Day 13: Closing the Circle
“And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, 'If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.'"
— Audre Lorde
You’ve made it to the final day of 13 Days of Erotic Wellness. Congratulations. Whether your journey so far has brought with it a very noticeable shift in your experience or a subtle, perhaps even below-consciousness rumbling and rippling, we can promise you that if you’ve committed time and care to each day’s invitation, if you’ve slowed down and spent even just fifteen minutes a day exploring each of the practices, you have planted some radical seeds of erotic wellness within you.
Now, if you continue to nourish them with even a few minutes of awareness and embodiment each day, those seeds will grow. As they grow and blossom, they will create an ever-more inhospitable environment for all those practices and beliefs that serve as obstacles to your erotic wellness and your vital and generative belonging in and to this world.
As a final practice we invite you to create and commit to seven days of simple ritual. It is well-documented (and long before science, well-known by our Ancestors), that engaging in structured and repetitive behaviors that enforce our experience of belonging and wellness create more resilience. In other words, the more we engage in simple rituals that remind us of our belonging, that make us accessible to wellness, the more foundational wellness and belonging we experience. The more we simply wake up and step into our day from a place of belonging and wellness. It becomes the water we swim in and the air we breathe.
Today we invite you to craft a simple ritual that you will repeat at least daily (but even better if it’s twice a day) that is a gesture of your belonging and wellness, and the gratitude this creates within you. It could be as simple as lighting a candle first thing in the morning, taking three breaths as you stare into the flame and remember that you belong to this world and it has a specific and unique place for you, then blowing it out. Repeating this at the end of the day before you climb into bed will help pattern the resilience and foundation of this practice with even more power.
Another simply daily ritual might look like acknowledging your Ancestors as you place your feet on the floor in the morning, feeling the blood in your veins and your beating heart as an endowment of wisdom and wellness that lives within the genetic heritage of your people — no matter how much wounding, pain, or dysfunction might be present in the more recent generations. We all come from wellness. It lives in our blood and bones as an imperative and responsibility. Taking two minutes each day to imagine this as it lives, physiologically within you — a fact that is undeniable — is a powerful antidote to the sense of despair and alone-ness that plagues so many of us in these alienating times.
Thank you for joining us for 13 Days of Erotic Wellness. We hope this has served your journey of reclamation, embodiment, belonging — and the necessary responsibility that comes with it. We encourage you to continue to share your experiences and be nourished by others’ in our community.
