Summer of Love, issue one: Root to Rise
Ground in to self. Expand in to love.
Wild heart spotted.
It doesn’t take much to get rearranged.
You walk down the sidewalk listening to angry music, the jittery combination of caffeine and loneliness fuelling each step, on your way to some kind of project you invented for yourself so that you do more than ruminate on your own BS all day.
You get to where you’re going and a stranger smiles in a way like you already have 37 inside jokes. Oh, hello. You arrange your face in some kind of practiced aloofness because you’ve been hurt 1000 times before.
You sit down next to them and don’t feel like making small talk so instead you tell them something kind of intensely weird. They hold your gaze and say something clever back. Oh, hi. You have your first inside joke.
Time passes. Other stuff happens. People enter in and exit out. You know this person for a few weeks. You learn stuff together about the world and, very carefully, very slowly, very intentionally, about each other.
Love type clutter accumulates: inside jokes multiply and become safe spaces to rest inside of. Playlists are generated and shared, both the cool ones you make together and the secret sappy ones you listen to on your bike. You have a first kiss and it’s kind of shocking, which is weird because you’ve had lots of other kisses, so you launch a kissing study to determine if it will always feel like magic. You go on curated adventures: hot and cold plunges, dance floors, yoga classes. You share meals and selfies. You tell the stories of your life and listen to theirs, captivated.
Eventually, there’s a reckoning.
A crossroads appears and you have a choice: continue as you are, with all the risks and demands of love, or retreat, back to safety.
Continuing on makes the most sense for the inner child who is enjoying the heck out of the process of falling in love. That part of you senses the warm, safe place created with the other and remembers that attachment from early childhood. Or, if you didn’t have a good attachment with your caregiver, your inner child still notices but in a way that is hungrier, more impatient, a little bit afraid. This. I want this. I was waiting for this.
But the inner child in all of us is ruled by the present day adult. The trouble with that is adulthood is actually really bad for love. We have jobs that take up lots of time and create stress in our bodies, limiting our capacity for cuteness. We live far away from people we want to be in relationship with. We did the whole inside jokes and playlist thing a few times with other people and it didn’t work out so rigid parts step forward to say no, not this again, you’re fine on your own, fault finding in the other and the connection in a weird, sad attempt to force the saddest potential outcomes.
Maybe you find a way to continue on together, but you feel rattled by instability any time it emerges, hyper fixating on the what ifs, reading your partner’s phone when they leave the room, analyzing their facial expressions during hard conversations, letting the TikTok algorithm pull you hours deep into tips on love as though your own sweet heart has nothing to say about that.
Maybe your adult parts take over and infiltrate the cute, forcing stupid conversations that begin with your first name, a word you hardly recognize because for a while now you’ve been know as Baby. The HR vibes continue on as a bullet point list of Why It Won’t Work is shared. You collect your dignity and move on. You clean up the cute clutter: decide the inside jokes weren’t that funny, unfollow the Spotify playlists, go to yoga at a different place for a while.
We convince our minds to think some type of way about love, but our bodies remember everything.
They remember the adrenaline of the beginning, the occasional anxiety of the in between, the bliss of secure attachment, the hunger for more, the ache of loneliness.
There is a reason why so many people are cold plunging and doing psychedelic inquiry in the woods and attending sweat lodges and doing EMDR and trying to flow this out of their system in yoga classes all over the world.
Right this minute, hundreds of thousands of humans are putting their physical bodies through some kind of enhanced sensory process to reckon with those body memories. Bio hacking bros just have broken hearts.
We can’t be grounded in love unless we are grounded in our bodies.
The Antidote: Create Your Foundation
In yoga, every posture begins with a steady foundation. Only from a place of stability can we expand:
*in tadasana, we stand tall, feet firmly planted, crown of the head reaching up, maybe the arms too
*in warrior 2, we organize our feet, centre our shoulders over our pelvis, broaden the collarbones and extend our arms
*in every backbend, we connect with intention to our core, hugging to the midline with such care that it feels possible to shine the heart forward and up, lengthening the throat, arching back
Trying to get in to any pose before stability will probably result in falling. Being in any pose and experiencing the instability of shifting gaze or ego interruptions to analyze what is happening will probably result in falling.
