and lack of housing, food, safety, and an ability to be productive creates unproductive stasis—rumination, worry, negative coping strategies, a lack of presence to dependents, and so on.
With that in mind, my client practice focuses on models of intimacy that include understanding the bidirectional influences caregiving has on attachment, how attachment affects conflict, and how sex derives its meaning through attachment, caregiving behaviours, conflict behaviours, and coping strategies using:
- Education (self-understanding, self-compassion, parenting, family systems, ancestral trauma and epigenetics, as well as other topics related to family sociology, relationships, and intimacy).
- Conflict Coaching & Non-Violent Communication.
- Mediation with various family actors and relationships, to improve and to dissolve.
- Embodiment practice through somatic mapping, breathwork, yoga, tantric philosophy, and grounding and balancing asana.
I start with, “Who are you?” and help establish a baseline for your approach to life through understanding your character strengths and values, and your adult attachment style within the context of intimate relationships, family, and work. My work is for people who are ready to work, ready to achieve personal sovereignty, not only to understand themselves cognitively but also to embody change through mental and tactile awareness. This includes my mediations. Couple and Family Mediations require an education component. Resolving a conflict over sex, money, power, or respect does not change anyone’s general feeling if all parties to the action do not understand the underlying needs of the person with whom they are in a relationship. Personal sovereignty lays on the understanding the others.
When you are ready to work on understanding your life, your loves, your relationships and connection, and improving these compassionately through self-awareness of your own strategies and understanding of your family’s legacies, I can help. I do intimacy with measurable results.