A yogi deep in their flow is settled on the mat. Be here now, they arrive with intention and connect breath to movement, feeling in to each expansion from the stability of a firm foundation.
Love thrives when we’re grounded into stability in our own hearts.
It is much easier to expand in to the curiosity and compassion of deep love if you know you can soothe your own nervous system, you have the means and ability to pick yourself up after a relationship breaks down, you trust yourself to stay safe in the uncertain waters of connection.
But remember that groovy feeling first felt in the presence of that stranger with a smile like they’ve got a secret? Remember how you rearranged and realigned yourself to them in pursuit of love?
Feel the gorgeous connection, keep that, but make nervous system regulation in love your own responsibility.
We wrongfully assign the task of stability maintenance to our partners. We root in to the connection of love and then expect it to become everything: maintenance centre, house keeping, soul cleansing, therapy.
“There is no neediness in desire. There is no caretaking in desire.
Caretaking is… a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.” (Esther Perel)
I’m not talking about the caretaking we do for our partners when they are sick, or need us to help them out somehow. I mean the regular offloading of nervous system regulation on to someone else and calling that a relationship.
Land in the Self
Signs of a dysregulated nervous system in love:
*overanalyzing the actions and words of another
*feeling frantic about the connection, asking your therapist, hairdresser, friend group chat what do you think this means?
*putting text messages into ChatGPT and asking it for advice
*feeling weird and anxious
*feeling avoidant and a bit condescending or even repulsed toward the other
*misaligning the (usually forced) acts of caretaking that your partner is coerced to do, simply to keep the peace, as proof that they love you
This is why all the good love advice urges us to create a super juicy, fun life BEFORE getting in to relationship, and why the best love advice recommends maintaining that even while in connection.
The next time you feel activated by a perception that you have about someone you’re in relationship with, try something on this list:
*listen to any audiobook about space by Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you’re like me, most of it won’t make sense, but he has a warm and engaging voice and he gets really excited about the universe. Black holes over doom scrolls, babes.
*plant something. All of us have room for an herb garden. You’ll forget all about what they meant when they said goodbye in that weird way when you’re trying to figure out what to do with all the basil that one tiny container produces
*play with an animal or a child, ideally outside. Be pulled in by their intense, kind of obsessive focus on play. Notice how when you get tired of that, it’s probably similar to how your partner might feel when you’re being a little too much. Oops. Now stop thinking about your partner or whoever and get ice cream.
*obviously, go to yoga. Don’t you dare dedicate your practice to anything like moving on or releasing pain or centring in the self. Dedicate it to being wild and freaky. Go for the tricky poses, if you want to. Let yourself fall. No big deal.
*do not engage in any content about relationships (besides this, 😘). Consume art about humans engaged in the hero’s journey, anything with a storyline where they hear a calling, go in pursuit of it, deal with sketchy stuff, and eventually find themselves or some kind of answer. Options: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Brittany Runs a Marathon, The Never-Ending Story, Wild
As you go through these actions to come home to your self, pay so much attention to how and who you are.
Feel the comfort of your own stability. Root down.
Rise
It’s almost summertime and we all deserve a summer love. Turn to your partner or to the universe and set the intention that whatever happens, you engage in it from a place of stability so that you can enjoy the juiciness of expansion.
This might include:
*let yourself venture to the edge of your comfort zone once in a while and rest in curiosity out there. Retreat, rest, recover, then do it again. You’ll find the edges of your world expand.
*become extremely suspicious of yourself any time you feel the need to employ some kind of strategy. Nope. There’s no freedom in that. Acting that way is low vibe, grippy and gross. Anything or anyone acquired in that manner is not meant for you and so it will not stay with you. Let it go.
*be so, so playful. We are specks of stardust having a human experience. Why so serious?
*hold your erotic energy with reverence. Remember, eroticism is not just about sex, it’s the flow state, the vibe of yes, THIS we feel when we make music, write, have long and juicy conversations, run by the water, paddle board at sunrise, do a long yoga practice and then hold hands in savasana. Conjure up so much erotic flow that your vibe shimmers. You walk in a room and a stranger with a kind smile thinks oh, hello. You might choose to share the vibe, or not, but either way your world just got a whole lot more fun.
When you are sovereign, love becomes a conscious offering. Affection is received with grace and gratitude.
Root to rise.
xo
Leanne
